Critique [of Fascism: A Review of Its History and Its Present Cultural Reality in the Americas]

Professor Forbes’ article represents a timely and important contribution. It should, if need be, serve as a means of raising the readers’ historical consciousnesses during a period in which dramatic changes in U.S. economic and social policies are under way, in a time when unabashed power politics seem to be imposed on half the globe by the ruling classes of both great imperial powers

Annexation or Conquest? The Economics of Empire Building

This paper develops an economic theory of empire building. This theory addresses the choice among three strategies that empire builders historically have used. We call these strategies Uncoerced Annexation, Coerced Annexation, and Attempted Conquest. The theory shows how the choice among these strategies depends on such factors as the economic gains from imperial expansion, the relative effectiveness of imperial armies, the costs of projecting imperial military power, and liquidity constraints on financing imperial armies. This theory also addresses the scope of imperial ambitions. The paper uses examples from the history of the Roman, Mongol, Ottoman, and Nazi German empires to illustrate the applicability of the theory.

Whose Crying Game? One Woman of Color\u27s Reflection on Representations of Men of Color in Contemporary Film

This film review of The Crying Game critically interrogates the politics of representation and domination which spectacleize Black male bodies. Working out of her location as an Asian American woman who is sensitive to the cinematic and everyday politics of exoticization, this cultural critic provides an analysis of the dynamic relations of power at work in the racial and heterosexual production and exploitation of Black gays in contemporary film. Drawing on the work of such critics as bell hooks, Robert Reid-Pharr, Kobena Mercer, and Judith Butler, she challenges us not to simply perpetuate the imperial gaze

Sèvres Porcelain and the Articulation of Imperial Identity in Napoleonic France

Original article can be found at: http://jdh.oxfordjournals.org/archive/ "Copyright 2007 The Author(s). This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited."From its inception in 1756, the Sèvres porcelain manufactory made elaborate, highly decorated dinner services for the exclusive use of the royal court. The objects used by the king were seen as extensions of his body and the act of decorating them became a means of royal veneration. While the French Revolution saw the decline of the manufacture, Napoléon recognized the enormous political value of Sèvres porcelain. Imperial power, however, was predicated not on the divinity of the Emperor, but on the clear demonstration of the material and cultural benefits brought about by his administration. This shift in the nature of executive power prompted a change in the design and decoration of Sèvres porcelain. Rococo decoration found in ancien régime porcelain was abandoned in favour of a highly didactic imagery that charted the triumphs and benefits of Napoleon's regime. This article sets out to examine this new repertoire of subjects and forms with specific reference to the Service de l'Empereur. Commissioned to be used at the wedding of Napoléon and his second wife Marie-Louise of Austria (daughter of the recently defeated Emperor of Austria), the service charts some of the events connected with French Imperial expansion, not least of which was the marriage itself.Peer reviewe

Mars Rising: Icons of Imperial Power

Political and news media imagery saturate the culture of our classrooms as thoroughly as the popular culture imagery that deliberately targets children and youth. Media images such as those of US president G. W. Bush\u27s visit to Canada that we discuss in this paper have become ubiquitous in our culture. In our view they constitute a primary mechanism through which the powerful political and economic forces exert an unrelenting threat on populations around the world. We (1 + 1 + 1)* enter this discussion from the point of view of Canadians, one of whom holds duel Canadian / US citizenship, all of whom have extensive backgrounds in the practice of our respective art forms and a broad range of academic study in the arts and media. We are well aware that mass-mediated images are not innocent happenstance. Our research revealed the degree to which every detail of the president\u27s media images had been envisioned, designed, and executed. To understand the images and how they contribute to the pervasive sense of insecurity within current social, political and economic realities, we are obliged to speak first to our reactions; we acknowledge and attempt to accurately foreground our own emotional and intellectual groundings. As we scrutinize the images and attend to their formal composition and content, we also articulate the qualities of these contemporary media images that we observe to be analogous to the composition and aesthetics of ancient religious icons. Simultaneously we recognize contemporary versions of historical, secular practices of recasting icons to accommodate the designs of Byzantine emperors and contemporary despots

