Old and New Rights

2009 ◽  
pp. 20-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mauro Di Meglio ◽  
Enrico Gargiulo

This chapter offers a long-term perspective on citizenship, questioning one of the basic assumptions of most of the literature on this topic, that is, the nation-state as unit of analysis. Through the adoption of a world-systemic perspective, two basic aspects of the history of citizenship stand out. Firstly, the fundamentally exclusive nature of this category, as it emerged and developed over the history of the modern world-system, since at least the “long 16th Century”. And, secondly, that well before the so-called “information revolution” of the last decades, “technology” has shaped the Western social imagination, acting, in various and changing historical forms, as an effective instrument of control and supremacy, producing asymmetric and inegalitarian effects, and providing a yardstick of the different “levels of development” of Western and non-Western peoples. In this view, the most recent phase of the history of citizenship, his e-form, seems to replicate, in new ways, the explanations of the gap existing both between and within countrie—now conceptualized as “digital divide”—and, at the same time, the illusory universalistic promise of an expansion of the citizenship and the rights associated to it.

2012 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 404-418 ◽  
Author(s):  
Waltraud Ernst

This article presents a case study of institutional trends in a psychiatric institution in British India during the early twentieth century. It focuses on mortality statistics and long-term confinement rates as well as causes of death. The intention is two-fold: first, to provide new material that potentially lends itself to comparison with the few existing institutional case studies that have explored this particular period; second, to highlight some of the problems inherent in the status of the statistics and the conceptual categories used, and to consider the challenges these pose for any intended comparative and transnational assessment. Furthermore, it is suggested that historians working on the history of western institutions ought to look beyond the confining rim of Eurocentric self-containment and relate their research to other institutions around the world. It is important for social historians to abstain from uncritically reproducing hegemonic histories of the modern world in which western cultures and nations are posited by default as the centre or metropolis and the rest as peripheries whose social and scientific developments may be seen to be of exotic interest, but merely derivative and peripheral.


1998 ◽  
Vol 156 ◽  
pp. 733-756 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Elvin

China's long-term history – social, economic, political, and intellectual – has been interwoven from the start with its environment. In counterposed fashion, the history of the Chinese environment has been entwined with that of anthropogenic forces. The Chinese landscape was one of the most transformed in the pre-modern world as the result of its reshaping for cereal cultivation, re-engineering by hydraulic works for drainage, irrigation and flood-defence, and deforestation for the purposes of clearance and the harvesting of wood for fuel and construction.


2011 ◽  
pp. 58-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
John M. Talbot

This article presents a history of coffee in the modern world-economy, w;ing an analyticalframework synthesized from Arrighi's concept of systemic cycles of accumulation and Braudel'snotion of three levels of economic analysis: material life, the market economy, and capitalism. Ittakes the commodity chain as the unit of analysis, and argues that this choice helps to illuminatethe caw;al connections between Braudel 's three layers. The method of incorporated comparisonis w;ed to compare restructurings of the coffee commodity chain with the restructurings of thelarger world-economy during each of Arrighi 's systemic cycles.


Author(s):  
Jürgen Osterhammel

This chapter examines different approaches to global history. Modern world history differs from older universal-historical constructions in that it presupposes an empirical idea of geography and of both the unity and plurality of humanity’s historical experience. After the Second World War, historians paid more attention to the interaction of the nation-state (the local) and the world (the global). The newer global history, while it does not negate the nation-state, strives to understand the reasons for the success of the West, without however reverting to a Eurocentric and essentializing perspective. Aware of the constructedness of history, it nonetheless pays attention to agency in the past, and to the plurality of perspectives and divergent historical paths. It does so by focusing on topics such as the history of migration, the environment, and economic globalization.


2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 243-252
Author(s):  
Ángel Alcalde

Transnational History emerged in the 1990s as a methodological perspective aiming to transcend the nation state as a prevalent unit of analysis. Akin to comparative history, transnational history focuses on transfers between countries and nations, cross-border exchanges and circulation of people and ideas, thus changing our understanding of modern historical phenomena and contributing to the development of global history. Today there is probably no modern historical subfield that has not heeded the new transnational insights. This review article argues that the history of fascism and national socialism have benefitted considerably from this epistemological advancement, and that this renewal has revolutionised our understanding of these ideologies, movements and regimes. Previously historians believed that fascism had emerged as a solution to the interwar crisis in different European nation states; ‘native’, ‘home-grown’ fascist movements, unique ultranationalist revolutionaries, spontaneously reacted to endogenous national problems and attempted a counterrevolution or national rebirth with different degrees of success. After the transnational turn, historians instead see fascism as a single transnational and global phenomenon that violently expanded throughout Europe and beyond by processes of transfer, mutual inspiration, hybridisation, interaction, entanglement and cross-border exchange.


