Opting for Oil: The Political Economy of Technological Change in the West German Chemical Industry, 1945-1961

1995 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 1057
Author(s):  
Anthony S. Travis ◽  
Raymond G. Stokes
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Technological Change ◽  
Chemical Industry ◽  
The Political ◽  
The West

The Problem of Liberal Empire Reconsidered

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 167-177
Author(s):  
Adom Getachew
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
West Indies ◽  
The Political ◽  
British West Indies ◽  
The West ◽  
Economic Violence ◽  
Liberal Political Economy ◽  
Liberal Imperialism

This review essay situates Christopher Taylor’s Empire of Neglect: The West Indies in the Wake of British Liberalism (2018) in the context of the two-decade-long debate about the emergence of a liberal imperialism during the nineteenth century. Through an examination of the political economy of emancipation in the British West Indies, Taylor recasts the problem of liberal imperialism by decentering its justificatory discourses in the metropole to examine its practical effects in the colonies. In this turn, he provides an important and missing “materialization” of liberal empire that makes the deep connections between free trade and freeing slaves legible. The practical and theoretical coincidence of these nineteenth-century developments as well as Taylor’s reconstruction of a West Indian tradition of political economy provide a new way of conceptualizing colonial economic violence elaborated as the product of a neglectful empire. It is in this tradition of critiquing and resisting a neglectful empire that we find critical and normative resources to think beyond the terms of our own entrapments within the terms of liberal political economy.

Office, land and subjects in the history of the Manwere fekuo of Kumase: an essay in the political economy of the Asante state

1980 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-208 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. C. McCaskie
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
General Consideration ◽  
West African ◽  
The Political ◽  
The West ◽  
Substantial Body ◽  
Material Basis ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Over Time

The fundamental reasoning underlying this paper is that, in seeking to advance our understanding of the material basis of political power in pre-colonial African polities, particular attention must be paid to the detailed reconstruction over time of the triumviral relationship between office, land and subjects. Acknowledgement is freely made of the fact that, for many (if not most) areas of Africa, this type of reconstruction is either exceptionally difficult or frankly impossible. This paper is concerned with the West African forest kingdom of Asante (Ghana) – a case evincing considerable institutional continuity and structural vigour, and one, moreover, sufficiently richly documented to permit the type and level of reconstruction posited. Specifically, and taking into account the substantial body of research already carried out on the general political history of Asante, this paper deals with patterns of authority over land and subjects as evidenced by the offices contained within the Manwere – one of the ten administrative/military fekuo of Kumase. The Manwere was created by Asantehene Kwaku Dua Panin (1834–67), and in seeking to account for the political imperatives underlying the foundation, the paper explores the context of the reign and the biography and career of the first Manwerehene, Kwasi Brantuo. Particular attention is paid throughout to the way in which the relationship between office, land and subjects within the Manwere was modified or otherwise altered by the nature of the political vicissitudes through which the Asante polity passed in the period between – broadly – the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. Underlying the paper, and supplying context to its conclusions, is a general consideration of the philosophy of the Asante ethic concerning such matters as wealth and accumulation, the nature of authority, and the conceptualization of citizenship.

From outside the Imperium: Gandhi's Cultural Critique of the ‘West’

1981 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-194 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashis Nandy
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Cultural Relativism ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Critique ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The West ◽  
Equitable Distribution ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
Shifting Baseline ◽  
Modern Nation State

Gandhi considered the cultural gap between the modern and the non-modern cultures deeper than that between the West and the East. It is the modern culture he rejected, not only as a social ideal, but also as a framework within which one could struggle for an equitable distribution of the products of modernity. Thus, to him, the demonic aspects of the modern Western culture did not centre around only the political economy of modernity, but also around modern West's scientific secularism, technologism, overorganization, ideologies of adulthood and masculinity, giganticism, stress on normality and oversocialization, and cultural evolutionism. Such a critique allowed Gandhi to see the West as a differentiated structure and the Western man as a co-victim of the oppression of the modern nation-state system, centralized economy, mass media and technocracy, and an ethic which was openly ethnocidal. Traditional cultures also were not undifferentiated to him. He was a critical traditionalist, not an uncritical defender of faiths, and he believed in ‘negative’ relativism, not in the anthropologist's version of cultural relativism. No culture could be perfect in his model, not even a traditional one; it could only be useful as a shifting baseline for cultural criticism.

Populism from a Latin American Perspective

Populism ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-77
Author(s):  
Taekyoon Lim
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Current Paper ◽  
The Political ◽  
The West ◽  
American Perspective

Abstract Discourses on contemporary populism owe much to the populism of the mid-20th century’s Latin America. From a Latin American perspective, the current paper critically reviews Dunn’s and Han’s papers on populism. These two papers are not quite directly comparable in their arguments because their analyses have discrete focuses and levels. Still, Dunn’s argument reasonably reflects the cases of the West whereas Han’s explains the Korean case quite effectively. One question that emerges from their discussion on populism is how generalizable their arguments are beyond the specific cases. From the perspective of Latin America, Dunn’s and Han’s arguments seem to have limited implications for understanding classical populism and contemporary neopopulism in Latin America though they provide insightful thoughts to rethink the political economy of the region with.

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