he global triumph of capitalism at the millennium, its Second Coming, raises a number of conundrums for our understanding of history at the end of the century. Some of its corollaries—“plagues of the ‘new world order,’” Jacques Derrida (1994: 91) calls them, unable to resist apocalyptic imagery—have been the subject of clamorous debate. Others receive less mention. Thus, for example, populist polemics have dwelt on the planetary conjuncture, for good or ill, of “homogenization and difference” (e.g., Barber 1992); on the simultaneous, synergistic spiraling of wealth and poverty; on the rise of a “new feudalism,” a phoenix disfigured, of worldwide proportions (cf. Connelly and Kennedy 1994).1 For its part, scholarly debate has focused on the confounding effects of rampant

/pdf/millennial-capitalism-first-thoughts-on-a-second-coming-523n2dqgia.pdf

Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming

Disasters seem destined to be major issues of academic enquiry in the new century if for no other reason than that they are inseparably linked to questions of environmental conservation, resource depletion and migration patterns in an increasingly globalised world. Unfortunately, inadequate attention has been directed at considering the historical roots of the discursive framework within which hazard is generally presented, and how that might reflect particular cultural values to do with the way in which certain regions or zones of the world are usually imagined. This paper argues that tropicality, development and vulnerability form part of one and the same essentialising and generalising cultural discourse that denigrates large regions of world as disease-ridden, poverty-stricken and disaster-prone.

Rendering the World Unsafe: ‘Vulnerability’ as Western Discourse

Since the early 1990s a number of projects have developed indexes to measure vulnerability to environmental change. This article investigates the key conceptual and methodological problems associated with such indexes. It examines in detail an index that explicitly addresses environmental change as an issue of vulnerability, the Environmental Vulnerability Index (EVI) developed by the South Pacific Applied Geoscience Commission (SOPAC). This examination offers some broader lessons for indicator-based projects, all of which require a simple model of complex and uncertain social-ecological systems, and entail difficult choices about the selection, standardization, weighting, and aggregation of indicators selected to represent important aspects of those systems. We conclude that indexes of vulnerability to environmental change cannot hope to be meaningful when applied to large-scale systems, and so should focus on smaller scales of analysis. We argue that they should not be used as the basis for disbursing f...

The Hazards of Indicators: Insights from the Environmental Vulnerability Index

Introduction: The Project of Historiography Section 1: Beginnings - East and West Introduction 1.1 Asian Historiography: Two Traditions 1.2 Historiography and Greek Self-Definition .3 Re-Reading the Roman Historians 1.4 The Historiography of Rural Labour 1.5 Towards Late-Antiquity Section 2: The Medieval World Introduction 2.1 The Historiography of the Medieval State 2.2 Saladin and the Third Crusade 2.3 Family and Household 2.4 The Medieval Nobility 2.5 Armies and Warfare 2.6 Popular Religion Section 3: Early-Modern Historiography Introduction 3.1 The Idea of Early Modern History 3.2 The Scientific Revolution 3.3 Intellectual History 3.4 The English Reformation 3.5 Popular Culture in the Early-Modern West 3.6 Revisionism in Britain Section 4: Reflecting on the Modern Age Introduction I: Revolution and Ideology 4.1 The French Revolution 4.2 The Soviet Revolution 4.3 National Socialism in Germany 4.4 Fascism and Beyond in Italy 4.5 Orientalism London: II Area Studies 4.6 China 4.7 Japan 4.8 India 4.9 Africa 4.10 North America 4.11 Latin America Section 5: Contexts for the Writing of History I: Hinterlands 5.1 History and Philosophy 5.2 History and Anthropology 5.3 History and Archaeology 5.4 History of Art II: Approaches 5.5 The Historical Narrative 5.6 The Annales School 5.7 Marxist Historiography 5.8 Women in Historiography 5.9 Comparative World History 5.10 Archives and Technology

Companion to Historiography

Although there have been heated debates over globalization and regionalization, refined empirical research has been lacking. Defining globalization and regionalization as specific types of linkages between countries, we attempt to empirically examine the following: (1) Has the world been globalized and/or regionalized? and (2) If it has, what are the consequences of these processes? To explore these questions, we analyze longitudinal data on international commodity trade using the social network approach. Data analysis shows that the world became increasingly globalized between 1959 and 1996 in the sense that each country studied traded with more countries in 1996 than in 1959. As a result, the world trade network became denser. At the core of this process has been the development of countries in the middle strata. We also find that the structure of the world trade network became decentralized over time, a change that provides greater support for neoclassical economic theory than for world-system/dependency theory. Regarding regionalization, we find that intraregional density is greater than interregional density and that intraregional ties are stronger than interregional ones. Moreover, both intraregional and interregional density increased significantly between 1959 and 1996, indicating, first, that the flow of world trade became regionalized and, second, that globalization and regionalization are not contradictory processes.

David S. Riddell

Papers

Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical Studies of Chile and Brazil:

Town, Country and People