Showing papers on "Expansionism published in 2009"

Russophobia: Anti-Russian Lobby and American Foreign Policy

Abstract: Preface List of Tables The U.S. Russia Policy after 9/11 The Anti-Russian Lobby The 'New Cold War' and American Sense of History The Chechnya 'Oppressor' and US Objectives in the Caucasus The 'Authoritarianism at Heart' and Washington's Democracy Promotion The 'Expansionism by Habit' and American Security Russia's Energy 'Imperialism' and US Interests Toward an Alternative Russia Approach Appendix: The Lobby's Ideology and Examples of Activities, 2003-2008 Index

Borderlines in borderlands : James Madison and the Spanish-American frontier, 1776-1821

Abstract: In examining how the United States gained control over the northern borderlands of Spanish America, this work reassesses the diplomacy of President James Madison. Historians have assumed Madison's motive in sending agents into the Spanish borderlands between 1810 and 1813 was to subvert Spanish rule, but Stagg argues that his real intent was to find peaceful and legal resolutions to long-standing disputes over the boundaries of Louisiana at a time when the Spanish-American empire was in the process of dissolution. Drawing on an array of American, British, French, and Spanish sources, the author describes how a myriad cast of local leaders, officials, and other small players affected the borderlands diplomacy between the United States and Spain, and he casts new light on Madison's contribution to early American expansionism.

Greed and Contingency: State Fiscal Crises and Imperial Failure in Early Modern Europe1

Abstract: Why do states lose the capacity to finance the expansionist military policies, economic development strategies, or domestic spending initiatives they once supported? The path‐dependent models offered by fiscal‐military, rational choice, and geopolitical theorists are evaluated in comparison with an elite conflict model of contingent historical change The latter model is found to be better able to explain territorial and fiscal stagnation and decline as well as imperial expansion in the cases of early modern Spain, France, the Netherlands, and Britain

Becoming Turk the Rajput Way: Conversion and Identity in an Indian Warrior Narrative

Abstract: The Kyamkhanis were a small Indian Muslim community who flourished in northern Rajasthan from c. 1450 to 1730. This article examines memories of the Kyamkhani past recorded in a seventeenth-century history of the ruling lineage, as a case study of both the process of Islamic expansionism in South Asia and the self-identity of rural Muslim gentry. While celebrating the ancestor who had converted to Islam generations earlier, the Kyamkhanis also represented themselves as local warriors of the Rajput class, an affiliation that is considered exclusively Hindu in India today. Their history was written in a local literary language, Braj Bhasa, rather than in the more cosmopolitan Persian that was widely used by Muslim elites at the time. The Kyamkhanis of the early modern era thus negotiated multiple social and cultural spheres, simultaneously participating in the local/vernacular as well as global/cosmopolitan arenas.

