An intellectual history of architectural modernism for an age of rising global inequality and environmental crisis.
The Earth That Modernism Built traces the rise of planetary design to an imperialist discourse about the influence of the earthly environment on humanity. Kenny Cupers argues that to understand how the earth became an object of design, we need to radically shift the terms of analysis. Rather than describing how new design ideas and practices traveled and transformed people and places across the globe, this book interrogates the politics of life and earth underpinning this process. It demonstrates how approaches to modern housing, landscape design, and infrastructure planning are indebted to an understanding of planetary and human ecology fueled by settler colonialism and imperial ambition.
Cupers draws from both canonical and unknown sources and archives in Germany, Namibia, and Poland to situate Wilhelmine and Weimar design projects in an expansive discourse about the relationship between soil, settlement, and race. This reframing reveals connections between colonial officials planning agricultural hinterlands, garden designers proselytizing geopolitical theory, soil researchers turning to folklore, and Bauhaus architects designing modern communities according to functionalist principles. Ultimately, The Earth That Modernism Built shows how the conviction that we can design our way out of environmental crisis is bound to exploitative and divisive ways of inhabiting the earth.
Few places were as important in the seventeenth-century European colonial New World as the pays d’en haut. This term means "upper country" and refers to the western Great Lakes (Huron, Michigan, and Superior) and the areas immediately north, south, and west of them. The region was significant because of its large Native American population, because it had an extensive riverine system needed for beaver populations—essential to the fur trade—and because it held the transportation key to westward expansion.
It was vital to the French, who controlled the region, to be on good terms with its peoples. To maintain good relations through trade and diplomacy with the nations in the pays d’en haut, the French built a number of posts, including one at Michilimackinac and one on the St. Joseph River (near Niles, Michigan). These posts were garrisoned by French troops and run by French commanders who contracted with merchants to manage business matters.
Edge of Empire provides both an overview and an intensely detailed look at Michilimackinac at a very specific period of history. While the introduction offers an overview of the French fur trade, of the place of Michilimackinac in that network, and of what Michilimackinac was like in the years up to 1716, the body of the book is comprised of over sixty French-language documents, now translated into English. Collected from archives in France, Canada, and the United States, the documents identify many of the people involved in the trade and reveal a great deal about the personal and professional relations among people who traded. They also reveal clearly the process by which trade was carried out, including the roles of both Native Americans and women. At the same time, the documents open a window into French colonial society in New France.
A comprehensive history of a state on Judah’s border
Edom at the Edge of Empire combines biblical, epigraphic, archaeological, and comparative evidence to reconstruct the history of Judah's neighbor to the southeast. Crowell traces the material and linguistic evidence, from early Egyptian sources that recall conflicts with nomadic tribes to later Assyrian texts that reference compliant Edomite tribal kings, to offer alternative scenarios regarding Edom's transformation from a collection of nomadic tribes and workers in the Wadi Faynan as it relates to the later polity centered around the city of Busayra in the mountains of southern Jordan. This is the first book to incorporate the important evidence from the Wadi Faynan copper mines into a thorough account of Edom's history, providing a key resource for students and scholars of the ancient Near East and the Hebrew Bible.
Imperialism as we knew it may be no more, but Empire is alive and well. It is, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri demonstrate in this bold work, the new political order of globalization. It is easy to recognize the contemporary economic, cultural, and legal transformations taking place across the globe but difficult to understand them. Hardt and Negri contend that they should be seen in line with our historical understanding of Empire as a universal order that accepts no boundaries or limits. Their book shows how this emerging Empire is fundamentally different from the imperialism of European dominance and capitalist expansion in previous eras. Rather, today’s Empire draws on elements of U.S. constitutionalism, with its tradition of hybrid identities and expanding frontiers.
Empire identifies a radical shift in concepts that form the philosophical basis of modern politics, concepts such as sovereignty, nation, and people. Hardt and Negri link this philosophical transformation to cultural and economic changes in postmodern society—to new forms of racism, new conceptions of identity and difference, new networks of communication and control, and new paths of migration. They also show how the power of transnational corporations and the increasing predominance of postindustrial forms of labor and production help to define the new imperial global order.
More than analysis, Empire is also an unabashedly utopian work of political philosophy, a new Communist Manifesto. Looking beyond the regimes of exploitation and control that characterize today’s world order, it seeks an alternative political paradigm—the basis for a truly democratic global society.
