Empire

Not-guilty verdicts, mistrials, and impunity for the Bundy family and many of their supporters in the armed confrontations over public land use in Nevada and Oregon. Expanded access for private oil, gas, mining, and logging industries and the downsizing of national monuments such as Bears Ears lead by Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke. A number of highly contentious debates and sensationalized events have again focused attention on land held in the public domain by the United States. This essay argues that federal land policy as a form of colonial administration has been constitutive for the logic of expectation as property in what is now the United States. From the state land cessions negotiated on behalf of the Articles of Confederation to the preemption acts (1830–1841) to the homestead acts (1862–1916) to present-day demands for land transfer, the acquisition and disposal of the so-called public domain have been central to westward colonization, the consolidation of the nation-state, and the promise of land ownership as the ostensible foundation of individual liberty. These dynamics are evident in contemporary conflicts over public lands and arguments for the transfer of public lands to either state or private ownership. Approaching the Bundy occupations as flashpoints that illuminate competing interpretations and claims to land within the history of westward colonization, this essay seeks to demonstrate the ways in which expectation emerges from particular economies of dispossession of indigenous peoples that have historically worked through and across the division of public and private property.

Federally-recognized tribes must adapt to many ecological challenges arising from climate change, from the effects of glacier retreat on the habitats of culturally significant species to how sea level rise forces human communities to relocate. The governmental and social institutions supporting tribes in adapting to climate change are often constrained by political obstructions, raising concerns about justice. Beyond typical uses of justice, which call attention to violations of formal rights or to considerations about the degree to which some populations may have caused anthropogenic climate change, a justice framework should guide how leaders, scientists and professionals of all heritages and who work with or for federally-recognized tribes understand what actions are morally essential for supporting tribes’ adaptation efforts. This paper motivates a shift to a forward-looking framework of justice. The framework situates justice within the systems of responsibilities that matter to tribes and many others, which range from webs of inter-species relationships to government-to-government partnerships. Justice is achieved when these systems of responsibilities operate in ways that support the continued flourishing of tribal communities.

The nature of the relationship between the Assyrian state and the Syro-Hittite states is often represented in the writings of archaeologists and ancient historians under the rubric of imperialism, Assyrian sovereignty, and the Syro-Hittite resistance, an unchanging formula largely based on center-periphery models. This structuralist model of fixed relationships is thus characterized as a firmly-set trajectory of power relations and a teleological narrative of conquest, ending without exception with the eventual and complete submission and subjugation of Syro-Hittite states to Assyrian military power. While Syro-Hittite states are represented as vulnerable and politically weak entities, the Assyrian state is referred as an “expansionistic imperial power” or “superior invading force”. Had they escaped direct Assyrian sovereignty, these peripheral communities were at least deemed “Assyrianizing” in their material culture. This a priori qualification of Syro-Hittite-Assyrian relationships as an imbalanced power distribution is an outcome of the preponderance of studies of Assyrian sovereignty with an obsession with the (cosmic) image of the sovereign in his visual and verbal manifestations. Secondly it is often assumed that the study of Assyrian imperialism has always operated through coercion and military violence. Alternative forms of engagement between the Neo-Assyrian state and the Syro-Hittite kingdoms such as diplomacy, political negotiation, trade, exchange of ideas, politics of settlement, land management, taxation or traveling craftsmen and circulation of technology and knowledge are much more rarely discussed. In this paper, I suggest that historical perspectives on the unchallenged Assyrian imperialism are often driven by the alluring, yet biased perspectives offered by the sumptuous, if not excessive corpus of Assyrian annalistic accounts, state sponsored texts, and imperial monuments. Therefore such perspectives prioritize short-term political histories of conquest and domination over other longer term and more horizontally distributed aspects of the past such as cultural practices, ecological histories, political landscapes, socialization, or material worlds. The historicist accounts of the Near Eastern past can be challenged and perhaps balanced by evidence offered by archaeological, material, and environmental research, which present alternative and often contrasting perspectives on these particular histories. Prioritizing textual evidence often leaves out the material flows, delicate negotiations of power, dynamics of trade and exchange and the politics of resource extraction. Attending to other forms of evidence allows us to reflect on the complexity of the relationships between Assyria and the Syro-Hittite states. In this article, I pay particular attention to such interactions and encounters that are other than military in nature, and give priority to material evidence that challenge standard imperialist narratives of Assyrian textual accounts.