Pakistan and Iran's Dysfunctional Relationship

Abstract: Published in the Spring 2009 Middle East Quarterly, pp. 43-50. In April 2008, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited Pakistan as part of a whistlestop tour of South Asia. The meeting was cordial but tense. While the two neighbors were once staunch Cold War allies, the Islamic Revolution, Afghanistan's civil war, and Pakistan's nuclear development have transformed the relationship into one of tense rivalry. As Afghanistan's stability has become a U.S. strategic concern, preventing Pakistan-Iran tensions from again transforming Afghanistan into a proxy battlefield should be a U.S. interest. Unfortunately, so long as the Iranian and Pakistani governments remain concerned with the defense of Shi'i and Sunni sectarian interests respectively, U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan may not be able to bring stability but at best may remain referees in a struggle that extends far beyond that country's borders. A Troubled Triangle Pakistan and Iran are bound by cultural, tribal, and religious bonds. Pakistan gained its independence in 1947 at the beginning of the Cold War. Iran became the first state to recognize the new nation, and the two neighbors soon developed a strong partnership, signing a treaty of friendship in 1950. Some of this was geopolitical. Pakistan was born amidst great bloodshed and a transfer of population with India, a country with which Pakistan has territorial disputes to the present day. Pakistan found a natural partner in Iran after the Indian government chose to support Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser who sought to export a pan- Arab ideology that threatened many Arab monarchies, a number of which were favored by the Iranian shah. Iran was a natural ally and model for Pakistan for other reasons as well. Both had majority Muslim populations but remained secular, centralized, and Western-oriented in practice. Both countries granted the other most-favored nation status for trade purposes; the shah offered Iranian oil and gas to Pakistan on generous terms, and the Iranian and Pakistani armies cooperated to suppress the rebel movement in Baluchistan.1 Both countries also became major bulwarks of U.S. policy in the Middle East. Both were firm U.S. allies and members of the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact. In 1971, however, the geopolitical situation began to shift. The withdrawal of British forces from the Persian Gulf left the United States to fill the vacuum, making Saudi Arabia far more important in U.S. strategic calculus. Pakistan's defeat in its 1971 war with India - and the loss of half its territory with Bangladesh's independence - led it to court China as a means to balance India. Pakistan also sought closer ties with the Arab states in order to isolate India, and thus weakened its ties to Iran, even though Islamabad-Tehran relations remained cordial. The shah's fall in 1979 was a blow to Pakistan. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's antiAmerican posture worried the Pakistani authorities, as did the prospect of any export to Pakistan of Khomeini's radical views. After all, in 1979, perhaps 20 percent of Pakistan's population was Shi'i and, at the same time, Khomeini's religious rhetoric sparked radicalism across the sectarian divide. Nevertheless, Islamabad offered an olive branch to Tehran. Pakistan was among the first countries to recognize the new Islamic Republic and was among very few countries in the region that refrained from supporting Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war.2 The 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan brought the Soviet Union to Pakistan's doorstep, transforming the geostrategic environment further, all the more so given India's close ties to Moscow. For the United States, concerned about Soviet expansionism, Pakistan's importance rose. Ironically, Pakistan, Iran, and the United States all found themselves on the same side with regard to Afghanistan, even as Iran's revolutionary authorities continued to hold U.S. diplomats hostage. Though Iran was preoccupied with domestic turmoil and its war with Iraq in the 1980s, it supported the Afghan resistance and provided limited financial and military assistance to groups who supported the Iranian vision of revolutionary Islam. …

Hitler's Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress

Abstract: Introduction Hitler as Moral Crusader and Liar The Cult of Evolutionary Progress Racial Struggle Morally Upright Aryans and Immoral Jews Hitler's Socialism: Building the People's Community Sexual Morality and Population Expansion Controlling Reproduction to Improve the Human Species The Struggle for Living Space: War and Expansionism Justifying Murder and Genocide Conclusion

War, Politics and Memory: Russian Historians Reevaluate the Origins of World War II

Abstract: The myth of the Great Patriotic War, including the role of the USSR in the origins of World War II, continues to be a key element in the national identity of the Russian people. Previously, Soviet authorities mandated a narrative depicting the Soviet Union sincerely and unambiguously working for peace and against Nazi expansionism in the prewar years. This interpretation criticized the Western Powers for their alleged complicity in Hitler's aggression. After the collapse of the USSR, several competing views have appeared. The Putin and Medvedev administrations, as well as the popular "national-patriotic" school, maintain much of the former Soviet interpretation. Other Russian historians, many of them politically liberal, indict Stalin for mishandling the prewar crisis or even for promoting the onset of war for imperialistic or revolutionary purposes.

Borderland Subversions: Anti-imperial Energies in The Awntyrs off Arthure and Golagros and Gawane

Abstract: Before a crowd of eager Arthurian spectators assembled near Carlisle, Galeron, introduced earlier as the "grettest" (greatest) of Galloway, kneels, signaling his submission to the stand-in for the imperial war machine to which he will soon swear allegiance.1 It is thus through dispossession and repossession that The Awntyrs off Arthure at the Terne Wathelayne stages the centrality of land to power plays in the Anglo-Scottish marches. The poem does not present an "English" Gawain who defeats a "Scottish" Galeron, winning yet another soldier for the armies of a British empire, but rather simultaneously invites and forecloses readings of the poem's territorial conflicts as essentially national or ethnic. In portraying the practice of side switching, key to survival on the militarized Anglo-Scottish border, the Awntyrs joins with a text that, though of a more northerly provenance, also defies simple national classification and that is also grounded in the brutal and fluid world of border warfare, where profit regularly trumped patriotism in determining to which power player marcher lords and their retainers gravitated. The Knightly Tale of Golagros and Gawane, though ostensibly of "Scottish" provenance, joins the Awntyrs in speaking from a marcher perspective of the impact of the raids and invasions that wracked the Anglo-Scottish borderlands.2 By bracketing our sense of the "national" origins of these poems, we can trace the manner in which they each manage critiques of imperialist expansionism. These critiques register regional reactions to processes of nation formation sweeping away the borderlands society that had fed off the almost continuous armed conflict of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Even as these texts reveal a nostalgia for the bravado and localism of war-torn times, they also speak to the devastation and misery produced by an economic world built upon violence. While the Awntyrs, set near the marcher stronghold of Carlisle, ultimately situates the collapse of the Arthurian empire at the very edge of its expanding frontier, Golagros offers

