Empire Building Research Articles

Intersectional Identity and Representative Politics

Representation scholarship has drawn from intersectionality theory 0to examine how systemic structures of oppression and privilege have created social groups with distinct political needs. Derived from Black feminist theory that recognizes that identities are mutually constitutive and interconnected, intersectionality research is rooted in the lived experiences of marginalized groups who call attention to social (in)justice. Empirical scholarship building on the insights of Black feminist theorists such as Collins and Bilge (2016), Hill Collins (1990), Crenshaw (1989; 1991), and King (1988) has constituted nothing less than a paradigm shift in the study of gender and politics. Nevertheless, there remain an array of opportunities to expand upon the potential for intersectional frameworks and methods, as well as pressing new questions concerning the operationalization of intersectionality itself. This Critical Perspectives section offers a moment to take stock of these developments and debates, as well as to highlight new pathways for scholarship committed to centering the margins and considering the nexus of multiple power structures that frame our political lives.

Unveiling how consumers accept digital-only fashion: an empirical examination building upon the functional theory of attitudes

Unveiling how consumers accept digital-only fashion: an empirical examination building upon the functional theory of attitudes

“Empire” Building in Medieval Iberia? Roots, Trajectories, Divergences

ABSTRACT The objective of this article is to reflect on the connections between early modern Spanish empire building and expansionism by Christian principalities during the medieval period. The core argument, which is, by necessity, reductionist owing to the brevity of this article, is that while late medieval / early modern attitudes about conquest and world domination drew heavily on the history, models, and practices of earlier centuries, the ideology of empire that emerged from the later fifteenth century was distinct in two primary, interrelated respects. First, the increased political fragmentation within Christian-ruled lands intensified the more localized, inward-looking dynamic of the territorial struggles against Muslim regimes that contrasted with the more global outlook of later medieval and early modern Christian imperialism. Second, the distinct ideologies of these sometimes coordinated but often competitive earlier expansionist efforts were founded upon different justificatory conceptions of sacred and secular history that, again, were, in essence, much more peninsular in their orientation.

Profiling residential energy vulnerability: Bayesian-based spatial mapping of occupancy and building characteristics

With global trends in electrification, communities highly dependent on electricity are facing increasing challenges, particularly due to more frequent weather events, which lead to significant surges in electricity demand or result in blackouts. However, the impact is disproportionate across space and time, which raises an urgent need to comprehensively assess residential energy vulnerabilities to ensure energy security for households. Existing methodologies, whether large-scale regional assessments or community-based surveys, predominantly rely on static data. This reliance significantly limits their ability to capture the spatial and temporal dynamics of energy vulnerability, which is particularly important in the face of climate change. This study analyses residential energy vulnerability in the dimensions of social vulnerability, building resilience, and energy burden by innovatively linking occupancy patterns with the built environment through a Bayesian-based spatial mapping methodology. We applied this method through a case study in a Philadelphia census tract area identified for its high vulnerability based on FEMA's National Risk Index. By mapping occupancy with residential buildings, we simulated the energy consumption patterns of approximately 900 residential buildings. The simulations utilized DOE single-family energy prototypes, tailored to account for empirical occupancy and building features, to predict hourly energy consumption and assess indoor thermal comfort during power outages on days with extreme temperatures. The findings reveal disparities across different dimensions of energy vulnerability and illustrate the dynamic nature of energy vulnerability that fluctuates with daily activities. The study also highlights areas with low thermal resilience, suggesting a need for retrofitting older buildings to improve energy efficiency. The implications of this research extend beyond the built environment to the socioeconomic aspects of energy use, advocating for adaptive community planning and the development of resilient energy infrastructures. The results serve as a foundation for stakeholders to implement targeted interventions, prioritize retrofitting efforts, and support equitable access to energy resources, thereby enhancing urban sustainability and resilience.

