Showing papers on "Empire published in 2007"

Law's Empire

Abstract: Scholars of culture, humanities and social sciences have increasingly come to an appreciation of the importance of the legal domain in social life, while critically engaged socio-legal scholars around the world have taken up the task of understanding "Law's Empire" in all of its cultural, political, and economic dimensions. The questions arising from these intersections, and addressing imperialisms past and present forms the subject matter of a special symposium issue of Social Identities under the editorship of Griffith University's Rob McQueen, and UBC's Wes Pue and with contributions from McQueen, Ian Duncanson, Renisa Mawani, David Williams, Emma Cunliffe, Chidi Oguamanam, W. Wesley Pue, Fatou Camara, and Dianne Kirkby. This paper introduces the volume, forthcoming in late 2007. The central problematique of this issue has previously been explored through the 2005 Law's Empire conference, an informal but vibrant postcolonial legal studies network.

Southern Theory: The global dynamics of knowledge in social science

Abstract: Introduction . Acknowledgments . Part I: Northern Theory . Empire and the creation of a social science. Modern general theory and its hidden assumptions. Imagining globalisation. Part II: Looking South . The discovery of Australia. Part III: Southern Theory . Indigenous knowledge and African Renaissance. Islam and Western dominance. Dependency, autonomy and culture. Power, violence and the pain of colonialism. Part IV: Antipodean Reflections . The silence of the land. Social science on a world scale. References . Index

Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century

Abstract: In the late eighteenth century, the political economist Adam Smith predicted an eventual equalization of power between the conquering West and the conquered non-West. Demonstrating Smith's continued relevance to understanding China's extraordinary rise, Arrighi examines the events that have brought it about, and the increasing dependence of US wealth and power on Chinese imports and purchases of US Treasury bonds. He traces how the recent US attempt to bring into existence the first truly global empire in world history was done in order to counter China's spectacular economic success of the 1990s, and how the US' disastrous failure in Iraq has made China the true winner of the US War on Terror. Smith's vision of a world market society based on greater equality among the world's civilizations is now more likely than at any time since "The Wealth of Nations" was published in 1776. In the 21st century, China may well become again the kind of non-capitalist market economy that Smith described, under totally different domestic and world-historical conditions.

What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848

Abstract: The Oxford History of the United States is by far the most respected multi-volume history of our nation. In this prize-winning, critically acclaimed addition to the series, historian Daniel Walker Howe illuminates the period from the battle of New Orleans to the end of the Mexican-American War, an era when the United States expanded to the Pacific and won control over the richest part of the North American continent. Howe's panoramic narrative portrays revolutionary improvements in transportation and communications that accelerated the extension of the American empire. Railroads, canals, newspapers, and the telegraph dramatically lowered travel times and spurred the spread of information. These innovations prompted the emergence of mass political parties and stimulated America's economic development from an overwhelmingly rural country to a diversified economy in which commerce and industry took their place alongside agriculture. In his story, the author weaves together political and military events with social, economic, and cultural history. He examines the rise of Andrew Jackson and his Democratic party, but contends that John Quincy Adams and other Whigs-advocates of public education and economic integration, defenders of the rights of Indians, women, and African-Americans-were the true prophets of America's future. He reveals the power of religion to shape many aspects of American life during this period, including slavery and antislavery, women's rights and other reform movements, politics, education, and literature. Howe's story of American expansion culminates in the bitterly controversial but brilliantly executed war waged against Mexico to gain California and Texas for the United States. Winner of the New-York Historical Society American History Book Prize Finalist, 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction

A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev

Abstract: Western interpretations of the Cold War--both realist and neoconservative--have erred by exaggerating either the Kremlin's pragmatism or its aggressiveness, argues Vladislav Zubok. Explaining the interests, aspirations, illusions, fears, and misperceptions of the Kremlin leaders and Soviet elites, Zubok offers a Soviet perspective on the greatest standoff of the twentieth century. Using recently declassified Politburo records, ciphered telegrams, diaries, and taped conversations, among other sources, Zubok explores the origins of the superpowers' confrontation under Stalin, Khrushchev's contradictory and counterproductive attempts to ease tensions, the surprising story of Brezhnev's passion for detente, and Gorbachev's destruction of the Soviet superpower as the by-product of his hasty steps to end the Cold War and to reform the Soviet Union. The first work in English to cover the entire Cold War from the Soviet side, A Failed Empire provides a history different from those written by the Western victors. 2008 Marshall Shulman Book Prize, American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies A Washington Post Book World Best of 2008 selection

Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age

Abstract: In this wide-ranging and stimulating book, a leading authority on the history of medicine and science presents convincing evidence that Dutch commerce--not religion--inspired the rise of science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Harold J. Cook scrutinizes a wealth of historical documents relating to the study of medicine and natural history in the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe, Brazil, South Africa, and Asia during this era, and his conclusions are fresh and exciting. He uncovers direct links between the rise of trade and commerce in the Dutch Empire and the flourishing of scientific investigation. Cook argues that engaging in commerce changed the thinking of Dutch citizens, leading to a new emphasis on such values as objectivity, accumulation, and description. The preference for accurate information that accompanied the rise of commerce also laid the groundwork for the rise of science globally, wherever the Dutch engaged in trade. Medicine and natural history were fundamental aspects of this new science, as reflected in the development of gardens for both pleasure and botanical study, anatomical theaters, curiosity cabinets, and richly illustrated books about nature. Sweeping in scope and original in its insights, this book revises previous understandings of the history of science and ideas.

The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860-1900

Abstract: Duncan Bell’s book comes with an intriguing picture on its front cover: Gustave Doré’s famous 1860 depiction of a New Zealander perched on a broken arch of London Bridge sketching the ruins of St Paul’s and its environs. The image, derived from an essay by Thomas Babington Macaulay, captures much of the Victorian premonition and anxiety about empire. Schooled on the classics and hardened in the tropics, successive generations of colonial statesmen and commentators in the 19th century learned to hope for little and fear much worse from the possession of far-flung dominion and settlement. Their ultimate nightmare was that the fate of Rome would catch up with Britain, that is, unbridled expansion overseas would precipitate the collapse of civilisation at the metropole. So fashionable had this Gibbonseque trope of ‘Macaulay’s New Zealander’ become by the 1860s that, according to David Skilton, the satirical magazine Punch called for a proclamation banning its use, along with other proverbial phrases such as ‘the Thin End of the Wedge’ and ‘the British Lion’. As arresting as Doré’s lithograph is, it does seem a slightly odd choice for Duncan Bell’s study, which is devoted to a series of Victorian writers and thinkers who developed a wholly positive vision of empire, looking forward to global peace and order, rather than back to the gloomy lessons of the past. No such problems are presented by the back cover. Gathered there are a series of top scholarly names from both sides of the Atlantic endorsing the book, which has been eagerly anticipated. Derived from his Cambridge PhD thesis of 2004, and trailed in a series of articles and edited collections, The Idea of Greater Britain is one the first major studies of Victorian intellectual life with the subject of the British empire left in, rather than out. Joint winner of the coveted Royal Historical Society’s Whitfield Prize, singled out for praise by Stephen Howe in the Independent, and already frequently cited in new work in the field, it is not just the cover, but the contents of this book, which demand to be noticed.

What's at Stake in the American Empire Debate

Abstract: Scholars of world politics enjoy well-developed theories of the consequences of unipolarity or hegemony, but have little to say about what happens when a state's foreign relations take on imperial properties. Empires, we argue, are characterized by rule through intermediaries and the existence of distinctive contractual relations between cores and their peripheries. These features endow them with a distinctive network-structure from those associated with unipolar and hegemonic orders. The existence of imperial relations alters the dynamics of international politics: processes of divide and rule supplant the balance-of-power mechanism; the major axis of relations shift from interstate to those among imperial authorities, local intermediaries, and other peripheral actors; and preeminent powers face special problems of legitimating their bargains across heterogeneous audiences. We conclude with some observations about the American empire debate, including that the United States is, overall, less of an imperial power than it was during the Cold War.

