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Expansionism

About: Expansionism is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 979 publications have been published within this topic receiving 11169 citations.


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Journal ArticleDOI
01 Jan 2012
TL;DR: The Russian Transcaucasian Company project of 1828 as mentioned in this paper was written in 1828 in Tiflis by Alexander Griboedov, who at the time served as Russian minister plenipotentiary in Persia, and Petr Zaveleisky, the vice-governor of Transcaucasia.
Abstract: God! How come it did not strike him before: Transcaucasia, you know, is a colony! (1) --Yuri Tynianov The project of the Russian Transcaucasian Company was written in 1828 in Tiflis by Alexander Griboedov, who at the time served as Russian minister plenipotentiary in Persia, and Petr Zaveleisky, the vice-governor of Tiflis. (2) The text of the project is lost except for two surviving pieces: "A Note on the Founding of the Russian Transcaucasian Company" and "Introduction to the Project of the Charter" of the Russian Transcaucasian Company. (3) However, General Mikhail Zhukovsky's critique of the project on ethical and economic grounds, entitled "Comments on the Note about the Founding of the Agricultural, Manufacturing, and Trade Company," gives us a good idea of the project's main points. (4) The authors of the project were seeking governmental assistance in founding a chartered company in Transcaucasia that would have privileges similar to the ones the British East India Company enjoyed at the time of its beginning. In return they promised to promote economic and cultural development in the region and bring high revenues into the empire's treasury. Their critic, however, thought that the authors' plans to monopolize trade and production in Transcaucasia would benefit neither the empire nor the region, while undermining the principles of social justice. So far scholars have either criticized the project as colonialist and oppressive or justified it as one that would have hastened the advance of capitalism in the Caucasus and thus would have contributed to historical progress. This article seeks to provide a more complex account of both Griboedov and of the project. In doing so, it will situate the project within the context of Russian discourse from that time about imperial expansionism in the Caucasus and also within the context of Enlightenment thinking about human equality, subjugated peoples, and the "Other." Together, the project and Zhukovsky's criticism read as an ongoing polemic about the proper management of the colonies, where each side's argument continues along a thread of thought coming down from the thinkers of the eighteenth century. Zhukovsky criticizes the authors of the project from the viewpoint of a supporter of free trade and free enterprise, whose negative opinion on monopolies and chartered companies was modeled on the ideas of Adam Smith. Griboedov and Zaveleisky's position is close to that of the French Enlighteners, Raynal, Diderot, and other contributors to A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies, whose "discussion of Russia's potential role in East-West trade constituted a brief for imperial expansion." (5) The latter, like Adam Smith, denounced many colonial practices, among them the founding of exclusive chartered companies, as economically ineffective and oppressive towards the inhabitants of the colonies. Yet at the same time Raynal and his collaborators "occasionally revealed enthusiasm" for colonial trade as a stimulator of industrial development worldwide and showed admiration for British successes in this type of endeavor. They encouraged their own country not to give up on its involvement with the colonies, but to seek new mutually beneficial ways of collaborating with them. In some passages, Raynal actually argues in favor of big trading companies, while Diderot goes further to specify certain circumstances when, in his opinion, successful trade requires the existence of a monopoly. The authors of the project for the Russian Transcaucasian Company share the French thinkers' desire for their own country to successfully compete with the British. National pride, which was long recognized as one of the important features of Griboedov's personality, contributed to his ambition to become an entrepreneur who knew "the art of making all other nations tributary to his own. …

2 citations

Book ChapterDOI
TL;DR: For example, this paper pointed out that while European powers have acted this way historically, China's own long history tells us that it wields power in a very different manner and that it will start to become aggressive and militaristic.
Abstract: China’sChina emergence as a great power has prompted many fears that it will start to become aggressive and militaristic. But while European powers have acted this way historically, China’s own long history tells us that it wields power in a very different manner.

2 citations

Book ChapterDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, an explorative discussion of the effects of this paradigm on the modeling and problem-solving methodology when dealing with a production planning problem that is shown to represent a system of problems is presented.
Abstract: Ackoff in his Redesigning the Futureargues in favor of a shift of paradigm toward an emphasis on synthesis, expansionism, and teleology. This paper is an explorative discussion of the effects of thisparadigm on the modeling and problem-solving methodology when dealing with a production planning problem that is shown to represent a system of problems.