Ascension

In the middle of the South Atlantic lies Ascension Island, a modest island constructed in the background of Cold War politics and military history. This essay examines Ascension Island in three parts: first, from geologic prehistory to British naval occupation; second, the operation of the island by the United States military and installation of NASA tracking stations; and third, the lost histories in the wake of empire building. Ascension, initially deemed uninhabitable, became a technical island. This essay explores a distant island which may mirror our future world.

The acquisition motive of newly credit rated firms

A large body of research documents an increased acquisition activity among credit rated firms. We examine whether firms seek an initial credit rating to conduct large scale acquisitions, and whether this acquisition activity is driven by empire building or value creation motives. First, we find that acquisitions are a credible motive for seeking a credit rating, initially rated firms are associated with 13.05pp greater acquisition likelihood and these transactions are more likely to be settled by cash. Second, to recoup the costs of becoming rated, firms conduct large-scale high-quality acquisitions associated with 1.52pp higher acquirer announcement returns, where the higher cumulative abnormal returns are concentrated among firms obtaining a speculative grade initial rating. Third, following the initial rating year, acquisition activity dampens to pre-rating levels. In sum our findings lend support to the notion that previously financial constrained firms enter the bond markets to complement bank financing when conducting large value enhancing acquisitions.

Mughal amphibious counterinsurgency in the Bay of Bengal’s hinterland: 1572-1612

ABSTRACT During the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the Mughal attempt at empire building in eastern India was challenged by the Pathan chieftains and the Hindu zamindars. Besides the Mughals, the Kingdom of Arakan tried to fish in troubled waters to establish a maritime presence in the littoral regions of Bay of Bengal. Pursuit of a sophisticated amphibious counterinsurgency strategy in tune with the ecological environment of the theatre of military operations enabled the Mughals to emerge victorious in the struggle for control of the Bay of Bengal’s hinterland.

Customer Concentration and Labor Investment Efficiency: Evidence from China

ABSTRACT: The labor force constitutes a paramount factor of production in the realm of business operations. In the past, China's abundant labor force significantly boosted productivity for firms. However, as the demographic dividend gradually wanes, concerns have arisen regarding a scarcity of labor force, exacerbating worries about rising labor costs. Therefore, focusing on enhancing firms' labor investment efficiency becomes pivotal. Using a sample of A-stock listed firms in China from 2013 to 2020, we examine the impact of customer concentration on the labor investment efficiency of supplier firms. Prior literature provides mixed results regarding the effect of concentrated customers. They can act as a governance mechanism for reducing agency problems, thus, increasing investment efficiency. Conversely, agency problems are aggravated in suppliers with concentrated customers, consequently, reducing investment efficiency. Our results suggest that customer concentration reduces labor investment efficiency, and this effect is more pronounced when customers possess high bargaining power. Additionally, the mechanism analysis reveal that customer concentration leads to less accurate information disclosure, higher operating risk, and an incentive to "empire building", reducing labor investment efficiency. The cross-sectional analysis reveals that customer concentration results in both over- and under-investment in labor, thereby reducing investment efficiency. In addition, we employ augmented models to rule out the possibility of a U-shaped relationship between customer concentration and labor investment efficiency. Furthermore, we adopt the instrumental variables approach as well as a two-stage regression model to address potential endogeneity concerns and mitigate the omitted variable concern. Our results hold after the robustness tests and endogeneity tests. The findings of this paper imply that firms should strategically diversify their customer bases, thereby reducing their reliance on a few large customers. Simultaneously, governments should actively encourage firms to broaden their customer base. It can help enhance labor investment efficiency by spreading the risks associated with customer concentration. Moreover, it is crucial to acknowledge that substantial customer bargaining power can negatively impact supplier firms. Thus, policymakers should promote antitrust regulations and fair trade practices to mitigate the high bargaining power of large customers.

