Global 1 Midterm 1

Nick Hewlett: "Democracy: Liberal and Direct"

-liberal democracy in The west is lacking -ways to improve: participation and power -liberal democracy: protects individualism and is practical(it works) -direct democracy: more popular control and extension of democracy -marxists: material equality before political equality -feminists: recognize the difference between different votes

Edward Said, "Introduction," from Orientalism

-one of the deepest and most recurring images of the "other" -anyone who studies the orient is an orientalist and what they do is orientalism -orientalism as a western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the orient -the orient is not essentially jsut n idea

"Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen"

-influenced by thomas jefferson and rousseau -not entirely equal; does not include rights for women and slaves -very vague and left up to interpretation

Krishan Kumar and Ekaterina Makarova, "Interview with José Casonova"

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Thomas Jefferson, "A Declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress Assembled,"

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David Held "Introduction to global transformations"

- hyperglobalizers: a new single global economy transcends and integrates world's major regions, de-nationalizes - skeptics: international interdependence has intensified without producing a unified global economy, world is breaking into blocs, most powerful states consolidate - transformationalists: globalization is spacial reorganization and rearticulation of economic political power, developments in one region can influence distant parts

Michael L. Coniff and Thomas J. Davis, "The Slave Trade and Slavery in the America"

-Africanization: when Africans revived society and culture to wherever they were taken

Barrie Axford "Globalization"

-globalization is the historical process by which the world is being made into a single place with systemic properties -the world is now globalized -interconnections of some boundaries and dissolving of others -if u think globalization is a myth this will lead to a superficial understanding of history -revolution in social sciences

Eric J. Wolf, "Introduction" to Europe and the People Without History

-historians and other researchers take SEPARATE NATIONS -by turning names into things we create false models of reality -the way history is told is misleading because it is told as a moral success story

J. M. Roberts, "The Mongols," from The Penguin History of the World

-how did the mongols become so succeesful? they faced divided enemies (christians, mongols); tolerance, and military

J. M. Roberts, "The Mongols," from The Penguin History of the World

-How did the mongols become so successful? they faced divided enemies (christians, mongols); tolerance, and military

Marshall G. S. Hodgson, "In the Center of the Map"

-Matteo Ricci brought map to china, they got upset because they weren't in the center -islam thought earth divided into 7 climes: moderate climes like med, or iran was more advanced -trend that people think of themselves as the center of the universe

Karl Marx, "The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism"

-capitalism is similar to stealing -ideas of free labor and the industrial revolution -corruption and exploitation, profit seeking

J. Salwyn Schapiro, "The Making of the Liberal Mind"

-enlightenment thoughts: 1)nature: natural laws 2)reason: reason, not faith, can help man face problems 3)goodness of man: man in naturally inclined to do good unless corrupted by ignorance and prejudice 4)progress: man has moved, is moving, and will continue to move forward 5)secularism: separation of church and state 6) toleration: locke and voltaire advocated religious tolerance 7)intellectual freedom: freedom of though and expression 8)education: child comes into the world with a blank page; school is the most important in shaping the human mind 9) economics: buying and selling, producing and consuming were to be free 10)government: people should be able to overthrow government that violates natural rights

Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giraldez, "Born with a 'Silver Spoon': The Origin of World Trade"

-europe was a big part in facilitating the role of the world trade; middlemen of silver trade -intermediaries in trade between the new world and china -china had more of an impact on the west than europe had on china

David J. Hess, "The Origins of Western Science: Technototems in the Scientific Revolution"

-europeans downplay the scientific discoveries of other regions, like the arabs and even filter them out (everything before 1500) 1) too technica; society is not seen as a big part 2) everything between old and new europe is put in a black box 3) story is told as an event - western science infrastructure rests on borrowings of china and nonwestern cultures

Thomas Bender, "The Ocean World and the Beginnings of American History, from A Nation Among Nations: America's Place in World History

-events in 15th and 16th century are reduced to being prequels of american history -example: mongols had unified most of afro euarasia -world was not global until oceans were crossed (oceanic revolution) because the ocean went from a barrier to a connector -america is seen as the center of history, but it "cannot be appraised except as a part. Of this revolution in human existence'

Peter N. Stearns, "Defining the Industrial Revolution"

-says that there is not a clear beginning or end for the industrial revolution -did not only occur in europe, which is what is usually thought -some places are still undergoing an industrial revolution -what constitutes and industrial revolution? the increase of output of goods and individual worker output (radical changes to technology and organization) -still in the process of industrial revolution

Clifford Geertz, "The Struggle for the Real"

-shift in the process of altering our entire view of religion and its social and psychological impact -focus is not on subjective life but on socially available "systems of significance" like beliefs, rites, meaningful objects in terms of which subjective life is ordered -semantic approach -we look/try to understand the way of looking at the world through religion, not how to describe the supernatural -ethos: how things are done

William H. McNeill, "A Short History of Humanity"

-started off with song and dance -ancestors only became human when we created language -consequences of intensified communicatuon

