How economics explains the world: a short history of humanity

A HISTORY OF THE WORLD IN 12 MAPS. By Jerry Brotten. xix and 521 pp.; maps, diagrs., ills., index. New York: Viking, 2012. $40.00 (cloth), ISBN 9780670023394. First it should be pointed out A History of the World in 12 Maps is not. It is not an introduction to world history; in fact, a knowledge of that subject is useful for the reader to get the maximum enjoyment. It also isn't simply a of cartography in twelve landmark maps. Nor is it a coffee-table book with color illustrations of the twelve maps and brief descriptions. Brotten looks at twelve maps that were created at particularly crucial and either shaped people's attitudes to the worlds in which they lived, or crystallized a particular world view at specific moments in global history (p. 13). He tells a story that he points out is discontinuous and marked by shifts and breaks, not the building up of progressively more accurate data--not the evolutionary approach taken in so many early histories of cartography. The book, as would be expected, is organized chronologically and progresses from clay tablets to Google Earth, and the twelve maps represent the worldviews or problems of each period. Thus, the chapter titles (subjects) and maps are: Science (Ptolemy), Exchange (Al Idrisi), Faith (the Hereford mappa mundi), Empire (Kangnido), Discovery (Martin Waldseemiiler), Globalism (Diogo Ribeiro), Toleration (Mercator), Money (Blaeu Atlas), Nation (Cassini), Geopolitics (Mackinder), Equality (Peters), and Information (Google Earth). While more than a single map is discussed in each chapter, the map is the main focus. The chapters discuss technology--printing, projections, thematic maps, and persuasive maps--as well as the worldview of a society or culture at the time. Brotten recognizes the importance of understanding the technology of a period as it applies to maps, something that many recent writers of histories of cartography fail to do. The book is somewhat reminiscent in style to Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything or James Burke's Connections in that the chapters are not a simple, straightforward discussion of the topic map, but rather weave connections to other maps of the time into the theme of the chapter. The History of the World in 12 Maps is clearly written with an excellent introduction that discusses of cartography and, of course, the now requisite discourse on what is a map? The book is beautifully illustrated: there are fifty-six color plates portraying the signature maps and other related maps of each period; thirty-eight black-and-white figures are also included. There are copious endnotes and an extensive index. Two chapters deserve to be singled out. These discuss maps and concepts of the past fifty years--periods not usually discussed in histories of cartography, because earlier works usually focused on maps up to 1800. However, Brotten brings the discussion to the twenty-first century. The last topics of the book are: Equality, which focuses on the Peters Projection and Information, which looks at Google Earth. …

REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES

Reviews of Books

The idea that societies or cultures can evolve and, therefore, can be compared and graded has been central to modern history, in general, and to big history, in particular, which seeks to unite natural and human history; biology and culture. However, while extremely useful, this notion is not without significant moral and ethical challenges, which has been noted by scholars. This article is a short intellectual history of the idea of cultural evolution and its critics, the cultural relativists, from the Age of the Enlightenment, what David Deutsch called the “beginning of infinity,” to the neo-Hegelianism of Francis Fukuyama. The emphasis here is on Europe and the Americas and the argument is that the universal evolutionism of the Enlightenment ultimately prevailed over historical partic-ularism, as global disparities in social development, which were once profound, narrowed or even disappeared altogether.