‘Land and empire: politics and the British aluminium company’ : Paper to the European Business Association Conference, Glasgow

For much of the twentieth-century, aluminium producers enjoyed a close relationship with national governments, not least as prominent players in military-industrial complexes (for example, Anderson 1951; Smith 1988; Grinberg and Hachez-Leroy 1997). This paper explores the ideological motivations and political activities of senior figures within Britain’s dominant native aluminium producer for much of the twentieth-century, the British Aluminium Company Ltd. (BACo), drawing on work by the author (Perchard 2007, 2010). As a company self-styled as ‘the Service’, support within BACo for imperial priorities and patrician values was sustained both by commercial imperatives as well as the social and cultural background of many of the directors (until the 1960s), amongst them hereditary landowners, retired senior military officers and latterly senior civil servants. This paper will examine the political activities of directors collectively and individually through their engagement with power elites (Mills 1956). In particular, it will focus upon the areas of imperial defence, and regional development in the Scottish Highlands (where BACo’s main smelters were based), to illustrate how their involvement in political activities and social networks was both self-serving and governed by instinctive values. In so doing it will also comment upon the ‘revolving door’ between public and private spheres. While calling into question the general application of the notion of a ‘gentlemanly capitalist’ order, this paper accords with Larry Butler’s view of imperial mining concerns and the British metropolitan government’s priorities during decolonization that: ‘it may, rather, be more accurate to speak of temporary convergences of interest’ (Butler 2007: 477; Cain and Hopkins 1987)

Imperio y democracia en el pensamiento político griego

This article aims at offering some arguments to understand the relationship between empire and democracy in Greek political thought. So, first, I will look into the language about power in the political vocabulary, presenting a thesis based upon a thesis by Nicole Loraux. Then, I will examine Aristotle?s The Constitution of Athens and Politics in order to understand how the Stagirite brings the imperial phenomenon into his political philosophy. Lastly, I will draw the following conclusion: even though Greek political thought did not conceive of empire as in contradiction with democracy, used to rule over the city, it placed the exercise of imperial power in a different site in regards to the power exerted in the democratic polis. Therefore, the fact that democracy was imperial did not amount to a paradox because democracy and empire corresponded to dissimilar domains in the power relations among men.Fil: Olivera, Diego Alexander. Universidad Nacional del Litoral. Instituto de Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales del Litoral. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Santa Fe. Instituto de Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales del Litoral; Argentin

A New Cartography of Imperial Power

In his latest book, Robert D Kaplan seeks to map the shifting contours of contemporary geopolitics. Instead, writes Manan Ahmed, its author ends up lost in cultural stereotype and misdirected scholarshi

The Perils of Proximity: The Geopolitical Underpinnings of Australian Views of New Caledonia in the Nineteenth Century

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the links between these far-flung outposts of empire, New Caledonia and Australia, were much stronger than we might realise today. New Caledonia loomed large in Australian preoccupations as a commercial partner and an export market but also as an example of French perfidy and maladministration and as a threat to security.Relations between these French and British colonies reflected in part the state of broader relations between the imperial powers, as well as changing geo-political realities in the region. The profoundly ambiguous and tension-filled relationship between the two imperial powers must be stressed – the two countries had been at war for much of the past five hundred years, they vied for power and influence in Europe, strategic control of international waters and colonial possessions and yet they recognised one another, in relation in particular to the indigenous other, as sharing European, Christian, civilised values.This article explores the attitudes and opinions expressed in the Australian press towards the French colony at certain key points in Australian/New Caledonian relations: the annexation of the Grande Terre by the French in 1853, the Kanak revolts of 1878-9 and the pre-World War I nickel mining boom. It focuses in particular on the security fears provoked by the proximity of New Caledonia to Australian shores