How 'dynasty' became a modern global concept : intellectual histories of sovereignty and property

The modern concept of ‘dynasty’ is a politically-motivated modern intellectual invention. For many advocates of a strong sovereign nation-state across the nineteenth and early twentieth century, in France, Germany, and Japan, the concept helped in visualizing the nation-state as a primordial entity sealed by the continuity of birth and blood, indeed by the perpetuity of sovereignty. Hegel’s references to ‘dynasty’, read with Marx’s critique, further show how ‘dynasty’ encoded the intersection of sovereignty and big property, indeed the coming into self-consciousness of their mutual identification-in-difference in the age of capitalism. Imaginaries about ‘dynasty’ also connected national sovereignty with patriarchal authority. European colonialism helped globalize the concept in the non-European world; British India offers an exemplar of ensuing debates. The globalization of the abstraction of ‘dynasty’ was ultimately bound to the globalization of capitalist-colonial infrastructures of production, circulation, violence, and exploitation. Simultaneously, colonized actors, like Indian peasant/‘tribal’ populations, brought to play alternate precolonial Indian-origin concepts of collective regality, expressed through terms like ‘rajavamshi’ and ‘Kshatriya’. These concepts nourished new forms of democracy in modern India. Global intellectual histories can thus expand political thought today by provincializing and deconstructing Eurocentric political vocabularies and by recuperating subaltern models of collective and polyarchic power.PostprintPeer reviewe

The Associations Between Central Serous Chorioretinopathy and Muscle Relaxants: A Case-Control Study

PURPOSE: To evaluate the role of muscle-relaxants as risk factors for the development of central serous chorioretinopathy (CSC) - the second most common retinopathy in our settings; despite multiple risk factors seen in our patients, 21% were initially labelled as idiopathic. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Retrospective case-control study at a tertiary hospital in the United Arab Emirates, where we reviewed the medical records of 273 patients with CSC examined between 2010 and 2019 for use of muscle-relaxants including tolperisone/eperisone, carisoprodol and gabapentin/pregabalin within a year of onset/recurrence of the disease. Intake of drugs with known association with CSC (including corticosteroids/sympathomimetics) was also recorded. Two hundred eighty-six subjects with adverse events seen at the same institute during the same study period served as controls. Odds ratios, Chi-Square tests and multivariate logistic regression were carried out to determine any associations with the muscle-relaxants and other pharmacological confounders - corticosteroids/sympathomimetics. RESULTS: Muscle relaxants may increase the risk of CSC as evident on multivariate regression analysis (OR: 2.55; confidence interval [CI]: 1.208‑5.413); the significance was retained on removing the 6 subjects who had corticosteroids/sympathomimetics (OR: 2.30; CI: 1.073–4.939). Univariate analysis yielded an OR of 2.52 for muscle relaxants (CI: 1.2149–5.2276), 2.96 for eperisone/ tolperisone (CI: 1.3531–6.5038), and 6.26 for eperisone as an individual agent (CI: 1.8146–21.6252). CONCLUSION: We found muscle relaxants to be associated factors of CSC regardless of inclusion of corticosteroids/sympathomimetics (P \u3c 0.05). Among individual classes of muscle relaxants in this study, only eperisone/tolperisone posed a significant risk (P \u3c 0.05). The vascular smooth muscle relaxation could be the possible mechanism that affects the choroidal blood flow and indirectly predisposes to CSC