This paper argues that capitalist accumulation requires imperialist expansion, and that this expansion creates a “raced” surplus laboring population. The argument proceeds in seven parts: that Marx’s assertion in chapter 25 of Capital that capitalism produces an ever-increasing relative surplus population is tenable in all but the longest of time frames; that imperial expansion played an important role in the transition to capitalism, though not for the reasons traditionally given; that overinvestment rather than the increasing organic composition of capital best explains imperial expansion in the capitalist era; that the uneven development of capitalism produces at the same time an uneven development of the surplus laboring population; that race has served as a mark of membership in the surplus laboring population; that by intertwining itself with the surplus laboring population, race serves to perpetuate itself despite its contradictions; and that despite this resilience, the contradictions of race also set in process conflicts that make it possible to overcome imperialism.

A critical, comparative analysis of the exhibition project Utopia Station, mounted by Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Molly Nesbit, and Rirkrit Tiravanija at the 2003 Venice Biennale, against Hardt and Negri's 2000 treatise, Empire. This essay was written in 2006 and originally published online in the journal PART (no. 12, 2007), which is now defunct as far as I can tell. I wrote this piece in my first year of grad school, but it has been cited by a number of scholars so I share it here in case it may be of further use to others.

‘Based on exhaustive work in numerous archives and in several languages, Lorenzo Kamel has produced what I think is one of the most definitive works on the transition from empire to nation-state. It is impressively ambitious and does what many major historians have been promising to do: to show how hard, Western conceptions of identity shaped and formed the thinking and decisions of statesmen and other political elites in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It also deals with the penetration of hard national categories among the various peoples of the empire. It is an authoritative book and will be very widely consulted.’
NICHOLAS DOUMANIS
Author of Before the Nation and Professor, School of Humanities and Languages, The University of New South Wales – Sydney
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‘This book will make an important mark on the field. From Empire to Sealed Identities shows the ways in which ethnic and other divisions were historically constructed in the Middle East under the influence of imperial powers. The work combines meticulous archival research in multiple languages with careful analysis of broader trends to map the transition from empire to homogenized nation-states. This ability to document with rich detail and at the same time be able to present the larger picture with great clarity is rare. The author pulls off the feat with great erudition.’
BETH BARON
Distinguished Professor of History, The Graduate Center and City College, CUNY
Past President, Middle East Studies Association (MESA)
Director, Middle East and Middle Eastern American Center
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‘In this engaging revisionary study, Lorenzo Kamel shows how modern Western-ist intellectual prejudices have distorted our understanding of identity and conflict in the modern Middle East. Based on original archival research and an exhaustive survey of secondary literature, the author reveals a world that can only be characterized as “medieval” if one misunderstands the Middle Ages. Focussing on the long nineteenth century, the book provides a chronological continuation of much of the most interesting work being done in pre-modern Mediterranean Studies.’
BRIAN A. CATLOS
Author of Muslims of Latin Christendom and Professor, Faculty of Religious Studies, University of Colorado Boulder
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‘Lorenzo Kamel is a dedicated and meticulous scholar, extremely experienced and internationally recognized for his research methodology. His extensive archival work, which forms the basis of many of his most important publications, is impressive by any academic standard. His archival research, informed by exemplary linguistic skills, has, without question, created new understandings of the complex dynamics shaping our inquiry into modern European empires, and the history of the Middle East in the 19th and 20th centuries. The Middle East from Empire to Sealed Identities will continue this outstanding trend.’
SARA ROY
Senior Research Scholar, Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES)

A collective intellectual biography that sheds new light on the Annales school, structuralism, and racial democracy.

Would the most recognizable ideas in the French social sciences have developed without the influence of Brazilian intellectuals? While any study of Brazilian social sciences acknowledges the influence of French scholars, Ian Merkel argues the reverse is also true: the “French” social sciences were profoundly marked by Brazilian intellectual thought, particularly through the University of São Paulo. Through the idea of the “cluster,” Merkel traces the intertwined networks of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Fernand Braudel, Roger Bastide, and Pierre Monbeig as they overlapped at USP and engaged with Brazilian scholars such as Mário de Andrade, Gilberto Freyre, and Caio Prado Jr..

Through this collective intellectual biography of Brazilian and French social sciences, Terms of Exchange reveals connections that shed new light on the Annales school, structuralism, and racial democracy, even as it prompts us to revisit established thinking on the process of knowledge formation through fieldwork and intellectual exchange. At a time when canons are being rewritten, this book reframes the history of modern social scientific thought.

"Guavas for Dummies, American Jíbaras, & Postnational Autonomy: When I Was Puerto Rican in the Hemispheric Turn" (2019) re-engages this text after I taught it in Puerto Rico four years. In this 2009 essay, Santiago’s memoir is said to bridge U.S. and Caribbean lit. WIWPR begins with a remembered Puerto Rico, and ends in the author’s adulthood in the USA. Studying Santiago’s text within a trajectory of immigrant narratives familiarizes the text to readers who are often processing their own entries into the US / its cultural orbit. This essay examines Santiago’s representation of jibaros, a subculture whose place in in Puerto Rico parallels the conflicted relationship many Jamaicans have with Rastafarians. Also, the theme of “Translating and Resisting Imperialism” is developed through a close reading of the chapter “The American Invasion of MacÚn.” Santiago’s treatment of gender roles in her family is also explored.

