scholarly journals Strange Parallels: Patterns in Eurasian Social Evolution

2011 ◽  
pp. 538-552 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Turchin
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Review Essay ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Social Evolution ◽  
General Trend ◽  
World History ◽  
State Building ◽  
Cultural Integration ◽  
Political Integration ◽  
State Breakdown

Most professional historians have abandoned the search for general patterns and laws of history, but not Victor Lieberman. Strange Parallels II (SP II), following on SP I, proposes that similar mechanisms governed state building in such different, and distant, regions as Southeast Asia, China, Western Europe, and Russia. During the period covered by Lieberman (c.800–1830) the general trend within these regions of Eurasia was towards increasing political and cultural integration. This overall trend was not monotonic; it was periodically interrupted by interregna – periods of state breakdown and territorial fragmentation. However, as time unfolded the interregna became shorter and less disruptive. Remarkably, during the second millennium cycles of political integration and disintegration became increasingly correlated between the widely separated Eurasian regions. Lieberman’s bold thesis is combined with truly encyclopedic scholarship and a breathtaking scope. SP II is a major achievement in comparative world history that will take future researchers years to fully digest. This review essay aims to make a first step in this direction.

The Qing Dynasty and Its Neighbors

2008 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 281-304
Author(s):  
Victor Lieberman
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
State Formation ◽  
Qing Dynasty ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Cultural Integration ◽  
Forward Movement ◽  
Inner Asia ◽  
The Qing Dynasty ◽  
Symbolic Resources ◽  
Imperial Expansion

Peter C. Perdue'sChina Marches Westargues that the Qing dynasty's ability to break through historical territorial barriers on China's northwestern frontier reflected greater Manchu familiarity with steppe culture than their Chinese predecessors had exhibited, reinforced by superior commercial, technical, and symbolic resources and the benefits of a Russian alliance. Qing imperial expansion illustrated patterns of territorial consolidation apparent as well in Russia's forward movement in Inner Asia and, ironically, in the heroic, if ultimately futile, projects of the western Mongols who fell victim to the Qing. After summarizing Perdue's thesis, this essay extends his comparisons geographically and chronologically to argue that between 1600 and 1800 states ranging from western Europe through Japan to Southeast Asia exhibited similar patterns of political and cultural integration and that synchronized integrative cycles across Eurasia extended from the ninth to the nineteenth centuries. Yet in its growing vulnerability to Inner Asian domination, China proper—along with other sectors of the “exposed zone” of Eurasia—exemplified a species of state formation that was reasonably distinct from trajectories in sectors of Eurasia that were protected against Inner Asian conquest.

The European identity formation in Ukraine

2017 ◽  
pp. 102-109
Author(s):  
Larysa Kovryk-Tokar
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
European Integration ◽  
European Community ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Political Integration ◽  
European Identity ◽  
European Values

Every nation is quite diverse in terms of his historical destiny, spiritual priorities, and cultural heritage. However, voluntary European integration, which is the final aim of political integration that began in the second half of the twentieth century from Western Europe, provided for an availability of large number of characteristics in common in political cultures of their societies. Therefore, Ukraine needs to find some common determinants that can create inextricable relationship between the European Community and Ukraine. Although Ukrainian culture is an intercultural weave of two East macrocivilizations, according to the author, Ukraine tends to Western-style society with its openness, democracy, tolerance, which constitute the basic values of Europeans. Keywords: Identity, collective identity, European values, European integration

American-European Relations in U. S. World History Textbooks, 1921-2001

2012 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 95-112
Author(s):  
Martin Alm
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
World History ◽  
History Textbooks ◽  
Democratic Tradition ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The U.S ◽  
English Heritage ◽  
Better Than

This article studies U.S. views of the historical relationship between the U.S. and Europe as conceived during the 20th century. This is examined through U.S. World history text books dating from 1921 to 2001. The textbooks view relations within a general teleological narrative of progress through democracy and technology. Generally, the textbooks stress the significan ce of the English heritage to American society. From the American Revolution onwards, however, the U.S. stands as an example to Europe. Beginning with the two world wars, it also intervenes directly in Europe in order to save democracy. In the Cold War, the U.S. finally acknowledges the lea ding role it has been assigned in the world. Through its democratic ideals, the U.S. historically has a spe cial relationship with Great Britain and, by the 20th century, Western Europe in general. An American identity is established both in conjunction with Western Europe, by emphasizing their common democratic tradition, and in opposition to it, by stressing how the Americans have developed this tradition better than the Europeans, creating a more egalitarian and libertarian society. There is a need for Europe to become more like the U.S., and a Europe that does not follow the American lead is viewed with suspicion.