Several essays provide historical perspective on contemporary U.S.–hemispheric relations. These include an analysis of the nature and dynamics of imperial domination, an assessment of financial relations between the United States and Latin America since the end of World War II, an account of Native American resistance to colonialism, and a consideration of the British government’s decision to abolish slavery in its colonies. Other essays focus on present-day conflicts in the Americas, highlighting various modes of domination and dissent, resistance and accommodation. Examining southern Mexico’s Zapatista movement, one contributor discusses dissent in the era of globalization. Other contributors investigate the surprisingly conventional economic policies of Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva; Argentina’s recovery from its massive 2001 debt default; the role of coca markets in the election of Bolivia’s first indigenous president, Evo Morales; and the possibilities for extensive social change in Venezuela. A readers’ guide offers a timeline of key events from 1823 through 2007, along with a list of important individuals, institutions, and places.
Contributors: Daniel A. Cieza, Gregory Evans Dowd, Steve Ellner, Neil Harvey, Alan Knight, Carlos Marichal, John Richard Oldfield, Silvia Rivera, Fred Rosen, Jeffrey W. Rubin
A new perspective on essential aspects of Esther’s plot and characters for students and scholars
Empire and Gender in LXX Esther foregrounds and highlights empire as the central lens in this provocative new reading of Esther. This book provides a unique synchronic reading of LXX Esther with the Additions, allowing the presence and negotiation of imperial power to be further illuminated throughout the story’s plot. Stone explores and demonstrates how performances of gender are inextricably intertwined with the exertion and negotiation of imperial power portrayed in LXX Esther and offers examples of connections to the range of imperial power experienced by Jewish people during the late Second Temple period.
Features:
From an award-winning historian, a concise overview of the deep and longstanding ties between China and the Koreas, providing an essential foundation for understanding East Asian geopolitics today.
In a concise, trenchant overview, Odd Arne Westad explores the cultural and political relationship between China and the Koreas over the past 600 years.
Koreans long saw China as a mentor. The first form of written Korean employed Chinese characters and remained in administrative use until the twentieth century. Confucianism, especially Neo-Confucian reasoning about the state and its role in promoting a virtuous society, was central to the construction of the Korean government in the fourteenth century. These shared Confucian principles were expressed in fraternal terms, with China the older brother and Korea the younger. During the Ming Dynasty, mentor became protector, as Korea declared itself a vassal of China in hopes of escaping ruin at the hands of the Mongols. But the friendship eventually frayed with the encroachment of Western powers in the nineteenth century. Koreans began to reassess their position, especially as Qing China seemed no longer willing or able to stand up for Korea against either the Western powers or the rising military threat from Meiji Japan. The Sino-Korean relationship underwent further change over the next century as imperialism, nationalism, revolution, and war refashioned states and peoples throughout Asia. Westad describes the disastrous impact of the Korean War on international relations in the region and considers Sino-Korean interactions today, especially the thorny question of the reunification of the Korean peninsula.
Illuminating both the ties and the tensions that have characterized the China-Korea relationship, Empire and Righteous Nation provides a valuable foundation for understanding a critical geopolitical dynamic.
“The relationship between China and Korea is one of the most important, and least understood, in Asia. With the wisdom and clarity we have come to expect from Westad, this book illuminates the long history of these two neighbors.”
—Rana Mitter, author of China’s Good War
“A timely must-read primer on the China–Korea relationship…and its impact on and implications for our world today.”
—Carter J. Eckert, author of Park Chung Hee and Modern Korea
“Valuable and wide-ranging…As two thousand years of history have shown, China’s role in Korea is a complex one. Westad’s short and stimulating study provides many clues to understanding that relationship.”
—J. E. Hoare, Literary Review
“An insightful and entertaining primer on Korean history over the last 600 years.”
—Popular History Books
Koreans long saw China as a mentor and protector. Chinese culture heavily influenced Korea, whose first written language used Chinese characters, while Confucianism shaped the structure of Korean government. This deep, sometimes fraught, relationship has done more to shape the politics of the region than many realize.
During the Ming Dynasty, Korea agreed to become a vassal of China, in hopes of escaping ruin at the hands of the Mongols. The connection frayed in the nineteenth century, when the Qing, beset by domestic problems, did little to protect Korea from encroaching Western powers or the imperial designs of Meiji Japan. The relationship shifted again in the twentieth century as nationalism, revolution, and war refashioned Asia. Odd Arne Westad lays bare the disastrous impact of the Korean War on the region and offers a keen assessment of Sino–Korean interactions today, including the thorny question of reunification.
