bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
“The Vices of Our Whole Generation”
Authors: Pederson Joshua
Published: January 2022

This chapter turns to Albert Camus's The Fall, a novel that has already been claimed for trauma theory by Shoshana Felman. It argues, by contrast, that moral injury provides a more helpful paradigm for looking at main character Clamence's mental suffering. In the novel, Clamence commits the crime of doing too little. Further, Clamence suffers for his failure and, as the chapter shows, is morally injured by it. Indeed, a discussion of the anguish that follow his failure to act (the crime of omission) allows one to begin thinking about the possibility of what might be called collective moral injury. The novel also raises the possibility that one is obligated to treat morally injured individuals who, because of their proximity to atrocity, could in recovery provide valuable testimony to mass trauma.
Summerhouses
Authors: Carso Kerry Dean
Published: January 2022

This chapter turns to summerhouses as hermits and hermitages, the popularity of which carried into the nineteenth century in the United States. Here, it explores the rustic style, which was often the style of the garden hermitage in the United States, and, more broadly, a popular style for summerhouse construction. Despite being architecturally modest, summerhouses were significant in that they provided a sense of retreat, escape, and solitude. They also allowed one to better appreciate nature. The major proponent of summerhouses during this period was Andrew Jackson Downing (1815–1852), who advocated rural and suburban life for middle-class strivers through his journal The Horticulturist and his pattern books. Downing understood the aspirations of the American middle class. As a sign of leisure, summerhouses proliferated in the landscape as symbols of gentility for the middle class while also projecting signs of civilization in the landscape.
Opening for Business
Authors: Ong Soon Keong
Published: January 2022

This chapter explains the challenges foreign merchants faced in Xiamen. It narrates the intensified trading activities of Western merchants after the Opium War and its huge impact on the commerce of China, especially in the treaty ports themselves. The chapter then details how the Opium sale to China; foreign steamers; and new items like kerosene, flour, and matchsticks became essential parts of Chinese everyday life. It also explains the reasons behind the treaty port's lackluster foreign trade. The chapter recounts Western merchants' dismay that their profits had been seriously undermined by Chinese competitors. In Xiamen especially, Western merchants had found it to be a “particularly tough” market.
Facilitating Migration
Authors: Ong Soon Keong
Published: January 2022

This chapter dissects Xiamen transformation into the in-between place of Minnan and explains the migration mechanisms and processes through the port city. The chapter looks at the economic impacts migration had on the emigrants themselves and the families they left behind in China as well as the transformative effects migration had on a city, especially one that witnessed the coming and going of a large number of people. Xiamen became known to the world as the depot for cheap Chinese hands when it was designated the first center in China for the disreputable trade in Chinese “coolies,” that is, indentured laborers under contract to foreigners. With such awareness, the chapter highlights Xiamen's role in the coolie trade until 1850. It unravels how the coolie trade — initiated and determined by European firms — left a particularly bad mark on the Chinese minds as it was perceived to be another form of imperialist exploitation of China. The chapter then investigates the development and evolvement of Xiamen as it catered to the needs of the emigrants: as a funnel city, as a budding financial center, and as a regional metropolis.
Conclusions
Authors: Ong Soon Keong
Published: January 2022

This chapter recalls the book's dual focus: Xiamen and the returned overseas Chinese. The chapter recounts the story of how individuals and businesses in Xiamen, and the mechanisms and connections they engendered through the port, facilitated the movements of Hokkiens overseas, and how returned overseas Chinese in turn helped determine the urban landscape and the development of the port city. Through an analysis of the relationships between returned emigrants and the port city, the chapter emphasizes the transformative impact of the migration process, which not only affected those who moved but also affected the place that they moved through. The chapter asserts that we cannot fully comprehend the activities of returned overseas Chinese in Xiamen unless we allow the emigrants to leave home. It argues that that the choice of whether or not to return was a conscious decision and was guided more by the emigrants' pragmatic and political concerns and their desire for personal and even selfish gains.
The Alliance for Progress on the Doubtful Strait
Authors: Lee David Johnson
Published: January 2022

This chapter starts by outlining the origins of the Alliance for Progress in Latin American ideas and political networks. It discusses the earliest version of the Alliance and how they promoted drastic political and economic change as an antidote to the spreading of a Cuban revolutionary model. US planners originally hoped to overturn the Nicaraguan government after fostering regime change in Cuba and the Dominican Republic, building on the efforts of Latin America's anticommunist democratic movement. When these initiatives faltered, Nicaragua became a key site for new programs to manage political and economic development built around the Central American Common Market (CACM). The chapter then assesses the implications of the promotion of regional development to regime change and analyzes how US programs work to integrate Nicaraguan elites by using community and regional development programs to win Conservative support for the Liberal-controlled central government. The chapter then looks at the impact of the election of Anastasio Somoza Debayle and the 1967 massacre in Managua and how it led many elite Nicaraguans to turn to the more radical politics promoted by the Cuba-inspired Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN).
Retracing Imperial Paths on the Mosquito Coast
Authors: Lee David Johnson
Published: January 2022

