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After the East-West Conflict: Democratization, State Colapse, and Empire Building

Hans Joas and Wolfgang Knöbl

in War in Social Thought: Hobbes to the Present

This chapter examines democratization, “failed states,” and empire building after the East–West conflict. The debate over “democratic peace” focused on democratization and was being underpinned by ... More

This chapter examines democratization, “failed states,” and empire building after the East–West conflict. The debate over “democratic peace” focused on democratization and was being underpinned by the vision of peace developed by Immanuel Kant in 1795. Since the end of the nineteenth century, there had been no serious discussion of Kant's ideas on how to achieve peace. Power–political realism, liberalism, and modernization theory, which were based on assumptions quite different from those of Kant, were far more prominent. It was only in the early 1980s that this changed, with global political developments and new political circumstances playing a crucial role in the resumption of the debate on Kant's ideas. The immediate trigger for this debate, at least the academic variant, was the two-part essay by Michael Doyle from 1983 entitled “Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs.” The chapter also considers the relationship between international relations and sociology.Less

Damnosa Hereditas: Habsburg People and State

A. Wess Mitchell

in The Grand Strategy of the Habsburg Empire

This chapter looks at the constitutional makeup of the Habsburg state and the limitations it placed on the mobilization of resources. In contrast to its physical geography, the political geography of ... More

This chapter looks at the constitutional makeup of the Habsburg state and the limitations it placed on the mobilization of resources. In contrast to its physical geography, the political geography of the Danubian Basin greatly complicated the task of Habsburg empire building. Accumulated in a pell-mell fashion over several centuries, the territorial holdings of the Austrian Habsburgs formed a composite state made up of multiple, historically separate polities, each with its own separate constitutional arrangement with the ruling dynasty. Its human population consisted of more than a dozen ethnic groups, none of which was strong enough to dominate the others. This internal makeup impeded the monarchy’s evolution as a modern state in two ways: by hindering the development of a centralized, efficient state administration and implanting sources of domestic conflict into the social fabric of the state. Both factors shaped Austria’s behavior as a strategic actor, placing it at a disadvantage in competition with more centralized and unified Great Power rivals. Ultimately, these characteristics prevented the monarchy from mobilizing its full power potential, effectively removed territorial expansion as an option for increasing state security, and presented internal vulnerabilities for enemies to exploit in wartime.Less

Higher and Lower at the Same Time

David Farber

in Everybody Ought to Be Rich: The Life and Times of John J. Raskob, Capitalist

This chapter describes John's entry into the skyscraper business, particularly his decision to build the Empire State Building. The Empire State Building was announced to the world on August 29, ... More

This chapter describes John's entry into the skyscraper business, particularly his decision to build the Empire State Building. The Empire State Building was announced to the world on August 29, 1929. The building would cost $60 million, be a thousand feet high, and open for business May 1, 1931. The chapter also details the impact of the stock market crash of 1929 on John's finances.Less

Rethinking Integration and Imperial Space

Kelly O'Neill

in Claiming Crimea: A History of Catherine the Great's Southern Empire

This concluding chapter argues that the empire-building process cannot be understood apart from its spatial context. On one hand, the exercise and experience of authority were shaped in important ... More

This concluding chapter argues that the empire-building process cannot be understood apart from its spatial context. On one hand, the exercise and experience of authority were shaped in important ways by the built and natural environments. Russian officials paid an inordinate amount of attention to sites and attempted to infuse many of them with particular symbolic significance. In another sense, the cultural and economic connections that integrated Crimeans into non-Russian, and usually trans-imperial, spaces were themselves valuable to the empire-building process. Commercial networks, family estates, and pilgrimage routes continually took Crimeans across the border of the empire. Cross-border transactions then provided the empire with channels for expanding its own sphere of influence.Less

