Fate Of Empire Research Articles

Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766

Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766

The Fate of Empires and Eurasian Federalism: A Discussion between the Eurasianists and their Opponents in the 1920s

AbstractThe discussion of the problem of federalism and multiculturalism was as heated among the Russian in the 1920s as it is today. It was initiated by the Russian Eurasianists who were opposed and criticised by various ethnic Russian and non-Russian intellectuals. Political, social and cultural issues were at the core of this discourse, which was concerned with the relationships between the dominant majority and ethnic minorities. These debates also concerned the future of the Russian State, its administrative structure and the construction of a Eurasian Nation.

Fred Anderson. Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. Pp. xxv, 862. $40.00. ISBN 0-375-40642-5.

Fred Anderson. Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. Pp. xxv, 862. $40.00. ISBN 0-375-40642-5. - Volume 33 Issue 2

The Education of Fernando de Leyba: Quapaws and Spaniards on the Border of Empires

IN 1771, A YOUNG SPANISH OFFICER, Fernando de Leyba, traveled from New Orleans to his new post on the Arkansas River. Spain had acquired the vast Louisiana region from France in 1763, and Commandant Leyba's superiors expected him to institute Spanish control over his part of the Louisiana interior. Knowing that Indian alliances were essential to Spanish dominance in Louisiana, the governor in New Orleans had sent a Spanish medal for Leyba to give to the leader of the Quapaws, the Indians who lived near Arkansas Post. The Quapaws' great chief, Cazenonpoint, was supposed to exchange his old French medal for the new Spanish one, signifying his people's shift in alliance from the French to the Spanish. At a formal assembly, Leyba presented the medal to Cazenonpoint. But to the chief's shock, the Spanish medal was smaller than the French one. Cazenonpoint declared that the Spanish had cheated him, and he demanded his French medal back.1 Through the clumsy error of a skimpy medal, the Spanish had insulted the Quapaws and endangered their alliance. From this inauspicious beginning, Chief Cazenonpoint and Commandant Leyba became antagonists in a strained alliance between their peoples. But the Quapaws gradually converted the Spanish to Quapaw ways of diplomacy. Over the following year, Cazenonpoint and the other Quapaw chiefs demonstrated their power to Leyba and taught him the wisdom of giving the Quapaws what they wanted-frequent and generous presents and the respectful treatment that alliance partners deserved. While Leyba learned Indian relations the hard way, the two men filling Leyba's and Cazenonpoint's respective positions a decade later-- Commandant Balthazar de Villiers and Quapaw chief Angaska-quickly forged a mutually beneficial personal and political partnership. Unlike Leyba, Villiers came to his post understanding Indian power and Spanish weakness in the Louisiana interior. Furthermore, both he and Chief Angaska had stronger personal incentives for forging a dependable alliance. Each had less support from his own people than had Leyba or Cazenonpoint. Villiers was French by birth, so he was an outsider to the Spanish empire. Angaska was an ambitious young chief, not the established leader that Cazenonpoint had been in 1771. While Leyba and Cazenonpoint had tested each other's power, Villiers and Angaska reinforced each other's legitimacy. The Quapaws' education of Fernando de Leyba and the symbiotic relationship between Angaska and Villiers both reveal the importance of individuals and local circumstance in determining the fate of empires and should remind us to be cautious in generalizing about the relationships among various European and Indian groups. Examining the interactions among a few important Quapaws and Spanish officials suggests not a static relationship between Indians and Europeans but a perpetual construction and reconstruction of those colonial relations. Different personalities shaped very different relationships. Individuals affected the course of history on the edges of empires, where power was diffuse. To overlook Indians' and Europeans' personal assumptions, interests, and actions distorts the reality of Indian-white relations. Policies and decrees meant little without implementation and reveal nothing about how Indians interpreted and reacted to them. This is not to say that Indian chiefs and Spanish officers did not act within structural constraints. Officers had orders and budgets, and chiefs had pressures and expectations from their peoples. The political structures of both Spanish and Quapaw society limited the powers of commandants and chiefs. All were influenced by their cultural and religious backgrounds and beliefs. But in colonialism, the personal and the structural were always intertwined. The conventional wisdom that the Spanish did not develop as strong a Quapaw alliance as the French neglects the differing situations and goals of the French on the one hand and the Spanish on the other. …

Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766

Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766

Crucible of war: the Seven Years' War and the fate of empire in British North America, 1754-1766

Crucible of war: the Seven Years' War and the fate of empire in British North America, 1754-1766

Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766

In this account of the Seven Years' War, Fred Anderson demonstrates that the conflict was more than just a peripheral squabble that anticipated the American Revolution, changing the character of British Imperialism with the mother country trying to reshape terms of empire and the colonists' place.

The fate of land empires: China and Russia

Toru Takimoto examines the economic and ethnic situations of what he calls the last two remaining land empires, Russia and China, and asks what is the likely fate of these empires. He says that the disintegration of the Soviet Union warned China to speed up its own economic reforms, which have been more successful than in Russia. Takimoto suggests that a democratic system will become more instituationalized in Russia over time, but believes there is only a small chance of a radical change in China's political system. Takimoto is a former IIPS senior research fellow and is presently director of the Office for Trade Policies Review in the Ministry of International Trade and Industry.