This chapter investigates the conflict on Nicaragua's eastern coast in the context of global critiques of the effects of both socialist and capitalist development on indigenous peoples. It explores the impact of the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional's (FSLN) vision of social development through national integration on the indigenous and Afro-descendant desires for autonomy. The US government encouraged groups that would begin their own revolutionary movement in the east, causing fractures in the international solidarity movement cultivated by the FSLN. The chapter also recounts the struggles of Miskito activists and their international allies against the revolutionary government in Managua. It then analyses the Fourth World Movement outside the Cold War, which was made possible by new ideas about ethnic pluralism and environmental sustainability that were transforming international development and would impact indigenous rights struggles worldwide.
Marketing a Culture of Self-Medication
Authors: Yang Timothy M.
Published: January 2022

This chapter investigates how Hoshi Pharmaceuticals marketed a culture of self-medication that tried to make patent medicines supplemental, rather than oppositional, to professional medical treatments. It concerns the most blatantly consumerist of all medicines, baiyaku, which included a variety of packaged pills and bottled tonics and, for much of Japan's early history, were vital to medical care. Historians have usually translated baiyaku as “patent medicines” or “proprietary medicines” because of their similarities to Western equivalents. The chapter uses the term “patent medicines” not just for convenience but to emphasize the global comparison. Ultimately, the chapter focuses on the marketing of Hoshi Pharmaceuticals' patent medicines, and, in particular, its most famous drug, Hoshi Digestive Medicine (Hoshi ichoyaku).
Things Fall Apart
Authors: Yang Timothy M.
Published: January 2022

This chapter addresses Hoshi Pharmaceuticals' financial fallout in the opium scandal's aftermath. It argues that the scandal revealed reasons for Hoshi's success that the company had hoped to conceal: profiteering from an exclusive monopoly over morphine and, quite possibly, from opium trafficking, both facilitated by collusive connections to government elites. The chapter also sheds a light on the shaky debt-financed foundations and questionable accounting methods on which the company was built. The opium scandal wreaked financial havoc when the company was at its most highly leveraged point in its short history. The chapter then unfolds how the company struggled to meet payroll and how blue- and white-collar workers went to the picket lines. It further discusses how creditors and investors tried to liquidate the company and salvage assets such as intellectual property related to its patent medicines.
Putin's Labor Dilemma
Authors: Crowley Stephen
Published: January 2022

This book investigates how the fear of labor protest has inhibited substantial economic transformation in Russia. Vladimir Putin boasts he has the backing of workers in the country's industrial heartland, but as economic growth slows in Russia, reviving the economy will require restructuring the country's industrial landscape. At the same time, doing so threatens to generate protest and instability from a key regime constituency. However, continuing to prop up Russia's Soviet-era workplaces, the book suggests, could lead to declining wages and economic stagnation, threatening protest and instability. The book explores the dynamics of a Russian labor market that generally avoids mass unemployment, the potentially explosive role of Russia's monotowns, conflicts generated by massive downsizing in “Russia's Detroit” (Tol'yatti), and the rapid politicization of the truck drivers movement. Labor protests currently show little sign of threatening Putin's hold on power, but the manner in which they are being conducted point to substantial chronic problems that will be difficult to resolve. The book demonstrates that the Russian economy must either find new sources of economic growth or face stagnation. Either scenario — market reforms or economic stagnation — raises the possibility, even probability, of destabilizing social unrest.
Downsizing in “Russia’s Detroit”
Authors: Crowley Stephen
Published: January 2022

This chapter addresses the case of Tolyatti, the country's largest monotown, often referred to as “Russia's Detroit.” It begins by investigating another example of Russia's industrial policy, this time through the automobile sector. The chapter details the rise of Russia's leading alternative union through that sector, and how its strengths and limitations mirrored those of the auto industry. It then focuses on AvtoVAZ, Russia's leading auto factory, located in Tolyatti. Just like the US city of Detroit, Tolyatti, along with AvtoVAZ, has experienced hard times. Indeed, the case of AvtoVAZ seems to provide a counter-example to one of the central claims of this book: massive layoffs took place here without large-scale social unrest, let alone a social explosion. Yet on closer inspection, the chapter finds that the downsizing of AvtoVAZ was accompanied with huge subsidies and considerable state intervention, some of which, rather than easing social tensions, made the situation even more combustible.
How Different is Russia? the Comparative Context
Authors: Crowley Stephen
Published: January 2022