In the century after the French Revolution, the South American outpost of Guiana became a depository for exiles—outcasts of the new French citizenry—and an experimental space for the exercise of new kinds of power and violence against marginal groups. Miranda Spieler chronicles the encounter between colonial officials, planters, and others, ranging from deported political enemies to convicts, ex-convicts, vagabonds, freed slaves, non-European immigrants, and Maroons (descendants of fugitive slaves in the forest). She finds that at a time when France was advocating the revolutionary principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, Guiana’s exiles were stripped of their legal identities and unmade by law, becoming nonpersons living in limbo.
The French Revolution invented the notion of the citizen, but as Spieler shows, it also invented the noncitizen—the person whose rights were nonexistent. Empire and Underworld discovers in Guiana’s wilderness a haunting prehistory of current moral dilemmas surrounding detainees of indeterminate legal status. Pairing the history of France with that of its underworld and challenging some of the century’s most influential theorists from Hannah Arendt to Michel Foucault, Spieler demonstrates how rights of the modern world can mutate into an apparatus of human deprivation.
“A landmark book…[a] bold reframing of the history of the British Empire.”
—Caroline Elkins, Foreign Affairs
An award-winning historian places the corporation—more than the Crown—at the heart of British colonialism, arguing that companies built and governed global empire, raising questions about public and private power that were just as troubling four hundred years ago as they are today.
Across four centuries, from Ireland to India, the Americas to Africa and Australia, British colonialism was above all the business of corporations. Corporations conceived, promoted, financed, and governed overseas expansion, making claims over territory and peoples while ensuring that British and colonial society were invested, quite literally, in their ventures. Colonial companies were also relentlessly controversial, frequently in debt, and prone to failure. The corporation was well-suited to overseas expansion not because it was an inevitable juggernaut but because, like empire itself, it was an elusive contradiction: public and private; person and society; subordinate and autonomous; centralized and diffuse; immortal and precarious; national and cosmopolitan—a legal fiction with very real power.
Breaking from traditional histories in which corporations take a supporting role by doing the dirty work of sovereign states in exchange for commercial monopolies, Philip Stern argues that corporations took the lead in global expansion and administration. Whether in sixteenth-century Ireland and North America or the Falklands in the early 1980s, corporations were key players. And, as Empire, Incorporated makes clear, venture colonialism did not cease with the end of empire. Its legacies continue to raise questions about corporate power that are just as relevant today as they were 400 years ago.
Challenging conventional wisdom about where power is held on a global scale, Stern complicates the supposedly firm distinction between private enterprise and the state, offering a new history of the British Empire, as well as a new history of the corporation.
Choy conducted extensive interviews with Filipino nurses in New York City and spoke with leading Filipino nurses across the United States. She combines their perspectives with various others—including those of Philippine and American government and health officials—to demonstrate how the desire of Filipino nurses to migrate abroad cannot be reduced to economic logic, but must instead be understood as a fundamentally transnational process. She argues that the origins of Filipino nurse migrations do not lie in the Philippines' independence in 1946 or the relaxation of U.S. immigration rules in 1965, but rather in the creation of an Americanized hospital training system during the period of early-twentieth-century colonial rule. Choy challenges celebratory narratives regarding professional migrants’ mobility by analyzing the scapegoating of Filipino nurses during difficult political times, the absence of professional solidarity between Filipino and American nurses, and the exploitation of foreign-trained nurses through temporary work visas. She shows how the culture of American imperialism persists today, continuing to shape the reception of Filipino nurses in the United States.
Napoleon’s campaigns were the most complex military undertakings in history before the nineteenth century. But the defining battles of Austerlitz, Borodino, and Waterloo changed more than the nature of warfare. Concepts of chance, contingency, and probability became permanent fixtures in the West’s understanding of how the world works. Empire of Chance examines anew the place of war in the history of Western thought, showing how the Napoleonic Wars inspired a new discourse on knowledge.