The Devil's Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa

Abstract: Germany's overseas colonial empire was relatively short-lived, lasting from 1884 to 1918. During this period, dramatically different policies were enacted in the colonies: in Southwest Africa, German troops carried out a brutal slaughter of the Herero people; in Samoa, authorities pursued a paternalistic defense of native culture; in Qingdao, China, policy veered between harsh racism and cultural exchange. Why did the same colonizing power act in such differing ways? In "The Devil's Handwriting", George Steinmetz tackles this question through a brilliant cross-cultural analysis of German colonialism, leading to a new conceptualization of the colonial state and postcolonial theory. Steinmetz uncovers the roots of colonial behavior in precolonial European ethnographies, where the Hereros were portrayed as cruel and inhuman, the Samoans were idealized as "noble savages," and depictions of Chinese culture were mixed. The effects of status competition among colonial officials, colonizers' identification with their subjects, and the different strategies of cooperation and resistance offered by the colonized are also scrutinized in this deeply nuanced and ambitious comparative history.

“The Production of Culprits: From Deportability to Detainability in the Aftermath of ‘Homeland Security’”

Abstract: In the aftermath of the events of September 11, 2001, the virtually instantaneous hegemony of a metaphysics of antiterrorism has radically reconfigured the politics of race, immigration, and citizenship in the United States. In the extended historical moment beginning with the United States' proclamation of a planetary “War on Terrorism” and encompassing our (global) political present, the US sociopolitical order has been racked by several interlocking crises—convulsively careening between heightened demands on citizenship and the erosion of civil liberties, imperial ambition and nativist parochialism, extravagant domestic law enforcement and global lawlessness. In relation to the parallel but contradictory hegemonic projects of “American” national identity and attachment, on the one hand, and the expansion or refortification of US empire, on the other, the cumulative crisis-as-opportunity for US nationalism that has ensued is replete with unpredictable dilemmas and unresolved possibilities for both citiz...

Islam after Communism: Religion and Politics in Central Asia

Abstract: Contents List of Maps List of Tables Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Islam in Central Asia 2. Empire and the Challenge of Modernity 3. The Soviet Assault on Islam 4. Islam as National Heritage 5. The Revival of Islam 6. Islam in Opposition 7. The Politics of Antiterrorism Conclusion: Andijan and Beyond Glossary Notes Select Bibliography Index

Environment and Empire

Abstract: 1. Introduction 2. Environmental Aspects of the Atlantic Slave Trade and CaribbeanPlantations 3. The Fur Trade in Canada 4. Hunting, Wildlife, and Imperialism in Southern Africa 5. Imperial Travellers 6. Sheep, Pastures, and Demography in Australia 7. Forests and Forestry in India 8. Water, Irrigation, and Agrarian Society in India and Egypt 9. Colonial Cities: Environment, Space, and Race 10. Plague and Urban Environments 11. Tsetse and Trypanosomiasis in East and Central Africa 12. Imperial Scientists, Ecology, and Conservation 13. Empire and the Visual Representation of Nature 14. Rubber and the Environment in Malaysia 15. Oil Extraction in the Middle East: the Kuwait Experience 16. Resistance to Colonial Conservation and Resource Management 17. National Parks and the Growth of Tourism 18. The Post-Imperial Urban Environment 19. Reassertion of Indigenous Environmental Rights and Knowledge

Communication and Empire: Media, Markets, and Globalization, 1860-1930

Abstract: Filling in a key chapter in communications history, Dwayne R. Winseck and Robert M. Pike offer an in-depth examination of the rise of the global media between 1860 and 1930. They analyze the connections between the development of a global communication infrastructure, the creation of national telegraph and wireless systems, and news agencies and the content they provided. Conventional histories suggest that the growth of global communications correlated with imperial expansion: an increasing number of cables were laid as colonial powers competed for control of resources. Winseck and Pike argue that the role of the imperial contest, while significant, has been exaggerated. They emphasize how much of the global media system was in place before the high tide of imperialism in the early twentieth century, and they point to other factors that drove the proliferation of global media links, including economic booms and busts, initial steps toward multilateralism and international law, and the formation of corporate cartels.Drawing on extensive research in corporate and government archives, Winseck and Pike illuminate the actions of companies and cartels during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, in many different parts of the globe, including Africa, Asia, and Central and South America as well as Europe and North America. The complex history they relate shows how cable companies exploited or transcended national policies in the creation of the global cable network, how private corporations and government agencies interacted, and how individual reformers fought to eliminate cartels and harmonize the regulation of world communications. In Communication and Empire, the multinational conglomerates, regulations, and the politics of imperialism and anti-imperialism as well as the cries for reform of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth emerge as the obvious forerunners of todays global media.