This chapter looks at the Russian example in a comparative context, in particular addressing the question of how countries immediately to the west (other postcommunist countries, especially Ukraine and Belarus) and to the east (in particular China) have dealt with (de)industrialization and labor protest. In Ukraine, deindustrialization coincided with even greater economic decline, resulting in protest and revolution. In Belarus, deindustrialization and mass privatization were largely avoided, but economic grievances, combined with a dictator clinging to office, led workers to deploy their symbolic power in an attempt to bring down that dictator. In contrast, massive deindustrialization in China led to widespread protest with little sign of political instability, occurring as it did alongside almost unprecedented levels of economic growth and the creation of entirely new cities. For Russia's leaders, the Chinese case appears as an unrealizable dream, while the Ukrainian and Belarusian scenarios represent their nightmare.
Philosophical Style
Authors: Verene Donald Phillip
Published: January 2022

This chapter shows the importance of style in works of speculative philosophy. The philosopher shares with the poet the importance of style in the sense of how meaning is put into language. Style is the third principle of composition, well known since Quintilian and Cicero: inventio (the amassing of materials), dispositio (their arrangement), and elocutio (their formulation in language). For the poet, nothing can be wasted. Each and every syllable is given a necessary role; every level of a metaphor is present; every connection of words is precise and simple. The poem, when good, is always something beyond itself. It is never what it seems.
The Rhetoric of Self-Discourse
Authors: Verene Donald Phillip
Published: January 2022

This chapter considers the sense in which self-knowledge is at the heart of philosophy by comparing Descartes, Vico, Montaigne, and Socrates. The ancient precept of self-knowledge, approached in psychological terms, depends upon the internal experience that allows one also to have experience as external to oneself. Once there is the experience of the distinction between I and world, the I can return to itself as an identity separate from any objects it identifies as not itself. The psychological fact of this inner sense is the ground of the possibility of self-discourse. The self finds itself as both within and without its activity. The human self can represent itself in language and also the world in language. The thinking self takes itself out of the immediacy of its feeling of the world and can make itself an object for itself, but it is an object different in kind from any other object. Its inner form is memory activated as the imagination.
The Rhetoric of Absolute Thought
Authors: Verene Donald Phillip
Published: January 2022

This chapter addresses the way in which Plato, Anselm, Kant, and Hegel bring their readers to a grasp of what it means to claim that thought can think itself. Here, metaphysical speech must take thought to the transcendent. Yet the transcendent cannot be wholly transcendent. If it is, there is no way to know it as something that is. If what is ultimate is wholly immanent it is not anything in itself. The being of what is ultimate must both be itself and be capable of being known. Thought must be able to put into language what is transcendent-immanent. Such speech is always paradoxical speech. The aim of the metaphysician therefore is to get the audience to accept the paradox, the sense in which that which truly is, is both itself and not itself.
Growing the City and Protecting the Environment
Authors: Weikart Lynne A.
Published: January 2022

This chapter looks at Mayor Michael Bloomberg's remarkable record in economic development, emphasizing how he changed New York City in ways that will be felt for decades into the future. It highlights the role Bloomberg played in reshaping the urban landscape, which is considered as his most important legacy as it affected the daily lives of citizens the most. It also discusses Bloomberg's signal achievement in the physical transformation of the city, particularly on parks and pedestrians. The chapter cites the analyses done by journalists and scholars on Bloomberg's economic development, which called attention to his ignorance of the unintended consequences of his large-scale development in the city's neighborhoods. It dwells on Bloomberg's passionate belief that more jobs can reduce poverty.
Successes and Failures in Education Reform
Authors: Weikart Lynne A.
Published: January 2022

This chapter discusses Mayor Michael Bloomberg's lack of experience about the city's educational system and the Department of Education. It recounts Bloomberg's disastrous appointment of Cathie Black as the commissioner of the Department of Education after he fired Joel Klein in 2011, as she was a publishing executive who had no experience in education. It also analyzes that Bloomberg's decision lacked fundamental logic as he believed in a market-based ideology, which infiltrated educational policy since the years of President Ronald Reagan. The chapter considers Bloomberg as a business person who was a believer in market-based reforms, not an educator steeped in conventional philosophies. It cites the market-based reforms that appealed to Bloomberg, which grew out of the school reform movement that began in 1983 with the publication of A Nation at Risk.
The Odor of Things
Authors: Samalin Zachary
Published: January 2022

