Search Results

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the key arguments and subjects discussed in the book, but it undertakes this review by means of a close investigation of the place of registration in contemporary scholarship. It explores the meaning of the term registration, and then examines the concept in existing social science theory, tracking the limits of its usage in the writings of Michel Foucault, Jack Goody, James Scott, and Amartya Sen's scholarship of social rights. It draws linkages between the chapters in the volume and the existing historiography on documentary government, drawing out the implications, in particular, of Clanchy's work. Moving beyond this review, it offers a theoretical account of the work of registration which highlights the (often neglected) dialectical politics at work in the registration of membership in human collectivities across time and region.

This introductory chapter considers perspectives on modern Kachin ethno-nationalism from the vantage point of different communities in Burma, India, China, and Thailand. It discusses anthropological representations of ‘the Kachin’ in the work of Edmund Leach, Jonathan Friedman, and lately that of James C. Scott, and examines the political implications of these representations. The chapter also considers why historians have found it difficult to undertake detailed studies of this region and the dangers of over-privileging the mandala as the defining historical intellectual apparatus. The methodological approach and objectives of the book are outlined in relation to these issues, with a particular focus on Jinghpaw dynamic political expansionism as a critical historical construct. The chapter concludes by briefly outlining each chapter to follow.

The epilogue forms a coda to the previous chapter, which argues that contemporary homesteading in eastern Kentucky represents a serious form of activism and resistance to capitalist modernity, even though it does little to change the nature of capitalism itself. The epilogue suggests that homesteading should be seen as a form of anarchism, defined by James Scott as “cooperation without hierarchy or state rule.” The epilogue illustrates that anarchism is a foundational mode of human life--one that remains crucial today even as it is overlooked and eroded--and argues that the intentional practice of anarchism represents an important, capacity-building experience in “lived democracy,” which is too often lacking in our families, schools, churches, governments, and workplaces.

In 1907, Scott Joplin arrived in New York and stayed in the Tenderloin — its center for entertainment. Rose Leaf Rag is another outstanding ragtime composition of Joplin. The author argues that after the brief hiatus of 1905 to the middle of 1907, he was now back in the ragtime groove, producing masterpieces of the genre. It was probably in late 1907 that Joplin met Joseph F. Lamb, a young white man, ragtime enthusiast, and amateur pianist and composer. Along with Joplin and James Scott, Lamb became known as one of the “Big Three of Classic Ragtime.” Joplin then published School of Ragtime — an instruction manual to demonstrate the precise manner of playing ragtime. Eventually, Joplin left John Stark and settled with Seminary Music where he met lyricist Irving Berlin.

Chapter 3 examines the creation of the international law profession in the United States, focusing in particular on the American Society of International Law (founded in 1906) and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (founded in 1910). It argues that the agenda of professional organizations reflected legalists’ search for authority in the social, cultural, and ideological context of the early twentieth-century United States. The growth of law schools and the law profession, the nature of legal thought, prevailing racial and gender discourses, and the needs of professionalism all contributed. As a result of this context—and of the important personal influence of James Brown Scott—these organizations came to embrace a judicialist sensibility of international law in the years leading up to World War I. Despite a diversity of personal views, the profession as a whole was congenial to elite interests.

Chapter 4 explores the tensions that began to arise between James Brown Scott and Alejandro Alvarez, and the evolution of the American Institute of International Law (AIIL) in the 1920s, the establishment of a closer relationship between the AIIL, the Pan-American Union, and the US Department of State. It considers the projects for the codification of public and private international law, as advanced by the AIIL at the Rio de Janeiro Commission of Jurists in 1927, and it also explores the reorganization of the AIIL with its new center in Cuba and the progressive engagement of Scott with the Cuban jurists and diplomats Antonio Sánchez de Bustamante and Cosme de la Torriente.

Chapter 2 analyzes the initial encounter and engagement between James Brown Scott and Alejandro Alvarez and the construction of a hemispheric legal network through the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) and the American Institute of International Law (AIIL), as originally conceived by both Scott and Alvarez, and its early history through the second decade of the twentieth century. It also examines Robert Bacon’s visit to South America (1913), repeating Elihu Root’s previous itinerary and the first two institutional meetings of the AIIL held in Washington, D.C., (1915–1916) and in Havana (1917). It also traces a genealogy of the rise of the hemispheric ideal of American international law, analyzing the formation of a common set of shared ideals and practices in the United States and Latin America.

Chapter 4 shows how key US elites embraced the legalist project for world order. The US delegation to the 1907 Hague Peace Conference took the lead in supporting the creation of an international court. Meanwhile, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace targeted its vast wealth toward promoting the judicialist agenda and convincing legalists on both sides of the Atlantic to support it. Thus, in both public and private efforts the United States was a leading promoter of the international law project. However, close examination of these plans reveals their limitations and dependence on assumptions of advancing civilization and the power of elite publications to shape public opinion. A high-profile debate over treaties in 1911 revealed that while the US foreign policymaking establishment embraced a legalist vision, this did not always result in “legal” behavior.

This chapter discusses the history of The London Mercury under the editorship of editor, John Collings Squire. The magazine experienced three phases in its twenty-year history. The first lasted from 1919 to 1931, when Squire maintained firm editorial control and adroitly defended his positions on art and neo-Georgian values. The second was from 1931 to 1934, as the magazine experienced a marked deterioration in editorial quality, ending with Squire's ouster from his post. The third and final incarnation occurred from 1934 to 1939 under the energetic editorship of Rolfe Arnold Scott-James, who made the magazine look like something recognizably and, by this time, even traditionally ‘modernist’. The longevity of The London Mercury on the British literary scene, compared to the more famous and scintillating ‘little magazines’, confirms its place as an important site of literary production between 1919 and 1939.