The early Roman Empire: consumption

Abstract: Roman society of the early empire presents a confusing and ambiguous image that we cannot easily situate in unidirectional accounts of European economic history. Clearly, public monuments in marble or other precious stone, military security, the urban food supply, roads, aqueducts and gladiatorial games testify to public consumption on a grand scale. On the other hand, the signs of poverty, misery, and destitution are no less obvious. Many inhabitants of the Roman empire only eked out a meager living, their skeletons grim testimonies to malnutrition and disease. Growth occurred because the wealth of the elite may have been a sign of effective exploitation of the poor. Roman National Income was indeed larger than that of any preindustrial European state. One of the requirements for an economy is to provide enough subsistence for its population to survive. The economic and social achievements of pre-industrial societies can be measured if standard of living of the masses exceeds bare subsistence levels.

History of Universities

Abstract: All advanced civilizations have needed higher education to train their ruling, priestly, military, and other service elites, but only in medieval Europe did an institution recognizable as a university arise: a school of higher learning combining teaching and scholarship and characterized by its corporate autonomy and academic freedom. The Confucian schools for the mandarin bureaucracy of imperial China, the Hindu gurukulas and Buddhist vihares for the priests and monks of medieval India, the madrasas for the mullahs and Quranic judges of Islam, the Aztec and Inca temple schools for the priestly astronomers of pre-Columbian America, the Tokugawa han schools for Japanese samurai—all taught the high culture, received doctrine, literary and/or mathematical skills of their political or religious masters, with little room for questioning or analysis. The same might be said for the monastic schools of early medieval Europe that kept alive biblical studies and classical learning in the Dark Ages between the fall of Rome and the 12th century Renaissance. The athenaeums and lyceums of ancient Greece had some of the characteristics of the medieval European university, free speculative thought and the challenge to authority, and for much the same reason, the fragmentation of authority and possibility of escape for the dissident philosopher to another city, but they never achieved the corporate form that gave the university its permanence. Only in Europe from the 12th century onwards did an autonomous, permanent, corporate institution of higher learning emerge and survive, in varying forms, down to the present day. The university was the accidental product of a uniquely fragmented and decentralized civilization. The Europe that emerged out of the violence and chaos of the Germanic and Viking invasions was fractured and divided on every dimension: between church and state, and within them between multiple layers of authority from emperor and pope through baron and bishop. These demanded the allegiance of society and imposed two systems of law, canon and civil, with equal jurisdiction over the faithful. In the mutually destructive strife between empire and papacy, power was “up for grabs” and fractionated out in a hierarchy of competing authorities: king and archbishop, duke and abbot, free county and free city, manorial lord and parish priest. In the interstices of power, the university could find a modestly secure niche, and play off one authority against another. Unintentionally, it evolved into an immensely flexible institution, able

The End of Tolerance: Racism in 21st Century Britain

Abstract: Introduction 1 Echoes of empire 2 From dependency to displacement 3 Seeds of segregation 4 We are here because you are there 5 Asylum and the welfare state 6 The dialectics of terror 7 The Halabja generation 8 Integrationism: the politics of anti-Muslim racism 9 Migration and the market-state 10 Here to stay 11 The new Leviathan 12 Community: theirs and ours Notes Index.