The Erotics of Pedagogy: Historical Intervention, Literary Representation, the "Gift of Education," and the Agency of Children

The Erotics of Pedagogy:Historical Intervention, Literary Representation, the "Gift of Education," and the Agency of Children Mitzi Myers (bio) I know that pedagogy is a depressing subject to all persons of sensibility, and yet I shall not apologize for touching upon it. Lionel Trilling In these times of wonderful revolution, and incalculable, & sudden changes in the fate of empires and the fortunes of individuals, the only good things of which we can feel absolutely secure are the possession of our minds, & of the esteem & affection of our friends. Maria Edgeworth to Etienne Dumont, 12 August 1815 Works of art exist simultaneously in two 'economies,' a market econ omy and a gift economy. . . . with gifts that are agents of change, it is only when the gift has worked in us, only when we have come up to its level . . . that we can give it away again. . . . the end of the labor of gratitude is similarity with the gift or with its donor. Lewis Hyde Literary childhood, the representation of children for both juvenile and adult audiences, begins to play a significant part within the Anglo-American cultural tradition in a Revolutionary era. The global backdrop of the child's domestic debut is transnational change: the American, French, and industrial revolutions and the Napoleonic wars.1 But how do children and their literary history relate to what historians think of as "big" history—the macropolitics [End Page 1] and institutional events that identify and dominate the "masculine" public sphere?2 Literary critics are mostly content to say that this period's tales teach, without specifying precisely what they teach, whom they reach, or, most important, how they carry out their pedagogical agenda. For example, Claudia Nelson's study of late nineteenth-century children's literature packages its prehistory as an unproblematic narrative of obedience: "The stress in such stories is on the world as it is. Secure in the knowledge that adult civilization was daily going from good to better, eighteenth-century rationalist writers felt no urge to portray their young protagonists as in any way more powerful morally than their adult preceptors. . . . [T]he goal of overweening obedience forbids the implication that children may in any way positively affect their environment; their world neither asks nor needs any help from them."3 Neither the rationalist educator's own experience nor the stories she tells about her world seem quite so secure on closer inspection. Nor, for that matter, can Enlightenment education be equated with Wordsworth's reasoning little monster of the Prelude's Book 5, though few literary historians can resist the temptation (ll. 296–363). Maria Edgeworth (1768–1849), the Anglo-Irish writer who is my subject, lived through all the cataclysmic events which mark the beginning of "modern" history and witnessed many of them at first hand. She saw Revolutionary Paris, fled for her life when the French invaded Ireland in 1798, and lived amid Irish upheaval. She coped with events ranging from murderous local marauders like the Defenders of the 1790s to the nationwide calamity of the Great Famine in the 1840s. Her public writing and its interplay with her world, her readers, and her life as a feeling daughter and a rational female writer solicit critical attention as exemplary of literary terrain we have not yet explored, not ground we know so well that we can dismiss it with a label. How, then, can historical contextualization and contemporary theory help us to specify what we mean when we say that a story from the literary past is "didactic"? Despite the theoretical bombardment to which the academy has long been subjected, despite the recognition that all texts (and interpretations) are historically and ideologically conditioned, despite the preoccupation with Difference, the Other, the Colonized, the Repressed, and the Marginal, it still does not seem to have occurred to the critical world at large that works for, about, and/or by children are ideal investigatory sites for trying out just about any contemporary [End Page 2] theory that elicits one's curiosity, be it gender, games, or gifts, subjectivity or psychoanalysis. Those who work with children's literature know better.4 Yet, as I've indicated, thus far critical...

The Fate of Empires

. . Let us examine one of the possible outcomes [of the impending struggle between Russia and the West]. What fate awaits Russia in case of her defeat? If Russia were a national state like France or modern Germany, the answer would have been comparatively simple and not so tragic. To be sure, she would have to endure all the horrors of destruction, humiliation, and starvation that are the lot of defeated Germany today, with the difference that she has become inured by now to hunger and slavery. For the majority of her population the downfall of the hated regime, even at the price of a temporary foreign occupation, would mean liberation. After all, the Americans, unlike Hitler, have no intention of colonizing Russia, nor do they plan to exterminate her inferior races. However, the issue is complicated by the fact that Russia is not a national state but a multinational empire, the last remaining empire in the world after the liquidation of all others. It would be nothing less than a miracle if she should emerge from the cataclysm unimpaired within the geographical boundaries that were hers at the outbreak of the Revolution.