A dynamic model for estimating the long-term need for repairs and renovations in residential buildings

ABSTRACT Reaching sustainability targets requires a holistic understanding of the different dimensions of residential building stock development. This paper aims to provide a solid and transparent approach for modelling residential building stock development with a focus on the long-term need for repairs and renovations. The modelling approach is based on Dynamic Material Flow Analysis (MFA) and the model is constructed using comprehensive Finnish statistics. Still, it is widely applicable to different geographical locations and modifiable for various purposes. The main contributions to the previous literature are the incorporation of empirical building mortality analysis and rehabilitation degree model in the MFA modelling framework. The model is demonstrated by modelling the development of Finnish residential building stock from 2020 to 2050. The annual average need for renovation from 2020 to 2050 is 4.1 million residential square metres (1.8% percent of the entire housing stock), equalling to annual investments of some 7.8 billion euros. However, the results revealed notable geographical differences between municipality categories. The results also suggest that the proportion of renovations in the total construction market is increasing while the volume of new housing construction is decreasing. The modelled results are in line with the Finnish Long-Term Renovation Strategy 2020–2050.

Healthcare as Ugly Feeling in Hans Sloane's Voyage

Abstract: Hans Sloane's A Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica (1707–25) exemplifies the collecting that would make him famous, includes evidence of the medical practice responsible for some of his wealth and fame, and has served as a key text for scholars puzzling out the relationship between museums, healthcare, empire building, and racial slavery in the Caribbean. This essay examines the strange style that this text and other natural histories adopt, with their long, clunky, repetitive, plain, and sometimes downright boring descriptions of weather, plants, animals, and minerals—and, more alarmingly, human beings, their lives, their bodies, and their suffering. Sianne Ngai's concept of "stuplimity" can help us describe the effects of this tedium, which both awes and shocks with its length, repetitions, and taxonomies and leaves an open feeling akin to the sublime. I further argue that this feeling has embodied consequences that are clear from Sloane's medical case studies. I term this particularly medical aesthetic a "quotidian fever." The term itself refers to regularly occurring but untreatable fevers and embeds within it both the tedium and the possibilities of "the quotidian." The incurability of these fevers—both for patients and on the page—is not overcome, but rather remains incurable because of the imperial world-building enacted by Sloane and represented by his style.

To the Establishment of the Practice of Royal Visits to the Colonies of Great Britain: Background for the First Official Tour
 of the Prince of Wales to Canada in 1860

The article regards the background of the first official visit of a member of the royal family to the colonial possessions of the British Empire – the tour of the Prince of Wales to Canada in 1860. The purpose of the analysis is to trace how the history of the emergence and development of the idea of traveling the heir
 to the British throne to Canada reflected the evolution of the views of the British and colonial politicianson of the Empire building and its perspectives. It is proved that the initiative of the royal journey,coming from the Canadian administration
 and supported by the British government,was aimed at strengthening ties between the mother country and the colony and solving pragmatic problems on both sides.The obtained results allow us to conclude that the project of the first official
 royal tour to overseas territories of Britain, being a product of the thought of the colonial society, indicated the mutual desire of the administration of Britain and Canada to find a balance of interests between the mother country and the colony in the process of updating forms and methods of colonial interaction and constructing the course of imperial policy.

Evading Capture: U.S. Army Engineers and Railroad Policy, 1827–1853

AbstractUntil 1838 the U.S. government lent railroads Army engineers to survey routes. Though not strictly regulators, these army engineers would consequently face powerful versions of the incentives that make regulatory capture a pervasive problem—including an intensified “revolving door,” the opportunity for institutional empire building, and a fertile ground for cognitive capture. Nevertheless, engineering officers would push to abolish federal railroad aid, succeeding by 1838. This article argues that they turned against railroad aid when the nation’s growing rail network revitalized long-standing republican hopes of replacing standing armies and fortifications with floating batteries and militias. Though this scheme was strategically quixotic, Jacksonian populism and fiscal retrenchment during the Panic of 1837 combined with the transportation revolution to make it appear a credible threat to the Corps’s institutional raison d’être—building coastal fortifications. Engineers thus turned against railroad aid to protect their core competency, highlighting underappreciated tensions between institutional and industry interests.