Amartya Sen, "Human Rights and Asian Values"

-universal recognition of the ideal of human rights can be harmful if universalism is used to deny or mask the reality of diversity -some arguments for authoritarian government in interest of economic development (lee hypothesis) -argues that there is a presence of tolerance and freedom in parts of Asian traditions *asian values used to justify authoritarianism is not especially asian -asian cultures do not support the idea of the clash of civilizations

Globalization - Barrie Axford

As the millennium approaches, globalization retains its allure as a designer concept of choice, despite conflicting claims that we now live in a postglobalized world, that the current frisson is only part of a recurrent tendency of world-capitalism since early modern times. As part of a critical examination of this concept, I want to offer what might be called a strong version of globalization, albeit one which draws attention to its complex, multidimensional character. First, let me say a little more about my strong version of globalization -- it is strong primarily in the sense that it goes beyond anodyne definitions of globalization as growing interconnectedness. My approach is multidimensional in that it does not privilege any one domain as providing the key to or essential dynamics of globalization, but addresses the complex and often contradictory interplay between economic, political, and cultural forces, and between local agents and global forces in making the world one place. At the end of 1990s, globalization is a term found routinely across social sciences, and one used promiscuously by all manner of folk, from politicians to media mongols. Indeed, the burden of much global talk is that boundaries are vanishing, giving away to a world made up of more or less dense networks of communication and exchange and hybridized identities. To reiterate: globalization is the historical process whereby the world is being made into a single place with systematic properties. Indeed the real charge in the concept of globalization, most poignantly observed in its current phase, is that conventional borders are becoming increasingly irrelevant to the actual patterns of much economic, cultural, and even political activity. Of course, in quotidian reality it is all messier. The idea of globalization creating a world which is a single place should not to taken to imply complete homogeneity, despite the fact that it does produce essential sameness in the surface appearance of social and political life across the globe. The first, which perhaps comes closest to some notion of global homogeneity, has the globalized world as little more than a map of variable tastes. So my third configuration has the globalized world as one which is the characteristically, if uneasily, hybridized, and in which whole cultures and identities are being replaced by those which are, to borrow from Salman Rushdie, impure and intermingled. Global consciousness may lead actors to support or to oppose aspects of globalization. So what sort of system is this? Today, nowhere is immune from these changes. The dynamic and labile quality of globalization can only be studied by adopting an approach that abjures the conventional distinctions between levels of analysis (personal and global) as well as refusing to privilege the explanatory power of one domain of human activity over others (economics over politics, and both over culture). In each of these accounts of a globalizing world, as well as others from opposite ideological perspectives there is a common fault -- nowhere is it understood that the complex and contradictory relations of economy, politics and culture requires the observer to unravel the intertwinings of an economic system admittedly dependent on the principle of commodification and cultural terrains which are both determined by, and yet still manage to elude or even subvert, the principle. Globalization triggers changes in the scale of social organization and changes in consciousness of the world too. In a recent paper, Giovanni Arrighi sets down the case for treating current globalization as part of evolutionary changes in world capitalism. The notion that the only thing which is distinct about late twentieth-century globalization is its scope and scale is just a throwaway line. Yet his argument still has the signal virtue of reminding us that globalization is not brand new. Let me just rehearse the strong position on globalization. These are potent images, yet revisionism is now much in vogue. But globalization is not reducible to economic processes and certainly just just to neoliberalism. But even for businesses this is only one side of the globalizing process. Second, Hirst and Thompson have scarcely anything to stay about technological changes and how they accelerate globalization, and what they do say underestimates the transformative effects of recent innovations. Third, the continued vitality of the sovereign state against globalization is argued empirically and as an article of faith. Of course, Hirst and Thompson are right to point to the continued vitality of states as players in the world economy and as the guardians of societal values, but in trying to rescue the State from the myth of its powerlessness, they are blind to some key considerations. As a conception globalization belongs to no single branch of the social sciences.

The Origins of Western Science: Technototems in the Scientific Revolution - David J. Hess