This chapter demonstrates how this specifically aesthetic disgust was integral to the collective revulsion catalyzed by the Great Stink of 1858. Analyzing hundreds of newspaper articles, parliamentary speeches, and other documents of this shared olfactory panic, the chapter examines what it means for an experience of collective emotion to have played such a pivotal role in the rationalization of modern society — a process traditionally understood to involve the exclusion of emotion and subjectivity from public affairs. It focuses particularly on the extent to which mid-nineteenth-century rationalizing appeals to disgust depended, contra Weberian accounts, on ascribing to the emotion a total irrationality nevertheless characterized by its utter calculability, a reflexive dependability that was often taken as a kind of ersatz or pseudo objectivity. The chapter then shift to discuss a portrait of this structure of unwanted feeling, within which disgust was simultaneously invoked and disavowed as a foundation for social agreement. It ultimately traces the underlying conception of revulsion as a negative sensus communis back to its proximal origin in debates in Enlightenment aesthetics, where the disgusting was excluded from artistic composition as the antithesis of the beautiful.
Governing the Dead
Authors: Vu Linh D.
Published: January 2022

This book explains how the Chinese Nationalist regime consolidated control by honoring its millions of war-dead, allowing China to emerge rapidly from the wreckage of the first half of the twentieth century to become a powerful state, supported by strong nationalistic sentiment and institutional infrastructure. The fall of the empire, internecine conflicts, foreign invasion, and war-related disasters claimed twenty to thirty million Chinese lives. The book draws on government records, newspapers, and petition letters from mourning families to analyze how the Nationalist regime's commemoration of the dead and compensation of the bereaved actually fortified its central authority. By enshrining the victims of violence as national ancestors, the Republic of China connected citizenship to the idea of the nation, promoting loyalty to the “imagined community.” The regime constructed China's first public military cemetery and hundreds of martyrs' shrines, collectively mourned millions of fallen soldiers and civilians, and disbursed millions of yuan to tens of thousands of widows and orphans. The regime thus exerted control over the living by creating the state apparatus necessary to manage the dead. Although the Communist forces prevailed in 1949, the Nationalists had already laid the foundation for the modern nation-state through their governance of dead citizens. The Nationalist policies of glorifying and compensating the loyal dead in an age of catastrophic destruction left an important legacy: violence came to be celebrated rather than lamented.
Manufacturing Republican Martyrdom
Authors: Vu Linh D.
Published: January 2022

This chapter examines the changes in political definitions and legal regulations of martyrdom. It recounts the uprising of a group of local gentry, businessmen, overseas students, and secret society members who broke into the residence of the viceroy of Guangdong and Guangxi, Zhang Mingqi. Some leaders of the insurgency had joined the Revolutionary Alliance, founded by Sun Yat-sen in Japan in 1905. Many of the rebels were killed in battle. The body count was recorded at eighty-six, but only seventy-two of the bodies could be identified. These seventy-two men became the Yellow Flower Hill martyrs. The chapter then exposes the plan of the county magistrates to dump them on Stinking Hill, where the local authorities had been burying criminals. However, Pan Dazheng, a participant in the uprising himself, and Jiang Kongyin, a Hanlin Academy member, intervened and had them buried on a hill outside the city center. The site, with its simple graves, became the Yellow Flower Hill, where a memorial complex was constructed in the late 1910s. Instead of being condemned as criminals, the chapter further analyses how these insurgents came to represent the ideal citizens of the Republic of China.
Consoling the Bereaved
Authors: Vu Linh D.
Published: January 2022

This chapter focuses on the relationship between the state and bereaved families. It chronicles the political recognition and monetary award received by Gen. Cai E's family from the Nationalist regime. Cai was a military governor of the independent Yunnan Province and hailed as one of the revolutionary predecessors of the Nationalist government. Following the case of Cai E, the chapter reveals how the state turned some deaths into national affairs by bureaucratizing them. The bureaucratization of death manifested in measures for funerary rituals and burials, as well as regulations prescribed for mourning and remembrance. A necrobureaucracy was created to ensure the posthumous wellbeing of the citizenry, with offices such as compensation committees and history bureaus to address requests from petitioners, compile biographies, and investigate thorny cases. The chapter examines how, like a bureaucracy that extracts revenue from the citizenry, a necrobureaucracy extracts value from the dead — as a bonding agent between the state and the living.
The Humoristic and the Invective
Authors: Hoogervorst Tom G.
Published: January 2022

This chapter argues that the true power of vernacular Malay resided in its endless possibilities for humor and playfulness, away from the wrath of colonial administrators, language purists, and elitist intelligentsia. It recalls how Chinese print entrepreneurs consciously prioritized the colloquial over the official, the translingual over the homogeneous, and the subversive over the hegemonic. The chapter zooms in on these practices through three complementary prisms. It highlights how Malay could be used to inscribe ethnic, cultural, or regional difference, then focuses on personal pronouns and their significance in expressing cultural affinity and (im)politeness. Ultimately, the chapter displays a typology of irreverent language as used in Sino-Malay publications. It also analyses the high fecundity of jokes, innuendos, and ever insightful volleys of swearing abounding in Sino-Malay texts.
Introduction
Authors: Nam Hwasook
Published: January 2022