The Empire and Empire Food

Yong Chen

in Chop Suey, USA: The Story of Chinese Food in America

This chapter links the spread of Chinese food to the geographic and socioeconomic expansion of the United States. This connection is best captured by the notion of “empire food,” which was created in ... More

This chapter links the spread of Chinese food to the geographic and socioeconomic expansion of the United States. This connection is best captured by the notion of “empire food,” which was created in the process of America's empire building for the pleasures of its citizens. While many Americans are unwilling or unable to see their country as an empire, the United States is, nonetheless, an empire of consumption characterized by extraordinary material abundance. It is the kind of empire that an American founding father such as Thomas Jefferson aspired to build in order to ensure freedom and liberty. Standing as an important event in the expansion of the American empire, the multiplication of Chinese restaurants expanded the meaning of American freedom and abundance by extending the dining-out experience to the masses.Less

The Manchu Great State

Timothy Brook, Michael van Walt van Praag, and Miek Boltjes (eds)

in Sacred Mandates: Asian International Relations since Chinggis Khan

The Qing Great State, founded by the Manchus in 1636, absorbed Ming China into a polity that ruled East Asia for close to three centuries. To recruit sources for their legitimacy, the Manchus drew on ... More

The Qing Great State, founded by the Manchus in 1636, absorbed Ming China into a polity that ruled East Asia for close to three centuries. To recruit sources for their legitimacy, the Manchus drew on Inner Asian Mongol and Tibetan Buddhist practices and forms of authority as well as Chinese. The Qing emperor was thus at once the Great Khan who commanded the allegiance of Chinggisid princes, the emanation of Manjusri who was recognized by the Dalai Lama, and the emperor at the apex of the Chinese tribute system. The realm the Qing emperor ruled was managed through particular relationships strategically developed with the ruling elites of each part of his realm in accordance with their respective worldviews. Stabilized from three different sources, the Qing was able to pursue a process of empire-building that dominated much of Asia at a time when states based in Europe were also building world empires. Skillful management of relations in these different legal orders held the whole together, but empire-building was a military project and could be sustained only through an investment of resources at a level. By the nineteenth century, the Qing was not able to meet these costs.Less

Introduction: Russian Orientology and ‘Oriental Renaissance’ in Fin-de-Siècle Europe

Vera Tolz

in Russia's Own Orient: The Politics of Identity and Oriental Studies in the Late Imperial and Early Soviet Periods

After outlining the book's key issues, the Introduction offers a brief history of Orientology in Russia in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, focusing on how the establishment of university ... More

After outlining the book's key issues, the Introduction offers a brief history of Orientology in Russia in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, focusing on how the establishment of university chairs and departments of Orientology was directly linked to the demands of Russian nation- and empire-building. Particular attention is paid to how, as a result of the activities of the Arabist Viktor Rozen, the study of Russia's eastern and southern borderlands, which Rozen called ‘Russia's own Orient’, became one of the research priorities for the Imperial Academy of Sciences in the 1890s. In showing how Rozen's agenda for Russian Orientology was linked to various pan-European intellectual trends, the Introduction also gives profiles of the main figures, Rozen's disciples, whose ideas are discussed in this book.Less

“I’m Not a Businessman, I’m a Business, Man”: A Hip-Hop Genealogy of Black Entrepreneurship

Simone C. Drake

in When We Imagine Grace: Black Men and Subject Making

This chapter charts a genealogy of black men’s urban business practices in relationship to citizenship and the law. Focusing on Marcus Garvey, Berry Gordy, and Jay-Z (aka Shawn Carter), this chapter ... More