1981 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard F. Weisfelder

Virtually all analyses of Lesotho's political framework have agreed that strong elements of national identity have neither forestalled domestic conflict nor served to promote a unified assault on awesome economic problems. Hence many writers imply that a major asset, rarely found in independent Africa, has been wasted.1 Roger Leys has perceptively applied dependency theories of a ‘labour reserve’ economy to Lesotho,2 and spends considerable effort on historical analysis aimed at demonstrating the duration and pervasiveness of this process of systematic underdevelopment. In his conclusion he suggests that ‘the long and courageous battle of the Basotho to assert their dignity and worth is in fact a resource and political weapon of incomparable significance in the long-term battle for the liberation of southern Africa.’ Leys infers that national and class identities are interrelated, and possibly reinforcing, when he says that ‘the history of the struggle of the Basotho people and the very degree of their integration into the black working class of South Africa is a formidable weapon.’3


2010 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 246-282 ◽  
Author(s):  
William E. Scheuerman

Most Realists today oppose far-reaching global reform on the grounds that it represents unrealistic and potentially irresponsible ‘utopianism’. An earlier generation of mid-century Realists, however, not only supported serious efforts at radical international reform but also developed a theoretically impressive model for how to bring it about. They considered the possibility of post-national political orders and ultimately a world state as desirable long-term goals, but only if reformers could simultaneously generate the thick societal background (or what they called ‘supranational society’) required by any viable order ‘beyond the nation state’. As they fail to engage constructively with proposals for global reform, present-day Realists betray their own intellectual tradition. By reconsidering the subterranean legacy of Realist reformism as advanced by mid-century international thinkers (e.g. E.H. Carr, John Herz, Hans Morgenthau, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Frederick Schuman), the essay provides a revisionist reading of the history of twentieth-century international theory, while also highlighting its significance for ongoing debates about global reform.


2006 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
ACHIM VON OPPEN

Planned villagization is a recurrent feature in modern Africa. Apart from their official goals, which were missed in most cases, rural settlement schemes can be seen as attempts by colonial and postcolonial states to inscribe a new territorial order into the countryside. Taking a group of villages in northwest Zambia as an example, this article examines the process and impact of territorialization in a long-term and interactionist perspective. The result is a history of contestation about competing concepts of spatiality and sociality which opens new perspectives on the making of both locality and the nation state in Central Africa.


2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (S1) ◽  
pp. S769-S769
Author(s):  
T. Gómez Alemany ◽  
J. Soler Vidal ◽  
I. Targa ◽  
B. Garcia Alarcon ◽  
A. Santoro ◽  
...  

A 71-year-old woman with history of major recurrent depressive syndrome responsive to clomipramine (last episode at 50-year-old) with the following medical records: ischaemic stroke with progressive cognitive impairment to the extent of requiring wheelchair.Current episodeDepressive symptoms, with suicidal thoughts, anxiety, tremor and low food intake in the last month (due to choke phobia) with up to 10 kg of weight loss.DiagnosisMajor recurrent depressive syndrome resistant to treatment with Parkinson syndrome.TreatmentLorazepam 10 mg/day levodopa 150/carbidopa 37.5 mg/day, LART Electroconvulsive therapy (Thymatron SYSTEM IV) was also carried out 3 times a week until 15 sessions were reached.DiscussionThis case illustrates the successful response with LART ECT towards major recurrent depression syndrome associated with a pharmacological parkinsonism maintained over the long-term (one year with ECT). There are sufficient evidences showing that the ECT has an effect in the dopaminergic system at different levels: dopamine release, dopamine neurotransmission and linkage with its receptor, and these effects differ between an acute stimulation and when repeated stimulation is carried out. It must be taken into consideration the fact that concomitant existence of depression and parkinsonism could represent another indication for ECT, since the pharmacological management of these patients is highly complex and could even more if we bear in mind that one of the therapeutical options towards the antidepressant potentiation (atypical anti-psychotics) can worsen the symptomatology.Disclosure of interestThe authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.


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