How did Spain rule over an immense global empire for more than three centuries given the absence of a standing army and the presence of stark inequalities? In this course students will learn how historians have answered this enduring question, and will analyze a range of primary sources such as wills, artworks, and petitions to develop theories of their own. We explore the experience of empire from the perspectives of diverse groups of people including free and enslaved Africans, indigenous men and women, mestizo soldiers, nuns, and colonial elites. By studying the writings of Andean intellectuals and the testimonies of slaves who took their masters to court or rose up in violent rebellions against the colonial order, students will develop a deeper understanding of the complexity of Spanish rule and its variations across time and place. We also consider the legacies of this global empire, and controversies about how we tell its history.
This course is chronologically and thematically organized. It begins in 1491, on the eve of the Iberian invasion of the Americas and the Caribbean, and ends in 1898, when Spain lost the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico.  The semester is structured around four myths about the global Spanish empire that persist in historiography and popular culture: the myth of colonial rule by coercion; the ‘commercial revolution’ and the myth of mobility; and the myth of imperial collapse. Key themes include the development of racial ideologies in the Iberian world, and their impact on the evolution of racial slavery.

The story of the modern feminist and humanitarian is a relatively short one, at least according to popular knowledge. The timeline tends to begin in 1948, with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Then come moments in the 1960s and 1970s, like the adoption of CEDAW in 1979. From more recent years, we cite the UN Sustainable Development Goals of 2015, or #MeToo’s viral moment in 2017.

My research expands this narrative by tracing the history of the “modern feminist humanitarian” to the late nineteenth century. I question the idea that feminism and humanitarianism were modern inventions of the post-World War Two era by turning to an exceptional historical case study: policy, research, and advocacy on female prostitution in Cambodia during the period of the French protectorate (1863-1954). I pose the following questions about past history and present practice: first, how do ideas about oppressed/emancipated female gender and sexuality shape the humanitarian mandates of states and institutions? And second, how can women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, framed by histories of imperial and colonial processes, move scholarship and activism to think about the ethics of being a feminist humanitarian?

As historians of gender and empire have demonstrated, the lives of women can often be traced by following what were the protectionist enterprises of imperial and colonial processes, and such projects often had nebulous or dangerous consequences for women. My research on projects that the French implemented in Cambodia corroborates this. This notion echoes scholarship pointing out that humanitarianism and human rights are not mutually dependent, leaving us with an unsettling thought: humanitarian interventions, even those designed to be gender-responsive, can be disempowering in its attempt to empower. Awareness of a historical tradition of gender-based interventions should alert development scholars and practitioners to critical examination of their own feminist research and gender mainstreaming programs. By interrogating the modern feminist and humanitarian claims made in the context of protecting women in colonial Cambodia, I challenge present policymakers and activists who claim to practice gender-sensitive and human-centered approaches in humanitarian and development programs across the Global South.

The Philippine-American War (c.1899 – 1913), which led to the colonial subjugation of the Philippines by the United States for over forty years and the suppression of the first independent republic in South-East Asia, is one of America’s forgotten wars. The historical amnesia surrounding this conflict is no accident. It is an enduring legacy of US government and military propaganda, widely disseminated by a largely supportive corporate press, which contributed in no small way to the American victory both at home and abroad. Propaganda is understood here as the deliberate falsification, distortion or tendentious portrayal of events to justify a political cause to the wider public. What I want to argue about this case, is that successful propaganda does not occur in the context of an otherwise rational and empirically verifiable public discourse. Successful war propaganda has to be reconciled with the self-respecting, symbolic self-interpretations of a national community. In the case of the United States, founded in part on a revolutionary republican imaginary but also a racialised and expansionist missionary vision of “Manifest Destiny”, this was not a simple or uncontested matter back in 1899.

This article provides a brief account of the American conquest of the Philippines and the attendant atrocities that accompanied the invasion. It will also explain how these brutal events were justified to the American public as hard but necessary acts of “Benevolent Assimilation”, for the benign tutelage of the Filipino. In particular, attention is paid to how propaganda was used to justify a colonial war, dehumanize the Filipino “other”, rationalize atrocities and erase alternative interpretations of events from the official record.