This introductory chapter poses the question of the vast and persistent gap between the crucial roles women industrial workers played in the process of Korea's modernization and the development of its labor movement during the twentieth-century and their continuing invisibility as key players in conventional social and historical narratives. It briefly explores the shifting social perceptions of yŏgong or factory women as well as new forms of consciousness emerging among them, which comes from a larger concern over the deep-seated and stubborn nature of social conservatism in South Korean society. Beneath the ultramodern and cosmopolitan lifestyle of today's South Korea, and despite the existence of strong progressive impulses throughout the twentieth century, South Korea remains an intensely class- and gender-conscious society. Hence why the focus on female industrial workers is revealing, because as lower-class women and as manual laborers, factory women, together with domestic service and sex industry workers, have historically been placed at the lowest rung of Korean society, receiving the brunt of both class and gender discrimination. Contemplating the evolving class and gender dynamics in the nation-building history of twentieth-century Korea through the lens of yŏgong and their struggle goes a long way toward understanding that history.
A “Woman-in-the-Sky”
Authors: Nam Hwasook
Published: January 2022

This chapter introduces Kang Churyong and the P'yŏngwŏn Rubber strike, of which she was one of the leaders. This unusual instance of a working-class woman taking a bold action in public and, moreover, making “eloquent” (talbyŏn) speeches on heavy-duty subjects such as solidarity of the proletariat (musanja) and the deplorable actions of employers caught media attention, and her story made national news the following day. In this way, a new type of female political actor was born. Indeed, conditions that allowed a factory woman to steer national attention had been in the making since the early 1920s. The chapter situates Pyongyang's rubber industry and its workers in the larger context of colonial industrialization and the colonial labor movement. It also presents the contours of the bourgeois nationalist movement in Pyongyang and how the focal point of the strike, that is, the issue of proper wage levels for women workers, was intertwined with an emerging division among Pyongyang's nationalist elite.
Factory Women in the Socialist Imagination
Authors: Nam Hwasook
Published: January 2022

This chapter examines Kang Churyong's association with the communist movement in the region, which at the time was concentrating its resources on the task of organizing industrial workers into revolutionary unions. A women's movement activist, Cho Yŏngok, served as a link between Kang and communist organizers. The chapter explores how the contemporary women's movement positioned itself toward women industrial workers and labor issues and surveys the rise of a new generation of educated “new women,” some of whom were, like Cho Yŏngok, joining underground operations to organize women workers at rubber and textile factories. The surge of women worker militancy provoked intense interest not only from communist activists but also from radical writers who began to compose activist yŏgong characters in their literary works. The chapter ends with an exploration of some of these works, stories that portray rubber workers in particular.
Seeing and Knowing
Authors: Quinlan Sean M.
Published: January 2022

This chapter elaborates one of the first true medical fads to sweep the literary scene of post-revolutionary France: physiognomy, or as its practitioners called it, the art and science of seeing. With this term, the chapter shows how one could divine a person's thoughts, intentions, and inner character by studying comportment, gestures, and other physical ticks, especially those made by the human face. The chapter explains how historians have identified physiognomy as a critical link in the story of European racism. It captures ongoing concerns within physiognomic discourse, then describes why physiognomic writings swept such a wide breadth of French intellectual life after the Reign of Terror. The chapter explores the factors why physiognomy appealed to many different political, social, and intellectual figures in the post-revolutionary period. It highlights physiognomy's defining features: its ideological and philosophical malleability, then argues that physiognomy fit into the growing world of medical writing, genres, and subcultures in the post-revolutionary years.
Philomena and the Erotics of Privilege in the Middle Ages
Authors: Moore Megan
Published: January 2022

This chapter focuses on a tapestry of grief produced in Philomena, a medieval retelling of an Ovidian tale of rape and infanticide recounted in the Metamorphoses. It explores how communal constraints on emotions mediate the construction of agency in tension between the powerful king and the vulnerable virgin. The chapter also looks at the nightingale's polyvalency as a fruitful way to approach the thematization of desire through suffering, as the nightingale highlights the interconnectivity of two seemingly dichotomous emotions — love and grief — as a way of exploring how emotional exceptionalism constructs stories of noble power. Philomena, as the chapter argues, offers an early test case for an erotics of grief developed more extensively in later romances, and it investigates the relation between the performance of elite emotions and the construction of noble power. The chapter analyses the valences of love and desire, grief and death that enshroud the nightingale as synecdochal of the complex emotional community of privilege within romance.
Masculinity, Mourning, and Epic Sacrifice
Authors: Moore Megan
Published: January 2022

