Susan Pedersen

Bio: Susan Pedersen is an academic researcher from Harvard University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Politics & Welfare state. The author has an hindex of 16, co-authored 27 publications receiving 1447 citations.

Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France, 1914-1945

Abstract: Acknowledgements Introduction: On dependence and distribution Part I. Programs and Precendents: 1. The family in question: state and family in prewar thought and politics 2. The impact of the Great War Part II. Reworking the Family Wage in the Twenties: 3. Family policy as women's emancipation? The failed campaign for endowment of motherhood in Britain 4. Family policy as 'Socialism in our Time'? The failed campaign for children's allowances in Britain 5. Business strategies and the family: the development of family allowances in France, 1920-1936 Part III. The Politics of State Intervention in the Thirties: 6. Engendering the British Welfare State 7. Distributive justice and the family: toward a parental welfare state Conclusion Bibliography Index.

Back to the League of Nations

Abstract: For the two decades of its effective existence, the League of Nations was a favored subject of academic research. International lawyers, historians, and political scientists across the globe scrutinized and debated every aspect of its working; leading American scholars of the period among them James Shotwell, Quincy Wright, and Raymond Leslie Buell devoted much of their lives to investigating (and often to supporting) its ideals.1 The League's demise slowed that scholarly flow to a trickle.2 Although a number of its former officials wrote temperate assessments of its activities in preparation for the transition to the United Nations,3 most postwar accounts of the League were "decline and fall" narratives or analytical postmortems intended to reinforce "realist" analyses of international relations.4 Early studies of the League had been based largely on the institution's printed records; those chastened later accounts, by contrast, were written from diplomatic records and out of national archives. For thirty years, the archives of the League's own Geneva Secretariat were very little disturbed. That neglect began to lift in the late 1980s, and for obvious reasons. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the bipolar security system, interwar debates over how to reconcile stability with new claims to sovereignty began to sound familiar. The breakup of Yugoslavia also unleashed a wave of ethnic conflict and

The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire

Abstract: PART I: MAKING THE MANDATES SYSTEM PART II: RETREAT FROM SELF-DETERMINATION, 1923-1930 PART III: NEW TIMES, NEW NORMS, 1927-1933 PART IV: BETWEEN EMPIRE AND INTERNATIONALISM, 1933-1939

Hannah More Meets Simple Simon: Tracts, Chapbooks, and Popular Culture in Late Eighteenth-Century England

Abstract: During the winter of scarcity of 1794, Hannah More wrote “a few moral stories,” drew up a plan for publication and distribution, and sent the package around to her evangelical and bluestocking friends. Their response was enthusiastic; even Horace Walpole abandoned his usual teasing to write back, “I will never more complain of your silence; for I am perfectly convinced that you have no idle, no unemployed moments. Your indefatigable benevolence is incessantly occupied in good works; and your head and your heart make the utmost use of the excellent qualities of both…. Thank you a thousand times for your most ingenious plan; may great success reward you!” Walpole then sent off copies of the plan to the duchess of Gloucester and other aristocratic friends. Following Wilberforce's example, such wealthy philanthropists subscribed over 1,000 pounds to support the project during its first year. Henry Thornton agreed to act as treasurer and Zachary Macaulay as agent, and the ball was rolling.In March 1795, the Cheap Repository of Moral and Religious Tracts issued its first publications. Prominent evangelicals and gentry worked to distribute them to the rural poor, booksellers, and hawkers and among Sunday schools and charity children. During the Repository's three-year existence, the fifty or so tracts written by Hannah More were supplemented by contributions from fellow evangelicals Thornton, Macaulay, John Venn, and John Newton, the poet William Mason, More's literary friend Mrs. Chapone, her protegee Selina Mills, and her sisters Sally and Patty More and by reprints of old favorites by Isaac Watts and Justice John Fielding.

Settler colonialism in the twentieth century : projects, practices, legacies

Abstract: Postcolonial states and metropolitan societies still grapple today with the divisive and difficult legacies unleashed by settler colonialism Whether they were settled for trade or geopolitical reasons, these settler communities had in common their shaping of landholding, laws, and race relations in colonies throughout the world By looking at the detail of settlements in the twentieth century--from European colonial projects in Africa and expansionist efforts by the Japanese in Korea and Manchuria, to the Germans in Poland and the historical trajectories of Israel/Palestine and South Africa--and analyzing the dynamics set in motion by these settlers, the contributors to this volume establish points of comparison to offer a new framework for understanding the character and fate of twentieth-century empires