Few moments in mankind’s history have seen such an impressive cultural revolution as the one that occurred during the Renaissance. An entirely new concept of man emerged, and the philosophical principles of Humanism overcame the old ideas and ideals of the Medieval period. Besides the well-celebrated achievements in the fields of architecture, figurative arts, literature, and philosophy, science also presented important innovations, particularly in medical studies, which were strengthened by the Renaissance concepts of the centrality of humanity and the rejection of dogmatic knowledge. Medical schools had been flourishing throughout Europe since the 11th century, and a new figure was acquiring social and cultural relevance: The surgeon. In previous centuries, surgeons were considered lower level practitioners, since their profession was regarded as a form of craft. The emerging knowledge about human anatomy, partially due to the studies of enlightened artists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, brought a new awareness about the role of surgical treatments. One of the most fascinating aspects of surgery during those times was the fact that it was performed by people representing the Renaissance ideal of polymath— people not only interested in one specific field, but endowed with a creative and inquisitive spirit so powerful that they were often also poets, artists, mathematicians, naturalists, and more. Although surgery had ascended beyond a mere craft, the profession still needed to find its own voice, and the invention of printing offered the chance to spread this new knowledge. The illustrations contained in those precious books made them works of art. As such, surgical knowledge was conveyed through art during the Renaissance. Today, these documents are admired as artwork, but they also can help us reconstruct Renaissance everyday life and trace the evolution of surgical techniques through time. In this column, we focus on one of these amazing books, Grossen Chirurgie (Great Surgery), by the German surgeon Walther Hermann Ryff. The book is considered both a masterpiece of Renaissance printing and among the most accurate sources to understand current concepts of traumatology during the Renaissance.

New books & media

A history of malaria

Christopher Hamlin's magisterial work engages a common experience-fever-in all its varieties and meanings. Reviewing the representations of that condition from ancient times to the present, More Than Hot is a history of the world through the lens of fever. The book deals with the expression of fever, with the efforts of medical scientists to classify it, and with fever's changing social, cultural, and political significance. Long before there were thermometers to measure it, people recognized as a dangerous, if transitory, state of being. It was the most familiar form of alienation from the normal self, a concern to communities and states as well as to patients, families, and healers. The earliest medical writers struggled for a conceptual vocabulary to explain fever. During the Enlightenment, the idea of became a means to acknowledge the biological experiences that united humans. A century later, in the age of imperialism, it would become a key element of conquest, both an important way of differentiating places and races, and of imposing global expectations of health. Ultimately the concept would split: were dangerous and often exotic epidemic diseases, while fever remained a curious physiological state, certainly distressing but usually benign. By the end of the twentieth century, that divergence divided the world between a global South profoundly affected by fevers - chiefly malaria - and a North where fever, now merely a symptom, was so medically trivial as to be transformed into a familiar motif of popular culture. A senior historian of science and medicine, Hamlin shares stories from individuals - some eminent, many forgotten - who exemplify aspects of fever: reflections of the fevered, for whom fevers, and especially the vivid hallucinations of delirium, were sometimes transformative; of those who cared for them (nurses and, often, mothers); and of those who sought to explain deadly epidemic outbreaks. Significant also are the arguments of the reformers, for whom stood as a proxy for manifold forms of injustice. Broad in scope and sweep, Hamlin's study is a reflection of how the meanings of diseases continue to shift, affecting not only the identities we create but often also our ability to survive.

