Author: Brett Bowden
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319524100
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 110
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Book Description
This book explores and explains the reasons why the idea of universal history, a form of teleological history which holds that all peoples are travelling along the same path and destined to end at the same point, persists in political thought. Prominent in Western political thought since the middle of the eighteenth century, the idea of universal history holds that all peoples can be situated in the narrative of history on a continuum between a start and an end point, between the savage state of nature and civilized modernity. Despite various critiques, the underlying teleological principle still prevails in much contemporary thinking and policy planning, including post-conflict peace-building and development theory and practice. Anathema to contemporary ideals of pluralism and multiculturalism, universal history means that not everyone gets to write their own story, only a privileged few. For the rest, history and future are taken out of their hands, subsumed and assimilated into other people’s narrative.
Author: R. Charles Weller
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319620789
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 428
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Book Description
This book makes a unique and timely contribution to world/global historical studies and related fields. It places essential world historical frameworks by top scholars in the field today in clear, direct relation to and conversation with one other, offering them opportunity to enrich, elucidate and, at times, challenge one another. It thereby aims to: (1) offer world historians opportunity to critically reflect upon and refine their essential interpretational frameworks, (2) facilitate more effective and nuanced teaching and learning in and beyond the classroom, (3) provide accessible world historical contexts for specialized areas of historical as well as other fields of research in the humanities, social sciences and sciences, and (4) promote comparative historiographical critique which (a) helps identify continuing research questions for the field of world history in particular, as well as (b) further global peace and dialogue in relation to varying views of our ever-increasingly interconnected, interdependent, multicultural, and globalized world and its shared though diverse and sometimes contested history.
Author: Benjamin de Carvalho
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351168959
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 623
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Book Description
This handbook presents a comprehensive, concise and accessible overview of the field of Historical International Relations (HIR). It summarizes and synthesizes existing contributions to the field while presenting central themes, approaches and methodologies that have driven the development of HIR, providing the reader with a sense of the diversity and research dynamics that are at the heart of this field of study. The wide range of topics covered are grouped under the following headings: Traditions: Demonstrates the wide variety of approaches to HIR. Thinking International Relations Historically: Different ways of thinking IR historically share some common concerns and areas for further investigation. Actors, Processes and Institutions: Explores the processes, actors, practices, and institutions that constitute the core objects of study of many HIR scholars. Situating Historical International Relations: Critically reflects about the situatedness of our objects of study. Approaches: Examines how HIR scholars conduct and reflect about their research, often in dialogue with a variety of perspectives from cognate disciplines. Summarizing key contributions and trends while also sketching out challenges for future inquiry, this is an invaluable resource for students, academics and researchers from a range of disciplines, particularly International Relations, global history, political science, history, sociology, anthropology, peace studies, diplomatic studies, security studies, international political thought, political geography, international law.
Author: Callum Barrell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316519074
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 277
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Book Description
The first complete account of the utilitarians' historical thought, from which emerge new interpretations of their philosophy and politics.
Author: Antonella Alimento
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030800873
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369
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Book Description
This edited collection explores the histories of trade, a peculiar literary genre that emerged in the context of the historiographical and cultural changes promoted by the histoire philosophique movement. It marked a discontinuity with erudition and antiquarianism, and interacted critically with universal history. By comparing and linking the histories of individual peoples within a common historical process, this genre enriched the reflection on civilisation that emerged during the long eighteenth century. Those who looked to the past wanted to understand the political constitutions and manners most appropriate to commerce, and grasp the recurring mechanisms underlying economic development. In this sense, histories of trade constituted a declination of eighteenth-century political economy, and thus became an invaluable analytical and practical tool for a galaxy of academic scholars, journalists, lawyers, administrators, diplomats and government ministers whose ambition was to reform the political, social and economic structure of their nations. Moreover, thanks to these investigations, a lucid awareness of historical temporality and, more particularly, the irrepressible precariousness of economic hegemonies, developed. However, as a field of tension in which multiple and even divergent intellectual sensibilities met, this literary genre also found space for critical assessments that focused on the ambivalence and dangers of commercial civilisation. Examining the complex relationship between the production of wealth and civilisation, this book provides unique insights for scholars of political economy, intellectual history and economic history.