At the beginning of the sixteenth century ancient teachings such as those of Ptolemy on the planets, Aristotle on motion, and Galen on physiology constituted the basis of accepted wisdom. The history of the scientific revolution is therefore a construction, as are all historical narratives. The story has been told and retold so many times that it has, to some extent, obtained some of the characteristics of a legend or myth. Why tell the story one more time? In 1543 Copernicus published De Revolutionibus Orbium, which he argued for a sun-centered theory of the universe. The transition to the Copernican system was a gradual one. Galileo provided additional support for the Copernican theory when he trained his new telescope on Jupiter's moons which revolved around the planet and therefore provided a suggestion of how the planets might revolve around the sun. The great problem of the Copernican system was that without crystalline orbs to hold the planets in places, nothing seemed to prevent them from crashing into each other falling into the sun. The foundations of other branches of the modern sciences were also laid during this period. In the early seventeenth century Bacon and Descartes provided a philosophical or methodological rationale for the growing movement and natural philosophers. A conventional narrative about the scientific revolution has several common features. Historians have long quarreled with each of the assumptions of the conventional narratives. Let me begin my critique of the conventional scientific revolution narrative with a question: "How Western is Western science and how revolutionary is the scientific revolution?" Needham has also contributed to a critique of Western ethnocentrism by documenting the tremendous interchange between European and non-European cultures prior to the scientific revolution. Other historians have begun to question the scientific revolution in a more profound way. The conventional Western view of Arabic-Muslim science has tended to overlook its originality and its influence on the scientific revolution in Europe. Although an older generation of scholars recognized the achievements of Arabic-Muslims and other non-Western science traditions, many of those scholars also invoked in the storehouse image and downplayed the direct influence of Arabic-Muslim science on the scientific revolution. Research on Arabic-Muslim influence on early modern physics and optics has taken great strides in recent years. A similar argument may be possible to make for Galileo, who like Harvey, was a student at Padua. The influence of Arabic-Muslim science on the leaders of the scientific revolution has clearly become a topic of serious scholarship. One area of scholarship that is opening up the questions of a multicultural history of science and technology is the history of mathematics. The careful work of scholars of medieval Arabic-Muslim science is also undermining the extent to which scientific revolution was revolutionary. One of the implications of opening up the black box of the sources of the scientific revolution is that the very idea of Western science is becoming increasingly problematic and ethnocentric. Thinking of science from a multicultural perspective can be distinguished from thinking about it from an international perspective.

Questions of Travel - Elizabeth Bishop

Inquiring about whether or not travel is worth it, and the difference between physical and mental travel.

Democracy: Liberal and Direct - Nick Hewlett

Contemporary trends with regard to the health of democracy are mixed. Perhaps the key notions for the improvement of contemporary democracy are participation and power. Democracy is one of the key ideologies of modernity. Liberal democracy is now widely established, both in practice and at the level of ideas. Those who champion liberal democracy point both to how it is practical (it works) and how it defends the rights of the individual. Defenders of direct democracy call for more debate and popular control, and extension of democracy into more areas. Analysts and activists influenced by Marxism stress the importance of greater material equality before political equality is possible. Feminists argue that there has been too great a distinction made between public and private spheres, and emphasize the importance of recognizing the difference among individual voters.

Introduction to Europe and the People Without History - Eric Wolf

Eric Wolf's Europe & the People Without History (1982) is a foundational work for anthropology, history, and global studies. I read parts of Europe and the People Without History my first year of college for a seminar titled "Imperialism, Slavery, and Revolution" with Shanti Singham. I tackled the rest over the summer when I returned home to Montana. Eric Wolf made sense of the world. I remained a history major, but I eventually studied anthropology because of Europe and the People Without History. Wolf was my introduction to the question of What is Anthropology? Eric Wolf takes aim at portrayals of a world of relatively isolated peoples, such as Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture. Wolf describes a world of interconnection. "The central assertion of this book is that the world of humankind constitutes a manifold, a totality of interconnected processes, and inquiries that disassemble this totality into bits and then fail to reassemble it falsify reality" (1982:3). Given this central assertion in the very first pages, it's sad that sometimes this lesson seems lost, even on some who had Eric Wolf as a professor, like Napoleon Chagnon. Sad too is that contemporary anthropology textbooks need to relearn this lesson. This may be why people like Bill Gates were never exposed to this way of understanding the world.

Peter Frankopan, Preface to The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

From the rise and fall of empires in China, Persia, and Rome itself to the spread of Buddhism and advent of Christianity and Islam, right up to Western imperialism and the great wars of the twentieth century, this epic, magisterial work illuminates how the Silk Roads--the crossroads of the world, the meeting place of East and West--perhaps more than anything else, shaped global history over the past two millennia. It was on the Silk Roads that East and West first encountered each other through trade and conquest, leading to the spread of ideas, cultures, and religions, and it was the appetites for foreign goods that drove economies and the growth of nations. From the first cities in Mesopotamia to the emergence of Greece and Rome to the depredations by the Mongols, the transmission of the Black Death, the struggles of the Great Game, and the fall of Communism--the fate of the West has always been inextricably linked to the East. By way of events as disparate as the American Revolution and the world wars of the twentieth century, Peter Frankopan realigns the world, orienting us eastward, and illuminating how even the rise of the West five hundred years ago resulted from its efforts to gain access to and control of these Eurasian trading networks. In an increasingly globalized planet, where current events in Asia and the Middle East dominate the world's attention, this magnificent work of history is very much a work of our times.

Globalization - Barrie Axford - Summary

Globalization is the process through which the world is being made into one place with systemic properties, this process is both historically variable and multidimensional, it involves interconnections across some boundaries and the dissolving of other boundaries, it also precipitates changes in consciousness and possibly in identity, to treat these profound changes simply as myth relies on a superficial and historical understanding of globalization. The study of globalization and of the global system constitutes a potential revolution in the social sciences.

