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A Cultural History of the Sea Volumes 1-6

Throughout history, how has the sea served as a site for cross-cultural exchange, trade and migration? As historians, how do the fields of naval history, maritime history and oceanic history intersect?

56 experts, 48 chapters and over 1,700 pages explore how representation and understanding of the sea has developed over 2,500 years of cultural and natural history.

Individual volume editors ensure the cohesion of the whole, and to make it as easy as possible to use, chapter titles are identical across each of the volumes. This gives the choice of reading about a specific period in one of the volumes, or following a theme across history by reading the relevant chapter in each of the six.

The six volumes cover: 1. - Antiquity (500 BCE - 800 CE); 2. - Medieval Age (1800 - 1450); 3. - Renaissance (1450 - 1650); 4. - Age of Enlightenment (1650 - 1800); 5. - Age of Empire (1800 - 1920); 6 - Modern Age (1920 - 2000+).

Each volumes adopts the same thematic structure, covering: Knowledges, Practices, Networks, Islands and Shores, Travelers, Representation, Imaginary Worlds, and Conflicts, enabling readers to trace one theme throughout history, as well as gaining a thorough overview of each individual period.

Volume 5: A Cultural History of the Sea in the Age of Empire (1800-1920)
Edited by Margaret Cohen (Stanford University, USA)

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Publication Type

Books

Publication Date

April 22, 2021

Subtitle

Volumes 1-6

Authors

Margaret Cohen

David D. Laitin awarded 2021 Johan Skytte Prize

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News Type

News

Date

Mon, 04/19/2021 - 12:00

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Laitin has made “culture,” often the junk drawer of political science studies, studiable and concrete by identifying various cultural components of a nation’s inner life; language is one aspect of culture, religion another, art and literature a third, how private family life is organized a fourth. Central to his thinking is that these cultural components do not have to easily reinforce each other or pull in the same direction. These “spheres” can co-exist without coinciding.

Read the full press release, translated into English: Culture is the product of…

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The Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science, known by many as the “Nobel Prize in Political Science,” is being awarded for the 27th consecutive year. This year’s recipient is David D. Laitin, for his “original and objective explanation of how politics shapes cultural strategies in heterogeneous societies.”

What (If Anything) is Wrong with Positive Liberty?

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Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society

Isaiah Berlin’s criticisms of positive liberty are often read as mere artefacts of his Cold War context. But are they good criticisms? This article evaluates Berlin’s three main worries about positive liberty—the inner-citadel worry, the moralization worry, and the tyranny worry. I find that while they may be reasonable worries to have about any concept of liberty, they are not compelling criticisms of positive liberty in particular.

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Publication Type

Journal Articles

Publication Date

March 23, 2021

Authors

Alison McQueen

Blood and Diamonds: Germany’s Imperial Ambitions in Africa

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Blood and Diamonds book cover Diamonds have long been bloody. A new history shows how Germany’s ruthless African empire brought diamond rings to retail display cases in America—at the cost of African lives.

Since the late 1990s, activists have campaigned to remove “conflict diamonds” from jewelry shops and department stores. But if the problem of conflict diamonds—gems extracted from war zones—has only recently generated attention, it is not a new one. Nor are conflict diamonds an exception in an otherwise honest industry. The modern diamond business, Steven Press shows, owes its origins to imperial wars and has never escaped its legacy of exploitation.

In Blood and Diamonds, Press traces the interaction of the mass-market diamond and German colonial domination in Africa. Starting in the 1880s, Germans hunted for diamonds in Southwest Africa. In the decades that followed, Germans waged brutal wars to control the territory, culminating in the genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples and the unearthing of vast mineral riches. Press follows the trail of the diamonds from the sands of the Namib Desert to government ministries and corporate boardrooms in Berlin and London and on to the retail counters of New York and Chicago. As Africans working in terrifying conditions extracted unprecedented supplies of diamonds, European cartels maintained the illusion that the stones were scarce, propelling the nascent U.S. market for diamond engagement rings. Convinced by advertisers that diamonds were both valuable and romantically significant, American purchasers unwittingly funded German imperial ambitions into the era of the World Wars.

Amid today’s global frenzy of mass consumption, Press’s history offers an unsettling reminder that cheap luxury often depends on an alliance between corporate power and state violence.

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Publication Type

Books

Publication Date

April 6, 2021

Authors

Steven Press

The Dynastic Imagination

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Adrian Daub’s The Dynastic Imagination offers an unexpected account of modern German intellectual history through frameworks of family and kinship. Modernity aimed to brush off dynastic, hierarchical authority and to make society anew through the mechanisms of marriage, siblinghood, and love. It was, in other words, centered on the nuclear family. But as Daub shows, the dynastic imagination persisted, in time emerging as a critical stance by which the nuclear family’s conservatism and temporal limits could be exposed. Focusing on the complex interaction between dynasties and national identity-formation in Germany, Daub shows how a lingering preoccupation with dynastic modes of explanation, legitimation, and organization suffused German literature and culture.