(1) Man and His Future (2) The Fate of Empires: being an Inquiry into the Stability of Civilisation (3) The Science of Human Behaviour: Biological and Psychological Foundations (4) Die Neue Tierpsychologie

IT may be stated as a truism that every new development of science modifies opinion as to the meaning and destiny of man himself. Well-intentioned sentimentalists, like the late Henry Drummond, try to “reconcile” science and religion by a metaphorical interpretation of both. Such attempts illustrate the popular instinct for unification, which is itself a part of religion and the kernel of metaphysical philosophy. Such a volume as Lieut.-Colonel Sedgwick's “Man and his Future” (1) is thus a sociological phenomenon, illustrating the vitality and variation of popular philosophy. The Anglo-Saxon, he says, has instituted the Age of Machines and Instruments; by means of these he is beginning to separate the component bricks of the universe (Clerk Maxwell's metaphor)—the atoms. Man is therefore on the eve of a great development, which is the integration of the whole universe (Herbert Spencer's metaphor)— whatever that may mean—by the employment of the forces of attraction against those of repulsion. The former and the men using them are, says this author, guided by Christ; the latter by Satan. A pre-occupation with the periodic theory of Mendeléeff and his school is the basis of these lucubrations. (1) Man and His Future. Part ii., The Anglo-Saxon: His Part and His Place. By Lieut. Col. William Sedgwick. Pp. 217. (London: Francis Griffiths, 1913.) Price 6s. net. (2) The Fate of Empires: being an Inquiry into the Stability of Civilisation. By Dr. A. J. Hubbard. Pp. xx + 220. (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1913.) Price 6s. 6d. net. (3) The Science of Human Behaviour: Biological and Psychological Foundations. By Dr. Maurice Parmelee. Pp. xvii + 443. (New York: The Macmillan Company; London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd.) Price 8s. 6d. net. (4) Die Neue Tierpsychologie. By Georges Bohn. Autorisierte deutsche Ubersetzung von Dr. Rose Thesing. Pp. viii + 183. (Leipzig: Veit and Co.., 1912.) Price 3 marks.

The Fate of Empires. Being an Inquiry into the Stability of Civilization

The Fate of Empires. Being an Inquiry into the Stability of Civilization

Promise and Performance in Chinese Science

UNDER the title of “Science á la Chinoise,” a writer in a recent number of the excellent North China Herald dwells on what may be called the disparity between the promise and the performance of Chinese science. The ancient classics contain beautiful maxims on the necessity for research into nature. The “Great Learning” tells us that knowledge is perfected by the investigation of nature; Confucius urged his pupils to study the “Book of Poetry,” because, among other things, they could become acquainted with the names of plants and animals; Mencius tells us that the careful study of phenomena is the road to knowledge, and in illustration says: “Though heaven is high and the stars distant, yet, having investigated their phenomena, we can sit down and calculate their revolutions for a thousand years.” It has long been a proverb among the learned that to be ignorant of a single thing is a disgrace to the true scholar, and to be ignorant of nature is as if nature did not exist. When the revered ancient sages of China, whose words are in the mouths of all, thus encourage scientific research, we should be led to anticipate great results from the patience, intelligence, and ingenuity of the Chinese. But, as in so many other respects in that anomalous country, we have excellent maxims and little more. There is, says this writer, neither research nor knowledge; science has no existence. There is indeed a considerable natural literature. From ancient times the Chinese have taken note of natural phenomena. Their record of solar eclipses is perhaps the most ancient and accurate in the world. They have more or less elaborate works on astronomy, mathematics, botany, zoology, mineralogy, physiology, and many other sciences. Yet there is scarcely any true science in them. Classification, even in regard to plants and animals, there is none. Mineralogy is mainly a description of curious stones. Nor is there any progress, for the more ancient works are generally the best, and as a consequence the Chinese to-day are as their fathers were thousands of years ago. The superstitions respecting natural phenomena, which are as living active truths to-day for all classes in China, remind us rather of man in his state of barbarism than of the ancient culture and civilisation of the Middle Kingdom. The sun and moon are to the Chinese as they were to primitive man, living things, gods to be worshipped. The stars in their courses powerfully influence, if they do not absolutely determine all human events. In them the wise may read as in a book the destiny of man and the fate of empires. Their combinations make lucky and unlucky days, and we shall do well to note carefully their signs and silent warnings. Comets are the precursors of famine, pestilence, and war-prog-nosticators of the wreck of empires and the fall of kings. Eclipses are the periodic efforts of the dragon fiend to destroy the lights of heaven, and every notice of an approaching eclipse sent by the Imperial astronomer to the provinces is accompanied by a Government order to employ the usual methods of gong-beating and so forth in order to rescue the threatened luminary. Again, thunder is the roar of the anger of heaven, and to be smitten by a thunderbolt is to be marked as a thing accursed. Wind is born in the heart of great mountains, whence it issues at the command of the wind-god. Most districts have their wind-mountains. That at Lung-Shan in the northern province of Chihli is the most remarkable. It has a cave at each of its four sides. The spring wind issues from the cave on the eastern side, the summer wind from the southern, and so for the others. Wind eddies or whirlwinds are raised by the hedgehog in his rapid passage from one place to another, the dust serving to screen him from the vulgar gaze. Rain is produced by the dragon god, who carries up vast quantities of water from the lakes and rivers in his capacious jaws, and pours it down in showers over the earth. Every mountain has its spirit or genius, every valley its nymph, every spring its naiad. Hence mountains and rivers, old trees and curious rocks, become objects of worship.