Tropical Despotisms
Tropical Despotisms

Author: David Allen Harvey

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2024-09-15

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 1501776681

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Tropical Despotisms reveals the alarm that spread among France's Caribbean possessions during the period between the Seven Years' War and the Revolution and the determination to cultivate a new patriotic community rooted in the Enlightenment principles of honor and civic virtue. Following France's humiliating defeat at the hands of the British, a loose coalition of frustrated and enlightened reformers hoped to promote imperial regeneration in order to restore France's wounded national pride, stabilize and strengthen the Antillean colonies, and bind the colonies more closely to the metropole. David Allen Harvey describes the historical relationship between capitalism and slavery in the making of the modern world economy and moves beyond simplistic arguments by discussing the contingent and evolving dynamic between the two. As a result, he reveals how capitalism and slavery developed in tandem in the eighteenth-century Caribbean but explains that reformers sought to enact a gradual transition to a free wage labor regime more in keeping with capitalism's ideal of free and voluntary contractual relationships between formally equal parties. Tropical Despotisms provides a new perspective on the social and demographic structure in the French Antilles and the wider French Atlantic world. Harvey uncovers not only the deep and critical debates around the issues of slavery and race but also the efforts by enlightened reformers as they proposed rethinking the political and economic structures by which the empire had been ruled, rationalizing governing institutions, and liberalizing trade.

A Substitute for Victory
A Substitute for Victory

Author: Rosemary Foot

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 1990

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 9780801424137

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After more than two years of bitter negotiations during which combatants and civilians continued to suffer casualties, the Korean armistice was concluded in July 1953. Focusing on the Americans' formulation of negotiating positions and on their attempts to coordinate political goals with military tactics, Rosemary Foot here charts the tortuous path to peace and offers a new explanation for the agonizing length of the talks. She also takes into account the role of the Western allies and the Indian, South Korean, North Korean, and Chinese governments as she examines the complex international setting in which the armistice took place.

Caribbean Middlebrow
Caribbean Middlebrow

Author: Belinda Edmondson

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 9780801448140

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It is commonly assumed that Caribbean culture is split into elite highbrow culture--which is considered derivative of Europe--and authentic working-class culture, which is often identified with such iconic island activities as salsa, carnival, calypso, and reggae. This book recovers a middle ground, a genuine popular culture in the English-speaking Caribbean that stretches back into the nineteenth century. It shows that popular novels, beauty pageants, and music festivals are examples of Caribbean culture that are mostly created, maintained, and consumed by the Anglophone middle class. Much of middle-class culture is further gendered as "female": women are more apt to be considered recreational readers of fiction, for example, and women's behavior outside the home is often taken as a measure of their community's respectability. The book also highlights the influence of American popular culture, especially African American popular culture, as early as the nineteenth century.

Empire and Modern Political Thought
Empire and Modern Political Thought

Author: Sankar Muthu

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-09-17

Total Pages: 419

ISBN-13: 1139576593

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This collection of original essays by leading historians of political thought examines modern European thinkers' writings about conquest, colonization and empire. The creation of vast transcontinental empires and imperial trading networks played a key role in the development of modern European political thought. The rise of modern empires raised fundamental questions about virtually the entire contested set of concepts that lay at the heart of modern political philosophy, such as property, sovereignty, international justice, war, trade, rights, transnational duties, civilization and progress. From Renaissance republican writings about conquest and liberty to sixteenth-century writings about the Spanish conquest of the Americas through Enlightenment perspectives about conquest and global commerce and nineteenth-century writings about imperial activities both within and outside of Europe, these essays survey the central moral and political questions occasioned by the development of overseas empires and European encounters with the non-European world among theologians, historians, philosophers, diplomats and merchants.

An Environmental History of Latin America
An Environmental History of Latin America

Author: Shawn William Miller

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2007-08-27

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 1316224325

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A narration of the mutually mortal historical contest between humans and nature in Latin America. Covering a period that begins with Amerindian civilizations and concludes in the region's present urban agglomerations, the work offers an original synthesis of the current scholarship on Latin America's environmental history and argues that tropical nature played a central role in shaping the region's historical development. Human attitudes, populations, and appetites, from Aztec cannibalism to more contemporary forms of conspicuous consumption, figure prominently in the story. However, characters such as hookworms, whales, hurricanes, bananas, dirt, butterflies, guano, and fungi make more than cameo appearances. Recent scholarship has overturned many of our egocentric assumptions about humanity's role in history. Seeing Latin America's environmental past from the perspective of many centuries illustrates that human civilizations, ancient and modern, have been simultaneously more powerful and more vulnerable than previously thought.