Human Rights and Asian Values - Amartya Sen

In 1776, just when the Declaration of Independence was being adopted in this country, Thomas Paine complained in Common Sense that Asia had long expelled freedom. Elias Canetti observed that in understanding the teachings of Confucius we have to examine not only what he says but what he does not say. The subtlety involved in what is often called the silence of Confucius seems to have escaped his austere modern interpreters who tend to assume that what is not explicitly supported must be implicitly forbidden. If we turn our attention from China to the Indian subcontinent, we are in no danger of running into a hard-to-interpret silence. I would like to conclude with a rather different issue, which is linked to the debate about the nature and the reach of Asian values. Since the conception of human rights transcends local legislation and the citizenship of the individual, the support for human rights can come from anyone -- whether or not she is a citizen of the same country as the individual whose rights are threatened. This basic recognition does not suggest of course that everyone must intervene constantly in protecting and helping others. To conclude, the so-called Asian values that are invoked to justify authoritarianism are not especially Asian in any significant sense. There is a great deal that we can learn from studies of values in Asia and Europe, but they do not support or sustain the thesis of a grand dichotomy. The recognition of diversity within different cultures is extremely important in the contemporary world, since we are constantly bombarded by oversimple generalizations about Western civilization, Asian values, African cultures, and so on.

Manfred Steger and Amentahru Whalrab - What is Global Studies? Theory and Practice

In most cases, the translation of a new intellectual vision into viable academic courses, programs, and institutions require both a dedicated team effort and good luck in the sense of connecting to an existing constellation of engaged people who share the vision. In late 1994, the noted sociologist Richard Appelbaum accepted an appointment to chair his provost's Ad Hoc Planning Committee to study the feasability of creating a common administrative home to several international programs located in various colleges and research units at UCSB. Opportunities for the successful establishment of an overarching global studies unit at UCSB had dramatically increased not only with the ongoing support and leadership of the religious studies and comparative literature scholar Giles Gunn but also with the recent arrival of Mark Juergensmeyer. Serving together on Appelbaum's committee, these scholars agreed that UCSB's new international unit should primarily address the globalization dynamics that were shaping the world now and into the future. In early 1995, the Provost's Ad Hoc Committee completed its work and recommended the establishment of a separate administrative locale bearing the compromise name, Global & International Studies. By this time, Giles Gunn who had been a participant in many of these negotiations, joined Juergensmeyer and Appelbaum in taking the considerable professional risk of also switching half of his academic appointment to the new G&IS Program. No sooner had Juergensmeyer, Gunn, and Appelbaum had secured much-needed office and meeting spaces than they were joined by Sucheng Chan, a tenured Asian studies expert who also requested the permanent transfer of half of her positions to G&IS. Over the next decade of the 2000s, Gunn continued his mission to integrate a strong humanities perspective into a program dominated by social scientists. There were ten tracks within the major: five area studies tracks, the Americas, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, East Asia, and the Pacific, and five global issues tracks (global economy, environment, politics, and world order, culture and society, and global science and technology). This process was greatly aided by the generosity of philanthropist, Kinko's founder, and serial entrepreneur Paul Orfalea who began teaching an immensely popular seminar in global business and leadership at UCSB in 2002. In 2015, precisely a decade after the inauguration of the Orfalea Center, the G&IS dropped its international from the name and became the Department of Global Studies. Other obstacles in the evolution of global studies at UCSB included procuring the necessary faculty lines for a very quickly growing program: motivating core global studies faculty to put countless unpaid overtime hours into serving on planning committees, developing new gateway courses, and teaching sometimes unremunerated course overloads to keep up with the exploding enrollments, engaging in long discussions with faculty senators from other colleges suspicious of the value of global studies while wielding the power to delay or block time-sensitive curricular or administrative proposals, and getting bogged down in seemingly endless negotiations with deans and other high-level administrators reluctant to allocate scarce resources to untested ideas and initiatives.

In the Center of the Map: Nations See Themselves as the Hub of History - Marshall G.S. Hodgson