This chapter navigates how the erotics of grief structure the relationships between leaders and their men in chansons de geste. By focusing on King Arthur's and Charlemagne's eroticization of sacrifice, the chapter suggests reading from the perspective of emotion which permits us to query how a spectrum of love relations work together to uphold and reinforce the codes of a medieval elite shaped by the commemoration of heroic masculinity. The chapter also elaborates on the Chanson de Roland, a recounting of the sacrifice of one of Charlemagne's most trusted men, Roland, in order to save his army by calling for reinforcements. It explores the homosocial emotional world of medieval men in battle in texts such as the Song of Roland, Aliscans, Le roman de Rou, and La mort le roi Artu to better understand how grief, desire, and masculinity intersect in service of elite culture predicated on sacrifice. The chapter argues that the emotional community of the chanson de geste is undergirded by complex performances of masculinity tied to eroticizing grief in service of narrating elite community.
Myths
Authors: Morrison James Ashley
Published: January 2022

This chapter addresses how “returning to the international gold standard” in 1925 was really an abandonment of capital controls. But for all of the discussion of the abandonment of these capital controls, there has been almost no analysis of their introduction in the first place. Typically, the 1920 legislation is treated as a continuation of the capital controls introduced during the war. If one is to apply the conventional model to the UK in 1920, one would expect the Conservatives and right-wing Liberals to support the removal of the capital controls, and the Labourites and left-wing Liberals to support their extension and expansion. However, the Conservatives were the ones who pushed the gold export embargo through Parliament. Indeed, the very man who introduced the legislation in 1920, Stanley Baldwin, was the prime minister who presided over the controls' removal by Winston Churchill in 1925. At the same time, the Labour Party and the labor unions vigorously criticized the controls on the grounds that they introduced inflation and thus reduced real wages.
Keynes’s Revolution
Authors: Morrison James Ashley
Published: January 2022

This chapter studies John Maynard Keynes's odyssey into world-changing monetary heterodoxy. By showing that it was possible to move past the gold standard, to allow the gold value of the pound to change over time, Keynes released policymakers from these debilitating “gold fetters.” Put another way, the innovation did not come in simply convincing policymakers that they should deploy countercyclical demand management. It came in showing them how they could do so by leaving the gold standard without losing control of inflation. This was only achieved in the 1930s, after Keynes had fully elaborated the theory of this system and the unintended experiment of suspending the gold standard showed, empirically, its viability. Thus, the arrival of “Keynesian” fiscal policy turned on Keynes's revolution in monetary policy.
Central Bankers as Saviors?
Authors: Morrison James Ashley
Published: January 2022

This chapter reviews what the role of the central banker is. For those who clung to the version of the gold standard professed in the Cunliffe Committee's reports, the question itself was provocative. The term “central banker” was anathema to their dogma of a monetary order governed by “rules” rather than “discretion.” In theory, the gold standard system needs no such actor. Montagu Norman rejected this view categorically. More than any of his predecessors, he recognized the pivotal role that a central banker can play in determining the direction of the economy. Thus, the answer to the question of the role of the central banker changed radically in this period, in large part due to a most unexpected confluence of outlook between John Maynard Keynes and Norman. Both would have disclaimed it, but Keynes and Norman agreed that central bankers could — and should — serve as “saviors.”
Introduction
Authors: Hunzeker Michael A.
Published: January 2022

This chapter highlights the important lessons about wartime learning. It seeks to know what enabled the marines — masters of conventional maneuver warfare — to adapt to the demands of a decidedly unconventional counterinsurgency doctrine. It also explores why do some militaries learn faster than others and what can we do to ensure that the Marine Corps — and all of our war-fighting organizations — are ready to learn as quickly as possible the next time we send troops into harm's way. The chapter's central premise is that the First World War is uniquely relevant to the challenges that today's leaders face as they prepare for tomorrow's wars. It then shifts to outline at least three reasons why the First World War — and the years leading up to it — is relevant to the challenges military leaders face today. The first reason involves the rate of technological change, the second reason concerns the character of technological change, and the third reason involves the relative absence of great-power wars in recent times. The chapter offers a theory of wartime learning — assessment, command, and training (ACT) theory — to explore how the German Army mastered the elastic defense in depth.
A Golden Idea
Authors: Osokina Elena
Published: January 2022