Reviewed by: Truth without Reconciliation: A Human Rights History of Ghana by Abena Ampofoa Asare Jeffrey Ahlman BOOK REVIEW of Asare, Abena Ampofoa. 2018. Truth without Reconciliation: A Human Rights History of Ghana. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 243 pp. $79.95 (cloth). Abena Ampofoa Asare’s Truth without Reconciliation is a difficult book; it is also an extremely powerful book. Framed around the National Reconciliation Commission (NRC) established in 2002 by the New Patriotic Party government of President J. A. Kufuor, it forces a rereading of Ghana’s postindependence history from the perspective of Ghanaian men and women harmed by the country’s postcolonial governments. At its heart is the methodological question of how scholars are to make sense of the archive created by the NRC. Eschewing a straightforward reading of the archive, Asare skillfully guides her readers through many nuances, hidden meanings, and contradictions that mark the petitions and testimonies collected by the NRC. In doing so, she untangles questions of power, gender, memory, family, and community, creating a compendium of narratives of Ghanaian postcolonial history. The narratives that she constructs, however, do not necessarily turn on their head the conventional narratives that surround the country’s recent history, but instead personalize and complicate them, injecting into them the depth and messiness of personal experience often lost in scholarly discourse. Asare opens the book with a short history surrounding the creation of the NRC and the partisan controversies it generated. She moves on to chapters focused on the violence inflicted on market women, families’ experiences with detention and political violence, the nonjurisdictional claims of those who lost property and their livelihoods to the country’s development schemes, and the blurred lines between perpetrators and victims in the stories of soldiers and citizens. Each of these chapters is organized around the personal accounts of individuals who petitioned and came before the NRC. Asare is not only meticulous in her presentation of these individuals’ stories, but deeply empathetic, as she weaves the individuality of each petitioner’s narrative into the complicated scaffolding of Ghana’s national histories. For instance, in her chapter on market women (chapter three), she turns to the long history of demonization the country’s market women have faced at the hands of its postcolonial governments, for which the market women regularly served as scapegoats for national economic troubles, leading most tragically to the 1979 burning of Accra’s Makola Market and additional attacks on markets in other major Ghanaian cities and towns (75). What Asare adds to this narrative is not simply an accounting of the [End Page 137] injuries sustained by these women due to the government’s actions: more importantly, she emphasizes the ways in which the market women who petitioned the NRC understood and articulated the social and professional bonds shaping their roles as traders, women, mothers, and caregivers—roles disrupted and, in some cases, destroyed by governmental actions. Exhibited in all of Truth without Reconciliation’s chapters is a rethinking of what a history of human rights could or should look like. For Asare, the question of human rights history is ultimately a methodological question: it is a history that extends beyond the institutional artifice of truth-and-reconciliation commissions like the NRC to the act of archival creation, negotiation, access, and silence, for embedded within archives like that of the NRC are the voices of those affected by governments’ actions. As Asare emphasizes throughout her book, too often questions of human rights are constrained to vague and abstract platitudes, yet, as she shows, a much richer and more authentic contestation of what human rights comprise is found in the archival voices of those who have come before commissions like the NRC, as individuals from nearly all walks of life engaged in debates over the rights and obligations shaping their relationships with the state. Asare’s book is thus a must-read for any student of Ghanaian history, as well as those interested in the history of human rights. It is one of those rare books whose theoretical and methodological interventions are equally matched by their empirical rigor. Jeffrey Ahlman Smith College Copyright © 2019 The Trustees of Indiana University

Thank you very much. Excellencies, ladies, and gentlemen, I would like to start by thanking the American Society of International Law for this valuable opportunity to speak at the Annual Meeting of one of the preeminent legal organizations in the world. Of the four courts represented in this panel, the ICC is the youngest one, but over the last 10 years, the ICC has grown from a court on paper into a fully functioning international judicial institution. I will just make some points without any particular order with respect to the development or progress we have made over the last 10 years. The most significant development in relation to the Assembly of States Parties' legislative role thus far took place in 2010 when the states parties agreed on amendments to the Rome Statute regarding the crime of aggression. However, these amendments will enter into force in 2017 at the earliest. In the meantime, the ICC is exercising its jurisdiction with respect to three other categories of international crimes, as you know: genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Last year, eight new suspects appeared before our judges--more than in all previous years combined. On the other hand, 10 persons sought by the International Criminal Court remain at large. Two weeks ago, the ICC issued its first judgment convicting Thomas Lubanga Dyilo for conscripting and enlisting children under 15 years of age and using them to participate actively in hostilities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Lubanga's guilty verdict is a landmark moment in the short history of the ICC. For the first time in the history of humanity, countries have come together and established a permanent means of holding serious human right abusers accountable while providing a fair system of justice, even for the most heinous crimes. I guess this is how we build a safer, more secure world. I think the Lubanga decision is also a significant marker for the development of international law. It has laid the groundwork for the kind of trial that many other notorious perpetrators of war crimes involving child soldiers would perhaps deserve. We showed, and you witnessed, the ICC mature from a fledgling institution to one which delivers results, holds mass killers accountable, and helps bring justice to their victims. The precedents set in this particular case will affect how the ICC administers justice in the future. Increasingly, the world is turning its eyes to the ICC whenever reports of atrocities committed with impunity emerge from any part of the world. The unanimous decision of the United Nations Security Council to refer the Libya situation to the ICC with the affirmative votes of the United States, China, Russia, and India was one of the strongest indicators of this growing international confidence in the ICC's role. Thus far, we have 120 states parties, and more will soon join us, but what I frequently find in my discussions with senior government officials from various countries is that lack of information and misconceptions are frequently the major obstacles to joining the ICC system. As I did this morning when I had a small-scale discussion with a few members of the U.S. Congress, two of the key points I always stress are (1) the principle of complementarity, meaning that national jurisdictions always have the primary responsibilities to investigate and prosecute Rome Statute crimes; and (2) the Rome Statute requirements that shall always subject every initiative taken by the prosecutor of the ICC to strict judicial scrutiny. I guess I am trying to dispel some suspicions that are widely shared by certain countries or people by pointing these two particular features of the Rome Statute out to them. …