In the sixteenth century of the Italian missionary, Matteo Ricci, brought to China a European map of the world, showing the new discoveries in America. Europeans of course have clung to the first type of map, showing Europe in the upper center; while the commonest maps in North America show the U.S.A. in that post of honor, even at the cost of splitting a content in two. The most famous case of this is indeed that of the "Middle Kingdom" -- China. At times that empire was strong. Thus came the Koreans, the Japanese, the Tibetans: thus came also the English from their distinct islands, seeking Chinese luxuries and offering little in return the Emperor could approve such as opium. At other times the imperial power grew feeble, local rulers seized power and tyrannized the people, prosperity faded. It could in fact be claimed that for a time China was the wealthiest and most populous, the most esthetically cultivated and even the most powerful state on earth; but when this fact was made the basis for the Chinese picture of the world, the result was tragic miscalculations. For the medieval Hindu the world was a place for the purification of souls. Accordingly, so far as history was significant, it was as ages varied in the degree to which society was well enough ordered to give virtue its due place. In the benighted lands to the east and west so tainted already with decline that pious Brahmins dared not set foot there -- souls were doomed to be born as barbarous Mlecchas; there they lived unhallowed lives till they should earn the right to be born in India. To the medieval Muslim the world looked very different from what it did to his Chinese or to his Hindu contemporaries. Many Muslims believed that Mohammed's birthplace, Mecca, was the center of the earth's surface. This was divided into seven "climes" from south to north, and from extreme heat to cold. World histories written by medieval Muslims might, therefore, have a preliminary section on the older Persians, Hebrews, and Romans; but from the time of Mohammed, the modern part of the history dealt almost exclusively with the Islamic peoples. The West Europeans of the same age had many of the same ideas of history and geography as the Muslims, getting them from the same Greek and Hebrew sources; but their interpretation was very different. Even among the Christians God had made a further selection -- casting aside those of the Levant and Greece as heretics or schismatics in favor of the Western Europeans under the Pope at Rome. The West Europeans allowed that the center of the world's surface was Jerusalem by exaggerating the length of the Mediterranean, their maps could show Spain and China as equally distant from it. In modern times all these medieval pictures of the world have vanished or been modified. The West Europeans were the first to be really faced with the new discoveries and have consequently led the way toward creating a new picture of the world.If during long centuries it was hard to find either truth or liberty in Western Europe, that period was regretfully labelled the Dark Ages of mankind; but in modern times the West Europeans have duly gone forth to enlighten and subdue the world -- so that history of a henceforth Westernized world may be safely reduced almost to that of the West itself. The map of the world is constructed accordingly. In European world atlases each European country has its won map with the rest of the world in a few pages at the end. Accordingly even on the world map, which ought to provide a sense of proportion, there is space to name a great many places in Europe, while in other populous centers like India or China, shown on a much smaller scale, only a few chief places need to be indicated. The story is often told of a small tribe whose word for mankind was the name for the tribe itself.

The Slave Trade and Slavery in the Americas

Once established by Europeans, the slave-based economies of the Americas expanded rapidly, demanding ever larger numbers of African laborers. The societies that emerged in the Americas proved to be completely new experiments. The absolute number of Africans imported into American societies most affected the extent and nature of African influence there. The Caribbean islands and coastal Brazil imported over three-quarters of all Africans who came to the Americas, financing the dense save trade from the profits from sugar and tobacco. A variety of slave regimes developed in mainland British North America as black bondage infiltrated every colony from the northern reaches of Massachusetts Bay, which would become Maine, down to the southern border where Georgia stood as a buffer against the Spanish in Florida. Four major regional patterns emerged. Even within regions, differences were often great. Two watersheds marked the general patterns everywhere. The second watershed flowed with and from the U.S. War of Independence (1775-1783). African Americans in urban settings lived differently than those in isolated locales, and they sometimes had more opportunities to improve their status and living conditions. In a few regions, African influence, while substantial in colonial times, tended to disappear during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Economic, spatial, and ecological factors played important roles in the Africans' arrival and habituation in the Americas. These same factors tended to diminish the slaves' quality of life: Endemic illnesses in the tropics and ease of replacement led planters to pay less attention to survival and reproduction. Geography affected the paths by which Africans arrived in the Americas. In another common transshipment experience, especially between the 1660s and 1730s, slaves who had worked for several years in the Caribbean would sometimes be sold to the captains sailing to the Chesapeake or other North American colonies. Topography and vegetation influenced the feasability of establishing successful maroon communities in the Americas. Finally, Africans in the Americas experienced psychological distance from their homelands. Part II presents a detailed view of four different regions of the hemisphere where Africans were taken and settled.

David Held, et al., "Religion" and "Empire," from Global Transformations: Politics, Economics, Culture

Paradoxically, none of the conventional list of world religions -- Christianity, Islam, Confucianism, Hinduism, Judaism, and Buddhism -- is present in significant numbers in every continent or region, though Christianity and Judaism have spread their adherents to most corners of the globe. Thus it is their geographical extensity, albeit often a regionally focused one, and their social impact that truly mark out the world religions from the many faiths that did and do exist. Applying our conceptual model of globalization to the world religions, we can argue that they have assumed an extraordinary extensity. Of course, world religions also display cultural hierarchy and unevenness in their spread. Alongside, and indeed often intimately intertwined with, the progress of the sacred realm on earth has followed the expansion of the secular realm of politics and military force, though in many ways the distinction is one that can only be drawn from the vantage point of a secularized later twentieth century. All empires inevitably face a series of interrelated structural problems or contradictions, particularly those that do not reply solely or predominantly on the repeated imposition of coercive force to obtain cooperation or subservience from their provinces.