Soldiers returning from the battlefields were forced to reconsider basic questions about what it is possible to know and how decisions are made in a fog of imperfect knowledge. Artists and intellectuals came to see war as embodying modernity itself. The theory of war espoused in Carl von Clausewitz’s classic treatise responded to contemporary developments in mathematics and philosophy, and the tools for solving military problems—maps, games, and simulations—became models for how to manage chance. On the other hand, the realist novels of Balzac, Stendhal, and Tolstoy questioned whether chance and contingency could ever be described or controlled.
As Anders Engberg-Pedersen makes clear, after Napoleon the state of war no longer appeared exceptional but normative. It became a prism that revealed the underlying operative logic determining the way society is ordered and unfolds.
The term “civilization” comes with considerable baggage, dichotomizing people, cultures, and histories as “civilized”—or not. While the idea of civilization has been deployed throughout history to justify all manner of interventions and sociopolitical engineering, few scholars have stopped to consider what the concept actually means. Here, Brett Bowden examines how the idea of civilization has informed our thinking about international relations over the course of ten centuries.
From the Crusades to the colonial era to the global war on terror, this sweeping volume exposes “civilization” as a stage-managed account of history that legitimizes imperialism, uniformity, and conformity to Western standards, culminating in a liberal-democratic global order. Along the way, Bowden explores the variety of confrontations and conquests—as well as those peoples and places excluded or swept aside—undertaken in the name of civilization. Concluding that the “West and the rest” have more commonalities than differences,this provocative and engaging bookultimately points the way toward an authentic intercivilizational dialogue that emphasizes cooperation over clashes.
How one company created the dominant aesthetic of digital realism.
Just about every major film now comes to us with an assist from digital effects. The results are obvious in superhero fantasies, yet dramas like Roma also rely on computer-generated imagery to enhance the verisimilitude of scenes. But the realism of digital effects is not actually true to life. It is a realism invented by Hollywood—by one company specifically: Industrial Light & Magic.
The Empire of Effects shows how the effects company known for the puppets and space battles of the original Star Wars went on to develop the dominant aesthetic of digital realism. Julie A. Turnock finds that ILM borrowed its technique from the New Hollywood of the 1970s, incorporating lens flares, wobbly camerawork, haphazard framing, and other cinematography that called attention to the person behind the camera. In the context of digital imagery, however, these aesthetic strategies had the opposite effect, heightening the sense of realism by calling on tropes suggesting the authenticity to which viewers were accustomed. ILM’s style, on display in the most successful films of the 1980s and beyond, was so convincing that other studios were forced to follow suit, and today, ILM is a victim of its own success, having fostered a cinematic monoculture in which it is but one player among many.
Drawing on theorists including Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Achille Mbembe, Martin illuminates a frightening financial logic that must be understood in order to be countered. Martin maintains that finance divides the world between those able to avail themselves of wealth opportunities through risk taking (investors) and those who cannot do so, who are considered “at risk.” He contends that modern-day American imperialism differs from previous models of imperialism, in which the occupiers engaged with the occupied to “civilize” them, siphon off wealth, or both. American imperialism, by contrast, is an empire of indifference: a massive flight from engagement. The United States urges an embrace of risk and self-management on the occupied and then ignores or dispossesses those who cannot make the grade.
For more than twenty years, Povinelli has traveled to the social worlds of indigenous men and women living at Belyuen, a small community in the Northern Territory of Australia. More recently she has moved across communities of alternative progressive queer movements in the United States, particularly those who identify as radical faeries. In this book she traces how liberal binary concepts of individual freedom and social constraint influence understandings of intimacy in these two worlds. At the same time, she describes alternative models of social relations within each group in order to highlight modes of intimacy that transcend a reductive choice between freedom and constraint.
Shifting focus away from identities toward the social matrices out of which identities and divisions emerge, Povinelli offers a framework for thinking through such issues as what counts as sexuality and which forms of intimate social relations result in the distribution of rights, recognition, and resources, and which do not. In The Empire of Love Povinelli calls for, and begins to formulate, a politics of “thick life,” a way of representing social life nuanced enough to meet the density and variation of actual social worlds.
By the turn of the twentieth century, Japan’s military and economic successes made it the dominant power in East Asia, drawing hundreds of thousands of Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese students to the metropole and sending thousands of Japanese to other parts of East Asia. The constant movement of peoples, ideas, and texts in the Japanese empire created numerous literary contact nebulae, fluid spaces of diminished hierarchies where writers grapple with and transculturate one another’s creative output.
