Books by "George L. van Driem"
3 books found
The Tale of Tea is the saga of globalisation. Tea gave birth to paper money, the Opium Wars and Hong Kong, triggered the Anglo-Dutch wars and the American war of independence, shaped the economies and military history of Táng and Sòng China and moulded Chinese art and culture. Whilst black tea dominates the global market today, such tea is a recent invention. No tea plantations existed in the world’s largest black tea producing countries, India, Kenya and Sri Lanka, when the Dutch and the English went to war about tea in the 17th century. This book replaces popular myths about tea with recondite knowledge on the hidden origins and detailed history of today’s globalised beverage in its many modern guises.
A Clergyman's Daughter is George Orwell's least well-known, most unappreciated novel. Drawing on his experiences as a hop-picker, teacher, and urban vagrant, it tells the peculiar story of Dorothy Hare, the daughter of the Rector of St Athelstan's in the fictional town of Knype Hill. Unacknowledged by her absent-minded father and gossiped about by his rheumatic parishioners, Dorothy is suddenly and traumatically catapulted into the unknown. She wakes up in London, her memory temporarily gone; travels to the Kentish countryside; spends a night in Trafalgar Square; works for the authoritarian schoolteacher Mrs Creevy; and then journeys back to her old, limited life. A novel about loss and return, A Clergyman's Daughter charts the course of a young woman's voyage out and circular homecoming. In his introduction to the novel, Nathan Waddell lays out the fantastical elements and socio-political dimensions of A Clergyman's Daughter and examines how it drew inspiration from James Joyce's epic modernist novel Ulysses, a book Orwell deeply admired.
This volume provides the most up-to-date and holistic but compact account of the peopling of the world from the perspective of language, genes and material culture, presenting a view from the Himalayas. The phylogeny of language families, the chronology of branching of linguistic family trees and the historical and modern geographical distribution of language communities inform us about the spread of languages and linguistic phyla. The global distribution and the chronology of spread of Y chromosomal haplogroups appears closely correlated with the spread of language families. New findings on ancient DNA have greatly enhanced our understanding of the prehistory and provenance of our biological ancestors. The archaeological study of past material cultures provides yet a third independent window onto the complex prehistory of our species.