Wealth and Power Reconfigured: Balkan Elites between Imperial Legacies and Modern Institutions. A Comparative Study of Financial Actors from the 18th to the 19th Century

The article explores the issues of colonial encounter as well as imperial legacy on the basis of Paul Scott’s The Jewel in the Crown novel from 1966. The imperial project was heavily promoted by the authorities in the 19th century, but the dissolution of the Empire between the 1940s and the 1960s led to the emergence of a critical type of historical fiction crafted by British writers who experienced the imperial system at first hand. The Jewel in the Crown exemplifies complex attitudes as well as archetypal patterns among the colonisers and the natives in British India. The analysis shows that the coloniser is a failed figure who is unable to understand and co-exist with the colonised.

Famously described by Mackinder as the “geographic pivot of history,” Eurasia was for thousands of years an arena for exchange and geopolitical competition among empires, among them the predecessors of today’s Chinese, Iranian, Russian, and Turkish states. When these Eurasian empires collapsed in the first decades of the 20th century, the states that replaced them still bore traces of the imperial legacy, even as rulers like Atatürk, Lenin, Mao, and the Pahlavi shahs actively denigrated their imperial predecessors. Cold War-era rivalries and alignments also reduced the salience of central Eurasia as a focal point for imperial competition. Since the end of the Cold War, these imperial legacies have grown more salient and more visible. The collapse of the USSR, China’s attempt to expand development from its eastern coast to its western periphery, and, more recently, the gradual reconnection of Eurasia to global markets through the construction of transit, infrastructure, and trade linkages have created opportunities for China, Iran, Russia, and Turkey to once again project power and influence into their Eurasian hinterlands in patterns structurally, institutionally, and ideologically shaped by the imperial legacies they each inherited. Their shared challenges include contested historical narratives, tension between national and trans-national identity discourses, and unstable borders. Leaders in all four states intervene in debates about historical memory, evoking the imperial past as a golden age and a template for their own ambitions.

The case of the first genocide of the 20th century, committed by German colonial troops against Ovaherero and Nama peoples in what is today Namibia, poses a significant ethical and political challenge not only in practice but also for International Relations theory and theorising. We develop our critical analysis by building on postcolonial critiques of eurocentrism in IR and world politics, and on critical historiographies of the discipline. In particular, we show how the bedrock of dominant international institutional arrangements in the early 20th century rests on a normative inversion, which can be explicated clearly in the context of the Ovaherero and Nama experiences. The normative inversion is manifested in the claims to supreme moral authority for continued European colonial rule in the aftermath of genocidal violence. While the League of Nations (LoN), and the legacies of imperialism have increasingly been addressed in historiographies of IR, neither this normative inversion, nor its political implications have been explicated in the way we pursue this here. Through the lens of our case, we argue that how IR and IR theory conventionally conceive of the international political order is not plausible or justifiable in light of the normative inversion. The struggles for justice and restorative relations by Ovaherero and Nama peoples draw attention to necessary shifts in political practices. The case signals the need for a more fundamental rethinking of premises in international political theory, and of global public political history. This can be meaningfully addressed by acknowledging and explicitly processing the implications of the normative inversion, its antecedent conditions, and its continuing presence in world ordering.

Purpose: To aim of the study was to analyze the influence of political ideologies on state formation in 19th century Asia. Methodology: This study adopted a desk methodology. A desk study research design is commonly known as secondary data collection. This is basically collecting data from existing resources preferably because of its low cost advantage as compared to a field research. Our current study looked into already published studies and reports as the data was easily accessed through online journals and libraries. Findings: Nationalism emerged as a powerful force, advocating for self-determination and sovereignty against colonial powers. Imperialism, driven by European nations, reshaped geopolitical boundaries and governance structures, leading to the formation of colonial states in many Asian regions. Additionally, modernization efforts, influenced by socialist and capitalist ideologies, prompted reforms in governance, infrastructure, and education, facilitating state-building processes across Asia. These ideological dynamics played pivotal roles in shaping the political landscapes and state formations that continue to influence Asia's development and geopolitics today. Unique Contribution to Theory, Practice and Policy: Modernization theory, dependency theory & postcolonial theory may be used to anchor future studies on the influence of political ideologies on state formation in 19th century Asia. Advocate for governance models that reflect the diverse cultural and ethnic identities within Asian states. Develop policies that acknowledge and address historical injustices and legacies of imperialism, as demonstrated by the case of Korea.