Daub builds this conception of dynasty in a syncretic study of literature, sciences, and the history of ideas, engaging with remnants of dynastic ideology in the work of Richard Wagner, Émile Zola, and Stefan George, and in the work of early feminists and pioneering psychoanalysts. At every stage of cultural progression, Daub reveals how the relation of dynastic to nuclear families inflected modern intellectual history.

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Publication Type

Books

Publication Date

January 29, 2021

Subtitle

Family and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Germany

Authors

Adrian Daub

Book Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Book Publisher External URL

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo61909872.html

Classical Athens as an Epistemic Democracy

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Brill's Companion to the Reception of Athenian Democracy- From the Late Middle Ages to the Contemporary Era

Contemporary democratic theory has many mansions: theories of competi-tive, pluralistic, and deliberative democracy have generated large literatures.2Among more recent developments is “epistemic democracy,” which focuses on the quality of the decisions made by democratic groups. The core premise of theories of epistemic democracy is that the legitimacy of democracy as a sys-tem of governance ought to be predicated on the results of decision- making, and not only the procedural rules and practices. How good or bad decisions are ought to be testable against some independent criterion of value. Thus, even if a given decision is procedurally impeccable by democratic standards (e.g. it was predicated on strict standards of equality of influence among decision- makers and those affected by the decision), if the decision itself was substantively bad, the epistemic democrat will say that something has gone seriously wrong. De-cisions may be judged bad either by a deontological moral standard (e.g. the decision resulted in the violation of certain persons’ rights), or by a practical efficacy standard (e.g. the decision resulted in outcomes that were detrimental to welfare or security interests common to residents of the relevant commu-nity). If democratic decisions are to be substantively good, decision- making processes must aggregate privately- held useful knowledge as well as individual preferences or interests. In brief, a democracy may be said to be “epistemic” to the degree to which it employs collective wisdom to make good policy.

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Publication Type

Books

Publication Date

October 30, 2020

Subtitle

Chapter in Brill's Companion to the Reception of Athenian Democracy: From the Late Middle Ages to the Contemporary Era

Authors

Josiah Ober

Hiding in Plain Sight: Κίνησις at the Core of Heidegger’s Work. Prolegomenon

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The tacit presupposition underlying all of Heidegger’s work, both early (regarding Dasein) and late (regarding Ereignis), was his retrieval of the unsaid in Aristotelian κίνησις. As the prologue to a work-in-progress, this essay discusses how Heidegger’s approach to phenomenology laid the groundwork for his rereading of κίνησις. Heidegger argued that Aristotle (1) understood κίνησις ontologically as a form of being and (2) worked within an implicit proto-phenomenological reduction of being (οὐσία) to intelligibility (παρουσία). Heidegger, in turn, interpreted παρουσία in terms of ἀλήθεια on three distinct but interrelated levels. This prologue prepares the way for a discussion of Heidegger’s readings of Physica III 1-3 and Metaphysica IX and their impact on the topics of Dasein and Ereignis.

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Publication Type

Journal Articles

Publication Date

December 16, 2020

Authors

Thomas Sheehan

Angrynomics | Book Talk with Mark Blyth

Thursday, January 21, 2021 | 1:00 PM -Thursday, January 21, 2021 | 2:00 PM

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Economics increasingly fails to explain why the pressures of life appear to be intensifying at the same time as income per capita is rising, or why we work more hours for less money in real terms. And why we see the rise of nationalism everywhere when globalization, on average, has made us all richer. The disconnect between our experience of the world and the economic model used to explain it has given rise to "angrynomics": an economy of heightened uncertainty and anger, where faith in the workings of markets and politics has been undermined and rapid and seemingly ever-accelerating economic change has become something to be feared. Eric Lonergan and Mark Blyth have written a book for anyone anxious, worried - or angry - about the mismatch between how they experience the world with the increasing day to day pressures they face and the model used by economic elites and politicians to explain and justify it. In a powerful and passionately argued analysis, they bring their critical insight and expertise to bear on the nature of angrynomics and offer a set of radical and innovative policies that cut across tired party political lines - and that if implemented might just help the world to be a less angry place.

Mark Blyth

Mark Blyth is the William R. Rhodes ’57 Professor of International Economics at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. Blyth graduated Strathclyde University in 1990 and then finished his PhD. in political science at Columbia University in 1999. He then joined the Johns Hopkins University before moving to Brown University in 2009.

Blyth’s research spans several areas. The first focuses on the power of economic ideas as seen in his recent award winning book, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea (New York: Oxford University Press 2015), which has been translated into 16 languages. He has written extensively on the political economy of Europe, as seen in his recent book, The Future of the Euro (New York: Oxford University Press 2015). His most recent book is Angrynomics (Columbia University Press 2020 - with Eric Lonergan), which deals with the economics underlying the current populist moment. He is currently working on a new joint project on the New Politics of Growth and Stagnation.