"Europe and the Islamic World sheds much-needed light on the shared roots of Islamic and Western cultures and on the richness of their inextricably intertwined histories, refuting once and for all the misguided notion of a "clash of civilizations" between the Muslim world and Europe. In this landmark book, three eminent historians bring to life the complex and tumultuous relations between Genoans and Tunisians, Alexandrians and the people of Constantinople, Catalans and Maghrebis--the myriad groups and individuals whose stories reflect the common cultural, intellectual, and religious heritage of Europe and Islam. Since the seventh century, when the armies of Constantinople and Medina fought for control of Syria and Palestine, there has been ongoing contact between the Muslim world and the West. This sweeping history vividly recounts the wars and the crusades, the alliances and diplomacy, commerce and the slave trade, technology transfers, and the intellectual and artistic exchanges. Here readers are given an unparalleled introduction to key periods and events, including the Muslim conquests, the collapse of the Byzantine Empire, the commercial revolution of the medieval Mediterranean, the intellectual and cultural achievements of Muslim Spain, the crusades and Spanish reconquest, the rise of the Ottomans and their conquest of a third of Europe, European colonization and decolonization, and the challenges and promise of this entwined legacy today. As provocative as it is groundbreaking, this book describes this shared history in all its richness and diversity, revealing how ongoing encounters between Europe and Islam have profoundly shaped both."

This paper traces the current prescription opioid crisis to some of its origins in the orders of race, colonialism and empire that connect our present day to the past. It is something of a sketch of a larger work that seeks to complicate our understanding of the power dynamics at play in what some estimate to be the world's most profound anthropogenic public health crisis

Multitud ha de ser un libro no solo ampliamente recomendado para
especialistas en temas de riesgo y terrorismo, sino en cuestiones de bio-política en general. La posición inicial de los autores intenta ser una lectura holística de  comprensión respecto al problema de la modernidad capitalista. Esta nueva fase implica un cambio, el cual puede ser interpretado como amenazante o simplemente una oportunidad para saltar a un estado más democrático en donde los actores y sus subjetividades se combinen. Una de las particularidades que distingue a estos dos pensadores del resto, es la visión del rol de la bio-política como mecanismo de adoctrinamiento orientado a crear comunidad. En ese contexto, la multitud debe ser considerada como un producto residual del capitalismo y de la excesiva movilidad de las fuerzas
productivas. Pero a la vez, la multitud es una fiel expresión que desafía la
propiedad privada. La modernidad, después de todo, crea estados paradojales en constante movimiento.

O presente texto tem como propósito a intenção de procurar definir o que é um império
e que componentes são necessárias para se definir o mesmo.
Império extravasa o domínio político e entra na esfera da economia e da cultura, ou será
que sempre lá esteve? Torna-se muitas vezes problemático o instituto humano de fazer uma
historiografia seccionada e etiquetada. Todavia, cada vez mais vemos o cruzamento dos
círculos, bem como de várias ciências, a fim de conseguirmos ter um debate sério e
completo. Hoje, falamos abertamente dos impérios económicos, dizemos tal coisa por
termos a ideia de algo volumoso, gigantesco e/ou megalómano, todavia veremos neste texto
que em alguns casos a dimensão geográfica não é tão importante, ou que não é algo
categórico.

What is Justice? How is it related to Faith? These questions are considered in the context of Empire’s propaganda and the truth of God’s alternative. The truth is: God is open to us in our very otherness, inspiring us to be open to each other. Faith is the recognition of this and the response to it. Justice is rooted in such openness to each other, whereas our being closed to each other causes injustice. But when we recognise this, we must also see our continuing complicity with injustice; when we name the distinction between Empire and Kingdom, we must not exclude current agents of Empire; when we are clear about the difference, we must not forget that, ultimately, God’s openness shakes all such divisions and builds a greater solidarity. So the writing is on the wall – through Daniel, Jeremiah, and Mark 3: 20-30 – warning us not to falsify God’s openness.

The article attempts a comprehensive review of the human security concept in order to question its utility for both research and policy-making. It notes the term’s interdisciplinary and extensively normative content that have facilitated its evolution into a successful security discourse. On the other hand, human security’s wide appeal has as a side-effect an extended conceptual polysemy inhibiting the cumulation of knowledge and the development of a relevant theory. Absence of conceptual clarity has also complicated its policy implementation. The article attempts to break the deadlock and move the debate forward by using the work of John Gerring and Paul A. Barresi on concept formation as an organizing device.

The article centres on the exploration of the fascist attempts to arrange the cinematographic audience in Italian East Africa (1936-1941). Methodologically, it puts the study of original archival records issued by the fascist administration against the background of theories and discourses about cinema for colonial subjects well spread in fascist Italy and in other imperial countries.