Along the Hindu Kush:Warren Hastings, the Raj, and the Northwest Frontier Kenneth W. Harl (bio) As a new presidential election approaches, many Americans, when they are not thinking about gasoline prices and unemployment statistics, wonder how the national interests are served by U.S. soldiers and pilots battling in a remote corner of the world, Afghanistan. Americans are aware of the less than ideal alliance with President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, and the repeated disputes, negotiations, and scandals that have rocked this alliance. Many are aware of how the fighting in Afghanistan has spread over the Hindu Kush— the daunting mountain barrier that divides Central Asia from the Indian subcontinent—into Pakistan. Osama bin Laden sought refuge in Pakistan. Both al-Qaeda and the Taliban operatives have found safe havens in Pakistan's rugged borderlands. Political events in Pakistan since 2008 have thus excited reporters and baffled the American electorate. Pervez Musharraf, leading general and ex-president, was compelled to resign and flee from prosecution on grounds of complicity in the assassination of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and his suspension of constitutional rule. An exile in London, he plans a political comeback. Meanwhile, the current prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gillani, has had his hands full with his own crises and clashes with his military that have arisen ultimately from the fighting in Afghanistan. Most Americans are aware that the imbroglio in Afghanistan and Pakistan has wider repercussions for Iran, the Republic of India, and the far more remote Central Asian republics of Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan. Yet most Americans are also products of today's ahistorical educational system and have no historical reference for comprehending these events, peoples, and lands. Those few remaining of the generation that won the Second World War have such a sense of history. Those few also witnessed the partition of British India, along with its religious and ethnic violence and then fierce fighting between India and Pakistan over Kashmir and Jammu. Indeed, the British imperial legacy in India has dictated much of what goes on today in these newly created nation-states along both sides of the Hindu Kush. The imperial legacy of British India is fundamental for understanding what we face today in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Central Asia. Two men are customarily hailed as the founders of the British Empire in India: Sir Robert Clive (1725-1774) and Warren Hastings (1732-1818). They turned the East India Company from a trade monopoly into the paramount military power in the subcontinent with a fiscal and military base in Bengal. Click for larger view View full resolution From Alfred Comyn Lyall, Warren Hastings (London, 1889). To Lord Macaulay, Whig politician, secretary at war (1839-1841), and historian, Robert Clive was a brave and daring conqueror comparable to Julius Caesar, the obvious standard for all proper Englishmen who learned their Caesar and Latin together in public school. Yet, given his dissolute recreation at Madras between campaigns and his appetite for prize money, Clive did not fit the proper Victorian model. Indian nationalists despise Clive because he so adeptly outmaneuvered Indian princes in the duplicitous diplomacy of the era. Clive was also extraordinarily lucky. No commander in the 18th century was missed by more musket balls and shrapnel. His victory at Plassey on June 23, 1757, was both audacious and decisive. It won for the East India Company, commonly dubbed the Honorable Company, control over Bengal and the right to collect taxes from the wealthiest provinces of the Mughal Empire under the Treaty of Allahabad.1 If Robert Clive proved the victor, Warren Hastings, the first governor-general at Calcutta (1773-1785), was the organizer of the empire in India, which came to be called the Raj after the reforms instituted in the wake of the Great Sepoy Mutiny in 1857-1858. Warren Hastings, however, is a far more complex a figure than Clive, and ultimately far more important; for he created India as we understand it today. Hastings started working for the Honorable Company as a clerk when he was 18 and rose quickly, sitting on the councils of both Calcutta and Madras. He was selected to govern British India, then divided into...

Shortly before and after the year 1200, the balance of power in the Balkan peninsula shifted dramatically. The fragmentation of imperial authority, the most evident manifestation of which was the conquest of Constantinople by the Western crusaders in 1204, and the establishment of the so-called, and short-lived, Latin Empire of Constantinople, created a political vacuum that was exploited by various powers that vied for regional supremacy, as well the imperial legacy. Most active in this struggle, which extended well into the 14th century, were the kingdoms of Bulgaria and Serbia. In the late 12th century, both were able to assert, or re-assert, their independence.

This paper aims to discuss the role of religion in contemporary European education systems, especially in the realm of social rights. Classical social thinkers of the late 19th and early 20th century all thought that religion would either disappear or become progressively attenuated with the expansion of modern institutions. They understand modernization not to involve the actual disappearance of religion, but perhaps as attenuation and certainly as changing religious forms in relation to other institutions. Studies of the relationship between religion and education in Europe seem to adopt the view that the study of religion is a precondition for tolerance and social awareness of religious diversity, as well as a prerequisite for personal development and social responsibility. Religious education is perceived as part of ‘bildung’ and a presupposition of citizenship education in its broader sense. This position challenges the foundation stones of enlightenment thought as an attempt to distinguish between knowledge and faith or citizenship and congregation. Educational systems, the par excellence institutions of Modernity, represent an interesting example of the peculiar co-existence between tradition and Modernity in European societies. The implications of the persistence of religion within the institutions of Modernity are both epistemological and political. While the foundations of modern knowledge on reason are challenged in several aspects of school knowledge, fundamentalism, nationalism and social exclusion.

