Showing papers on "Empire published in 2020"

The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History

Abstract: List of IllustrationsPrefaceCh. 1Conversion and Christian Growth3Ch. 2The Class Basis of Early Christianity29Ch. 3The Mission to the Jews: Why It Probably Succeeded49Ch. 4Epidemics, Networks, and Conversion73Ch. 5The Role of Women in Christian Growth95Ch. 6Christianizing the Urban Empire: A Quantitative Approach129Ch. 7Urban Chaos and Crisis: The Case of Antioch147Ch. 8The Martyrs: Sacrifice as Rational Choice163Ch. 9Opportunity and Organization191Ch. 10A Brief Reflection on Virtue209Notes217Bibliography223Index243

Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy : Rethinking Women of Color Organizing

Abstract: The logic of slavery can be seen clearly in the current prison-industrial complex (PIC). While the PIC generally incarcerates communities of color, it seems to be structured primarily on an anti-Black racism. Rayna Green further elaborates that the current Indian “wannabe” phenomenon is based on a logic of genocide: non-Native peoples imagine themselves as the rightful inheritors of all that previously belonged to “vanished” Indians, thus entitling them to ownership of this land. The living performance of “playing Indian” by non-Indian peoples depends upon the physical and psychological removal, even the death, of real Indians. Heteropatriarchy is the building block of US empire. In fact, it is the building block of the nation-state form of governance. Christian Right authors make these links in their analysis of imperialism and empire.

The fire this time: Grenfell, racial capitalism and the urbanisation of empire:

Abstract: Over the last few years, an emergent body of International Relations scholarship has taken an interest in the rise of global cities and the challenges they bring to existing geographies of power. I...

Following the infrastructures of empire: notes on cities, settler colonialism, and method

Abstract: This paper investigates urban life through the contested formation of settler colonial infrastructure. Trespassing nationalist narratives, it ‘follows the infrastructure’ across imperial space, tim...

Worldmaking after empire: the rise and fall of self-determination

Abstract: Contemporary global justice theorists have largely neglected the transnational aspirations of the post- decolonization movement, instead seeing it as solely a movement for countries to gain national political independence. Adom Getachew’s groundbreaking study challenges this misconception by recovering the internationalist thought and political projects of twentieth-century anti-colonial nationalism. Drawing from anti-colonial thinkers and statesmen such as Nnamdi Azikiwe, W. E. B. Du Bois, George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah, Eric Williams, Michael Manley, and Julius Nyerere, Getachew argues that anti-colonial nationalists were as much “world makers” as they were state builders. As colonies became independent states while already deeply embedded in unequal global relations, anti-colonial nationalists clearly saw the interconnectedness between national self-determination and global equality. Responding to and proposing innovations based on their specific historical situation, anti-colonial nationalists generated a universal ideal of a postimperial world in which “democratic, modernizing, and redistributive national states were situated in thick international institutions designed to realize the principle of nondomination” (p. ). This vision, as Getachew compellingly suggests, is still deeply relevant for thinking about global justice today. Analyzing the anti-colonial “worldmaking” that is present in institutionalizing a universal right to self-determination, experimenting with regional federalism, and pushing for a “welfare world,” Getachew advances two important and novel theses, which she discusses in the first and most theoretical chapter of the book. The first is that empire was and should be conceptualized beyond alien rule, and understood instead as unequal integration into an international hierarchy, a process that continues to this day. The second is that contra the anti-statism prevalent in cosmopolitan theories of global justice, nationalism and internationalismmay, in fact, be compatible and mutually reinforcing. As Getachew states, anti-colonial nationalists “believed national independence could be achieved only through internationalist projects” (p. ). These two theses clearly have implications for theorizing contemporary global justice. Indeed, Getachew alludes to the possibility of a “postcolonial cosmopolitanism” that takes seriously collective claims to sovereignty and selfdetermination as bulwarks against past and present imperialism.

