Conclusion

Author(s):  
Nicola Miller

This chapter draws several conclusions about the history of knowledge through a survey of landscapes of knowledge in Spanish America over the hundred years or so after independence. It discusses the recognition of knowledge that matters as much as the production or distribution in analysing outcomes of past and present struggles to extend access to knowledge. It also clarifies how certain ways of knowing are deemed worthy of being received as knowledge and who decides what counts as knowledge, even before it is subject to validation. The chapter emphasizes that a nation-state can be revealingly interpreted as a community of shared knowledge, providing a more flexible and more grounded analytical framework of an imagined community. It stresses that the knowledge order of a society will affect its capacity to achieve integration, constitutional legitimacy, and political participation.

Author(s):  
Romany Craig

Libraries, Archives and Museums are interesting institutions as they share common goals of preserving and providing access to ‘knowledge.’ This knowledge, however, is not neutral. The history of these institutions began in the ‘West’ as a nation building project meant to solidify notions of superiority over ‘other’ nations and peoples. The processes involved in selecting what knowledge and artifacts are worthy of preservation and are thus available to the public, provide insight into who is valuable to the nation and what knowledge is legitimate. The colonizing function of these institutions is evident as they alienate, silence, stigmatize and erase the lives of indigenous peoples. Yet, this need not be the case. For professionals in these fields, decolonizing these spaces involves more than simply making note of best practices for indigenous peoples as a new user group. Continued involvement in a process of decolonization must begin with the acknowledgement of multiple valid world views and multiple valid ways of knowing.


Author(s):  
Susan E. Whyman

The introduction shows the convergence and intertwining of the Industrial Revolution and the provincial Enlightenment. At the centre of this industrial universe lay Birmingham; and at its centre was Hutton. England’s second city is described in the mid-eighteenth century, and Hutton is used as a lens to explore the book’s themes: the importance of a literate society shared by non-elites; the social category of ‘rough diamonds’; how individuals responded to economic change; political participation in industrial towns; shifts in the modes of authorship; and an analysis of social change. The strategy of using microhistory, biography, and the history of the book is discussed, and exciting new sources are introduced. The discovery that self-education allowed unschooled people to participate in literate society renders visible people who were assumed to be illiterate. This suggests that eighteenth-century literacy was greater than statistics based on formal schooling indicate.


Author(s):  
Rebecca Skreslet Hernandez

This introduction sets out the scope of the book’s argument and explains why Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī is such an interesting figure in the history of Islamic legal thought. It describes the reception of al-Suyūṭī’s work at home in Cairo and abroad as well as his lasting legacy. It outlines the analytical framework and the importance of interdisciplinary methods, including discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, anthropology, history, religious studies, and literary criticism to the argument of the book. An explanation of how al-Suyūṭī’s life can inform our understanding of the current situation in modern Egypt is followed by a review of the secondary literature and a full outline of each chapter.


Author(s):  
Daojiong Zha

AbstractChina is a key player, not just an actor, in the global search for health security. Reiteration of this point is useful for International Relations studies, which often portray China as a factor to contend with, especially given the background of the country as the first to report the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper adopts an analytical framework developed through a summary of routines in Chinese engagement in global health from a practitioner’s perspective: aid, interdependence, governance and knowledge. These are the core elements in a country’s pursuit of engagement with the rest of the world. After the introduction, the second section of the paper reviews contributions from China in the history of global plague control over the past century. The third section discusses structural issues affecting access to vaccines, which are essential for bringing COVID-19 under effective control. The fourth section identifies a number of challenges China is facing in global health governance. The final section offers a few concluding thoughts, reiterating the nature of interdependence in the global search for enhancement of health security.


