This text presents a series of case studies - including classical Greece, Renaissance Italy and the Portuguese and Spanish empires - to show how the historical-materialist analysis of societies is a better guide to understanding global systems than the theories of standard international relations.
This book tells a story of radical educational change. In the early nineteenth century, an imperial civil society movement promoted modern elementary 'schools for all'. This movement included British, American and German missionaries, and Indian intellectuals and social reformers. They organised themselves in non-governmental organisations, which aimed to change Indian education. Firstly, they introduced a new culture of schooling, centred on memorisation, examination, and technocratic management. Secondly, they laid the ground for the building of the colonial system of education, which substituted indigenous education. Thirdly, they broadened the social accessibility of schooling. However, for the nineteenth century reformers, education for all did not mean equal education for all: elementary schooling became a means to teach different subalterns 'their place' in colonial society. Finally, the educational movement also furthered the building of a secular 'national education' in England.
Livesey traces the origins of the modern conceptions of civil society to Ireland & Scotland during the 18th century, arguing that it was invented as an idea of renewed community for provincial & defeated élites to allow them to enjoy liberty without participating in governance.
The family can be viewed as one of the links in a “golden chain” connecting individuals, the private sphere, civil society, and the democratic state; as potentially an important source of energy for social activity; and as the primary institution that socializes and diffuses the values and norms that are of fundamental importance for civil society. Yet much of the literature on civil society pays very little attention to the complex relations between civil society and the family. These two spheres constitute a central element in democratic development and culture and form a counterweight to some of the most distressing aspects of modernity, such as the excessive privatization of home life and the unceasing work-and-spend routines. This volume offers historical perspectives on the role of families and their members in the processes of a liberal and democratic civil society, the question of boundaries and intersections of the private and public domains, and the interventions of state institutions.
The end of the empire and the legacies of Britain's imperial past have shaped how the British public interact with the outside world. This book shows how the international activities of civic associations in the 1960s can help us to understand the impact of decolonisation on the British public's sense of international responsibility.
Twentieth-century Russia, in all its political incarnations, lacked the basic features of the Western liberal model: the rule of law, civil society, and an uncensored public sphere. In Slavophile Empire, the leading historian Laura Engelstein pays particular attention to the Slavophiles and their heirs, whose aversion to the secular individualism of the West and embrace of an idealized version of the native past established a pattern of thinking that had an enduring impact on Russian political life. Imperial Russia did not lack for partisans of Western-style liberalism, but they were outnumbered, to the right and to the left, by those who favored illiberal options. In the book's rigorously argued chapters, Engelstein asks how Russia's identity as a cultural nation at the core of an imperial state came to be defined in terms of this antiliberal consensus. She examines debates on religion and secularism, on the role of culture and the law under a traditional regime presiding over a modernizing society, on the status of the empire's ethnic peripheries, and on the spirit needed to mobilize a multinational empire in times of war. These debates, she argues, did not predetermine the kind of system that emerged after 1917, but they foreshadowed elements of a political culture that are still in evidence today.
Central Asia, known as the home of Tamerlane and the Silk Road, is a crossroads of great cultures and civilizations. In 1991 five nations at the heart of the region—Kazakstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan— suddenly became independent. Today they sit strategically between Russia, China, and Iran and hold some of the world’s largest deposits of oil and natural gas. Long-suppressed ethnic identities are finding new expression in language, religion, and occasional civil conflicts. Civil Society in Central Asia is a pathbreaking collection of essays by scholars and activists that illuminates the social and institutional forces shaping this important region’s future. An appendix provides a guide to projects being carried out by local and international groups.