Race, Empire, and Epistemic Exclusion: Or the Structures of Sociological Thought

Abstract: This essay analyzes racialized exclusions in sociology through a focus on sociology’s deep epistemic structures. These structures dictate what counts as social scientific knowledge and who can prod...

Brexit and Empire: ‘Global Britain’ and the Myth of Imperial Nostalgia

Abstract: In the wake of the 2016 referendum, the idea that ‘imperial nostalgia’ motivated the Leave vote became a staple of academic commentary. Yet such claims suffer from four important flaws. They are us...

Black Africans’ Freedom Litigation Suits to Define Just War and Just Slavery in the Early Spanish Empire

Abstract: This article explores how some enslaved Black Africans litigated for their freedom in Spanish royal courts in the sixteenth century on the basis that—as Christians—they had been unjustly enslaved in Africa. With a focus on the port cities of Seville and Cartagena, I explore how freedom litigation suits illuminate how individuals from starkly different social worlds and intellectual milieus—who inhabited the same urban sites—affected and shaped one another's intellectual landscapes. I trace how enslaved Africans’ epistemologies of just slavery shaped broader discourses on the just enslavement of Africans in the Spanish Empire.

The Lion's Share: A History of British Imperialism 1850 to the Present

Abstract: As well as presenting a lively narrative of events, Bernard Porter explores a number of broad analytical themes, challenging more conventional and popular interpretations. He sees imperialism as a symptom not of Britain's strength in the world, but of her decline; and he argues that the empire itself both aggravated and obscured deep-seated malaise in the British economy.

Italian Privileges and Trade in Byzantium before the Fourth Crusade: A Reconsideration

Abstract: Between 1082 and· 1192 several Byzantine emperors conferred extensive privileges on the three main Italian maritime powers, Venice, Pisa and Genoa A new reading of their commercial and fiscal provisions in a contemporary context and in a comparative framework reveals some misunderstood or overlooked aspects of their content, suggests novel inter­pretations, and sheds light on some of their effects on trade, shipping and the Italian settletment pattern in the Empire before the Fourth Crusade The disparity between the respective privileges granted to the three maritime powers was far wider than generally assumed Deliberate measures taken by the Byzantine government, the arbitrary action of its officials, especially in the provinces, and political developments affected in various ways, at times heavily, the implementation of these privileges and the benefit deri­ving from them These factors should be taken into account in any evalua­tion of Italian trade and settlement in Byzantium and the impact these had on the Empire's economy

Nostalgia for the Empire: The Politics of Neo-Ottomanism

Abstract: A ghost has been haunting Turkey, a ghost of the Ottoman past. This statement, inspired by The Communist Manifesto, succinctly captures the message of M. Hakan Yavuz's latest book. Nostalgia for th...

Is an Antiracist and Decolonizing Applied Linguistics Possible

Abstract: This article argues for an uncovering of the multitude of ways in which applied linguistics has functioned as an important and effective vehicle for White supremacy and empire, with its disciplinary roots embedded in assumptions about racial inequalities and racial hierarchies and, equally importantly, the concealment of these forms of racial discrimination which often manifest as innocuous language practices. In particular, the notion of objectivity has played a guiding role in reinscribing Whiteness in much applied linguistics theorizing and research within a global context of inequitable racial power and forms of knowledge production and transmission that are steeped in colonial reasoning. In this piece, the author considers what antiracism and decolonization mean within applied linguistics and asks: Is the discipline of applied linguistics irretrievably rooted in an ontology of race and empire? Or is an antiracist and decolonizing applied linguistics possible?