Between Stalin and Hitler: Class War and Race War on the Dvina, 1940-46 (2nd Edition)

Abstract: Covering the horrors that took place in Latvia from the beginning of the Second World War until 1947, this book focuses on the heart of the 20th century: Stalinist industrialization, collectivization and political annihilation; Nazi expansionism and genocide; with local nationalism, local nationalist rivalries, and local anti-Semitism. The author traces the developments in one particular region of Latvia, Daugavpils. There, the dilemma of Hitler or Stalin, the ideological struggle of fascism or communism was more acute than anywhere else in Europe since the population was actively involved in establishing both.

Ehrenburg and Grossman: Two Cosmopolitan Jewish Writers Reflect on Nazi Germany at War

Abstract: After the German invasion in 1941, World War II became a major, if not the major, topic of Soviet literature. Among the countless fictional works on it, however, those by Ilya Ehrenburg (Il'ia Erenburg) and Vasilii Grossman emerge as distinctive in one particular respect, their cosmopolitan perspective. I say cosmopolitan in the sense that though both writers, like the typical Soviet war novelist, sought to convey the experience of Russians going through World War II, their horizon of reference was not essentially defined by Soviet space but encompassed a more cosmopolitan, or more precisely a European, perspective. Given that most Soviet fiction about this war is intensely patriotic (1)--after all, the Soviets called it the Great Patriotic War--the war novels of these writers provide interesting studies of the interaction between the cosmopolitan and the patriotic, two categories that are far from always distinct. The typical Soviet vcar novel, and here Konstantin Simonov's Days and Nights (Dni i nochi, 1943-44) about Stalingrad would provide a good example, is largely about military maneuvers and relations between individuals in the Red Army unit that is the novel's focus. But Ehrenburg and Grossman had larger ambitions and used military engagements as a background for presenting their own ideas about history, politics, and culture. These ideas were framed by these two writers' account of the great confrontation between the Nazis and the Soviets, which they represented as not just a military engagement but a confrontation between two culture systems that would determine who has the right to lead Europe. In adopting this approach they were inscribing their war novels into the ongoing debates about Russia/Soviet Russia's destiny, debates in which Germany has often functioned as a point of comparison. Consequently, here I first sketch in brief this larger framework. During the decades leading up to the Bolshevik Revolution, a popular account among intellectuals of the special destiny for Russia was that the country, poised as it was between Europe and Asia, could save the Europeans from the Aslan hordes. After the Bolsheviks came to power, their spokesmen, including Stalin, though inconsistent in their mission statements, in effect often re-inflected the notion that Russia would lead Europe, providing various scenarios for the Bolshevik state to dominate the continent either politically or at least ideologically. Germany was a critical factor in Soviet efforts to achieve such dominance. The Comintern was based in Berlin, and the German capital became a staging ground for Soviet ideological (if not political) expansionism. After the Nazi takeover in 1933, however, Germany began to function as the chief antagonist and competitor in the international arena. This shift had its impact on Soviets' conceptions of their particular role within Europe. Now the "hordes" to be withstood were not to the East, or even so much the rapacious Western capitalists per se, as the fascist states and among them the Nazi in particular. In other words, they were within Europe itself. Moreover, Germany and even the German workers could no longer be seen as the main conduit for ideological expansionism, and the whole attitude toward Germany had to be revised. Party spokesmen and intellectuals were particularly troubled by the question how could a country (Germany) with such a developed communist movement and such highly "conscious" workers suddenly become so enthusiastic for determinedly anti-Bolshevik forces? How could a country of such high cultural achievement descend into one built on violence? After the invasion of June 1941, when Germany became the enemy, such philosophical and ideological questions were somewhat shelved as intellectuals became the mainstay of a propaganda effort that caricatured the Germans. The two authors I am discussing, Grossman and Ehrenburg, played central roles in this propaganda effort, both of them by working as war correspondents for the main army newspaper, Krasnaia zvezda. …

Where Did the Black Rough Riders Go

Abstract: The Spanish-American War was a key moment in the development of U.S. imperialism and the popular western. Its iconic figure was Roosevelt's rough rider—the Anglo-Saxon gentleman cowboy par excellence—who yoked frontier heroism to overseas militarism, in the process justifying American extra-continental expansionism and extending the ideological reach of the western. The black military presence in Cuba—and, subsequently, Puerto Rico and the Philippines—threatened that process by challenging white superiority on the western frontier and the imperial battlefield. When white myth makers suppressed this story of black heroism, they drove it deep into the western's creative fabric. By following the fortunes of black soldiers, in print and in society, we can recognize how deeply the western formula is motivated and shaped by the blackness it denies and to what different ends African-American writers yoked western adventure, military action, and meanings of manhood in the United States.