The Despot's Guide to Wealth Management
The Despot's Guide to Wealth Management

Author: J. C. Sharman

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2017-03-07

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1501708430

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An unprecedented new international moral and legal rule forbids one state from hosting money stolen by the leaders of another state. The aim is to counter grand corruption or kleptocracy ("rule by thieves"), when leaders of poorer countries—such as Marcos in the Philippines, Mobutu in the Congo, and more recently those overthrown in revolutions in the Arab world and Ukraine—loot billions of dollars at the expense of their own citizens. This money tends to end up hosted in rich countries. These host states now have a duty to block, trace, freeze, and seize these illicit funds and hand them back to the countries from which they were stolen. In The Despot's Guide to Wealth Management, J. C. Sharman asks how this anti-kleptocracy regime came about, how well it is working, and how it could work better. Although there have been some real achievements, the international campaign against grand corruption has run into major obstacles. The vested interests of banks, lawyers, and even law enforcement often favor turning a blind eye to foreign corruption proceeds. Recovering and returning looted assets is a long, complicated, and expensive process. Sharman used a private investigator, participated in and observed anti-corruption policy, and conducted more than a hundred interviews with key players. He also draws on various journalistic exposés, whistle-blower accounts, and government investigations to inform his comparison of the anti-kleptocracy records of the United States, Britain, Switzerland, and Australia. Sharman calls for better policing, preventative measures, and use of gatekeepers like bankers, lawyers, and real estate agents. He also recommends giving nongovernmental organizations and for-profit firms more scope to independently investigate corruption and seize stolen assets.

Rare Earth Frontiers
Rare Earth Frontiers

Author: Julie M. Klinger

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-01-15

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 1501714619

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"Rare Earth Frontiers is a timely text. As Klinger notes, rare earths are neither rare nor technically earths, but they are still widely believed to be both. Although her approach focuses on the human, or cultural, geography of rare earths mining, she does not ignore the geological occurrence of these mineral types, both on Earth and on the moon.... This volume is excellently organized, insightfully written, and extensively sourced."―Choice Drawing on ethnographic, archival, and interview data gathered in local languages and offering possible solutions to the problems it documents, this book examines the production of the rare earth frontier as a place, a concept, and a zone of contestation, sacrifice, and transformation. Rare Earth Frontiers is a work of human geography that serves to demystify the powerful elements that make possible the miniaturization of electronics, green energy and medical technologies, and essential telecommunications and defense systems. Julie Michelle Klinger draws attention to the fact that the rare earths we rely on most are as common as copper or lead, and this means the implications of their extraction are global. Klinger excavates the rich historical origins and ongoing ramifications of the quest to mine rare earths in ever more impossible places. Klinger writes about the devastating damage to lives and the environment caused by the exploitation of rare earths. She demonstrates in human terms how scarcity myths have been conscripted into diverse geopolitical campaigns that use rare earth mining as a pretext to capture spaces that have historically fallen beyond the grasp of centralized power. These include legally and logistically forbidding locations in the Amazon, Greenland, and Afghanistan, and on the Moon.

Indonesian Destinies
Indonesian Destinies

Author: Theodore Friend

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-07-01

Total Pages: 648

ISBN-13: 9780674037359

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How can such a gentle people as we are be so murderous? a prominent Indonesian asks. That question--and the mysteries of the archipelago's vast contradictions--haunt Theodore Friend's remarkable work, a narrative of Indonesia during the last half century, from the postwar revolution against Dutch imperialism to the unrest of today. Part history, part meditation on a place and a past observed firsthand, Indonesian Destinies penetrates events that gave birth to the world's fourth largest nation and assesses the continuing dangers that threaten to tear it apart. Friend reveals Sukarno's character through wartime collaboration with Japan, and Suharto's through the mass murder of communists that brought him to power for thirty-two years. He guides our understanding of the tolerant forms of Islam prevailing among the largest Muslim population in the world, and shows growing tensions generated by international terrorism. Drawing on a deep knowledge of the country's cultures, its leaders, and its ordinary people, Friend gives a human face and a sense of immediacy to the self-inflicted failures and immeasurable tragedies that cast a shadow over Indonesia's past and future. A clear and compelling passion shines through this richly illustrated work. Rarely have narrative history and personal historical witness been so seamlessly joined.

A Short History of England
A Short History of England

Author: Reginald James White

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1967-08

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 9780521094399

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Interpretative survey that traces the development of English society from the Roman occupation to 1900 A.D.

Spatial Revolution
Spatial Revolution

Author: Christina E. Crawford

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2022-02-15

Total Pages: 422

ISBN-13: 1501759213

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Spatial Revolution is the first comparative parallel study of Soviet architecture and planning to create a narrative arc across a vast geography. The narrative binds together three critical industrial-residential projects in Baku, Magnitogorsk, and Kharkiv, built during the first fifteen years of the Soviet project and followed attentively worldwide after the collapse of capitalist markets in 1929. Among the revelations provided by Christina E. Crawford is the degree to which outside experts participated in the construction of the Soviet industrial complex, while facing difficult topographies, near-impossible deadlines, and inchoate theories of socialist space-making. Crawford describes how early Soviet architecture and planning activities were kinetic and negotiated and how questions about the proper distribution of people and industry under socialism were posed and refined through the construction of brick and mortar, steel and concrete projects, living laboratories that tested alternative spatial models. As a result, Spatial Revolution answers important questions of how the first Soviet industrialization drive was a catalyst for construction of thousands of new enterprises on remote sites across the Eurasian continent, an effort that spread to far-flung sites in other socialist states—and capitalist welfare states—for decades to follow. Thanks to generous funding from Emory University and its participation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.