Search Results

Hodgson’s predilection for thinking in abstract, conceptually grounded ways about historical subjects make him profoundly different form other historians. Examples abound in his considerations of many aspects of Islamic and world history, both great and small. Crossley has found Hodgson’s “military patronage state” to be of particular interest. All steppe empires (another Hodgsonian concept) from East Asia to the Ottoman empire were shaped by their common of the ruler as the proprietor of the state. From this it followed that the state was ruler’s personal monopoly and the centralized bureaucracy was an emanation of his household. For Muslims this was the figure of the padishah. The greatest of them was the Mongol ruler, the Great Khan. Steppe empires, Crossley explains, like early Islamic empires, were accretions of larger and larger patronage systems with the important difference that they were centered upon the primacy of military power. But the Mongols and other East Asian pastoral nomadic steppe empires were also imbued with the heritage of the Chinese imperial system. Crossley concludes that Hodgson’s concepts of the steppe empire and the military/patronage state as practiced by Mongol-style regimes continue to has relevance to the history of a range of empires across Asia.

This chapter examines the relationship between social science and Cold War militarism. During the Cold War, social scientists hoped to provide the foundations for a successful counterinsurgency doctrine. However, the synthesis of civilian and military expertise was uneasy. As social scientists mobilized to protect American national security from the communist threat, their efforts pushed them onto the front lines of militarization. Moreover, military patronage threatened scholars' intellectual autonomy and fundamentally challenged long-standing national values. Nevertheless, with militarization hidden behind social-scientific rhetoric and creative institutional configurations, scholars and soldiers tried to recast the spread of American military power as democratic reform and the militarization of social knowledge as an antidote to Cold War militarism.

After World War II, the University of Chicago founded the Institute for Nuclear Studies (later renamed the Fermi Institute), where distinguished Manhattan Project alumni were encouraged to explore broadly the possibilities of atomic research. This chapter focuses on chemists Harold C. Urey and Harrison Brown, as well as the younger chemists who worked with them, who turned their postwar research programs toward the topics of geo- and cosmochemistry, first at Chicago, and then at Caltech. Although both of these chemists set out to avoid weapons work, they remained connected to the Atomic Energy Commission, and gained funding for isotope geochemistry in part because of their status as “atomic insiders,” and the connection of their work to military concerns. The availability of large-scale funding, related to national security, also contributed substantially to the growth and success of isotope geochemistry as a field and to its displacing of traditional geological research, thus helping to shape the contours of postwar earth sciences along the lines of Cold War security concerns.

As has been amply demonstrated by historians of the Middle East, the institution of waqf was essential to the support of religious and social services from the period of the establishment of military patronage states in medieval Islam and on into the high noon of Ottoman hegemony over the region. This chapter analyses endowments in the newly created state of Transjordan, where the Ottoman government struggled to supplant the wide range of services provided locally by waqfs. By the twentieth century, however, Ottoman officials were aware that a state's claim to modernity rested at least in part on its ability to offer its citizens a degree of protection. The battle unfolding in al-Salt, then, concerned the state's sphere of action, its rights and responsibilities vis-à-vis the populations under its purview, as much as it did the revenues generated by the waqfs.

The notable neurophysiologist John C. Lilly moved from work on macaques to dolphins in the late 1950s, eventually elaborating a research program that placed Tursiops truncatus (the bottlenose dolphin) at the center of an increasingly visionary effort to transcend the boundaries of the human. His stated objective: “communication” with an alien intelligence. Along the way he succeeded in selling dolphins to NASA (and others) as an intimate animal alterity, creatures capable of showing us ourselves from elsewhere. This chapter traces the rise and fall of Lilly’s scientific enterprise, in an effort to make sense of his own trajectory (from “right stuff” avionics bio-engineer to Esalen guru), but also to use his story to illuminate the imbrication of Cold War science and the counter cultural imaginary. Lilly’s dolphins became avatars of the Age of Aquarius.