This chapter examines how the currency interventions of the New Economic Policy (NEP) are important for Torgsin's story because they allowed Soviet people to enhance their gold and foreign currency savings significantly, and some of these valuables ended up in Torgsin. In 1930, when Torgsin was born, the Soviet population already lived on scarce rations, and mass famine was looming. On June 14, 1931, Narkomfin finally allowed Torgsin to accept tsarist gold coins in payment for its goods. The government needed hard currency and gold, but driven by hunger, it was the people who took the initiative. In this respect, Torgsin, the enterprise to drain people of their wealth, was no less the brainchild of the people who fought to survive than it was a product of resolutions of the country's leadership seeking for currency valuables. However, the true currency revolution happened when the government allowed Torgsin to accept personal and household items made of gold. The chapter then provides a comparison between Torgsin and the state rationing system of the same period.
The Sorcerer’s Stone
Authors: Osokina Elena
Published: January 2022

This chapter assesses how Torgsin became a sorcerer's stone of Soviet industrialization. Torgsin did not sell anything abroad but nonetheless was considered an export organization because it turned the country's resources into gold and foreign currency. The terms and conditions under which Torgsin worked contributed to its hard-currency success. It saved on expenses related to export, but most important, Torgsin's sale prices were not affected by the world economic crisis and international competition because Torgsin sold at home, where shortages and famine raged and the state had a price monopoly. Torgsin's methods were predatory, but if the government, instead of opening Torgsin to Soviet people, had tried to gain more hard currency by further increasing food exports under the unfavorable world market conditions, the scope of the famine would have been even greater.
Introduction
Authors: Sachedina Amal
Published: January 2022

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the iconic imagery and discourse of national heritage in the Sultanate of Oman. At the heart of the broad sociopolitical and economic transformations that have undergirded Oman's rise as a prosperous oil producer lies another phenomenon in which daily objects and architectures circulate as a visual, discursive mode of cultural production, called turāth (heritage). Since Oman's inception as a modern state in 1970, its heritage industry and market fashions a distinctly territorial polity, marking Oman as a nation-state. To understand the full impact of heritage as a state campaign of intervention and colonization of the local histories of Nizwa and the sur al-Lawati, the chapter looks back through the pre-1970 era. It examines how the sultanate's heritage project is historically situated as part of the greater context of colonial governance and modern statehood.
Reform and Revolt through the Pen and the Sword
Authors: Sachedina Amal
Published: January 2022

This chapter discusses how the Ibadi Imamate's establishment in 1913 was considered to be a culmination of three processes: (1) the British regulation and blockade of trade in enslaved people and arms into the region, (2) the active presence of British troops and naval squadrons, and (3) increasingly strident protests against what was widely considered the tyrannical regime of the British-supported sultan. The chapter looks at these policies, exploring the ways in which they were understood and acted upon according to two distinctive concepts of historical time. The first was the British understanding of progressive historicity that aimed to extend “civilization” across the region. This understanding entailed total transformation of the land and social order to leave behind the “tribal anarchy” and “xenophobic religiosity” of the past. The second was the Ibadi Imamate's, in which tradition, in accordance with Ibadi sharīʿa, was not the enemy of change but the ground on which change could occur. Historical logic was incorporated into thought and action by both sides to condition a moral relationship that brought about a confrontation of cultures with different modes of conceptualizing the relationship between religion and politics.
Museum Effects
Authors: Sachedina Amal
Published: January 2022

This chapter looks at the public spaces that have come into being; museums, heritage festivals, monuments, street montages, and exhibits have heralded the nahda in a dual sense — an epochal break from the past, even as they celebrate the “return” and the immanence of this history in the present. These values and principles have fundamentally reorganized historical experiences and cultivated new sensibilities and emotional links, providing the context for shaping the nation. In the process, the mode of museal representation that is heritage cleaved the temporal assumptions of sharīʿa time and its relations to the past. The materiality of objects and sites, including sharīʿa manuscripts and mosques, assume an iterative, pedagogical mode of representation through which historical-national claims, histories, and heritage objects substantiate the sultanate. These material effects cultivate everyday national civic virtues and new forms of religiosity and of punctuating time, defining the ethical actions necessary to become an Omani modern citizen through the framework of tradition.
Nizwa, City of Memories
Authors: Sachedina Amal
Published: January 2022

This chapter examines how, in Nizwa, socioeconomic instabilities and their effects are powerfully shaped by the felt gap between national historical narratives and the utopian aspirations and civic values that are intimately associated with them. Memories of life during the imamate and the violence that followed were managed and contained by the sultanic state through the concrete practices of heritage discursive practices, tourism, and historic preservation acts that made the last physical traces of the imamate and tribal histories meaningful through a national-modernist temporality. But this new sense of time, the history and imagery it conveys, assumes a performative dimension. Among laypeople, the language of heritage becomes a discursive medium and a practical enterprise for economic and political claims making through such ethical principles as social solidarity, generosity, and interpersonal consultation, which are continually undermined by the state's restructuring of the urban fabric of the city. Through tracking people's relationships to the old residential quarters, the fort, and the souq of Nizwa, the chapter considers how this contradictory state of affairs has opened a space for alternative memory practices that invoke the Ibadi Imamate, while acting as a broader critique of the sultanate's governance practices.
Conclusion
Authors: Sachedina Amal
Published: January 2022