There is little doubt that China's reform can be seen as a special case in the history of humanity, of modernization, and even in the relatively short history of economic transition. In terms of market-oriented choice, reform in China is not different from that in most countries in the world. With respect to the transition from a command to a market-based economy, comparable countries could be narrowed down to most of the former communist states that bear similarity. When taking into consideration the circumstances in which the ongoing corporatization and/or privatization take place under the conditions of a regime that is nondemocratic in both polity and, to a large extent, resource allocation, however, the matching number of countries would be further reduced to a few, such as Vietnam and some autocratic small nations. Again, among these few, China's reform has its own specific features.

Timeline: HIV

A tickling in the nose, frequent sneezing, chills and a runny nose, followed by a scratchy throat, fatigue, a light headache and lots of thick mucus. Who does not know these symptoms of the classic common cold? For about 50 years, we have known the culprits to be rhinoviruses or other subgroups of the so-called picornaviruses, which lead to short-lived infections in the mucus membranes of the nose, throat and sometimes the bronchial tubes. If we look at the history of mankind and its illnesses, then the 50 years of certain knowledge about the cause of the cold make the discovery seem quite recent. This article offers insight into the history of medicine and examines the evidence — usually hidden — for the cold in various epochs and cultures. Between intuition and surprisingly exact descriptions from the past, sometimes with a blink of the eye, the focus is trained on the nose and the mucus accumulating there, in order to find out how the cold’s appearance was construed. Therapeutic recommendations have ranged from black cumin to cauterizing irons to snuff. Sometimes the suggestions are completely foreign, yet at times they appear surprisingly modern, although ancient in origin.