Chapter 5 focuses on the controversy over intervention that arose at the Sixth Pan-American Conference (1928) held in Havana and the hemispheric impact of the projects for the codification of international law advanced by the American Institute of International Law (AIIL). It analyzes in detail James Brown Scott’s engagement with the Peruvian jurist Víctor Manuel Maúrtua, which led to the final displacement of Alejandro Alvarez from the secretariat of the AIIL. It also examines the challenges that the Anti-War Treaty of Saavedra Lamas posed to Scott and the very existence of the AIIL, which eventually led to the crisis of the organization.

After winning with unexpected ease the Spanish–American War of 1898, justified at home as a case of humanitarian intervention, the United States started understanding itself as a world power. This led to a renewed attention to international law, in order to reconcile the new leading role of the country with its democratic tradition. Even the formal colonialism in the Philippines and the tutelage of the newly independent Cuba were recast by the founders of the American Society of International Law as an expression of egalitarian values, American and universal at the same time. This ambiguous nationalist/cosmopolitan identity was based on a narrative of progress: the peak of civilization reached by the United States would expand world-wide through example and benevolent assimilation. This chapter argues that it was a narrative of primarily religious origin that justified the war in the eyes of the American people and underpinned future foreign policy.

This chapter opens the book by introducing key players and key nodes in the history of the charitable landscape in California; putting voluntary associations in context; explaining understandings of modern childhood; providing a brief history of Oakland and its urban development; and making the argument for using the cultural landscape to investigate women, children, and communities. Key concepts, from Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas, James Scott, and Jane Jacobs, are introduced. Procuring low-rent spaces in older buildings facilitated innovation, by women for urban children, showing that new places and ideas come from experimenting with older things and practices. Objects and spaces are also ripe for studying the cultural exchanges that shaped decisions and for assessing results including whether or not adults used the charitable landscape to exercise ethically adequate objectives for children and their childhoods.

This chapter analyses women’s use of mockery and ridicule in prenuptial performance among Trinidadian and Bihari Hindus; Canadian-Moroccan and Bulgarian-Israeli Sephardic Jews; Romanian Orthodox Christians; and Muslim Tuareg smith praise singers. Following James Scott, this chapter argues that prenuptial mockery and ridicule function as weapons of the weak or the disempowered, asserting resistance to the change and loss that accompany marriage while helping to alleviate anxiety through momentary empowerment, familiarizing new social contexts for the bride and female relatives through humor and levity.

Examines the complicated conversations with power undertaken by early Tudor courtly drama generally, and explores the various ways in which we might attend to the nuances of those conversations. It uses the work of the social anthropologist James C. Scott as one way of rethinking the ways in which such plays were able to speak truth to power in the period prior to the Reformation. But it suggests also the limits of Scott’s model to describe the full complexity of Tudor courtly conversation, offering a more nuanced approach that might take fuller account of the subtle interactions between playwrights, audiences and royal authority in this period.

This chapter frames the context for the main interrelated questions the book answers: 1) what are some distinct concepts of freedom emerging out of the experience of slavery? 2) What important insights does analyzing the relationship between slavery and freedom provide to political theorists that they do not know, have ignored, or have not sufficiently investigated? The introduction defines the concept of marronage, first by explaining its historical and conventional usages; and second, by delineating novel forms of marronage employed subsequently in the book. It utilizes the work Aimé Césaire and James C. Scott to accomplish. Furthermore, it outlines key dimensions of flight absent from contemporary fugitive theory and provides a rationalization for why marronage is an essential heuristic device. The chapter turns to demarcation of two alternative traditions of freedom theorizing in Western thought (negative and positive), thereby demonstrating a void left by their static notions of freedom. It suggests the idea of marronage fills the conceptual chasm. The remainder of the chapter examines the advantages and shortcomings of Orlando Patterson’s thought, outlines recent developments in intellectual traditions rethinking political theory from modernity’s underside, and concludes with the book prospectus.

Little is known about the formal crafting of the Paris Peace Treaties in 1919/20 and the set of international lawyers that was tasked to draft the hundreds and thousands of articles of one of the most contested peace settlements of all times. Taking a fresh look behind the scenes of the negotiations in Paris, this chapter unearths role and influence of the drafting committee, offers a characterization of the in-house lawyers involved, and examines how they transformed political bargaining into legally binding rules and treaty provisions. The broader aim is to explore what international legal advisors do in government service and how they operate along the blurred the boundary between law and politics.

Chapter 3 studies the way in which the debates over the existence and nature of an American international law drew on discussions about the Monroe Doctrine and its legitimacy and redefinition as a Pan-American and hemispheric principle of international law, focusing on Alejandro Alvarez, who was the most eloquent promoter of this approach. Both Latin American and US international lawyers, diplomats, politicians, and intellectuals took an active part in these debates, notably Alvarez, Luis María Drago, Baltasar Brum, Elihu Root, Charles Evans Hughes, Theodore Roosevelt, Hiram Bingham, James Brown Scott, and Woodrow Wilson, among others. The chapter examines how a US national, political and unilateral doctrine of the nineteenth century began to be conceived as a continental and multilateral principle of international law in the early twentieth century.