Blyth is a regular contributor to the journal of the Council for Foreign Relations, Foreign Affairs and he contributes to several Podcasts, including the Financial Times Alphaville podcast.

Co-sponsored by the Global Populisms Project.

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Mark Blyth Brown University

WHAT TECH CALLS THINKING An Inquiry Into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley

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Adrian Daub’s What Tech Calls Thinking is a lively dismantling of the ideas that form the intellectual bedrock of Silicon Valley. Equally important to Silicon Valley’s world-altering innovation are the language and ideas it uses to explain and justify itself. And often, those fancy new ideas are simply old motifs playing dress-up in a hoodie. From the myth of dropping out to the war cry of “disruption,” Daub locates the Valley’s supposedly original, radical thinking in the ideas of Heidegger and Ayn Rand, the New Age Esalen Foundation in Big Sur, and American traditions from the tent revival to predestination. Written with verve and imagination, What Tech Calls Thinking is an intellectual refutation of Silicon Valley's ethos, pulling back the curtain on the self-aggrandizing myths the Valley tells about itself.

FSG Originals × Logic dissects the way technology functions in everyday lives. The titans of Silicon Valley, for all their utopian imaginings, never really had our best interests at heart: recent threats to democracy, truth, privacy, and safety, as a result of tech’s reckless pursuit of progress, have shown as much. We present an alternate story, one that delights in capturing technology in all its contradictions and innovation, across borders and socioeconomic divisions, from history through the future, beyond platitudes and PR hype, and past doom and gloom. Our collaboration features four brief but provocative forays into the tech industry’s many worlds, and aspires to incite fresh conversations about technology focused on nuanced and accessible explorations of the emerging tools that reorganize and redefine life today.

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Publication Type

Books

Publication Date

October 13, 2020

Journal Publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Authors

Adrian Daub

External URL

WHAT TECH CALLS THINKING An Inquiry Into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Va…

A Cross-National Investigation into Contextual Effects and Populist Radical Right Support

Thursday, October 29, 2020 | 10:00 AM -Thursday, October 29, 2020 | 11:00 AM

Populist radical right parties are more successful in some areas than others. However, when trying to explain geographical patterns of support for the populist radical right, similar outcomes in otherwise different contexts and different outcomes in otherwise similar contexts can be observed. In this paper, we show that this paradox can be understood when we examine how citizens are affected differently by the context in which they live. Using a unique dataset containing geocoded survey data and contextual data from four countries (DE, FR, NL and UK), we demonstrate that mediating and moderating variables, such a perceptions of local decline and education level shape the relationship between contextual development such as the increasing presence of immigrants, on the one hand, and populist and nativism attitudes and PRR support, on the other hand.

A draft copy of this research paper may be downloaded by using the link provided below under "Event Materials".

Sarah L. de Lange is Professor by special appointment at the Department of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam, where she holds the Dr. J.M. Den Uyl chair. Her research interests include societal cleavages, political parties, and extremism, populism, and radicalism. Her recent research projects focus on the emergence of new political oppositions in Europe on that basis of, amongst others, geographical, generational, and educational divides. She has recently concluded the collaborative international project Sub-National Context and Radical Right Support in Europe (supported by an ORA grant) and is currently co-directing the research project Generational Differences in Determinants of Party Choice (supported by an NWO grant). Her co-edited volume Radical Right-Wing Populist Parties in Western Europe: Into the Mainstream?, which appeared with Routledge in 2016, analyses the extent to which radical right-wing populist parties have become part of mainstream politics, as well as the factors and conditions which facilitate this trend.

Co-Sponsored by the Global Populisms Project.

A Cross-National Investigation into Contextual Effects and Populist Radical Right Support. A mediated and moderated relationship?

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The Underwater Imagination: From Environment to Film Set, 1954–1956

"Seeing Through Water: The Paintings of Zarh Pritchard" in Coastal Works: Culture of the Atlantic Edge

Fish Eye Fish: Diver in Fish Bowl

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Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times

Mirrors for Princes and Sultans: Advice on the Art of Governance in the Medieval Christian and Islamic Worlds

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Rogue Empires: Contracts and Conmen in Europe's Scramble for Africa

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WHAT TECH CALLS THINKING An Inquiry Into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley

The James Bond Songs: Pop Anthems of Late Capitalism

Four-Handed Monsters: Four-Hand Piano Playing and Nineteenth-Century Culture

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Knowledge Management for Self-Organised Resource Allocation

Is development uniquely modern? Ancient Athens on the doorstep

In Search of Democracy 4.0: Is Democracy as We Know It Destined to Die?

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Heidegger Never Got Beyond Facticity

Being and Time 18: A Paraphrastic Translation