Browse

This book argues that the history of human rights can be meaningfully extended from the present all the way back to the late medieval period. It further claims that the key question up until the Age of Revolutions was not whether or not all individuals possessed rights, but rather what happens to our rights when we enter into a political society. Our contemporary rights regime holds that we preserve human rights under all conditions. But in the period between the Wars of Religion and the late Enlightenment, most theorists argued that we had to either give up our rights, or transfer them to government. I show in this book how, why, when, and where the “preservation regime” of rights imposed itself over its rivals. In conclusion, I demonstrate how this earlier history is relevant for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), by showing how the French Declarations of the Rights of Man (1789, 1793) were re-interpreted and repeated in the 150 years after their promulgation.

What is the role of currency statecraft in world politics? When a national money gains international appeal, the power resources of the issuing country are augmented. Currency statecraft is about what the country chooses to do – or not do – with its currency power. This book begins with the premise that every international money goes through a life cycle, from youth to maturity to (eventually) decline. At each stage, the supplier has three choices: to be pro-active in favor of international use, to resist internationalization, or to remain neutral. The central argument of the book is that beyond purely material factors, currency statecraft is motivated by cognitive considerations having to do with a society’s underlying sense of identity. In particular, policy is shaped by the extent of a state’s geopolitical ambition: how driven it is to build or sustain a prominent place in the community of nations. Extensive study of experience in the modern era demonstrates the key role played by the presence or absence of geopolitical ambition in the rise of international currencies like the West German Deutsche mark or Japanese yen, the long-standing dominance of the US dollar, and the decline of the British pound. The book concludes with a look at the growing rivalry between America’s greenback and the emergent renminbi of China – the central drama on the world currency stage today. Analysis suggests that a new era of open and costly monetary hostilities may be approaching.

While the world has seen much progress in economic growth and poverty reduction over the last few decades, the persistence of extreme poverty and its increased concentration in specific places has stimulated renewed interest in the processes of economic development and the possibility of poverty traps. This volume, based on papers first presented at an NBER conference in June 2016, draws together an outstanding collection of new studies of the dynamic, stochastic processes by which households accumulate assets and increase their productivity and earnings potential, as well as the conditions under which some individuals, groups, and economies struggle to escape poverty, and when and why adverse shocks have persistent welfare consequences. Poverty traps may arise when poverty becomes self-reinforcing because the poor's equilibrium behaviors perpetuate low standards of living. The poverty traps hypothesis carries especially important implications for the design and evaluation of policies and projects intended to reduce poverty. The chapters in this volume extend and integrate the range of the mechanisms hypothesized to generate poverty traps, including feedback loops between poverty and mental health, aspirations and preferences. The chapters link the relevant theory to empirics, and offer new empirical evidence that highlights both the insights and the limits of a poverty traps lens on the contemporary policy commitment to achieve zero extreme poverty worldwide by 2030.

Too often, notions of capitalist change rely on the myth of the willful entrepreneur from the global North who transforms the economy and delivers modernity—for good or ill—to the rest of the world. Cigarettes Inc. offers an intimate cultural history that upends this story, revealing the myriad cross-cultural encounters that produced all levels of corporate life prior to World War II. In this startling new account of corporate innovation and expansion, this book uncovers a corporate network rooted in Jim Crow segregation that stretched between the United States and China. Hundreds of white southerners, bright leaf tobacco, cigarettes, and industry expertise flowed through this multinational network. Cigarettes, Inc. teems with a global cast—from Egyptian, American, and Chinese entrepreneurs to a multiracial set of farmers, merchants, factory workers, marketers, and even baseball players, jazz musicians, and sex workers. Through their stories, Cigarettes, Inc. newly accounts for the cigarette’s spectacular rise in popularity and in the process offers nothing less than a sweeping reinterpretation of the corporation and its relationship to empire.

Following the launch of Sputnik, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization became a prominent sponsor of scientific research in its member countries, a role it retained until the end of the Cold War. As NATO marks sixty years since the establishment of its Science Committee, the main organizational force promoting its science programs, Greening the Alliance is the first book to chart NATO’s scientific patronage—and the motivations behind it—from the organization’s early days to the dawn of the twenty-first century. Drawing on previously unseen documents from NATO’s own archives, Simone Turchetti reveals how its investments were rooted in the alliance’s defense and surveillance needs, needs that led it to establish a program prioritizing environmental studies. A long-overlooked and effective diplomacy exercise, NATO’s “greening” at one point constituted the organization’s chief conduit for negotiating problematic relations between allies. But while Greening the Alliance explores this surprising coevolution of environmental monitoring and surveillance, tales of science advisers issuing instructions to bomb oil spills with napalm or Dr. Strangelove–like experts eager to divert the path of hurricanes with atomic weapons make it clear: the coexistence of these forces has not always been harmonious. Reflecting on this rich, complicated legacy in light of contemporary global challenges like climate change, Turchetti offers both an eye-opening history of international politics and environmental studies and a thoughtful assessment of NATO’s future.