"[R]eaders who are sick at heart": Melville's Typee and the Expansion Controversy

Abstract: After James Fenimore Cooper's rise to celebrity status in the 1 820s, there emerged in the United States a burgeoning literary West in which AngloAmerican triumphalism and U.S. identity were persistently conflated. At the same time, however, writers of the western frontier also tended to interweave counter-imperial, dissenting rhetorics into their narratives; especially as the United States moved closer to war with Mexico in 1 846, their works increasingly ventriloquized the nation's widespread anxiety over Indian Removal, slavery, and expansionism's threat to the character of a nation founded upon republican, anti-imperialist principles. While critics have long noted the impact of such expansion-related issues on Herman Melville's writings from the late 1840s through the beginning of the 1 850s,1 less attention has been paid to how those writings resonate with ideological contestations that freighted the nation's literary and political discourse at the height of Manifest Destiny. This essay briefly discusses Melville's first and most commercially-successful book, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846), in the context of conflicts bred by the practical dilemmas and moral transgressions endemic to the United States' expansionist program. More specifically, focusing on Typee's provocative treatment of the dynamic between Anglo-Europeans and the racial and international Other, I suggest that the explosive response the book evoked among American reviewers, as well as the wide popularity it attained almost immediately after its publication, arose from its participation in struggle between ideologies of conquest and counterimperial impulses. Though set in the South Pacific Isles, Typee's structural and thematic elements rendered it largely representative of the antebellum American literary West.2 The idea of the West carried explicitly international connotations in the public imagination at the time of Melville's writing; as Howard Doughty argued in his 1 962 biography of Francis Parkman, there obtained a "shared experience" between the United States' expansionist program and "the whole expansionist phase of European culture, as its 'radiation' on a worldwide scale brought it into contact usually destructive with cultures of a different nature and induced a more

The Forgotten History: Textbook Controversy and Sino-Japanese Relations

Abstract: History plays an important role in shaping the relations between Japan and China. Because Japani?½s military expansionism during 1931-1945 has left a deep scar in the memories of the Chinese population, the issue of history remains at the core of Sino-Japanese diplomacy. Since the 1980s, the Chinese government has consistently accused the Japanese government of revising and obscuring Japani?½s wartime history, notably that of the Japanese military aggression in China during 1931-1945. Chinai?½s reaction against the Japanese governmenti?½s whitewashing of history demonstrates the fear that, by rendering Japanese youths oblivious of their nationi?½s militarist past, Japan may repeat its past. While diplomatic negotiations to improve Sino-Japanese relations have taken place, disagreement over historical interpretation continues to fuel the discontent between the two countries. To better understand the dynamics of the Sino-Japanese relations, the research investigates the origins and nature of the textbook controversy by discussing how the controversy came about and how each government responded to the issue. In addition, the analysis of ultranationalist movement in Japan allows us to understand the public reaction to the controversy as well as its political repercussions. I also explore the Franco-German case of postwar reconciliation and development of preventive institutions. By comparing the postwar experience of China and Japan to that of Europe, we can gain an insight about the creative ways of constructing a common history between historically hostile nations. Finally, the assessment of Japanese leadership since 2000 enables us to evaluate the future development surrounding the problem of history and its impact on bilateral relations.

Philosophical Perspectives on Evolutionary Theory: A Sketch of the History

Abstract: Discussion of Darwinian evolutionary theory by philosophers has gone through a number of historical phases, from indifference (in the first hundred years), to criticism (in the 1960s and 70s), to enthusiasm and expansionism (since about 1980). This paper documents these phases and speculates about what, philosophically speaking, underlies them. It concludes with some comments on the present state of the evolutionary debate, where rapid and important changes within evolutionary theory may be passing by unnoticed by philosophers.

From effet utile to effet néoliberal (A Critique of the New Methodological Expansionism of the European Court of Justice)

Abstract: European integration is in a crisis. This crisis affects not only the political integration, as has been revealed by the failure of the Constitutional Treaty and the Lisbon Treaty.