2021 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
pp. 566-598
Author(s):  
Matthias van Rossum

AbstractThis article argues that we need to move beyond the “Atlantic” and “formal” bias in our understanding of the history of slavery. It explores ways forward toward developing a better understanding of the long-term global transformations of slavery. Firstly, it claims we should revisit the historical and contemporary development of slavery by adopting a wider scope that accounts for the adaptable and persistent character of different forms of slavery. Secondly, it stresses the importance of substantially expanding the body of empirical observations on trajectories of slavery regimes, especially outside the Atlantic, and most notable in the Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago worlds, where different slavery regimes existed and developed in interaction. Thirdly, it proposes an integrated analytical framework that will overcome the current fragmentation of research perspectives and allow for a more comparative analysis of the trajectories of slavery regimes in their highly diverse formal and especially informal manifestations. Fourth, the article shows how an integrated framework will enable a collaborative research agenda that focuses not only on comparisons, but also on connections and interactions. It calls for a closer integration of the histories of informal slavery regimes into the wider body of existing scholarship on slavery and its transformations in the Atlantic and other more intensely studied formal slavery regimes. In this way, we can renew and extend our understandings of slavery's long-term, global transformations.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 86-109
Author(s):  
Clara Bellamy

This article discusses how Zapatista women have built themselves as transformative political subjects that disrupt the racist, classist, and patriarchal nation-state. It underscores the importance of reflecting on Zapatista women, on their struggle for particular demands specified in the Revolutionary Women’s Law, especially the collective struggle for obtaining rights such as to land, to participate politically, and to organize themselves in the armed struggle. Instead of entering into debate over whether Zapatista women are feminists or not, this article recognizes how, besides transforming living conditions, the Zapatistas have organized politically and gone from a process of invisibility, silence, and obedience to one of recognition, speech, and command. In this sense, the struggle of Zapatista women is an example of theoretical and practical ruptures within the history of class, gender, and race struggled in Mexico and the world.


Res Publica ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 36 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 361-380
Author(s):  
Paul Magnette

This paper examines the evolving ideological content of the concept of citizenship and particularly the challenges it faces as a consequence of the building of the European Union. From an epistemological point of view it is first argued that citizenship may be described as a dual concept: it is both a legal institution composed of the rights of the citizen as they are fixed at a certain moment of its history, and a normative ideal which embodies their political aspirations. As a result of this dual nature, citizenship is an essentially dynamicnotion, which is permanently evolving between a state of balance and change.  The history of this concept in contemporary political thought shows that, from the end of the second World War it had raised a synthesis of democratic, liberal and socialist values on the one hand, and that it was historically and logically bound to the Nation-State on the other hand. This double synthesis now seems to be contested, as the themes of the "crisis of the Nation State" and"crisis of the Welfare state" do indicate. The last part of this paper grapples with recent theoretical proposals of new forms of european citizenship, and argues that the concept of citizenship could be renovated and take its challenges into consideration by insisting on the duties and the procedures it contains.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandra Issel-Dombert

To this day, French politicians and grassroots movements refer to the cahiers de doléances of the Ancien Régime as a primordial democratic legitimation tool for self-expression, for the pooling of opinions and the negotiation of social interests. The precursor of the petition, it has entered collective memory as the "French recipe" of political participation from below. As a mouthpiece for democratic articulation, this text type not only documents the actual state of a society described by its authors, but also far-reaching visions of the future. It can thus be read equally as an indicator of the disposition prevalent in a society at a given time, but as a social history of France as well. Based on culture-oriented linguistics, this study traces the evolution of the cahiers de doléances from the beginning of their lore to its end. This study work was awarded the "Prix Germaine de Staël" as well as the advancement award "Language and Law" of the University of Regensburg.


2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-95
Author(s):  
Michael Meng

Why study the history of modern German-speaking Central Europe? If pressed to answer this question fifty years ago, a Germanist would likely have said something to the effect that one studies modern German history to trace the “German” origins of Nazism, with the broader aim of understanding authoritarianism. While the problem of authoritarianism clearly remains relevant to this day, the nation-state-centered approach to understanding it has waned, especially in light of the recent shift toward transnational and global history. The following essay focuses on the issue of authoritarianism, asking whether the study of German history is still relevant to authoritarianism. It begins with a review of two conventional approaches to understanding authoritarianism in modern German history, and then thinks about it in a different way through G. W. F. Hegel in an effort to demonstrate the vibrancy of German intellectual history for exploring significant and global issues such as authoritarianism.


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