Race and the education of desire

Abstract: Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality has been one of the most influential books of the last two decades. It has had an enormous impact on cultural studies and work across many disciplines on gender, sexuality, and the body. Bringing a new set of questions to this key work, Ann Laura Stoler examines volume one of History of Sexuality in an unexplored light. She asks why there has been such a muted engagement with this work among students of colonialism for whom issues of sexuality and power are so essential. Why is the colonial context absent from Foucault's history of a European sexual discourse that for him defined the bourgeois self? In Race and the Education of Desire, Stoler challenges Foucault's tunnel vision of the West and his marginalization of empire. She also argues that this first volume of History of Sexuality contains a suggestive if not studied treatment of race. Drawing on Foucault's little-known 1976 College de France lectures, Stoler addresses his treatment of the relationship between biopower, bourgeois sexuality, and what he identified as "racisms of the state." In this critical and historically grounded analysis based on cultural theory and her own extensive research in Dutch and French colonial archives, Stoler suggests how Foucault's insights have in the past constrained-and in the future may help shape-the ways we trace the genealogies of race. Race and the Education of Desire will revise current notions of the connections between European and colonial historiography and between the European bourgeois order and the colonial treatment of sexuality. Arguing that a history of European nineteenth-century sexuality must also be a history of race, it will change the way we think about Foucault.

Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil

Abstract: Oil is a curse, it is often said, that condemns the countries producing it to an existence defined by war, corruption and enormous inequality. Carbon Democracy tells a more complex story, arguing that no nation escapes the political consequences of our collective dependence on oil. It shapes the body politic both in regions such as the Middle East, which rely upon revenues from oil production, and in the places that have the greatest demand for energy. Timothy Mitchell begins with the history of coal power to tell a radical new story about the rise of democracy. Coal was a source of energy so open to disruption that oligarchies in the West became vulnerable for the first time to mass demands for democracy. In the mid-twentieth century, however, the development of cheap and abundant energy from oil, most notably from the Middle East, offered a means to reduce this vulnerability to democratic pressures. The abundance of oil made it possible for the first time in history to reorganize political life around the management of something now called "the economy" and the promise of its infinite growth. The politics of the West became dependent on an undemocratic Middle East.In the twenty-first century, the oil-based forms of modern democratic politics have become unsustainable. Foreign intervention and military rule are faltering in the Middle East, while governments everywhere appear incapable of addressing the crises that threaten to end the age of carbon democracy - the disappearance of cheap energy and the carbon-fuelled collapse of the ecological order. In making the production of energy the central force shaping the democratic age, Carbon Democracy rethinks the history of energy, the politics of nature, the theory of democracy, and the place of the Middle East in our common world.

The Theoretical Core of the New Institutionalism

Abstract: Proclamations of a “new” institutionalism, while widespread, have met with some skepticism in the scientific community. Critics wonder what about the new institutionalism is really so new. Institutions, surely, have been a focus of political science since its inception. In Europe, the state has consistently been central to the study of politics and, hence, plans to “bring it back in” do not seem especially innovative. Further confusion has arisen because the new institutionalists do not propose one generally accepted definition of an institution, nor do they appear to share a common research program or methodology. In fact, three separate branches of scholarship—rational choice, organization theory, and historical institutionalism—all lay claim to the label, seemingly without adhering to an overarching theoretical framework. I believe, however, that the new institutionalists do indeed share a common goal, one that cuts across these competing branches. My purpose in writing this essay is to communicate more clearly the content of this theoretical core. I hope in this way to clarify the contribution of the new institutionalism to political science and to indicate, as well, some of the problems currently facing this approach. Further, because historical institutionalism is the least well understood

Poverty and policy

Abstract: In this analysis of public policy to reduce poverty, the authors point out, among other things, that typically the highest incidence and severity of poverty are still found in rural areas, especially if ill-watered. For many of the rural poor, the only immediate route out of poverty is by migration to towns, to face a higher expected income, although often a more uncertain one. This may or may not reduce aggregate poverty. We can be more confident that growth in agricultural output -- fueled by investment in human and physical infrastructure -- is pro-poor, though not because the poor own much land. The policies pursued by most developing countries up to the mid-1980s -- and by many still -- have been biased against the rural sector in various ways. The same is true -- although different policies are involved -- of the other major sectoral concentration of poor, namely, the urban informal sector. There are clear prospects for reducing poverty by removing these biases. Looking ahead (far ahead, in some cases), it is less clear how much further gain to the poor can be expected from introducing a bias in the opposite direction. Neutrality should be the aim. We need good data and measurement to identify which public actions are effective in fighting poverty. There have been a number of advances in household data and analytic capabilities for poverty analysis over the last ten years. We are in a better position than ever to devise well-informed policies. The authors identify two important roles for public action. One is to foster the conditions for pro-poor growth, particularly by providing wide access to the necessary physical and human assets, including public infrastructure. The other is to help those who cannot participate fully in the benefits of such growth, or who do so with continued exposure to unacceptable risks. Here there is an important role for aiming interventions by various means to improve the distribution of the benefits of public spending on social ser(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)