Introduction : Southern Africa : Frameworks for Thinking

Abstract: All of us necessarily have a parochial view of the world; we see it through the distorting medium of our own concerns. Since concerns differ, we find it difficult to recognise other people's world-pictures. But in spite of this, many with widely different - indeed opposing - world views are united in finding Southern Africa of central interest. Why is this? First, there are material concerns. Southern Africa is a major source of certain important materials (gold, diamonds, chrome, platinum and uranium). There is a natural concern that supplies should not be interrupted. There are substantial investments - both from Europe and America - in the region, and there is also concern with the maintenance of markets. Secondly, there are what might be described as geo-political interests. Western politicians and publicists see the area in terms of Soviet expansionism. Public statements of South African leaders are along similar lines, although it is not clear how far such statements are genuinely believed and how far they are intended as a diversion from other issues. Others [eg Johnson 1977] point to the activities of western powers (the United States and France in particular) in the region. Some of the African countries are concerned with the expansionist policies - political and economic - of the Republic of South Africa. But, whatever the interpretation, there is widespread concern that the region may be the setting for conflicts which could well take on a world dimension. Lastly there are what might be called ideological and moral issues. There are those who are centrally aware of the extreme and institutionalised inequalities in the region - and in particular the racial inequalities inside South Africa itself. As a reflection of these powerful, if conflicting, interests, Southern Africa enjoys widespread, if confusing, publicity in the world press.

International competition law and policy: A work in progress

Abstract: Competition law and policy has evolved in significant ways both domestically and internationally over the past two decades. Internationally, the evolution of competition regulation has been driven by the intersection of two forces. First, business and commerce have continued to become more internationalised. This means that domestic economies are now highly interdependent; private business conduct occurring in one state can (and does) have profound effects in other states. Second, the number of countries adopting a competition law regime has expanded significantly. In the late 1980s, only 20 jurisdictions had a system of competition law. Today, this has expanded to over 100. Some very important economies for example, India and China have only recently acquired competition law regimes. The various systems of competition law have numerous points of commonality, but also many points of divergence. These divergences occur at substantive, remedial and procedural levels. The intersection of the two forces creates a problem of regulatory overlap. Any state substantially and directly affected by private, economic conduct wherever occurring has a legitimate interest in regulating that conduct because it has a legitimate interest in protecting the economic wellbeing of its citizens. This inevitably includes conduct that occurs beyond the state's territorial borders. In an interconnected world, it is not realistic to expect states to adopt a strict territorial approach towards protecting their legitimate economic interests. Thus, occasions of concurrent competition jurisdiction are continually being created. Because of regime diversity (both in competition law and, more generally, legal systems) and because competition rulings are based on domestic considerations (that is, local welfare considerations, not the welfare offoreigners), these occasions of concurrent jurisdiction are often contested. The contest may be more or less willing depending on the circumstances. Thus, the question raised is: how should these contests be mediated? If one imagines a spectrum of possibilities, then a unilateral solution lies at one end and a global competition agreement at the other. The unilateral solution involves expansive claims to extraterritorial jurisdiction vigorously and unilaterally applied. The only real exponent of this type of realist solution has been the United States. Even for a state as powerful as the US, however, the record of success has been patchy. In response to US jurisdictional expansionism, states have developed defensive measures that dilute its effect. Such measures include laws that prohibit cooperation with foreign authorities (for example, giving or supplying of evidence in US antitrust cases), laws that prohibit local firms from complying with certain foreign awards, and even laws that enable firms to claw-back damages paid pursuant to foreign competition awards. The lessons seem clear while there is a compelling need to move away from a jurisdictional model based on territorial sovereignty, unilaterally achieving this in a hostile environment is fraught with difficulty.

Persia, Tartaria, and Pamphilia

Abstract: This paper seeks to explicate the imaginary geographies of Mary Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (1621) by tracing conflicting early modern genealogies of the Tartar—conventionally represented as issuing from Central Asia during the Middle Ages and threatening Western Europe up to the early modern period—in relation to English engagement with the Ottoman and Safavid empires around the turn of the seventeenth century.1 Wroth’s Urania is significant as the first original, as opposed to translated, prose romance by an English woman to appear in print.2 She was forced to withdraw the first part from circulation shortly after its initial publication under pressure from powerful men for whom her depictions of the patriarchal abuse of wives, daughters, and servants struck too close to home; however, she continued with an equally substantial second part, which remained in manuscript until its publication as a scholarly edition in 1999.3 In this second part, Wroth shifts from the classical emphasis of the first part to an increasingly belligerent assertion of a universalistic Christian identity, albeit one primarily in service of political expansionism and not presented as a spiritual practice or doctrine.4 Ultimately, the Urania links this identity to a polity encompassing “East” (Asia) and “West” (Europe) under the auspices of an imaginary Holy Roman Empire, which in Wroth’s era was “a phantom” of “a universal imperialist hope” for Western Europeans and not a political reality.5