2 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: German geopolitical claims have changed from aggressive, military expansionism (Jackboots) at the beginning of the twentieth century to a civilianised foreign policy (Birkenstocks) at its end as mentioned in this paper.
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

2 citations

Journal Article
TL;DR: The Topographia Hibernica as discussed by the authors is of little value as a work of ethnography and, although promoted by its author as a lucid circumscription of Ireland and its inhabitants, it clearly and disconcertingly swerves between fact and fiction; and although rhetorically endorsed by the testimony of impartial experience, it betrays a variety of authorial prejudices.
Abstract: Assessed from a modern perspective, the Topographia Hibernica is of little value as a work of ethnography. Although promoted by its author as a lucid circumscription of Ireland and its inhabitants, it clearly and disconcertingly swerves between fact and fiction; and, although rhetorically endorsed by the testimony of impartial experience, it betrays a variety of authorial prejudices. The result is a written landscape that is inhabited by a bizarre menagerie of outlandish monstrosities and vitiated by inflections of scorn, disdain and slander. If Gerald's zoological observations are to be believed, the Ireland of the 1180's accommodated not only such familiar creatures as eagles, hares, weasels and geese, but also such oddities as a portentous frog, a prophetic werewolf, a population of banished fleas, a flock of unboilable ducks, and a species of fish remarkable for its golden dentures.(1) Similarly, if his ethnological remarks are given any credit, then it must be assumed that the twelfth-century Irish were indeed scrofulous barbarians notable for their addiction to unbounded turpitudes of lust, for these ostensible monsters of perversion allegedly practiced incest, granted bestiality a ritualistic function in ceremonies of kingship, and idiosyncratically displayed the stigmata of hermaphroditism as the physical consequences of their ethnic deviance.(2) In short, if we believe all Gerald tells us, then we must also accept that the nature of twelfth-century Ireland and its inhabitants paradoxically ran "contra naturae cursum" (II, Incipit). The veracity of the Topographia has of course long been discredited, and the earliest systematic demolitions to be undertaken from an Irish perspective were made in the seventeenth century. The first was Stephen White's Apologia pro Hibernia, written in the last decade of the reign of Elizabeth I, and therefore during specifically the period in which the Catholics of Ulster were being forcibly displaced by protestant immigrants;(3) the second, the Cambrensis eversus of John Lynch, was published in the early years of the Restoration and in the aftermath of Cromwell's punitive campaign of 1649.(4) That the work of a medieval author should have gained such celebrity over four hundred years after its composition is in itself remarkable, if not unique. But this attention hardly redounds to Gerald's credit. For both White and Lynch, the Topographia represented a timeless declaration of imperialism and belligerence, its pejorative rhetoric perversely transformed into an immutable truth that could be used to justify any Insular intervention in Irish affairs.(5) In the view of both, therefore, it had become a paradigm, a veritable institution of conflict which had at all costs to be dismantled. There is a great deal that justifies this view. Gerald holds the disreputable distinction of being the first inhabitant of Britain to depict the Irish as idle, disorganized and little better than animals;(6) and he is as an early apologist for foreign invasion, his derogatory treatise often reading as an imperialistically inflected act of containment. It is dedicated to Henry II, who himself led an expeditionary force to Ireland in 1171 and subsequently nominated Prince John as its new Overlord;(6) it documents apparent historical facts interpreted to ratify the Kings of Britain as the rightful monarchs of Ireland;(8) and it performs in its very title a gesture of total appropriation, territory (topos) constituted and regulated by writing (graphia) in facilitating and glorifying rehearsal of the full imposition of Angevin power.(9) Gerald accordingly anticipates later developments both by presenting the Irish in prejudicial terms and by aligning such a stratagem with contemporary Insular movements of territorial and cultural expansionism. And the inferences to be drawn from his text can be summarized through a perverse reasoning, which, with variations of ambiguous subtlety, can still be heard today: if the Irish are in such egregious need of the civilizing and natural culture of Britain, it is specifically because they are so barbarically marginal to the green and pleasant land in which civilization, culture, and presumably also nature itself, so egregiously flourish. …

2 citations


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Performance
Metrics
No. of papers in the topic in previous years
YearPapers
202374
2022172
202126
202038
201928
201835