Problems and challenges facing ethnic diversity in Myanmar: A socio-historical analysis from a Christian perspective

Epilogue

Robber Barons and Wretched Refuse ◽

10.7591/cornell/9781501748318.003.0011 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 217-220

Author(s):

Robert F. Zeidel

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Working Class ◽

Ethnic Diversity ◽

Historical Analysis ◽

The United States ◽

Immigrant Workers ◽

Capitalist System ◽

American Capitalism ◽

Fundamental Values ◽

American Economy

This epilogue discusses how closing America's proverbial gates to the influx of European and Asian laborers ended the decades-long era when industrialization and immigration had combined to transform the United States. Big business had come to dominate the American economy, and millions of working-class foreigners had extensively increased its ethnic diversity. Their nexus created numerous benefits, yet it also engendered a host of socioeconomic maladies. The tragedy of 1886, or 1892, or 1919–1920, was not necessarily the failure of socialism or anarchism to wage a successful revolution against American capitalism. Indeed, whether the doctrines advocated by working-class radicals would have made the United States a better nation invites speculation that exceeds the realm of historical analysis. Ultimately, industrial-era Americans betrayed their most fundamental values. While they welcomed the arrival of immigrant workers who would transform the United States into a commercial giant and produce unparalleled economic gain, they stifled those who demanded radical alterations to the capitalist system in which they toiled, dismissing their alternative doctrines as un-American. Instead of allowing debate and considering the legitimacy of the workers' grievances, they branded their beliefs and behaviors as subversive, and identified their origins as inherently foreign, as having no place in and being inimical to the essence of the United States.

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The Indigenous Inheritance: Critical Antecedents and State Building in Latin America and Southeast Asia

Social Science History ◽

10.1017/ssh.2020.2 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 44 (2) ◽

pp. 251-274

Author(s):

Dan Slater ◽

Hillel David Soifer

Keyword(s):

Latin America ◽

World War Ii ◽

Southeast Asia ◽

Ethnic Diversity ◽

Historical Analysis ◽

State Building ◽

Critical Junctures ◽

Path Dependent ◽

State Infrastructural Power ◽

Infrastructural Power

AbstractIn comparative-historical analysis, countries are always different places before critical junctures set them on divergent pathways. By comparing the legacies of politicized ethnic diversity for the construction of state infrastructural power in Latin America and Southeast Asia, we elaborate the methodological and substantive importance of these “critical antecedents.” The critical antecedent in each region was the inheritance at independence of a sharp indigenous cleavage. This indigenous inheritance shaped threat perceptions and state-society coalitions in both regions in similarly powerful path-dependent ways—yet in intriguingly divergent directions. A salient indigenous cleavage hindered but did not preclude state building in nineteenth-century Peru, while fostering but not predestining state building in post–World War II Malaysia. Divergent levels of postcolonial state infrastructural power thus exhibit deep if indirect foundations in the identity cleavages inherited from preindependence eras. This cross-region comparative exploration highlights the analytical leverage gained from systematically incorporating preexisting cross-case differences into critical juncture accounts.

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