Drawing extensively on vernacular sources in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, this book analyzes the most active of these contact nebulae: semicolonial Chinese, occupied Manchurian, and colonial Korean and Taiwanese transculturations of Japanese literature. It explores how colonial and semicolonial writers discussed, adapted, translated, and recast thousands of Japanese creative works, both affirming and challenging Japan’s cultural authority. Such efforts not only blurred distinctions among resistance, acquiescence, and collaboration but also shattered cultural and national barriers central to the discourse of empire. In this context, twentieth-century East Asian literatures can no longer be understood in isolation from one another, linked only by their encounters with the West, but instead must be seen in constant interaction throughout the Japanese empire and beyond.
From the flights of the Wright brothers through the mass journeys of the jet age, airplanes inspired Americans to reimagine their nation’s place within the world. Now, Jenifer Van Vleck reveals the central role commercial aviation played in the United States’ rise to global preeminence in the twentieth century. As U.S. military and economic influence grew, the federal government partnered with the aviation industry to carry and deliver American power across the globe and to sell the very idea of the “American Century” to the public at home and abroad.
Invented on American soil and widely viewed as a symbol of national greatness, the airplane promised to extend the frontiers of the United States “to infinity,” as Pan American World Airways president Juan Trippe said. As it accelerated the global circulation of U.S. capital, consumer goods, technologies, weapons, popular culture, and expertise, few places remained distant from the influence of Wall Street and Washington. Aviation promised to secure a new type of empire—an empire of the air instead of the land, which emphasized access to markets rather than the conquest of territory and made the entire world America’s sphere of influence.
By the late 1960s, however, foreign airlines and governments were challenging America’s control of global airways, and the domestic aviation industry hit turbulent times. Just as the history of commercial aviation helps to explain the ascendance of American power, its subsequent challenges reflect the limits and contradictions of the American Century.
Empire of the Dharma explores the dynamic relationship between Korean and Japanese Buddhists in the years leading up to the Japanese annexation of Korea. Conventional narratives cast this relationship in politicized terms, with Korean Buddhists portrayed as complicit in the “religious annexation” of the peninsula. However, this view fails to account for the diverse visions, interests, and strategies that drove both sides.
Hwansoo Ilmee Kim complicates this politicized account of religious interchange by reexamining the “alliance” forged in 1910 between the Japanese Soto sect and the Korean Wonjong order. The author argues that their ties involved not so much political ideology as mutual benefit. Both wished to strengthen Buddhism’s precarious position within Korean society and curb Christianity’s growing influence. Korean Buddhist monastics sought to leverage Japanese resources as a way of advancing themselves and their temples, and missionaries of Japanese Buddhist sects competed with one another to dominate Buddhism on the peninsula. This strategic alliance pushed both sides to confront new ideas about the place of religion in modern society and framed the way that many Korean and Japanese Buddhists came to think about the future of their shared religion.
Leading writer Boris Kagarlitsky offers an ambitious account of 1000 years of Russian history. Encompassing all key periods in Russia's dramatic development, the book covers everything from early settlers, through medieval decline, Ivan the Terrible - the 'English Tsar', Peter the Great, the Crimean War and the rise of capitalism, the revolution, the Soviet period, finally ending with the return of capitalism after 1991.
Setting Russia within the context of the 'World System', as outlined by Wallerstein, this is a major work of historical Marxist theory that is set to become a future classic.
Superman may be faster than a speeding bullet, but even he can't outrun copyright law. Since the dawn of the pulp hero in the 1930s, publishers and authors have fought over the privilege of making money off of comics, and the authors and artists usually have lost. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the creators of Superman, got all of $130 for the rights to the hero.
In Empire of the Superheroes, Mark Cotta Vaz argues that licensing and litigation do as much as any ink-stained creator to shape the mythology of comic characters. Vaz reveals just how precarious life was for the legends of the industry. Siegel and Shuster—and their heirs—spent seventy years battling lawyers to regain rights to Superman. Jack Kirby and Joe Simon were cheated out of their interest in Captain America, and Kirby's children brought a case against Marvel to the doorstep of the Supreme Court. To make matters worse, the infant comics medium was nearly strangled in its crib by censorship and moral condemnation. For the writers and illustrators now celebrated as visionaries, the "golden age" of comics felt more like hard times.
The fantastical characters that now earn Hollywood billions have all-too-human roots. Empire of the Superheroes digs them up, detailing the creative martyrdom at the heart of a pop-culture powerhouse.
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