Public Health, Health Promotion and the Problem of Positivism

Abstract Introduction Even though in public health and health promotion (HP) the most fundamental concepts refer to philosophical notions like equality, equity, fairness, justice or well-being, the practice of empirical research in HP is dominated by quantitative and standardized measures (seen widely on Health Literacy studies). Most of the quantitative empirical research has hardly any contact to these notions above referred. Public health and HP concepts shared by the WHO, UNESCO, UNHCR (asf. charters and declarations) deserve to be better explored. Development It is argued that there are several reasons that reproduce the domination of numbers in the field of public health and HP, rather than the insightful and transformative thoughts of theoretical developments. One reason is the power from medicine and similar disciplines that use their statistical and evidence-based methods as standard rules of evaluation. A second reason is the promise of public health and HP to make things better. A third reason is that in public health-related study programs very little attention is given to philosophy or sociological insights, although these are basic foundations of public health and HP. Explore some problems and shortages of a positivistic understanding of public health and HP, i.e. the scientific practice that overwhelms the reality by its methods and sees only what can be seen through the lens of the used methods, is needed to reflect on sustainability of human action. Discussion Public health and HP both refer immanently to - although contested - concepts and theories of democracy, freedom and justice. These concepts and theories are resistant against a pure mathematization and cannot be operationalized fully by quantitative numbers. There is a normative surplus in the subject of public health and HP that needs to be addressed differently. Finally, the relationship between empirical research and theory building in public health and HP is a quest yet to be firmly rooted.

Representation, Race and Empire: a Postcolonial Analysis of the New York Global History Regents exam

ABSTRACT Postcolonial studies have long identified history curriculum as a site of empire building. High stakes exams like the Global History Regents Exam in New York (NYGHR) undoubtedly impact curriculum but have yet to be examined through a postcolonial lens. This study evaluates to what extent, if at all, the NYGHR perpetuates eurocentrism as defined by four concepts from the literature: numerical representation, replacement, tokenism and narrative erasure. Through both qualitative and quantitative analysis, the study finds the exam to be eurocentric both in its numerial underrepresentation of the global south, and in its replacement and ommission of global south achievement, its overuse of tokenism, and its flagrant narrative erasure of the violence of colonialism. The study posits implications and next steps for students, practitioners and future research on how to build inclusive, student driven global history curricula

Multi-objective optimization designs of phase change material-enhanced building using the integration of the Stacking model and NSGA-III algorithm

The incorporation of phase change materials (PCM) into building envelopes has proven to reduce carbon emissions and energy consumption to combat climate change. However, the energy performance of PCM-enhanced building depends on several factors and the optimization of such factors using empirical building design is more difficult and sometimes even impossible. Therefore, this paper proposes a multi-objective optimization method to consider multi-objectives, including building energy consumption, economic benefit, and carbon-saving. In this study, a non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm III (NSGA III) is coupled with a Stacking model to minimize building operational energy consumption (BOEC) and maximize life cycle economic benefit (LCEB) and life cycle carbon reduction (LCCR) simultaneously by finding the optimum configuration of PCM thickness, window-to-wall ratio, exterior glazing U-value and solar heat gain coefficient. The results show that the Stacking model combined with 8 heterogeneous machine learning models has the best performance for predicting energy consumption with a high correlation efficiency (R2 = 0.97). In addition, the building optimized with the Stacking-NSGA III framework shows a reduction of BOEC by 45.38 % and an increase of LCCR by 10.75 kg·CO2.e/m2. Moreover, the LCEB over a 50-year service life is 452.21 CNY/m2. It is believed that the proposed multi-objective optimization method can help stakeholders to find the most suitable PCM-building design strategies for their specific needs.