Chicana/o ethnography is a subfield of Chicana/o anthropology and sociocultural anthropology. There are two ways of looking at the term Chicana/o ethnography: one, as the work conducted and written by self-identified Chicana/o anthropologists and social scientists; two, as the anthropological work produced on Chicanas/os and US-based ethnic Mexicans. Chicana/o ethnography emerges in the late 1960s with the Chicano Power movement in the United States. With the entry of Chicana/o PhDs in the social sciences and in particular anthropology during the 1960s, the field of cultural anthropology became the site of contested counter-narratives by racialized groups in the United States. Those self-identifying as Chicana/o and receiving degrees in the social sciences ushered in a critique of anthropology’s colonial and imperial legacy. In particular, conducting ethnographic fieldwork and writing ethnographies on US ethnic Mexicans by non-Mexicans came under scrutiny by Mexican Americans. Although there have been Mexican and Mexican American social scientists that have studied US Mexican communities since the late 19th century, the emergence of Chicana/o ethnography is situated out of political struggle both in Chicana/o communities and in universities throughout the United States. Since then, Chicana/o ethnography has evolved to include ethnographic studies on expressive culture and folklore, identity formation, transnational migration and communities, community studies, US-Mexico borderlands studies, social movements, and (il)legality and subject formation. Accordingly, this bibliography begins with initial texts and works that contested the ways in which anthropologists and social scientists initially viewed the US Mexican population and the politics of conducting research in Chicana/o communities. This bibliography emphasizes the field of Chicana/o anthropology as it pertains to the production of ethnographic work by Chicana/o anthropologists and the ethnographic work on Chicana/o communities, cultures, and experience. It does not encapsulate all of the ethnographic work conducted by Chicana/o social scientists in fields other than anthropology nor does it include all the ethnographic work conducted on Chicana/o lives by social scientists. Instead, it also incorporates several key works by social scientists that further the field of Chicana/o anthropology and sociocultural anthropology.

The paper provides a legal-historical overview of the institute of right of self-defense in the Principality and Kingdom of Serbia and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Namely, the importance of the right of self-defense for criminal law is reflected in the fact that it is the basis for the exclusion of illegality, i.e. impunity. Тhe institute of right of self-defense appeared in Serbian law during the time of Nemanjić. Аs a modern institute, right of self-defense was legally defined first time in the Criminal Code of 1860. On that occasion, the domestic legislator laid the foundations of the modern institute of right of self-defense, regulating it in detail. Despite this, it was not always easy for judges in practice to assess whether there is a place to apply the institute of right of self-defense or not. At the beginning of the 20th century, the quality of the legislation from the 19th century was confirmed. The regulations on right of self-defense were changed, but not to a large extent, but just enough to harmonize with European solutions. Therefore, in the paper, the greatest attention will be paid to the analysis of the legal solution from 1860, with reference to examples from practice; with reference to legal changes from the beginning of the 20th century.

Osmanlı Devleti’nin Tanzimat dönemi sosyal ve siyasi her alanda ıslahatların yapıldığı bir devir olarak bilinir. Bu döneme yani 19. yüzyıla girilmesiyle klasik dönem müesseselerinin yanında modern müesseselerin de kurulmaya başlandığı sıklıkla görülür. Bu çalışmada Sultan Abdülmecid döneminde İstanbul medreselerinde müderrislik yaparak İstanbul’a ve İstanbul medreselerine ve dolayısıyla ilim hayatına katkıda bulunan Rusçuklu Ali Fethi Efendi’nin kısa hayat hikayesini, II. Mahmud döneminde başladığı ve Sultan Abdülmecid döneminde devam ettiği ve aynı zamanda birçok müderristen farklı seyreden müderrislikteki hızlı ilerleyişini ele aldık. Ayrıca birbirinden farklı konularda kitapları da bulunan Ali Fethi Efendi’nin mektep ve meclislerdeki görevlerini ve konumunu inceledik. Böylece Ali Fethi Efendi özelinde mevcut genel bazı kanaatlerin aksine dönemin bir kısım merkez ulemasının yapılan ıslahatların ve modernleşen kurumların karşısında ve dahi dışında değil, ıslahatlar neticesinde kurulan ve kurulmasına karar verilen modern dönem kurumlarında bilfiil yer aldığını ve bu kurumlara katkılar sağladığını göstermeye çalıştık.

As a modern institution, the joint-stock company can be defined as a limited partnership whose stockholders share the rights/responsibilities of the company in proportion to their shares. It first emerged in the 17th century but gained popularity during the 20th century. However, the adaptation of the joint-stock company was realised by the Muslim world only recently.

