(Dis)connected Empires

(Dis)connected Empires PDF Author: Zoltán Biedermann
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198823398
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
(Dis)connected Empires takes the reader on a global journey to explore the triangle formed during the sixteenth century between the Portuguese empire, the empire of Kotte in Sri Lanka, and the Catholic Monarchy of the Spanish Habsburgs. It explores nine decades of connections, cross-cultural diplomacy, and dialogue, to answer one troubling question: why, in the end, did one side decide to conquer the other? To find the answer, Biedermann explores the imperial ideas that shaped the politics of Renaissance Iberia and sixteenth-century Sri Lanka. (Dis)connected Empires argues that, whilst some of these ideas and the political idioms built around them were perceived as commensurate by the various parties involved, differences also emerged early on. This prepared the ground for a new kind of conquest politics, which changed the inter-imperial game at the end of the sixteenth century. The transition from suzerainty-driven to sovereignty-fixated empire-building changed the face of Lankan and Iberian politics forever, and is of relevance to global historians at large. Through its scrutiny of diplomacy, political letter-writing, translation practices, warfare, and art, (Dis)connected Empires paints a troubling panorama of connections breeding divergence and leading to communicational collapse. It examines a key chapter in the pre-history of British imperialism in Asia, highlighting how diplomacy and mutual understandings can, under certain conditions, produce conquest.

(Dis)connected Empires

(Dis)connected Empires PDF Author: Zoltán Biedermann
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198823398
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Get Book Here

Book Description
(Dis)connected Empires takes the reader on a global journey to explore the triangle formed during the sixteenth century between the Portuguese empire, the empire of Kotte in Sri Lanka, and the Catholic Monarchy of the Spanish Habsburgs. It explores nine decades of connections, cross-cultural diplomacy, and dialogue, to answer one troubling question: why, in the end, did one side decide to conquer the other? To find the answer, Biedermann explores the imperial ideas that shaped the politics of Renaissance Iberia and sixteenth-century Sri Lanka. (Dis)connected Empires argues that, whilst some of these ideas and the political idioms built around them were perceived as commensurate by the various parties involved, differences also emerged early on. This prepared the ground for a new kind of conquest politics, which changed the inter-imperial game at the end of the sixteenth century. The transition from suzerainty-driven to sovereignty-fixated empire-building changed the face of Lankan and Iberian politics forever, and is of relevance to global historians at large. Through its scrutiny of diplomacy, political letter-writing, translation practices, warfare, and art, (Dis)connected Empires paints a troubling panorama of connections breeding divergence and leading to communicational collapse. It examines a key chapter in the pre-history of British imperialism in Asia, highlighting how diplomacy and mutual understandings can, under certain conditions, produce conquest.

Digital Disconnect

Digital Disconnect PDF Author: Robert W. McChesney
Publisher: New Press, The
ISBN: 1595588914
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Celebrants and skeptics alike have produced valuable analyses of the Internet's effect on us and our world, oscillating between utopian bliss and dystopian hell. But according to Robert W. McChesney, arguments on both sides fail to address the relationship between economic power and the digital world. McChesney's award-winning Rich Media, Poor Democracy skewered the assumption that a society drenched in commercial information is a democratic one. In Digital Disconnect McChesney returns to this provocative thesis in light of the advances of the digital age, incorporating capitalism into the heart of his analysis. He argues that the sharp decline in the enforcement of antitrust violations, the increase in patents on digital technology and proprietary systems, and other policies and massive indirect subsidies have made the Internet a place of numbing commercialism. A small handful of monopolies now dominate the political economy, from Google, which garners an astonishing 97 percent share of the mobile search market, to Microsoft, whose operating system is used by over 90 percent of the world's computers. This capitalistic colonization of the Internet has spurred the collapse of credible journalism, and made the Internet an unparalleled apparatus for government and corporate surveillance, and a disturbingly anti-democratic force. In Digital Disconnect Robert McChesney offers a groundbreaking analysis and critique of the Internet, urging us to reclaim the democratizing potential of the digital revolution while we still can.

The Great Disconnect

The Great Disconnect PDF Author: Marco Magnani
Publisher: EGEA spa
ISBN: 8823887712
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Despite its excesses and contradictions, globalization has lifted billions of people out of poverty, enabled scientific progress, and reduced conflict. Nevertheless, globalization is going through a deep crisis. Marco Magnani identifies four forces that are fueling the «great disconnect»: economic and technological trends are reshaping global value chains; do-mestic political dynamics are fostering closures in an attempt to protect national interests; external shocks (pandemics, wars, financial crises) are exposing the vulnerability of the global system; geopolitical objectives are encouraging to restrict relations to countries perceived as friends. In such a scenario, politics prevails over economics, regionalization increases, and the instability of international alliances soars, partly due to the proliferation of «free agent» countries seeking strategic autonomy. Fragmentation has high economic costs and it increases the risk of conflict. But it may also trigger a new globalization trend. The Arctic, the Under-water, Space and the Digital Revolution can be fronts of competition and dispute, or they can represent the new frontiers of cooperation. The world to come will largely depend on the ability of liberal democracies to defend and promote their values, abroad and at home. The hope is that the revival in the circulation of goods, services, capital, people and knowledge will consolidate rights and spread freedoms.