Introduction: Imagined Communities - Benedict Anderson

Perhaps without being much noticed yet, a fundamental transformation in the history of Marxism and Marxist movements is upon us. If the Vietnamese invasion and occupation of Cambodia in December 1978 and January 1979 represented the first large-scale conventional war waged by one revolutionary Marxist regime against another. Such consideration serve to underline the fact that since World War II every successful revolution has defined itself in national terms -- the Peoples Republic of China, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam and so forth and in doing has grounded itself firmly in a territorial and social space inherited from the prerevolutionary past. Eric Hobsbawn is perfectly correct in stating that Marxist movements and states have tended to become national not only in form but in substance, i.e. nationalist. But if the facts are clear, their explanation remains a matter of long-standing dispute. The aim of this book is to offer some tentative suggestions for a more satisfactory interpretation of the anomaly of nationalism. Before addressing the questions raised above, it seems advisable to considerable briefly the concept of nation and offer a workable definition. Part of the difficulty is that one tends unconsciously to hypothesize the existence of nationalism with a big N and then classify it as an ideology. In an anthropological spirit, then, I propose the following definition of nation: it is an imagined political community -- and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will ever know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion. The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in which the Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical realm. Finally, it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal, comradeship. These deaths bring us abruptly face to face with the central problem posed by nationalism: what makes the shrunken imaginings of recent history (two centuries) generate such colossal sacrifices? I believe that the beginnings of an answer lie in the cultural roots of nationalism.

The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism - Karl Marx

The economic structure of capitalistic society has grown out of the economic structure of feudal society. The immediate producer, the laborer, could only dispose of his own position after he had ceased to be attached to the soil and ceased to be the slave, serf, or bondman of another. The industrial capitalists, these new potentates, had on their part not only to displace the guild-masters of handicrafts, but also the feudal lords, the possessors of the sources of wealth. In the history of primitive accumulation, all revolutions are epoch-making that act as the levers for the capitalist class in course of formation; but above all, those moments when great masses of men are suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence and hurled as free and unattached proletarians on the labor-market. In England, serfdom had practically disappeared in the last part of the 14th century. The prelude of the revolution that laid the foundation of the capitalist mode of production was played in the last third of the 15th, and the first decade of the 16th century. The process of forcible expropriation of the people received in the 16th century a new and frightful impulse from the Reformation, and from the consequent colossal spoliation of the church property. After the restoration of the Stuarts, the landed proprietors carried, by legal means, an act of usurpation, effected everywhere on the Continent without any legal formality. The glorious Revolution brought into power, along with William of Orange, the landlord and capitalist appropriators of surplus value. The last process of wholesale expropriation of the agricultural population from the soil to finally, the so-called clearing of estates, i.e., the sweeping men off them. The spoiltation of the church's property, the fraudulent alienation of the State domains, the robbery of the common lands, the usurpation of feudal and clan property, and its transformation into modern private property under circumstances of reckless terrorism, were just so many idyllic methods of primitive accumulation. Now that we have considered the forcible creation of a class of outlawed proletarians, the bloody discipline that tuned them into wage-laborers, the disgraceful action of the State which employed the police the accelerate the accumulation of capital by increasing the degree of exploitation of labor, the question remains: whence came the capitalists originally? Doubtless many small guild-masters, and yet more independent small artisans, or even wage-laborers, transformed themselves into small capitalists, by gradual extending exploitation of wage-labor and corresponding accumulation, into full-blown capitalists. The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement, and entombment in the mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of blackskins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. The different moments of primitive accumulation distribute themselves now, more or less, in chronological order, particularly over Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, and England. In the history of the colonial administration of Holland -- and Holland was the head capitalistic nation of the 17th century, is on of the most extraordinary relations of treachery, bribery, massacre, and meanness. The English East India Company, as is well-known, obtained besides the political rule in India, the exclusive monopoly of the teatrade, as well as the Chinese trade in general, and of the transport of goods to and from Europe.The treasures captured outside Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement, and murder floated back to the mother-country and were then turned into capital. Today industrial supremacy implies commercial supremacy. The birth of Modern Industry is also heralded by a great slaughter of the innocents. In the counties of Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, and more particularly in Lancashire, the newly invented machinery was used in large factories built on the sides of streams capable of turning the water-wheel. such a task it was to establish the eternal laws of the nature, of the capitalist mode of production, to complete the process of separation between laborers and the conditions of labor, to transform, at one pole, the social means of production and subsistence into capital, at the opposite pole, the mass of the population into wage-laborers, into free-laboring poor, that artificial product of modern society.

Born with a Silver Spoon: The Origin of World Trade in 1571 - Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giraldez

The global trade dates from the founding of the city of Manila in 1571, which formed the first direct and permanent trade link between America and Asia. Much American silver traversed the Atlantic Ocean, passing through Europe on its journey to China. The conventional explanation of this west-to-east flow of money is that Europe had to send treasure to Asia because the West had to settle its trade deficit with Asia. Depicting precious metals as passive money that adapts to trade imbalances diverts attention from its central issues. Both the Spanish empire and Tokugawa shogunate captured a substantial portion of silver profits from mines they controlled. The worldwide decline in the value of silver in the early modern period translated directly into global price inflation. We have consciously neglected any attempt to tie the African continent into the global trade of silver. Not all slaves remained in Brazil, nor were all of them plantation laborers. Scholars have been long interested in the impact of Europeans onAsia. The physical presence of Europeans in Asia in early modern times -- and the simultaneous physical absence of Asians in the West -- has understandably led scholars to pay attention mostly to the impact of the West on Asia.