From jackboots to birkenstocks: the civilianisation of german geopolitics in the twentieth century

Abstract: German geopolitical claims have changed from two phases of aggressive, military expansionism (Jackboots) at the beginning of the twentieth century to a civilianised foreign policy (Birkenstocks) at its end This paper describes this transition during the second half of the twentieth century in light of a changing international system and the geopolitical constellations of the Cold War and European integration As part of such historical experiences, external circumstances and internal preferences the civilian power concept became the foundation for the Berlin Republic's grand strategy of promoting civilianised structures in the international system Unlike at the beginning of the twentieth century, German foreign policy after reunification in 1990 was not based on a deliberately pursued strategy of militaristic power politics to attain world power status It reflected a foreign policy identity into which Germany ‘grew’ during the Cold War in a process of adapting and becoming part of European integration and American hegemony Even though Germany did not completely abandon its power ambitions, their articulations and claims were radically transformed A civilianised international system thereby became the objective and medium of German foreign policy Such a system is characterised by multilateralism, supranational integration, strong international institutions, rule of law, free trade, human rights, good governance and restrictions of the use of force

World Conquerors or a Dying People? Racial Theory, Regional Anxiety, and the Brahmin Anglo-Saxonists

Abstract: This essay focuses on an influential group of New England patrician intellectuals, including Henry Cabot Lodge, James K. Hosmer, and John Fiske. It argues that the New England backgrounds of these men informed their thinking about race, distinguishing them from their Anglo-Saxonist colleagues from other regions. Specifically, the Anglo-Saxonist triumphalism of the Brahmins was undercut by their anxieties about the fate of their race in New England, where they faced a number of daunting challenges. The result was the unique mixture of power and impotence, arrogance and despair, expansionism and defensiveness that distinguishes the Brahmins from other Anglo-Saxonists. The internal contradictions of the Brahmins are particularly evident in their commentary on immigration, an area where, because of their prestige and political influence, they wielded an outsize influence over federal policy.

3. Okakura Tenshin: Writing A Good History Upon A Modern Plan

Abstract: In East Asia, Pan-Asian ideologies have been seen as ideological tools in support of Japanese expansionism and colonization. Japan's relationship with the Asian continent has been shaped by geography as much as by history. In the modern period, new notions of empire, as well as the pressures of Western imperialism, led Japan to cobble together its own colonial dominion. Okakura Tenshin's cultural critique of Western civilization found its expression in the three English books he wrote. Japan, because it has preserved its independence, and is the repository of Asian culture, has a responsibility to lead Asia. Early writing on Japanese history was also influenced by the works of Guizot and Buckle, and, under this influence, writers sought to understand Japan within the terms of European civilization. Okakura sees the period from the late eighteenth century to the early nineteenth century as marking the transition to the modern world. Keywords: Asian culture; East Asia; European civilization; Japanese history; Okakura Tenshin; Pan-Asian ideologies; Western imperialism

Spectral Economies at the Anglo-African Margin: Bertram Mitford’s Predatory Politics of Consumption

Abstract: This article examines the work of critically neglected colonial writer, essayist and cultural critic Bertram Mitford, with particular reference to his novel The Sign of the Spider (1896). Taking an economic approach to fin de siecle imperial politics, I argue that Mitford offers an important yet sadly overlooked counter-narrative of imperial expansionism. To an extent, Mitford undermines figures like H. Rider Haggard whose narratives betray a particular insensitivity to the depredatory conditions of Empire. Exploring Derridean formulations of Hauntology, I suggest that Mitford’s success lies partly in his ‘spectralisation’ of fiscal realities. The narrative, featuring apparitions of erstwhile economies, allows for a dialogue between past and present that problematizes Britain’s position in global markets at the fin de siecle . I further illustrate that Mitford’s depictions of anthropophagy offer a scathing cultural critique of late nineteenth-century imperial enterprise. From the indigenous tribes in an evolutionary state of economic nature to the merchant or financier at the end point of our financial evolution, ‘economic man’ shares a primal, archetypal desire to consume. In conclusion, I suggest Mitford attempted both to destabilise the popular myth of Britain’s ‘beneficent’ patronage of occupied South Africa, and bravely to undertake the work of inheriting the legacy of Britain’s predatory economic past.