Homo Imperii: A History of Physical Anthropology in Russia

Abstract: It is widely assumed that the "nonclassical" nature of the Russian empire and its equally "nonclassical" modernity made Russian intellectuals immune to the racial obsessions of Western Europe and the United States. Homo Imperii corrects this perception by offering the first scholarly history of racial science in prerevolutionary Russia and the early Soviet Union. Marina Mogilner places this story in the context of imperial self-modernization, political and cultural debates of the epoch, different reformist and revolutionary trends, and the growing challenge of modern nationalism. By focusing on the competing centers of race science in different cities and regions of the empire, Homo Imperii introduces to English-language scholars the institutional nexus of racial science in Russia that exhibits the influence of imperial strategic relativism. Reminiscent of the work of anthropologists of empire such as Ann Stoler and Benedict Anderson, Homo Imperii reveals the complex imperial dynamics of Russian physical anthropology and contributes an important comparative perspective from which to understand the emergence of racial science in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe and America.

Imperial dialectics and epistemic mapping: From decolonisation to anti-Eurocentric IR:

Abstract: What would it mean to construct a post-imperial discipline rather than a ‘post-Western’ one? ‘Post-imperial’ means addressing the ways in which colonial empires divided the world into separate real...

Warfare, state and society in the Byzantine world, 565-1204

Abstract: Warfare, State and Society in the Byzantine World is the first comprehensive study of warfare and the Byzantine world from the sixth to the twelfth century. The book examines Byzantine attitudes to warfare, the effects of war on society and culture, and the relations between the soldiers, their leaders and society. The communications, logistics, resources and manpower capabilities of the Byzantine Empire are explored to set warfare in its geographical as well as historical context. In addition to the strategic and tactical evolution of the army, this book analyses the army in campaign and in battle, and its attitudes to violence in the context of the Byzantine Orthodox Church. The Byzantine Empire has an enduring fascination for all those who study it, and Warfare, State and Society is a colourful study of the central importance of warfare within it.

Overlapping Histories, Co-produced Concepts: Imperialism in Chinese Eyes

Abstract: Many historians of China, particularly those based in North America, insist that the Qing dynasty's territorial expansion was imperial and comparable to the imperial expansions of other global empires. Other historians, particularly but not only those based in the People's Republic of China, continue to resist this interpretation. They argue that dynastic expansion in the Ming and Qing periods was simply a form of nation-state building, akin to similar processes in Europe. Rather than rejecting their claims as a product of Chinese nationalism, we argue that the term “empire” should be (re)understood as a global co-production, emerging from multiple intersecting histories and scholarly debates about those histories. Doing so challenges influential definitions of empire that rely on a distinction between empires and nation-states, highlighting their dual presence in both Euro-American and Chinese pasts (and presents). This move demands a rejection of periodizations that suggest that empires ceased to exist following the period of decolonization from 1945 to the 1970s. This opens up new avenues of historical and normative inquiry to acknowledge the modern continuity between empires and nation-states.

The Museum of London, 1976-2007 : reimagining metropolitan narratives in postcolonial London

Abstract: Since the 1990s, cultural historians have developed exciting new scholarship charting shifting representations of empire at museums. Yet city museums feel strangely absent from these conversations, which have principally focused on national and regional museums in Britain, its former colonies and Europe. This thesis responds to this gap in the literature by mapping the shifting representation of empire and colonial histories at the Museum of London between 1976-2007. Opened in 1976 by Queen Elizabeth II, the Museum of London was an amalgamation of the London Museum (1912) and the Guildhall Museum (founded 1826), situated in the heart of the City, at the south-west corner of the Barbican Centre. Given its location, once the heart of the British Empire, the Museum of London provides a unique space to examine the changing place and value of empire in Britain’s foremost metropolitan museum. The thesis begins then by charting the origins of the Museum of London, analysing the place and value of empire within the Museum’s permanent galleries in 1976. It proceeds by untangling the complex relations underlying shifting representations, to explore how and why changes in narrative orientation occurred in 1989 when the Museum started planning a new exhibition, ‘The Peopling of London’, launched in 1993. This marked the Museum’s initial serious engagement with the legacies of British colonialism in relation to its urban constituents. The legacy of this small exhibition led to increased engagement with postcolonial histories, culminating with ‘London, Sugar and Slavery’ in 2007, staged at the Museum of London Docklands to mark the bicentenary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. The cumulative picture is a complex, sometimes ambiguous, relationship between the Museum and London’s colonial past.