Introduction - Giles Gunn

The reader is designed to introduce students to some of the ways that the world has been woven into a system of interrelated but far from completely integrated processes, interactions, and transformations since long before the beginning of the Common Era. The terms "global" and "globalization" are fraught with so many complications and discontents that one almost wishes one could substitute others in their place. In the face of such a specter, it is small comfort to learn that globalizing trends have, since World War II, also made possible a threshold increase in the world' per capita income, reduced by half the number of people living in direst poverty, reinforced the desire to work for nuclear disarmament, lent support to the war against terror, helped expand the environmental movement, and encouraged the organization of literally thousands of international groups and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) devoted to addressing various social, political, and economic grievances and the relief of human suffering generally. However, before we venture too many generalizations about a worldwide process that in its latent phases is changing at a pace rapidly approaching what feels like warp speed, it is important to dispel a few myths about the words globalization and global themselves. But this in turn suggests that the corollary term global should not be assumed to represent some seamless whole or unified totality. Yet this implies that the process of world-making or re-making, known as globalization is a comparatively contemporary phenomenon which has accelerate to its present velocity only perhaps because of the collapse of the Soviet Union and hence the termination of the Cold War. Those who associate the origins of globalization with this first European Age of Exploration and Discovery are also likely to assume that when the modern world system as Immanuel Wallerstein has termed it, first took shape in the early 1600s, it was essentially an economic rather than political system and was built around a series of core structures characterized by aggressive commercial growth, strong governmental structures, and a powerful sense of national identity, all of which permitted them to control, for their own benefit, the evolution of those weaker states and regions of the world that developed on their peripheries. Earliest evidence on a global scale of these cultural and symbolic as well as commercial changes can, as a matter of fact, be detected more than two thousand years before the creation of the modern world system itself when, as historians like William H. McNeill and Marshall Hodgson have demonstrated, an Afro-Eurasian zone of civilization first came into existence over a period of something like a thousand years. As it happens, this history by which the world has, for several thousand years, been continuously woven and rewoven into an increasingly interlinked and interdependent assemblage of life-systems is not one to which, until very recently, the social sciences or in the humanities have paid very much attention. Thus while questions about globalization's evolution and subsequent historicization, or about its form and function in different locales, or about its association with other historical phenomena (such as the development of capitalism, or the democratic, and much later, socialist revolutions, or the rise of the nation-state or the industrial revolution, or mass migration, or global war, or the transformations in communications and finance, or multiculturalism, or the World Wide Web.) Needless to say, globalization has attracted its proponents and defenders as well as its skeptics and opponents. Not surprisingly, these more enthusiastic proponents of globalization are countered by large and growing body of skeptics, critics, and opponents of globalization. At the other pole among skeptics and critics one finds a series of thinkers and actors, many of the latter having taken the street to protest the policies of the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank) who believe that globalization simply represents another form of domination by First World countries of Third World countries, a form of domination in which individual distinctions of culture and society are being erased and local economics are becoming firmly coopted by or subsumed within a global system of capital expansion. Such differences of opinion and perspective only point up the fact that the field of global studies is a site of contestation as well as consensus. The answers to such questions will not, and do not, and have not come easily, but the questions themselves become more pressing every day. Evidence of a new disposition in American higher education to begin to engage is globalization critically can be seen in a number of places. The most debilitating among former intellectual habits that need to be abandoned is the maintenance of that barrier within the academy that currently divides the social sciences from the humanities. Next to go will have to be the practice of thinking primarily in terms of stable entities to be studied, whether they be traditions, periods, institutions, practices, texts, careers, genres, or what-have-you. Still a third habit that must be discarded in the social sciences as well as the humanities is our tendency to conceive of cultures, like identities as homogenous, monolithic, and easily discriminable. A fourth habit we must relinquish is the tendency to periodize by centuries, as though the life of time, if I may coin a phrase, can be measured everywhere and at all times in segments of one hundred years. But if time in effect moves at different rates of speed in different places for different peoples in relation to different trajectories of hope, possibility, custom, and coercion, so place is also a more elastic and unwieldly category than we have acknowledged in much of our scholarship. Last but not least, we must acknowledge that if globalization has rendered cultures and the forms and practices that characterize them more mobile as well as socialized, enabling them to travel across traditional borders and help create and sustain new diasporic communities, it has also freed the faculty of the imagination, always a potent, if still too often undervalued, force in historical life, to become a principal agent in the construction and reconstruction of the global world itself.