As well as sources for the study of the period, Renaissance archives are a subject of scholarly inquiry in their own right. Early modernists have increasingly appreciated the significance of a knowledge of record-keeping practices in research, and how an understanding of archives as contingent and culturally specific warrants reading their history, organization, and uses as mirrors (perhaps distorting ones) of culture, politics, and society. Renaissance archives make up a heterogeneous and dispersed panorama of sources ranging from administrative documents and official records to personal papers and private collections. Examples are the archive of the d’Este family, initiated in the mid-15th century and preserved in the 19th-century building of the Archivio di Stato di Modena, or the Archivo General de Simancas, founded in the 16th century and still located in the same 15th-century castle where it was originally established. The unprecedented development of public and private record-keeping during the Renaissance made archives ubiquitous and an inescapable part of the lives of many. The proliferation of archives must be connected with cultural and political changes such as the spread of literacy, the growth in size and complexity of states and institutions, and developments in the organization and management of the records. War, fires, and accidental destruction have severely damaged valuable materials, while dismemberment and reorganization have compromised entire collections; however, Renaissance archives have been reintegrated into modern institutions and still shape them in many ways. Focusing on archival practices rather than on archives as products enables us to view the history of archives in Europe as a series of transformations in which to identify elements of continuity and phases of rupture.

As part of a larger ethnographic research project, this article analyses the history of memorialization on the First World War Gallipoli battlefields and its relationship with international travel and tourism. It contrasts the original Australian and New Zealand memorialization on the site with Turkish memorials constructed there in the late 20th century, a significant proportion of which are characterized by direct symbolic recognition of the ‘other’. Drawing on Bakhtin’s writings on referential discourses I refer to these as being dialogical. At Gallipoli this dialogical memorialization facilitated the rise of Australian tourism to the battlefields by allowing for a cosmopolitan reimagining of the military campaign, which included emphasizing extraordinary cases of humanity and framing soldiers as tourists. A cultural sociology of the public sphere is proposed as a way of comprehending such tourism, one that avoids assumptions about the severing of meaningful cultural ties with the events and institutions of modernity.

The comparative study of Hinduism encompasses three broad forms of conceptual enquiry, cultural imagination, and political engagement. First, there are occasional attempts in premodern South Asia to outline correspondences or analogies between Islamic doctrines and Vedic worldviews, such as al-Biruni’s descriptions in the 11th century of scriptural texts, cosmology, astronomy, and so on, and Dara Shikoh’s attempt in the 7th century to highlight certain parallels between Sufi and Vedantic thought. However, the comparative enterprise of painstakingly detailing correspondences between European and Indic conceptual systems begins only with the gradual installation of the administrative-legal apparatus of the East India Company in Bengal. Starting from the late 18th century onward, various British scholars and administrators, and occasionally continental European figures, began to sketch immense comparative vistas on which they placed Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin cultures at varying points on an evolutionary continuum, which was said to have culminated in the ideals and the institutions of modernity. The orientalist projections of a Vedic Hindu antiquity of uncorrupted humanity and the currently degraded popular Hinduisms were sometimes adopted by British Christian missionaries who reconfigured these temporal contrasts into their own comparative spectra of fragmented Hindu truths culminating in the saving truth of Christ. Second, these orientalist-colonial imaginations of a pure Vedic Hindu antiquity were creatively appropriated by influential Hindu figures such as Swami Vivekananda, S. Radhakrishnan, and others who constructed distinctive patterns of comparative scales for positioning the essential spirit of the European and the Hindu civilizations. Third, the “comparative study of Hinduism” that we have outlined in this introduction has come under fierce criticism in various academic circles in the early 21st century such as postcolonial theory, subaltern studies, feminist theory, and so on. Roughly, these scholarly perspectives claim that the attempt to “compare” across cultural and religious boundaries involves the postulation of transhistorical universals that are said to inflict epistemic violence on distinct conceptual systems by encapsulating them under monolithic descriptions. The comparative study of Hinduism seems to presuppose some kind of common ground between a Hindu category and a non-Hindu category, and it is precisely this notion of commonality that is often charged as being politically suspect and culturally reductive. The comparative study of Hinduism in academic circles, then, is yet another essentially contested topic. As this introduction suggests, the bibliography on the “comparative study of Hinduism” can be placed in three categories. First, the perceptions of Hinduism recorded by “outsiders” such as Muslim travelers, Christian missionaries, and British colonial administrators. Second, the various forms of “critical insider” responses developed by Hindu figures who delineated comparative scales on which reconstructed forms of traditional Hinduism are placed vis-à-vis aspects of European modernity and Christian doctrine. Third, the current academic interrogations of the coherence of the “comparative” project, which charge that the very idea of the “comparative study of Hinduism” is deeply implicated in the nexus between the classifications of indigenous knowledges and the entrenchment of colonial asymmetries of power.

Boom time for neuroscience in China