The Imperialisation of Assyria: An Archaeological Approach

Abstract: The Assyrian Empire was the first state to achieve durable domination of the Ancient Near East, enduring some seven centuries and, eventually, controlling most of the region. Yet, we know little about how this empire emerged from a relatively minor polity in the Tigris region and how it managed to consolidate its power over conquered territories. Textual sources, often biased, provide a relatively limited source of information. In this study, Bleda S. During examines the rich archaeological data of the early Assyrian Empire that have been obtained over the past decades, together with the textual evidence. The archaeological data enable us to reconstruct the remarkably heterogeneous and dynamic impact of the Assyrian Empire on dominated territories. They also facilitate the reconstruction of the various ways in which people participated in this empire, and what might have motivated them to do so. Finally, During's study shows how imperial repertoires first developed in the Middle Assyrian period were central to the success of the Neo-Assyrian Empire.

Bordering Britain: Law, race and empire

Abstract: Book synopsis: (B)ordering Britain argues that Britain is the spoils of empire, its immigration law is colonial violence and irregular immigration is anti-colonial resistance. In announcing itself as postcolonial through immigration and nationality laws passed in the 60s, 70s and 80s, Britain cut itself off symbolically and physically from its colonies and the Commonwealth, taking with it what it had plundered. This imperial vanishing act cast Britain's colonial history into the shadows. The British Empire, about which Britons know little, can be remembered fondly as a moment of past glory, as a gift once given to the world. Meanwhile immigration laws are justified on the basis that they keep the undeserving hordes out. In fact, immigration laws are acts of colonial seizure and violence. They obstruct the vast majority of racialised people from accessing colonial wealth amassed in the course of colonial conquest. Regardless of what the law, media and political discourse dictate, people with personal, ancestral or geographical links to colonialism, or those existing under the weight of its legacy of race and racism, have every right to come to Britain and take back what is theirs.

Rendering settler sovereign landscapes: Race and property in the Empire State:

Abstract: This article examines the politics of race, indigeneity, and landscape in US American enactments of property. Its substance is the homelands of the Haudenosaunee, now territorialized as upstate New...

Upper Canada’s Empire: Liberalism, Race, and Western Expansion in British North America, 1860s – 1914

Abstract: This article recovers a long-forgotten tradition of Canadian political thought – a Liberal idea of nation-building premised on the expansion and consolidation of an Upper Canadian empire. Combining...

The Passing of “Geography’s Empire” and Question of Geography in Decolonization, 1945–1980

Abstract: Critical engagement with the relations between geography and empire has become integral to the view that geography is a power-laden venture rather than an impartial or self-contained discipline. Th...

International Status in the Shadow of Empire: Nauru and the Histories of International Law

Abstract: Nauru is often figured as an anomaly in the international order. This book offers a new account of Nauru's imperial history and examines its significance to the histories of international law. Drawing on theories of jurisdiction and bureaucracy, it reconstructs four shifts in Nauru's status – from German protectorate, to League of Nations C Mandate, to UN Trust Territory, to sovereign state – as a means of redescribing the transition from the nineteenth century imperial order to the twentieth century state system. The book argues that as international status shifts, imperial form accretes: as Nauru's status shifted, what occurred at the local level was a gradual process of bureaucratisation. Two conclusions emerge from this argument. The first is that imperial administration in Nauru produced the Republic's post-independence 'failures'. The second is that international recognition of sovereign status is best understood as marking a beginning, not an end, of the process of decolonisation.

Colonialism in Global Perspective

Abstract: Kris Manjapra weaves together the study of colonialism over the past 500 years, across the globe's continents and seas. This captivating work vividly evokes living human histories, introducing the reader to manifestations of colonialism as expressed through war, militarization, extractive economies, migrations and diasporas, racialization, biopolitical management, and unruly and creative responses and resistances by colonized peoples. This book describes some of the most salient political, social, and cultural constellations of our present times across the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe. By exploring the dissimilar, yet entwined, histories of conquest, settler colonialism, racial slavery, and empire, Manjapra exposes the enduring role of colonial force and freedom struggle in the making of our modern world.