Variant Rebellions: Psychic Compromise in Obi; or, Three-Fingered Jack

Abstract: This paper explores certain fundamental aspects of melodramatic theatricality used to depict the colonial world on the London stage at the turn of the century. As melodrama was a hybrid of comedy, tragedy, pantomime, and sentimentalism, the juxtaposition of a variety of these compositional strategies opens up the interpretation of John Fawcett's successful pantomime Obi; or Three-Fingered Jack (1800) and its later 1830 melodramatic adaptation by William Murray. As examples of racial melodramas, these plays disrupt the otherwise conventional moral polarity typical of melodramas by situating archetypal melodramatic characters in a morally ambiguous, theatrically conceptualized colonial space. Stage apparatus and performance were but two aspects of melodramatic theatricality that were deployed to recreate the colonial world. The basic argument in this paper explores the contrary pulls within these plays. On the one hand, the spectators' cathartic celebration of the rebels' expulsion at the end of the play entrenches their identification with British imperial ideology by arousing collective feelings of patriotism, thus consolidating the national identity of spectators as British imperialists. On the other hand, the visuals and the music that depict the colonial social order of a slave colony and the heroic feats of the rebel slave opened up a space of possible critique of British imperial ventures. These contrary drives within the melodramatic form are reformulated in terms of a "psychic compromise" in which the act of rebellion is endorsed for its dramatic potential to arouse fantasies of heroic revolt but is ultimately compromised in a larger ideological frame that celebrates the empire and the reconstitution of colonial order. This paper offers insights into the popular cultural perception of the empire, obliquely illuminating the larger historical processes of empire building during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

The Merchant Prince of Black Chicago: Anthony Overton and the Building of a Financial Empire

The Merchant Prince of Black Chicago: Anthony Overton and the Building of a Financial Empire

Introduction: Citational Politics in Medical Anthropology.

Introduction: Citational Politics in Medical Anthropology.

Maps and Mini-Imperialists

Children no longer reside on the periphery of studies of empire. Over the past two decades, a robust body of scholarship has demonstrated that youngsters—both as symbols and as flesh-and-blood individuals—have been crucial to the project of empire building. This is particularly true when examining the history of the United States, an empire whose central tenet was a denial of its own imperialism. Cultural constructions of childhood innocence and vulnerability bolstered justifications for U.S. political and territorial expansion in the name of uplift. And youngsters’ perceived malleability made them prime targets for efforts to mold imperial citizens and subjects. Youth groups, schools, and children’s material culture, recent scholarship has demonstrated, helped mold young imperialists—even as children themselves challenged or revised the lessons imparted by their elders. For example, Mischa Honeck’s Our Frontier is the World: The Boy Scouts in the Age of American Ascendancy examines how the Boy Scouts helped support American global expansionism across the twentieth century.1 In a similar vein, Brian Rouleau’s Empire’s Nursery: Children’s Literature and the Origins of the American Century explores how children’s books cultivated what Rouleau calls an “imperial consciousness.”2 Mahshid Mayar’s new book Citizens and Rulers of the World: The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire adds to this productive conversation. The book focuses on children’s complex relationship with maps and map-making during the 1890s. It examines how U.S. geopolitical power was represented spatially and how the meanings of this power were conveyed to the next generation.

“The Great Demoralization”: race, intimacy, and empire in the American West’s anti-Chinese movement, c. 1848–1892

ABSTRACT This study examines the entanglement of empire and intimacy in the anti-Chinese movement of the late nineteenth-century American West. Situating this particular manifestation of race-making against the backdrop of nineteenth-century empire building, this article delineates how Euro-Americans pathologized Chinese migrants’ sexual practices as contradictory to settler colonial futurity. It reads across Asian American history, the study of American empire, and the history of sexuality, historiographies that have at times woven in and out of conversation with one another, but nonetheless remain discrete.