The Balance of Power in World History

Abstract: Introduction: Balance and Hierarchy in International Systems S.J.Kaufman, R.Little & W.C.Wohlforth Balancing and Balancing Failure in Biblical Times: Assyria and the Ancient Middle Eastern System 900-600 BCE S.J.Kaufman & W.C.Wohlforth The Greek City States in the Fifth Century BCE: Persia and the Balance of Power R.Little Intra-Greek Balancing, the Mediterranean Crisis of ca. 201-200 B.C., and the Rise of Rome A.M.Eckstein The Forest and the King of Beasts: Hierarchy and Opposition in Ancient India (c.500 - c.232 BCE) W.J.Brenner The Triumph of Domination in the Ancient Chinese System V.Tin-bor Hui 'A Republic for Expansion': The Roman Constitution and Empire and Balance of Power Theory D.Deudney Hierarchy and Resistance in the American State-Systems, 1400-1800 CE C.Jones Stability and Hierarchy in East Asian International Relations, 1300 to 1900CE D.C.Kang Conclusion: Theoretical Insights from the Study of World History S.J.Kaufman, R.Little & W.C.Wohlforth

Hunger: A Modern History

Abstract: Hunger is as old as history itself. Indeed, it appears to be a timeless and inescapable biological condition. And yet perceptions of hunger and of the hungry have changed over time and differed from place to place. Hunger has a history, which can now be told.At the beginning of the 19th century, hunger was viewed as an unavoidable natural phenomenon or as the fault of its lazy and morally flawed victims. By the middle of the 20th century, a new understanding of hunger had taken root. Across the British Empire and beyond, humanitarian groups, political activists, social reformers, and nutritional scientists established that the hungry were innocent victims of political and economic forces outside their control. Hunger was now seen as a global social problem requiring government intervention in the form of welfare to aid the hungry at home and abroad. James Vernon captures this momentous shift as it occurred in imperial Britain over the past two centuries.Rigorously researched, "Hunger: A Modern History" draws together social, cultural, and political history in a novel way, to show us how we came to have a moral, political, and social responsibility toward the hungry. Vernon forcefully reminds us how many perished from hunger in the empire and reveals how their history was intricately connected with the precarious achievements of the welfare state in Britain, as well as with the development of international institutions, such as the United Nations, committed to the conquest of world hunger. All those moved by the plight of the hungry will want to read this compelling book.

Gender and empire

Abstract: 1. Why Gender and Empire? 2. Empire, Gender, and Modernity in the Eighteenth Century 3. Of Gender and Empire: Reflections on the Nineteenth Century 4. Gender and Empire: The Twentieth Century 5. Medicine, Gender, and Empire 6. Sexuality, Gender, and Empire 7. Gender and Migration 8. Nations in an Imperial Crucible 9. Legacies of Departure: Decolonization, Nation-making, and Gender 10. Empire and Violence 1900-1939 11. Childhood and Race: Growing up in the Empire 12. Faith, Missionary Life, and the Family 13. Archive Stories: Gender in the Making of Imperial and Colonial Histories

Triumph of the Expert: Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of British Colonialism

Abstract: The most striking feature of British colonialism in the twentieth century was the confidence it expressed in the use of science and expertise, especially when joined with the new bureaucratic capacities of the state, to develop natural and human resources of the empire. Triumph of the Expert is a history of British colonial doctrine and its contribution to the emergence of rural development and environmental policies in the late colonial and postcolonial period. Joseph Morgan Hodge examines the way that development as a framework of ideas and institutional practices emerged out of the strategic engagement between science and the state at the climax of the British Empire. Hodge looks intently at the structural constraints, bureaucratic fissures, and contradictory imperatives that beset and ultimately overwhelmed the late colonial development mission in sub-Saharan Africa, south and southeast Asia, and the Caribbean. Triumph of the Expert seeks to understand the quandaries that led up to the important transformation in British imperial thought and practice and the intellectual and administrative legacies it left behind.