The Struggle for the Real - Clifford Geertz

There has been, in short, a general shift in modern anthropological discussion of culture, and within it of religion as part of culture, a shift from a concern with thought as an inner mental state or stream of such states to a concern with thought as the utilization by individuals in society of public, historically created vehicles of reasoning, perception, feeling, and understanding -- symbols, in the broadest sense of the term. Such an approach is neither introspectionist nor behaviorist; it is semantic. But how are we to isolate the religious perspective at all? Are we not thrown back onto more upon the necessity of defining religion adding one more catch phrase the belief of spiritual beings, morality touched with emotion, ultimate concern, to what is surely an endless catalog? Well, no. One can begin in a fog and try to clear it. The heart of this way of looking at the world, that is, of the religious perspective, is, so I would like to argue, not the theory that beyond the visible world there lies an invisible one (though most religious men have indeed held, with differing degrees of sophistication, to some such theory);, not the doctrine that a divine presence broods over the world (though, in an extraordinary variety of forms, from animism to monotheism, that too has been a rather undreamt of in our philosophies. In anthropology, it has become customary to refer to the collection of notions a people has of how reality is at base put together as their world view. Religious patterns such as those I have been discussing thus have a double aspect: they are frames of perception, symbolic screens through which experience is interpreted; and they are guides for action, blueprints for conduct. The world view side of the religious perspective centers, then, around the problem of belief, the ethos side around the problem of action.

From Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity - Liah Greenfeld

This book is an attempt to understand the world in which we live. The word nationalism is used here as an umbrella term under which are subsumed the related phenomena of national identity (or nationality) and consciousness, and collectivities based on them -- nations; occasionally it is employed to refer to the articulate ideology on which national identity and consciousness rest, though not -- unless specified -- to the politically activist, xenophobic variety of national patriotism, which it frequently designates. The specific questions which the book addresses are why and how nationalism emerged, why and how it was transformed in the process of transfer from one society to another, and why and how different forms of national identity and consciousness became translated into societies which defined themselves as nations. The specificity of nationalism, that which distinguishes nationality from other types of identity, derives from the fact that nationalism locates the source of individual identity within a people, which is seen as the bearer of sovereignty, the central object of loyalty, and the basis of collective solidarity. To understand the nature of the idea of nation, it might be helpful to examine the semantic permutations which eventually resulted in it, as we follow the history of the word. In this sense, a group of foreigner united by place of origin, the word nation was applied to the communities off students coming to several universities shared by Western Christendom from loosely geographically or linguistically related regions. As universities sent representatives to adjudicate grave ecclesiastical questions at the Church Councils, the word underwent yet another transformation. At this point, where Zernatto's story breaks off, we may pause to take a closer look at it. The process of semantic transformations is constantly redirected by structural (situational constraints which form the new concepts of the word); at the same time, the structural constraints are conceptualized, interpreted, or defined in terms of the concepts (the definition of the situation changes as the concepts evolve) which thereby orient action. The applicability of the idea of the nation and its potency increased a thousandfold as the meaning of the word was transformed again from rabble to nation. National identity in its distinctive modern sense, is, therefore an identity which derives from membership in a people, the fundamental characteristic of which is that it is defined as a nation. There are important exceptions to every relationship in terms of which nationalism has ever been interpreted -- whether with common territory or common language, statehood or shared traditions, history or race. As it is, however, nationalism is the most common and salient form of particularlism in the modern world. The word nation which in its conciliar and at the time prevalent meaning of an elite was applied to the population of a specific country, England, became cognitively association with the existing political, territorial and ethnic connotations of a population and a country. The word nation meaning sovereign people, was now applied to other populations and countries which like the first nation, naturally had some political, territorial, and/or ethnic qualities to distinguish them, and became associated with such geopolitical and ethnic baggage. The term nation applied to both conceals important differences. The two branches of nationalism are obviously related in a significant way, but are grounded in different values and develop for different reasons. Perhaps the most important difference concerns the relationship between nationalism and democracy. The emergence of the original, in principle, non-particularistic idea of the nation as a sovereign people was evidently, predicated on a transformation in the character of the relevant population, which suggested the symbolic elevation of the people and its definition as a political elite, in other words, on a profound change in structural conditions. As it did so, the nature of sovereignty was inevitably interpreted. These two dissimilar interpretations of popular sovereignty underlie the basic types of nationalism, which one may identify as individualistic-libertarian and collectivistic-authoritarian. It must be kept in mind, of course, that these are only categories which serve to pinpoint certain characteristic tendencies within different -- specific -- nationalisms.

Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen

Written during the French Revolution: Men are born and remain free/equal in rights, the aim of every political association is the preservation of human rights, sovereignty lies in the nation, liberty is the power to do whatever is not injurious to others, law has the right to forbid only actions which are injurious to society, law is expression of general will, no men may be accused/arrested/detained except when they break the law, the law is to establish only penalties that are absolutely and obviously necessary, since every man is presumed innocent until declared guilty, severely repressed by law, no one is to be silenced for their opinions, free communication of ideas/opinions, public force protecting the rights of man, maintenance of the public force, citizens have the right to taxation with representation, public agent has to account for his administration, separation of powers, property is a sacred and inviolable right.