Relocating Socialism: Asia, Socialism, Communism, and the PAP Departure from the Socialist International in 1976

Abstract: The connections between the Cold War and spatiality, geography, and the geopolitical have seldom been far apart, yet in conventional analyses they have tended to be more ambivalent. On the one hand, the Cold War could not be understood without its location within a territorial, material, and grounded context. For instance, geography allowed intellectuals to visualize where adherents to capitalism or communism were located, make sense of how communist expansionism was taking place, and frame the global extent of the Cold War itself and the annihilist potential of the ensuing arms race. Yet, on the other hand, space and geography have often always been peripheralized, so in this case, all phenomena have been explained as part of an unfolding historical narrative spanning the time of Yalta to Reykjavik, and on to either the liberal triumphalist or civilizationally conflicting present. One does not have to look far beyond the theses of Fukuyama and Huntington to locate the preferred temporal explanations of Cold War phenomena.

Path of Empire: Panama and the California Gold Rush, and: Habits of Empire: A History of American Expansion (review)

Abstract: Path of Empire: Panama and the California Gold Rush. By Aims McGuinness. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008. Pp. 249. Cloth, $35.00; Paper, $19.95.)Habits of Empire: A History of American Expansion. By Walter Nugent. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008. Pp. 387. Maps. Cloth, $30.00.)Reviewed by Amy S. GreenbergWhither the course of empire. Thomas Cole transfixed the American art world in the mid 1830s with a series of allegorical paintings that suggested that the course of empire was inexorable, a cyclical decline from the idyllic pastoral state into ruin. The historiography of empire has not followed this neat linear trajectory. Only slowly has empire crept back into the history of the early American republic from the more immediate past. For decades, diplomatic historians treated America's imperialism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as an unfortunate digression from an otherwise noble history of idealistic settlement-driven expansionism. The idea that antebellum Americans pursued empire was openly rejected by scholars: Didn't the United States incorporate the Spanish, French, British, and Mexican settlers in newly acquired territories into the polity? Weren't politicians and citizens of the period openly disdainful of England's empire? If the United States was imperialist, why didn't it annex all of Mexico when it had the opportunity? Why did it wait until 1898 to annex Hawai'i? Why didn't it grab Cuba in the 1850s?All these questions have answers, and none of them includes altruism on the part of American politicians. Were it not for sectional tensions in the 1850s, the United States would certainly have pursued further territorial acquisitions, and extending full citizenship rights to the peoples of those territories was hardly the only option politicians debated. Indeed the Mexicans of America's new Southwest never enjoyed the full citizenship rights promised them in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.The fact that antebellum America was imperialistic is not only acknowledged but also central to the theses of two recent publications. Path of Empire is an innovative transnational history of Panama during the U.S. Gold Rush, and Habits of Empire is a traditional narrative history of American foreign relations published by a trade press. Vastly different, both adopt a perspective that would have been unthinkable twenty years ago.Aims McGuinness's Path of Empire: Panama and the California Gold Rush is a remarkable first book, a revised University of Michigan dissertation that quite literally approaches an old topic from a new direction. Utilizing a wide array of sources, many unearthed at great pains from archives in Colombia and Panama, McGuinness asks a provocative question: What did the Gold Rush look like from the perspective of Panama? Panama was a key transit route for Gold Rush travelers from the eastern United States, and the site of the first transcontinental railroad, built decades before the Panama Canal. Like other Latin American countries, it was also targeted by filibusters in the 1850s. Thus a very small country took on outsized international significance in the 1850s.Not surprisingly this transformation had profound internal ramifications for Panama. The railroad, which was originally embraced by the ruling elite as a panacea, instead destroyed the local economy by quickly transporting travelers from one coast to another, completely undermining the indigenous transit system. Growing tensions between Panamanians and Americans ultimately exploded in an 1856 incident over a slice of watermelon that left seventeen people dead outside the Panama City railroad station. In Panama the Tajada de Sandia, as it is known, is embraced as a heroic act of resistance against an occupying force. McGuinness uses the incident as a framing device for a complex history in which the meanings of events of international significance were actively contested on both sides of Panama's borders. …