A History of Mankind. By Hutton Webster Historical Selections. By Hutton Webster Ancient History, from the earliest times to 476 A.D. By M. W. Keatinge and D. G. Perry Empites of Long Ago. By F.R. Worts The Story of the Roman People. By E. M. Tappan The Roman Empire. By G. H. Stevenson Platonism and its Influence. By A. E. Taylor Short History of the Christian Church from the Earliest Times to the Present Day. By C. P. S. Clarke The Archaeology of Roman Britain. By R. G. Collingwood An Historical Geography of Europe, 800–1789. By J. M. Thompson The Social and Economic Development of Scotland before 1603. By I. F. Grant Facsimiles of Early Charters from Northamptonshire Collections. Edited, with an introduction and notes, by F. M. Stenton Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester. By Charles Bémont Studies and Notes supplementary to Stubbs's Constitutional History, Volume III. By Ch. Petit‐Dutaillis and Georges Lefebvre. Translated by M. I. E. Robertson and R. F. Treharne Guide to Archives and other Collections of Documents relating to Surrey: (1) General Introduction and Scheme, by C. Hilary Jenkinson; (2) The Public Record Office, by M. S. Giuseppi; (3) Parish Records, Civil and Ecclesiastical, (4) List of Court Rolls with some notes of other Manorial Records, (5) Borough Records, all by Miss D. L. Powell Medieval Cheshire: an economic and social history of Cheshire in the reigns of the three Edwards. By J. H. Hewitt The Register and Records of Holm Cultram. Edited by F. Grainger and W. G. Collingwood. The History of Kirby Underdale. By the Rev. W. R. Shepherd The Ancient Usages of the City of Winchester. By J. S. Furley A short history of Lincolnshire. By C. Brears South Lancashire. By A. Wilmore Calendar of Plea and Memoranda Rolls preserved among the archives of the Corporation of the City of London at the Guildhall, A.D. 1364–81. Edited by A. H. Thomas Sainte Catherine de Sienne: Essai Critique des Sources. Tome II, Les Euvres de Sainte Catherine de Sienne. Par Robert Fawtier The Documents of Iriki: illustrative of the development of the Feudal Institutions of Japan. Translated and edited by K. Asakawa Europe, 1715–1815. By R. B. Mowat Europe and England, 1789–1914. By P. Meadows England in Modern Times, (1714–1902). By R. M. Rayner British History: a survey of the History of all the British Peoples. By Ramsay Muir Britain and Europe: an Introduction to History. Book ii, from the Renascence to the Present Day. By R. A. F. Mears A General History for the Middle School, 1500–1763. By T. G. Standing The American Colonies, 1492–1750: A Study of their Political, Economic and Social Development. By M. W. Jernegan A History of American Life: A. M. Schlesinger and Dixon Ryan Fox, editors. Vol. I, The Coming of the White Man, 1492–1848. By H. I. Priestley Selected Readings in American History. Edited by T. C. Pease and A. S. Roberts American History told by Contemporaries. Edited by A. B. Hart, with the collaboration of J. G. Curtis The Diary of John Quincy Adams, 1794–1845: American Political, Social and Intellectual Life from Washington to Polk. Edited by Allan Nevins The Kingdom of Saint James: A Narrative of the Mormons. By M. M. Quaife Andrew Johnson: A Study in Courage. By Lloyd P. Stryker A Calendar of the Court Minutes of the East India Company, 1668–70. By E. B. Sainsbury Charles Talbot, Duke of Shrewsbury. By T. C. Nicholson and A. S. Turberville Studies in Eighteenth‐Century Diplomacy, 1740–48. By Sir Richard Lodge Sir Charles Hanbury Williams and European Diplomacy, (1747–58). By D. B. Horn India Under Wellesley. By P. E. Roberts The Age of Grey and Peel. By the late H. W. C. Davis. Introduction by G. M. Trevelyan Modern Political Constitutions. By C. F. Strong The English Constitution. By Sir Maurice Amos

ConclusionsAlthough biological weapons have been used only sporadically throughout human history, and their military effectiveness has never been clearly demonstrated by use in war, the impact of natural disease outbreaks continually reminds us that they are potentially very effective weapons. For that reason there has been a continual fascination with them by nations in the last century, a fascination that continues today. Particularly where regional hegemony (or resisting it) may require unconventional weapons, they remain a major threat. The legal regime prohibiting them is clear and in place, but it lacks effective mechanisms to verify compliance and to build confidence in the existing legal regime. Repairing that gap constitutes an urgent agenda for the international community.The urgency is made greater by the rapid scientific progress stimulated by genomics, proteomics, and a host of related research technologies [37]. These promise increasingly rapid advances in understanding human physiology and microbial pathogenesis. The scientific advances are matched by rapid changes in biotechnology and the pharmaceutical industries, as they too assimilate the new methods. All of this is likely to bring new military interest in biological weapons, perhaps even in countries not now considered proliferation risks.