This chapter charts a genealogy of black men’s urban business practices in relationship to citizenship and the law. Focusing on Marcus Garvey, Berry Gordy, and Jay-Z (aka Shawn Carter), this chapter analyses the nuances of what I refer to as a hip-hop genealogy and how it infuses the ways in which these men imagine black entrepreneurship as a nationalist site of redemption, enabling them to build literal empires. The self-branding that is central to how each of these men builds an empire possesses its own nuances, but each is driven by a self-actualization produced by imagining alternatives to the limited spaces open to black men. The law, custom, and intra-racial conflict emerge as challenges for all three men’s pursuits; the ways they negotiate and think about the obstacles challenges discourses of crisis. It is, however, difficult to separate hegemonic gender ideologies from nationalist and capitalist informed economic pursuits; thus, I also consider the role black women play in the empire building legacies of these men.Less

Elusive Subjects and the Instability of Noble Society

Kelly O'Neill

in Claiming Crimea: A History of Catherine the Great's Southern Empire

This chapter focuses on one of the crucial mechanisms of empire building: the integration of elites. Previous scholars have presumed that the Crimean elite followed a path similar to that of their ... More

This chapter focuses on one of the crucial mechanisms of empire building: the integration of elites. Previous scholars have presumed that the Crimean elite followed a path similar to that of their Georgian and Ukrainian peers. According to the accepted narrative, officials offered the mirzas a role in facilitating the establishment of Russian rule, and they accepted. By the early nineteenth century, mirzas relinquished the reins of authority to Russian officials and landowners, thus removing any vestiges of local particularity in the Tavrida administration. Those who remained in positions of power did so only by forsaking their previous allegiances and becoming part of the Russian social and cultural fabric. In so doing, they left the Crimean Tatar population vulnerable to integrationist policies.Less

Southward Migration: Empire Building and Transculturation in Brazil-Maru

in Across Meridians: History and Figuration in Karen Tei Yamashita's Transnational Novels

This chapter examines the issues of empire building and transculturation in Karen Tei Yamashita's novel Brazil-Maru, describing her research for this novel about government-sponsored Japanese ... More

This chapter examines the issues of empire building and transculturation in Karen Tei Yamashita's novel Brazil-Maru, describing her research for this novel about government-sponsored Japanese emigration to Brazil during the interwar year. It analyzes how Yamashita's attempt to grapple with the contradictory dimensions of the Japanese emigration to Brazil was translated into rhetorical ambiguities, elliptical references, and esoteric visions in her literary portrayals. The chapter also considers several aspects of the novel as fraught with ideological tension, including utopia as an imperial imaginary ideal and the primitive as a racially inflected signifier.Less

Awe: Toward a Depression Sublime

John Marsh

in The Emotional Life of the Great Depression

By awe, philosophers and psychologists mean the sensation that overcomes someone in the presence of something simultaneously vast, powerful, and, when compared to humans, strangely humbling. The ... More

By awe, philosophers and psychologists mean the sensation that overcomes someone in the presence of something simultaneously vast, powerful, and, when compared to humans, strangely humbling. The chapter begins with a review of amazing discoveries such as island universes, the expanding universe, and the Big Bang that altered the understanding of the universe and made the solar system “seem but a speck of dust in infinite space.” It then turns to other sources of awe, or the Depression sublime: the Empire State Building; Jesse Owens’s record-setting long jump at the 1936 Berlin Olympics; the moral heroism of the Joads in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath; and James Agee and Walker Evans’s deification of tenant farmers in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Whereas most accounts of the sublime involve the vastness of nature overwhelming human beings, during the Depression human beings themselves became a source of the sublime.Less

Manifest Fantasies: British-Malayan Counterinsurgency and Nation Building in U.S. Strategy

Wen-Qing Ngoei

in Arc of Containment: Britain, the United States, and Anticommunism in Southeast Asia

This chapter revisits the Malayan Emergency to recover the outsize American fascination with Britain’s military triumph over the guerrillas of the Malayan Communist Party. It traces how U.S. ... More

