IV. The role of Europe in the early modern world-system: parasitic or generative?

1992 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 396-400 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert A. Dodgshon
2006 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Lane

While theories of global capitalism have added a new dimension to our understanding of the dynamics of the modern world, a ‘globalisation’ approach to the transformation of the state socialist societies is relatively underdeveloped. This paper studies the role of international and global factors under state socialism and the world system in the pre-1989 period. The paper considers traditional Marxist approaches to the transition to capitalism and criticises the model of state capitalism as well as the world system approach. In contrast, social actors (the ‘acquisition’ and ‘administrative’ social strata and the global political elite)are identified as playing a major role in the fall of state socialism, and were a nascent capitalist class. The transformation of state socialism, it is contended, had the character of a revolution rather than a shift between different types of capitalism.


2001 ◽  
Vol 26 (02) ◽  
pp. 373-401 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren Benton

Jurisdictional fluidity was a central feature of early modem Iberian law, and jurisdictional tensions were exacerbated by overseas conquest and colonization. Contests over the legal status of conquered peoples featured both jurisdictional jockeying among colonial factions and widespread preoccupation with the symbols and rituals marking cultural and legal difference. This article examines the dynamics of jurisdictional politics in seventeenth-century New Mexico, where church and state officials carried on a bitter feud over legal authority during most of the century. Rather than viewing this contest as either transparently political or a mask for deeper processes defining hegemony, the article argues that seemingly dry legal distinctions were the focus of passionate and persistent struggle precisely because they merged institutional and cultural concerns of missionaries, settler elites, and Indians. The analysis leads to broader, more speculative claims about the role of jurisdictional fluidity in creating an “orderly disorder” that spanned diverse regions within Spanish America and, more broadly, across colonial regimes in the early modern world.


Author(s):  
Ulrike Strasser

The conclusion summarizes the main findings of this book’s exploration of the transgenerational and transregional Jesuit chain of influence in the early modern world. It stresses the simultaneously mimetic and individualistic manifestations of missionary masculinity and the role of media in reproducing it. While Jesuit masculinity left traces on societies around the world, the men and women whom the missionaries believed to have converted in turn also reformed European Catholicism. An epilogue takes the story to today’s US-controlled Guam where Chamorro Catholicism provides a site for anti-imperial critique and identity-formation, reflecting a process that began with the events narrated in this book. Notably, twenty-first-century Chamorro death customs still show vestiges of early modern matrilineal traditions and indigenous women’s agency.


Author(s):  
Barbara Pitkin

Distinctly modern forms of historical consciousness emerged first after the Enlightenment but were anticipated by early modern developments in attitudes towards and strategies for recovering the past. Scholarship has only recently focused on how religious perspectives of the sixteenth century and the demand for alternative visions of religious history contributed to broader developments in early modern historiography. This chapter investigates the role of the past in Calvin’s vision of reform through the lens of his 1543 treatise, Supplex Exhortatio, to show how an early modern version of historical thinking is reflected in and shapes his reforming agenda. Though much of his programme is in continuity with Western reforming traditions, Calvin’s vision involves more conscious and critical engagement with and re-evaluation of the past. Attention to the contours of Calvin’s historical thinking illuminates the highly complex relationships among religious orientations, religious conflicts, and engagements with history in the sixteenth century.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (5) ◽  
pp. 253-272
Author(s):  
K. S. Gadzhiev

The article analyzes some, in the opinion of the author, key factors that determine the nature and consequences of the coronavirus pandemic, which has a more or less significant effect on the turbulent state of the modern world, giving it special specificity, additional significance and irreversible character. Having analyzed a number of pandemic assessments and ideas popular in the scientific literature for the state and prospects of the modern world, it is concluded that with all the possible reservations in this matter, the coronavirus pandemic can be considered as one of the most important factors enhancing the significance of those tectonic shifts in the basic infrastructures of the modern world, which serve as the basis for a change in the liberal/ unipolar world order by a new type of world system. It is shown that the pandemic exposed those pain points that, by definition, are characteristic of transition periods or the so-called axial times. It is accompanied by an exacerbation of contradictions and conflicts between nations, hostility and demonization of the enemy and, accordingly, various forms of racism, xenophobia. Having critically analyzed the ideas about the revival of the positive role of the national state, the supposed end of globalization, the “post-coronavirus world”, the so-called “new normality”, etc., their author’s interpretation is given. Of course, a significant place is given to a comparative analysis of the issues concerning the forms and ways of solving the problems caused by the coronavirus pandemic by different countries.


Author(s):  
Pamela H. Smith

This chapter focuses on “itineraries of matter,” or objects as traveling carriers of cultural practices and meanings, in the early modern world. It examines the role of red in the transmission of knowledge back and forth among European vernacular practitioners and text-oriented scholars in their production and reproduction of knowledge about natural things. To this end, the chapter takes us to the heat and dangers of vermillion production in early modern Europe: the hours of firing, stirring, stoking, hammering, chemical manipulation, and anxious waiting that produced the red pigments highly valued by painters and illuminators to bring blood to life. Vermillion production was dangerous and exacting, and yet its underlying techniques traveled rapidly across early modern Europe (and beyond) together with the webs of interlinked homologies—an entourage of lizards, blood, gold, alchemical formulas, and vernacular knowledge—which formed the foundations of early modern science.


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