A Review Essay on The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700–1850 by Joel Mokyr

2012 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory Clark
Keyword(s):  
Review Essay ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
World History ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Intellectual Movement

The British Industrial Revolution is the key break in world history. Yet the timing, location, and cause of this Revolution are unsolved puzzles. Joel Mokyr's book is one of a number of recent attempted solutions. He explains the Industrial Revolution through the arrival of a particular ideology in Britain, associated with the earlier European intellectual movement of the Enlightenment. This review considers how Mokyr's “idealist” approach fares as an account of the Industrial Revolution, compared to the spate of recent proposed “materialist” explanations. (JEL N13, N63)

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
State Building ◽  
Court System ◽  
The Times ◽  
The Church ◽  
Written Sources

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Russian and Ukrainian witchcraft from the Middle Ages to the turn of the twentieth century. Like their European neighbors, Russia and the Ukrainian lands recorded incidents of witchcraft and sorcery from the times of the earliest written sources, and along with other Christian cultures, they formally condemned the practice of magic outside of the Church. In synch with their European contemporaries, they saw spikes in formal legal prosecution during the early modern period. In the case of Russia, this was a time of ambitious state building and expansion of the tsarist court system. Formal trials of witches there began as a minute trickle in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, when they were already well underway or even inching toward an end in parts of Western Europe. Peaking in the second half of the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth centuries, Russian and Ukrainian trials abated only during the 1770s but did not cease altogether until the mid-nineteenth century. Witchcraft was energetically prosecuted in Russia and Ukraine after the entire notion of magic had fallen into disrepute (or even become laughable) among most members of the educated classes in Western areas.

scholarly journals An Old Practitioner Still in Search of the métier d'historien Response to Peer Vries, “The Prospects of Global History: Personal Reflections of an Old Believer”

2019 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-127
Author(s):  
Cátia Antunes
Keyword(s):  
Review Essay ◽  
World History ◽  
Global History ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Personal Reflections

Peer Vries's eloquent review essay “The Prospects of Global History: Personal Reflections of an Old Believer” sees the chance to review The Prospect of Global History as an opportunity to champion Global History as a discipline and voice his concerns regarding what, in his view, have become possible abuses or deviancies in the practice of the discipline. His long-standing status as one of the founding fathers of the discipline and of its consecrated Journal of Global History places him in a position of undisputable authority as an old believer, while his far-reaching knowledge of current debates in Global and World History and his poignant views, reflected in the review essay, are trademarks of his work.

State, Power, Anarchism

2011 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-98
Author(s):  
Peter Manicas
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
State Building ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Yale University ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Marginalized Communities ◽  
Hill Country ◽  
Failure State ◽  
State Authority ◽  
History Of

The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. By James C. Scott. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. 464p. $35.00.The book under discussion is James C. Scott's latest contribution to the study of agrarian politics, culture, and society, and to the ways that marginalized communities evade or resist projects of state authority. The book offers a synoptic history of Upland Southeast Asia, a 2.5 million–kilometer region of hill country spanning Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Burma, and China. It offers a kind of “area study.” It also builds on Scott's earlier work on “hidden transcripts” of subaltern groups and on “seeing like a state.” The book raises many important theoretical questions about research methods and social inquiry, the relationship between political science and anthropology, the nature of states, and of modernity more generally. The book is also deeply relevant to problems of “state-building” and “failed states” in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia. As Scott writes, “The huge literature on state-making, contemporary and historic, pays virtually no attention to its obverse: the history of deliberate and reactive statelessness. This is the history of those who got away, and state-making cannot be understood apart from it. This is also what makes it an anarchist history” (p. x).In this symposium, I have invited a number of prominent political and social scientists to comment on the book, its historical narrative, and its broader theoretical implications for thinking about power, state failure, state-building, and foreign policy. How does the book shed light on the limits of states and the modes of resistance to state authority? Are there limits, theoretical and normative, to this “anarchist” understanding of governance and the “art of being governed”?—Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor

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