Author: Javier Fernández-Sebastián
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 0429756097
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 356
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Book Description
This book casts a fresh look at what to date has been a relatively unexplored question: the enormous value and usefulness of the metaphor in the understanding and writing of history (and at the historical culture reflected by these metaphors). Mapping a wide range of tropes present in historiography and public discourse, the book identifies some of the key metaphorical resources employed by historians, politicians, and journalists to represent time, history, memory, the past, the present, and the future and examines a selection of analytical concepts of a temporal nature, built upon unmistakeably metaphorical foundations, such as modernity, event, process, revolution, crisis, progress, decline, or transition. The analysis of these and other pillars on which modern history has been built, whether as a philosophy of history, as an academic discipline, or as a set of events, will interest graduates and scholars dealing with the historical and social sciences and the humanities in general. Key Metaphors for History offers a broad overview of historiography and historiosophy, from an unfrequented point of view, halfway between conceptual history, theory of history and metaphorology. Moreover, it constitutes a form of self-reflection of the historian on his or her own positionality when researching and writing history.
Author: Krishna R. Kanchith
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003801994
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 171
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Book Description
This volume critically explores the cultural significance and fate of the “literary” in the European and the Indian traditions as it traces the history of the reception of works that have had a deep hold on the lives and sensibilities of people across time and cultures. The book grapples with three major concepts in the humanities—the literary, the philosophical/theological and the historical. It looks at Homer’s reception by Plato; Virgil’s reception by Christianity; the many responses that The Mahabharata has received over centuries and across cultures in India; and the reception of Kumaravyasa’s Kumaravyasabharata, among other works, and analyses the understanding of truth, time and history that influence the reading of these works in different times and cultural contexts. Part of the Critical Humanities across Cultures series, this book will be useful for scholars and researchers of philosophy, literature, history, comparative literature, cultural studies and post-colonial studies.
Author: Brett Bowden
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
ISBN: 180341684X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 123
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Book Description
Human beings have an overwhelming tendency to overemphasize the significance of the present without considering context or historical perspective. For many, here and now is as good as it gets - we have steadily progressed from a savage past, and all we have to look forward to is the great unknown. But if our literature and cinema are anything to go by, many are convinced that the future will indeed be dystopian. At the same time, arguments abound that living in the moment is a key to happiness and success. However, to privilege the present over the past or future, Brett Bowden argues, is to engage in tempocentrism. More than a mere preoccupation with the present, tempocentrism involves comparing and judging the past in relation to the present, with the tendency to assume that the present isn't only materially and qualitatively different from the past but also superior to it, often morally so. Yet tempocentrism, a mistaken belief in the unprecedented nature of events going on around us, brings with it a skewed perspective loaded with bias and prejudice. Requiring just as much ignorance and arrogance as Eurocentrism - tempocentrism implies that the present is somehow superior to the past because we live in it now. The point, however, is not to suggest that there is not something special about the present - there might well be - but now is not the time to decide whether it is more significant than previous moments, or those still to come. Depending on the issue or event in question, the time for that is later ... possibly hundreds or thousands of years later.
Author: Allen C. Guelzo
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1101912227
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 625
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Book Description
A WALL STREET JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • From the award-winning historian and best-selling author of Gettysburg comes the definitive biography of Robert E. Lee. An intimate look at the Confederate general in all his complexity—his hypocrisy and courage, his inner turmoil and outward calm, his disloyalty and his honor. "An important contribution to reconciling the myths with the facts." —New York Times Book Review Robert E. Lee is one of the most confounding figures in American history. Lee betrayed his nation in order to defend his home state and uphold the slave system he claimed to oppose. He was a traitor to the country he swore to serve as an Army officer, and yet he was admired even by his enemies for his composure and leadership. He considered slavery immoral, but benefited from inherited slaves and fought to defend the institution. And behind his genteel demeanor and perfectionism lurked the insecurities of a man haunted by the legacy of a father who stained the family name by declaring bankruptcy and who disappeared when Robert was just six years old. In Robert E. Lee, the award-winning historian Allen Guelzo has written the definitive biography of the general, following him from his refined upbringing in Virginia high society, to his long career in the U.S. Army, his agonized decision to side with Virginia when it seceded from the Union, and his leadership during the Civil War. Above all, Guelzo captures Robert E. Lee in all his complexity--his hypocrisy and courage, his outward calm and inner turmoil, his honor and his disloyalty.
Author: Hall Bjørnstad
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429849850
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 377
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Book Description
By examining the history of universal history from the late Middle Ages until the early nineteenth century we trace the making of the global. Early modern universal history can be seen as a response to the epistemological crisis provoked by new knowledge and experience. Traditional narratives were no longer sufficient to gain an understanding of events. Inspired by recent developments in theory of history, the volume argues that the relevance of universal history resides in the laboratory of intense, diverse and mainly unsuccessful attempts at thinking history and universals together. They all shared the common aim of integrating all time and space: assemble the world and keep it together.