This chapter revisits the Malayan Emergency to recover the outsize American fascination with Britain’s military triumph over the guerrillas of the Malayan Communist Party. It traces how U.S. policymakers’ attempts to cherry-pick lessons from the British counterinsurgency campaign in Malaya shaped U.S. regional and global strategies from the 1950s through the 1960s. The American preoccupation with British-Malayan counterinsurgency tactics, as well as British and Malayan leaders’ efforts to exploit this preoccupation and thereby strengthen their Cold War partnership with America, illuminates the British Empire’s critical and enduring influence upon American empire-building across the global South.Less

Edifice Complex?: The Cause of the 1920s Building Boom

Jason M. Barr

in Building the Skyline: The Birth and Growth of Manhattan's Skyscrapers

The skyscraper boom of the Roaring Twenties has not been subjected to much rigorous study. What caused it? There are two conventional stories: The ego story and the financing story. The ego story ... More

The skyscraper boom of the Roaring Twenties has not been subjected to much rigorous study. What caused it? There are two conventional stories: The ego story and the financing story. The ego story says that the building boom of the Roaring Twenties was caused by egos unleashed by the economic euphoria of the day. The financing story says that real estate Gold Bonds were to blame. This chapter argues that the growth of the skyline was a rational response to important structural changes in the economy, which created a tremendous demand for office space in the city; technological progress was also making building skyscrapers much cheaper. The Empire State Building is not representative of the period. Some of the construction was caused by the stock market boom, but the rise of Midtown 2.0, with the completion of Grand Central Station and Penn Station, was the central cause.Less

The Distant Shore

David Farber

in Everybody Ought to Be Rich: The Life and Times of John J. Raskob, Capitalist

This chapter describes John Raskob's activities in his later years. He continued to manage calmly the economic travails that the Empire State Building put him through into the early 1940s, and ... More

This chapter describes John Raskob's activities in his later years. He continued to manage calmly the economic travails that the Empire State Building put him through into the early 1940s, and remained rightly optimistic about the value of his grand adventure in the skyscraper business. Although his fortunes would go up and down, and personal and policy attacks from his political enemies would occasionally enrage him and drive him back briefly into the public arena, Raskob would find peace, pleasure, and reward in the challenges he created for himself. Up until the end, Raskob kept doing things. He kept imagining that his next enterprise or his newest investment would produce another fortune and that his latest project would prove rewarding for everyone he had invited to the game.Less

Introduction

David Farber

in Everybody Ought to Be Rich: The Life and Times of John J. Raskob, Capitalist

This introductory chapter provides a biographical sketch of John Jakob Raskob, who embodied the American Dream of his day. Starting as a $5 a week stenographer at Holly Pump and Machine Shops, he ... More

This introductory chapter provides a biographical sketch of John Jakob Raskob, who embodied the American Dream of his day. Starting as a $5 a week stenographer at Holly Pump and Machine Shops, he became the financial helmsman of the DuPont Company and then General Motors. His stock pronouncements made headline news and moved the markets. He built the Empire State Building. Raskob was one of a small group of men who created the capitalist order of the modern United States.Less

The Akkadian Constitutive Revolution and the Establishment of Universal Monarchy in Mesopotamia

Saïd Amir Arjomand

in Revolution: Structure and Meaning in World History

In this chapter, the unification of Mesopotamia from its northern periphery in the twenty-fourth century BCE is considered a constitutive revolution. It was led by Sargon of Akkad. Sargon (meaning ... More

In this chapter, the unification of Mesopotamia from its northern periphery in the twenty-fourth century BCE is considered a constitutive revolution. It was led by Sargon of Akkad. Sargon (meaning Legitimate King) gained power in the northern city of Kish and founded his own city of Akkad. Ancient Mesopotamia shared a common culture but was politically fragmented into a number of temple city states.The idea he used for the unification of the north and the south and resulted in the revolutionary transformation of Mespotamia was that of universal monarchy over the entire land. On its basis, Sargon constituted the first empire in world history that expanded beyond Mesopotamia and in which the ruler was deified and all men who served him were called his men. This constitutive revolution thus established sacral kingship in ancient Mesopotamia.Less