Reading the Other

Reading the Other PDF Author: Carol de Dobay Rifelj
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472103409
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Combines literature and philosophy to explore whether and to what extent we can know the thoughts and feelings of others

The European Union and Global Social Change

The European Union and Global Social Change PDF Author: József Böröcz
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135255792
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
This book examines just what the European Union is, in the context of the ongoing structural transformation of the global system. The author develops an integrated approach to global transformations, drawing on geopolitics, political geography, international relations, economics, economic and political history, political economy and macro-sociology to discuss how this supra-state organisation, that shares and pools the sovereignty of some of the wealthiest states of the modern world, makes sense. The book: Interprets the ongoing transformation of west European public authority in the context of the global geopolitical economy of competition, cooperation and conflict Examines the consequences of west European integration for the global system in a longue-durée perspective, developing a new, geopolitical dialect within world-systems analysis, sharpening some of the conceptual tools developed by its paradigm-setters. Develops a new conceptualization for the EU’s global geopolitical strategy, which the author describes this strategy as the elasticity of size Developing a deeper understanding of global social change and west European strategies of global advantage-maintenance and power-management, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of European Politics, International Politics, International Relations Theory and Globalization Studies.

Escape Attempts

Escape Attempts PDF Author: Stanley Cohen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134921160
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
From sexual fantasies to holidays this marvellous book charts our escape attempts. In a series of dazzling commentaries the authors reveal the ordinary and extraordinary ways in which we seek to defy the despair of the breakfast table and the office But the book is much more than a first-rate cartography of everyday life. It crackles with important theoretical insights about how `normality' is managed. This fully revised edition contains a superb new introduction, `Life After Postmodernism', which exposes the conceits of the postmodernist adventure and which should be required reading for anyone interested in making sense of everyday life.

A Buyer's Market

A Buyer's Market PDF Author: Anthony Powell
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226677354
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Anthony Powell’s universally acclaimed epic A Dance to the Music of Time offers a matchless panorama of twentieth-century London. Now, for the first time in decades, readers in the United States can read the books of Dance as they were originally published—as twelve individual novels—but with a twenty-first-century twist: they’re available only as e-books. The second volume, A Buyer’s Market (1952),finds young Nick Jenkins struggling to establish himself in London. Amid the fever of the 1920s, he attends formal dinners and wild parties; makes his first tentative forays into the worlds of art, culture, and bohemian life; and suffers his first disappointments in love. Old friends come and go, but the paths they once shared are rapidly diverging: Stringham is settling into a life of debauchery and drink, Templer is plunging into the world of business, and Widmerpool, though still a figure of out-of-place grotesquerie, remains unbowed, confident in his own importance and eventual success. A Buyer’s Market is a striking portrait of the pleasures and anxieties of early adulthood, set against a backdrop of London life and culture at one of its most effervescent moments. "Anthony Powell is the best living English novelist by far. His admirers are addicts, let us face it, held in thrall by a magician."--ChicagoTribune "A book which creates a world and explores it in depth, which ponders changing relationships and values, which creates brilliantly living and diverse characters and then watches them grow and change in their milieu. . . . Powell's world is as large and as complex as Proust's."--Elizabeth Janeway, New YorkTimes "One of the most important works of fiction since the Second World War. . . . The novel looked, as it began, something like a comedy of manners; then, for a while, like a tragedy of manners; now like a vastly entertaining, deeply melancholy, yet somehow courageous statement about human experience."--Naomi Bliven, New Yorker “The most brilliant and penetrating novelist we have.”--Kingsley Amis

The New Peasantries

The New Peasantries PDF Author: Jan Douwe van der Ploeg
Publisher: Earthscan
ISBN: 1849773165
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
This book explores the position, role and significance of the peasantry in an era of globalization, particularly of the agrarian markets and food industries. It argues that the peasant condition is characterized by a struggle for autonomy that finds expression in the creation and development of a self-governed resource base and associated forms of sustainable development. In this respect the peasant mode of farming fundamentally differs from entrepreneurial and corporate ways of farming. The author demonstrates that the peasantries are far from waning. Instead, both industrialized and developing countries are witnessing complex and richly chequered processes of 're-peasantization', with peasants now numbering over a billion worldwide. The author's arguments are based on three longitudinal studies (in Peru, Italy and The Netherlands) that span 30 years and provide original and thought-provoking insights into rural and agrarian development processes. The book combines and integrates different bodies of literature: the rich traditions of peasant studies, development sociology, rural sociology, neo-institutional economics and the recently emerging debates on Empire.

The Democratization Disconnect

The Democratization Disconnect PDF Author: Brian K. Grodsky
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442269359
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
The most recent wave of democratic revolutions has convinced many in the West of the triumph of political rights. But in this provocative book, Brian Grodsky argues forcefully that nothing could be further from the truth. Today’s revolutionaries—both democratic and non-democratic—are much like those who preceded them throughout history. They’ve all come into power promising enhanced political, but especially economic, rights: higher wages, better living standards, more security. The difference between today’s pro-democracy leaders and yesterday’s non-democratic ones, the author demonstrates, rests on the perceived international legitimacy of the democratic template. Now, when even the most abusive regimes feel the need to label themselves democracies, opponents delegitimize rulers by calling them undemocratic. This sets the stage for what Grodsky calls the “democratization disconnect.” Leaders and followers fight for political change not as an end, but as the most acceptable means to attain economic rights. But by selling democracy as a panacea for the ills of the preceding regime, new elites simultaneously cheapen the notion of democracy and, by creating unrealistic popular expectations, set it up for failure. Putting a fresh new spin on hotly debated current events, this clear-eyed and informed book will be essential reading for all politically engaged readers.

The Crumbling of Empire

The Crumbling of Empire PDF Author: M. J. Bonn
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351799037
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
This book concerns the end of the age of colonization and the inherent changes in the world economy. It discusses the author’s perception of the disintegration of free trade and ideas on the solution of federation. Starting with an introduction to economic thought and history the author then presents the state of the world at the time of writing in terms of colonies and dependencies and looks at economic nationalism and economic separatism. This discursive text is an important account of the global economic issues of the early twentieth century by one of the most well-known economists of the age who became a foremost expert in international financial affairs.