Escape from Empire: The Developing World's Journey through Heaven and Hell

Abstract: A provocative view of economic growth in the Third World argues that the countries that have achieved steady economic growth-including future economic superpowers India and China-have done so because they have resisted the American ideology of free markets. The American government has been both miracle worker and villain in the developing world. From the end of World War II until the 1980s poor countries, including many in Africa and the Middle East, enjoyed a modicum of economic growth. New industries mushroomed and skilled jobs multiplied, thanks in part to flexible American policies that showed an awareness of the diversity of Third World countries and an appreciation for their long-standing knowledge about how their own economies worked. Then during the Reagan era, American policy changed. The definition of laissez-faire shifted from "Do it your way," to an imperial "Do it our way." Growth in the developing world slowed, income inequalities skyrocketed, and financial crises raged. Only East Asian economies resisted the strict prescriptions of Washington and continued to boom. Why? In Escape from Empire, Alice Amsden argues provocatively that the more freedom a developing country has to determine its own policies, the faster its economy will grow. America's recent inflexibility-as it has single-mindedly imposed the same rules, laws, and institutions on all developing economies under its influence-has been the backdrop to the rise of two new giants, China and India, who have built economic power in their own way. Amsden describes the two eras in America's relationship with the developing world as "Heaven" and "Hell"-a beneficent and politically savvy empire followed by a dictatorial, ideology-driven one. What will the next American empire learn from the failure of the last? Amsden argues convincingly that the world-and the United States-will be infinitely better off if new centers of power are met with sensible policies rather than hard-knuckled ideologies. But, she asks, can it be done?

Rethinking environmental history: World-system history and global environmental change

Abstract: Introduction: Environmental History as Political Ecology Part I The Environment in World-System History: Tracing Social Processes in Nature 1. Environmental Impacts of the Roman Economy and Social Structure: Augustus to Diocletian 2. "People Said Extinction Was Not Possible": Two Thousand Years of Environmental Change in South China 3. Precolonial Landesque Capital: A Global Perspective 4. Food, War, and Crisis: The Seventeenth-Century Swedish Empire 5. The Role of Deforestation in Earth and World-System Integration 6. Silver, Ecology, and the Origins of the Modern World, 1450-1640 7. Trade, "Trinkets," and Environmental Change at the Edge of World-Systems: Political Ecology and the East African Ivory Trade 8. Steps to an Environmental History of the Western Llanos of Venezuela: A World-System Perspective 9. The Extractive Economy: An Early Phase of the Globalization of Diet, and Its Environmental Consequences 10.Yellow Jack and Geopolitics: Environment, Epidemics, and the Struggles for Empire in the American Tropics, 1640-1830 Part II Ecology and Unequal Exchange: Unraveling Environmental Injustice in the Modern World 11. Marxism, Social Metabolism, and International Trade 12. Natural Values and the Physical Inevitability of Uneven Development under Capitalism 13. Footprints in the Cotton Fields: The Industrial Revolution as Time-Space Appropriation and Environmental Load Displacement 14. Uneven Ecological Exchange and Consumption-Based Environmental Impacts: A Cross-National Investigation 15. Combining Social Metabolism and Input-Output Analyses to Account for Ecologically Unequal Trade 16. Physical Trade Flows of Pollution-Intensive Products: Historical Trends in Europe and the World 17. Environmental Issues at the U.S.-Mexico Border and the Unequal Territorialization of Value 18. Surrogate Money, Technology, and the Expansion of Savanna Soybeans in Brazil 19. Scale and Dependency in World-Systems: Local Societies in Convergent Evolution 20. The Ecology and the Economy: What is Rational?

Victorian visions of global order : empire and international relations in nineteenth-century political thought

Abstract: 1. Introduction Duncan Bell 2. Free trade and global order: the rise and fall of a Victorian vision Anthony Howe 3. The foundations of Victorian international law Casper Sylvest 4. Boundaries of Victorian international law Jennifer Pitts 5. 'A legislating empire': Victorian political theorists, codes of law, and empire Sandra Den Otter 6. The crisis of liberal imperialism Karuna Mantena 7. 'Great' versus 'small' nations: scale and national greatness in Victorian political thought Georgios Varouxakis 8. The Victorian idea of a global state Duncan Bell 9. Radicalism and the extra-European-world: the case of Marx Gareth Stedman Jones 10. Radicalism, Gladstone, and the liberal critique of Disraelian 'imperialism' Peter Cain 11. The 'left' and the critique of empire c. 1865-1900: three roots of humanitarian foreign policy Gregory Claeys 12. Consequentialist cosmopolitanism David Weinstein.

Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860-1920

Abstract: List of Illustrations Preface Introduction: Empire Recentered 1. Governing Colonial Peoples 2. Constructing Identities 3. Projecting Power: The Indian Army Overseas 4. Recruiting Sikhs for Colonial Police and Military 5. "Hard Hands and Sound Healthy Bodies": Recruiting "Coolies" for Natal 6. India in East Africa Conclusion List of Abbreviations Notes Selected Bibliography Index

An Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management

Abstract: In this significant Marxist critique of contemporary American imperialism, the cultural theorist Randy Martin argues that a finance-based logic of risk control has come to dominate Americans’ everyday lives as well as U.S. foreign and domestic policy. Risk management—the ability to adjust for risk and to leverage it for financial gain—is the key to personal finance as well as the defining element of the massive global market in financial derivatives. The United States wages its amorphous war on terror by leveraging particular interventions (such as Iraq) to much larger ends (winning the war on terror) and by deploying small numbers of troops and targeted weaponry to achieve broad effects. Both in global financial markets and on far-flung battlegrounds, the multiplier effects are difficult to foresee or control. Drawing on theorists including Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Achille Mbembe, Martin illuminates a frightening financial logic that must be understood in order to be countered. Martin maintains that finance divides the world between those able to avail themselves of wealth opportunities through risk taking (investors) and those who cannot do so, who are considered “at risk.” He contends that modern-day American imperialism differs from previous models of imperialism, in which the occupiers engaged with the occupied to “civilize” them, siphon off wealth, or both. American imperialism, by contrast, is an empire of indifference: a massive flight from engagement. The United States urges an embrace of risk and self-management on the occupied and then ignores or dispossesses those who cannot make the grade.

From farmers to merchants, conversions and diaspora: human capital and jewish history

Abstract: From the end of the second century CE, Judaism enforced a religious norm requiring fathers to educate their sons. We present evidence supporting our thesis that this change had a major influence on Jewish economic and demographic history. First, the high individual and community cost of educating children in subsistence farming economies (2nd to 7th centuries) prompted voluntary conversions of Jews that account for a share of the reduction from 4.5 to 1.2 million. Second, the Jewish farmers who invested in education gained the comparative advantage and incentive to enter skilled occupations during the urbanization in the Abbasid empire in the Near East (8th and 9th centuries) and they did select themselves into these occupations. Third, as merchants the Jews invested even more in education—a precondition for the mailing network and common court system that endowed them with trading skills demanded all over the world. Fourth, the Jews generated a voluntary diaspora within the Muslim Empire and later to Western Europe. Fifth, the majority of world Jewry lived in the Near East when the Mongol invasions in the 1250s brought this region back to a subsistence farming economy in which many Jews found it difficult to enforce the religious norm, and hence converted, as it had happened centuries earlier. (JEL: J1, J2, N3, O1, Z12, Z13)

Popular Morality in the Early Roman Empire

Abstract: Morality is one of the fundamental structures of any society, enabling complex groups to form, negotiate their internal differences and persist through time. In the first book-length study of Roman popular morality, Dr Morgan argues that we can recover much of the moral thinking of people across the Empire. Her study draws on proverbs, fables, exemplary stories and gnomic quotations, to explore how morality worked as a system for Roman society as a whole and in individual lives. She examines the range of ideas and practices and their relative importance, as well as questions of authority and the relationship with high philosophy and the ethical vocabulary of documents and inscriptions. The Roman Empire incorporated numerous overlapping groups, whose ideas varied according to social status, geography, gender and many other factors. Nevertheless it could and did hold together as an ethical community, which was a significant factor in its socio-political success.

The Blackwell history of the Latin language

Abstract: Preface. 1 Latin and Indo-European. 2 The Languages of Italy. 3 The Background to Standardization. 4 'Old' Latin and its Varieties in the Period c.400--150 BC. 5 The Road to Standardization: Roman Latin of the Third and Second Centuries BC. 6 Elite Latin in the Late Republic and Early Empire. 7 Sub-Elite Latin in the Empire. 8 Latin in Late Antiquity and Beyond. Glossary. Appendix: The International Phonetic Alphabet. Bibliography of Reference and Other Works. Index.