Crossing Empire's Edge: Foreign Ministry Police and Japanese Expansionism in Northeast Asia (review)

Abstract: and the late Miyata Noboru, who trace the origin of their discipline to Inoue Enryô, Ema Tsutomu, and Yanagita Kunio and his followers. Use of the term yôkai is thus a matter of choice, and the choice is not a universal one: in the fields of Japanese theater studies and early modern literature, for instance, the term yôkai has never played an important role, even in works dealing with bakemono (monsters), yûrei (ghosts), or konpaku (spirits)—all considered yôkai by scholars in the field of “yôkai studies.” All of which is to say that Pandemonium and Parade bears the marks of the scholarly genealogy upon which Foster draws. And this is, I think, another fascinating aspect of Foster’s project: his book, written in English, engages in a dialogue with the work of a particular group of Japanese scholars, currently the most active and productive in the discussion of the mysterious, while also tracing the history of its own discipline. Pandemonium and Parade is an important contribution to Japanese studies, then, not only in its nuanced treatment of yôkai—in the way it makes yôkai speak to us about specific cultural and historical moments—but also in its careful delineation, in the liminal, in-between field of English-language Japanese studies, of the very contexts from which yôkai studies emerged. Foster notes that unlike Godzilla, Mizuki’s yôkai “remained domestic actors” (p. 203); yet the remarkable success of Yokai Attack: The Japanese Monster Survival Guide suggests that, true to form, yôkai refuse to be constrained even by national borders. Pandemonium and Parade shows that yôkai studies, too, can travel. The wealth of research and secondary scholarship that Pandemonium and Parade brings together for the first time makes this book essential reading for researchers in the field; the contemporary relevance of yôkai and Foster’s wonderful prose make it ideal for use in undergraduate classes and easily accessible for anyone interested in the topic.

Comparing media systems: re-evaluating the role of the public media in the digital age

Abstract: This paper is the continuation of my previous PhD research, Journalism and Political Democracy in Brazil, which was published by Lexington Books (March 2008), and was an investigation of the role of the mainstream media in Brazil and in Latin America in the re-democratization phase following the end of the dictatorship in the mid-80’s. Comparing Media Systems is a comparative research analysis which aims to be an initial examination of the state of the public media structures in Europe in contrast to the strengthening of the public media platform in emerging democracies like Brazil as a means of boosting wider cultural and educational levels. It aims to assess the ways in which such an initiative can contribute to the fortification of spaces for debate and the further construction of a complex communication system that can attend to multiple and diverse publics in Latin America. In the context of decline of the PSB tradition in the UK due to digitalisation and market expansionism, this project focuses on the ways in which the public media - attached to a revised understanding of the role that the public sphere ideal can still have in the 21st century - can contribute to deepen media democratisation in the region. These nations have a weak public sector and are seeking to fortify multiple public spheres in order to expand citizens’ information rights, creating the means for cultural emancipation and providing wider access of less privileged groups to quality information and debate.

Propaganda through travel writing: Frederick Burnaby's contribution to great game British politics

Abstract: In the second half of the nineteenth century, British-Russian relations were defined by war and conflict due to the former's desire to check and balance the latter's increasingly strong ambitions in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. In what has come to be known as the Great Game, the British tried to prevent essentially a possible Russian invasion of India. Such an invasion could be attained by the Russians either by the occupation of territory in Central Asia, thereby taking the land route to India, or by expansion into the Mediterranean Sea and from there to the Indian Ocean via the Suez Canal. The British response to the threat on the land route was to try and create spheres of influence in the region before the Russians did, and, at the Mediterranean front, to support the territorial integrity of the weakened Ottoman Empire against Russian expansionism. Concurrent to these political developments, the practice of writing and publishing accounts of imperial adventure and/or travel was gaining increased popularity in Britain, as the political conditions were ripe enough for the reception of these works. Especially the adventure/travel accounts by pro-imperialist writers were highly popular among a reading audience which was expanding beyond class boundaries from the 1860s onwards. Therefore, in effect, this vein of travel writing also functioned as a channel of propaganda for pro-imperialist political views, especially those of Disrealite Tories in the 1870's. Frederic Burnaby, who was an officer of the British imperial army, a traveler-adventurer and a writer, was foremost among the pro-imperialist figures who propagated a Russophobic and Turcophilic tone in British popular politics at that time by his two accounts of travel: A Ride to Khiva: Travels and Adventures in Central Asia (1876) and On Horseback through Asia Minor (1877). In this article I will explore and illustrate the discursive strategies deployed by