This group biography of the X Club follows the nine members from their family and cultural roots, through their early friendships, to their intense lobbying campaigns in the 1860s, and on to their years of scientific power and cultural authority. Although often identified as professionalizers of science, few of their preoccupations fall under this heading, the exception being their concern with developing the infrastructure of scientific research –specialist journalism, specialist libraries, and bibliographies. Their multifaceted ambitions are largely summed up as a shared determination to promote the dignity and independence of science and scientific men. They rejected the imprimaturs of aristocratic patronage, theological orthodoxy, and practical utility. Rather, scientific achievement should itself receive cultural and social recognition. More broadly, they sought to change “ways of thinking” and to build a secular culture and society. The quieter members are shown to share the naturalism of the leading publicists; their shared project was to include human life, mind and society with the natural order. The achievements of the conspicuous publicists are shown to depend on the reliable support of the obscure members and of many allies, both within and outside science. Thus, the rich material on the nine members enables this microhistory of the X Club to become a macrohistory of the operation of Victorian scientific societies and the place of science in Victorian culture, and heroic modes of interpretation, which attribute foresight and power to a few individuals, are countered.

Guerrilla Marketing argues that counterinsurgency and marketing have merged together in Colombia. More specifically the book analyzes a government program to persuade FARC guerrillas to defect from the rebel movement while also rebranding the Colombian army as a humanitarian actor. This program in the Ministry of Defense has partnered with Lowe/SSP3, an advertising firm that has managed the brands of Mazda and RedBull in Colombia. The partnership pitches a new life to guerrilla fighters, one as consumer citizens and entrepreneurial subjects. Those who abandon the insurgency’s ranks are coaxed into informing on their former comrades, providing the military valuable strategic and tactical intelligence. The book develops the concept of brand warfare to describe the fusion of counterinsurgency and consumer culture into an affective assemblage that is key to understanding governance in the early twenty-first century. Guerrilla Marketing follows stories from the perspective of former and active guerrillas from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), military officers, marketers, peace negotiators in Havana, and exiles living in unexpected places, such as rural Sweden. Testimonials, and their accompanying drawings by Colombian artist Lucas Ospina, separate the chapters. In its conclusion the book analyzes the implications for other war-torn countries, criticizing how Colombia has reframed demobilization in a way that weaponizes the peace-building ethos of the policy. The epilogue contemplates the book’s implications for Colombia’s post-peace accord future by analyzing the FARC’s own guerrilla marketing at its tenth and final conference as a guerrilla army.

About a millennium ago, sometime between 1020 and 1050, in Cairo, a large illustrated book on the heavens and the Earth was completed. Modern scholars were unaware of its existence until its recent ‘discovery’ and acquisition in 2002 by the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford. It is today referred to as The Book of Curiosities, and it contains a remarkable series of early maps and astronomical diagrams, most of which are unparalleled in any Greek, Latin or Arabic material. The treatise is composed of two parts. The first is on the heavens, moving the reader from the outermost sphere of the stars through the spheres of the five planets visible to the naked eye down to the sub-lunar world of winds and comets. The second part is on the Earth, beginning with calculation of the Earth’s circumference, then moving to maps of the inhabited world, islands of the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, and major lakes and rivers of the world, ending with strange plants and animals inhabiting the Earth. Lost Maps of the Caliphs examines how the discovery of this manuscript contributes to the history of cartography, to the history of astronomy and astrology, and to our knowledge of Mediterranean and Indian Ocean networks of communication. It includes new perspectives on the history of maritime charts before the age of the portolans, on the patterns of Mediterranean travel and trade before the Crusades, and on Fatimid–Ismaʿili missionary networks in East Africa and the Indus Valley.

Musical Vitalities charts a new path for music studies by blending the study of musical works with perspectives drawn from the life sciences. In opposition to humanist approaches that insist on a separation between culture and nature—approaches that appear increasingly untenable in an era defined by human-generated climate change—Musical Vitalities treats music as one example of the cultural practices and biotic arts of the animal kingdom rather than as categorically distinct from nonhuman forms of sonic expression. The book challenges the human exceptionalism that has allowed musicologists to overlook music’s structural resemblances to the songs of nonhuman species, the intricacies of music’s physiological impact on listeners, and the many analogues between music’s formal processes and those of the dynamic natural world. Through close readings of music and aesthetics that suggest wide-ranging analogies between music and nature, Musical Vitalities seeks to both rekindle the critical potential of nineteenth-century music and rejoin the humans at the center of the humanities with the nonhumans whose evolutionary endowments and planetary fates they share. In its discussion of organicism, formalism, critical plant studies, biosemiotics, and systems theory, the book puts canonical publications by figures such as Immanuel Kant, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Eduard Hanslick in conversation with more recent thinkers including Elizabeth Grosz, Michael Marder, Donna Haraway, and Eduardo Kohn. The piano music of Robert Schumann occupies a special place in the book, which features interpretations and analyses of the Arabesque, op. 18, Blumenstück, op. 19, and Waldszenen, op. 82.

Written from the dual perspective of a cultural/music historian and a dramaturg who worked on the bicentennial production of The Ring of the Nibelung at La Scala Milan and the Berlin State Opera, The Trouble with Wagner engages the deep politics and aesthetics of Wagner's music dramas as well as the responsibility of the stage to bring them both to the visible surface. An introductory chapter seeks an original understanding of the historical, philosophical, ideological, and formal foundations of Wagner's works. The four central chapters focus on the four works of the Ring cycle. An afterword places Wagner at the start of what has become known as the post-secular, with a concluding discussion of post-secular claims as they inform the debate about the Wagner taboo in Israel.