Bearing the White Man’s Burden: American Empire and the Origin of Public Administration

Abstract: There is an overlooked chapter in the history of American public administration: the experiment with colonial administration in the two decades following the Spanish-American War. Several scholars now identified as pioneers of American public administration were actively engaged in this project. They studied European empires closely to determine how the new American dependencies should be governed. This work was guided by beliefs about racial superiority and the duty of civilized nations to improve uncivilized peoples through colonization. This episode of administrative history provides insight into how American academics thought about race and public administration in the early decades of the twentieth century, both overseas and within the United States. It compels a reassessment of our understandings about their commitment to democracy, and about the supposed differences between American and European public administration at that time.

Carceral Empire: A People's History of the Origin of Prison in the United States

Abstract: Despite popular scholarship's conclusion that the American penitentiary had humanitarian origins, focusing on the relationship between the prison and both American Indian nations and black communities reveals its deep and previously ignored connection to slavery and imperialism, both domestic and global. Since black civilians were an intentional subject of the first prisons, American penologists looked to plantation carcerality for inspiration. As America began to envision its imperial expansion across the continent and controlling colonies abroad, the young Empire shifted its strategy from military violence to carceral control and legal colonialism. At the same time, prisons across the ‘free’ North engaged in a superlegal trafficking of their black prisoners into Southern slavery under the authority of the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act, even though many prisoners were known to be free. Greater police presence and increased prisons served to maintain the local and federal governments’ racial control through an Economy of Tenuous Freedom the State holding black freedom captive to prevent struggles for liberation, civil rights, and political power. Nevertheless, the 1830s saw a widespread mobilization of black anti-carceral activism under the leadership of the working-class black community and a leader willing to fight for freedom at any cost.

Economic Governance in the Empire-Commonwealth in Theory and in Practice, c. 1887-1975

Abstract: After a long spell of neglect, historians in the last twenty years have started again to take an interest in the economics of the ‘British World’: an entity centred on Britain and the dominions. Their approach emphasises shared culture and networks. By contrast this article reasserts the importance of institutions of governance in shaping economic transactions and hence the importance of political (not cultural) economy. In order to re-emphasise the connected importance of co-ordination between states within the Empire, it prefers the term Empire-Commonwealth to British world, a term more closely grounded in contemporary language. It argues that the Empire-Commonwealth possessed complex, patchy, but discernible practices of economic governance which the paper delineates and argues were shaped by the overriding concern to maximise the autonomy of self-governing members (Britain and the dominions). These practices let to cooperation over preferential trading arrangements, currency, taxation, migration and investment, law and regulation, and transport and communications. After 1945 the international framework which sustained these practices transformed, while the internal dynamics of the post-imperial Commonwealth made significant cooperation on matters other than aid and development in the global south unlikely. The possibility of broad-ranging governance receded even as intra-Commonwealth trade and investment declined.

The Memory of Mursa: Usurpation, Civil War, and Contested Legitimacy Under the Sons of Constantine

Abstract: This chapter considers the historical significance of the usurpations and civil wars of the 350s, paying close attention to the usurpations of Magnentius and Vetranio. The chapter analyses the central role that victory in civil war served for the Constantinian dynasty in shaping the defining features of imperial legitimacy (aspects of which were appropriated by the usurpers themselves in order to legitimise their rebellions against Constantius II). The focus for the chapter’s analysis resides on the events and broader significance of the battle of Mursa in September 351 in which Constantius II defeated Magnentius. The memorialisation of Constantius II’s victory at Mursa is discussed in terms of its role in substantiating Constantius’ imperial image and also in relation to its role in disassembling the same image in later fourth-century historiography. The impact of this conflict on the configuration of political allegiances in Rome and the western empire is also evaluated in the chapter.