This concluding chapter explains how, even though the forms heritage assumes in Oman may seem familiar, inasmuch as they are global, their significance is best understood within the parameters of a regional history. People's mundane engagements with the traces of the material past are subjected to hegemonic visual and discursive practices, even as their understandings turn fluid as they are subjected to changes in the region. Like the rest of the Arab-Persian Gulf region, the explanatory basis of pervasive heritage in Oman tends to reference the rise of a new form of polity — the nation-state, the need to create a new mode of collective consciousness by sociopolitical elites and to mitigate the uncertain effects of rapid modernization brought about by sudden oil wealth. Heritage, in such a scenario, is deemed no more than a fabricated form of history that papers over reality, one moreover that cannot be relied on for any kind of essential truth. The familiar form these public heritage institutions assume — from museums to textbooks — is taken as the work and design of Western professionals and thus purged of any genuine sense of the past.
Regimes and the Regional Order
Authors: Pempel T. J.
Published: January 2022

This concluding chapter assesses the interplay between the multiple regime clusters discussed thus far and the broader Asia-Pacific region over time. It examines how regime combinations shaped the regional order, but also how prevailing regional trends reverberate to influence different regimes. Altered global conditions favored the emergence of particular types of regimes while precluding others. Yet the chapter also analyzes how different mixes of regimes reshaped the Asia-Pacific regional order in defining ways. It argues that the regional order has gone through three discrete phases. The first was predominantly shaped and reinforced by American hegemony and Cold War bipolarity. Next, a second regional order saw the advance of regional economic synergies as the Asia-Pacific shifted from hostile bipolarity into an order characterized by peace and prosperity. Finally, a third regional order has been taking shape roughly since the global financial crisis (2008–2009).
“Safety Valves of Social Passions”
Authors: Lucey Colleen
Published: January 2022

This chapter examines depictions of urban prostitution from the perspective of medical, judicial, and sociological discourses. Russian writers, including Vsevolod Garshin, Leo Tolstoy, and Leonid Andreev drew upon stories from actual sex workers to debunk the theories of prominent sociologists and criminologists like Cesare Lombroso who argued that prostitution was necessary to preserve the social order. Yet these Russian writers, while sympathetic to the registered prostitute, nevertheless engaged in moments of voyeurism and fetishization. Unable to determine whether the prostitute's body should evoke empathy or titillation, their texts vacillate between eroticism and revulsion. This chapter thus analyzes four texts debated in leading journals, lecture halls, and salons throughout Russia. Each work represents a shift in the national narrative on femininity, the commodification of sex, and the discussion of women's rights.
The Dowerless Bride on Russia’s Marriage Market
Authors: Lucey Colleen
Published: January 2022

This chapter turns to the image of the dowerless bride. Here, the dowerless bride operated as proof that the country faced a marriage crisis. A woman's dowry (or lack thereof) came to signify the mercantile self-interest that threatened the sanctity of marriage. Lacking the right to marital choice, impoverished women found themselves bartered by parents on the bridal market or coerced into brothel service by madams. Comparing genre paintings by artists like Nikolai Shilder with contemporary literary works by Aleksandr Ostrovsky and Avdotia Panaeva, the chapter contends that artistic production likened unequal marital unions to a new kind of social prostitution driven by market capitalism.
The New Dogs of War
Authors: Thomas Ward
Published: January 2022

As this book details, militias and paramilitary groups wield greater power than national governments in many countries, while in some war zones private contractors perform missions previously reserved for uniformed troops. Most ominously, terrorist organizations with global reach have come to define the security landscape for even the most powerful nations. Across the first decades of the twenty-first century, we have witnessed a dramatic rise in the use of military force by these nonstate actors in ways that have impacted the international system, leading to the author of this book to undertake this assessment of the state of play at this critical moment. To understand the spread of nonstate violence, the author focuses on the crucial role played by an epochal transformation in international norms. Since the eighteenth century, the Westphalian model of sovereignty has reserved the legitimate use of force to states. The book argues that normative changes in the decades after World War II produced a “crisis of coherence” for formal and informal rules against nonstate violence. In detailed case studies of nonstate militias, transnational terrorist networks, and private military contractors, the book explains how forces contesting state prerogatives exploited this crisis, which in turn reshaped international understandings of who could legitimately use force. By considering for the first time all three purveyors of nonstate violence as aspects of the same phenomenon, the book explains this fundamental shift in the norm that for centuries gave states the monopoly on military force.