Taking Empire Seriously

Calls to 'decolonize' sociology and make social science more responsive to the concerns of postcolonial thought have proliferated in recent years. But what exactly is the postcolonial critique, and what are its dangers and possibilities? This lecture builds upon these calls to decolonize sociology while also pushing the postcolonial project further. It offers an analysis of the lineage of postcolonial thought and its apparent opposition to sociological thought. It then specifies the postcolonial critique of sociology and asks how sociology can best respond. A range of examples from social theory, the history of empire, and militarized policing help us better appreciate the need for the postcolonial turn

Postcolonialism and Sociology

In dieser per E-Mail geführten Debatte diskutieren wir über das Verhältnis von Postkolonialismus und Soziologie. Während post- und dekoloniale Ansätze in den Geistes- und Literaturwissenschaften vergleichweise breit diskutiert wurden, war die Rezeption in der Soziologie eher verhalten. Die Gründe für diesen Unterschied werden ebenso angesprochen wie aktuelle Verbindungen zwischen postkolonialer Theorie und Soziologie. In this email debate we discuss the relation between postcolonialism and sociology. While post- and decolonial approaches had a significant impact on the humanities, reception in sociology has been more reluctant. The reasons for this difference are as well discussed as recent connections between postcolonial thought and sociology

OCCLUDING THE GLOBAL: ANALYTIC BIFURCATION, CAUSAL SCIENTISM, AND ALTERNATIVES IN HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY

Historical sociology in the USA has produced novel insights on various dynamics, forms, and processes Go • Occluding the Global 123 cal sociology was founded upon an interest in the emergence, constitution and social complexities of modernity -or as Adams, Clemens, and Orloff put it (2005: 2), in 'how people and societies became modern or not'. And we know, not least from worldsystems analyses, that modernity has never been a national phenomenon. It has been a transnational and global development, occurring on scales higher than national states. If historical sociology is interested in modernity, it is not unreasonable to think that it might also be interested in a larger project of illuminating the emergence, construction, and dynamics of modernity on transnational and global scales. Besides, historical sociology's colleagues in history have already globalized their discipline: 'global history' and 'transnational history'. And Presidents of the American Sociological Association like Michael Burawoy and European theorists like Ulrich Beck have called for sociologies that are more global in method, theory and conceptualization The issue is not that comparative historical sociology has narrowed its lens to Europe or the United States. As historical sociologists themselves defend, non-European parts of the world are on the agenda already (Mahoney 2010). Nor is it a question of looking at 'inter-national' issues. Historical sociologists have looked at the international system already, taking it to consist mainly of national states. The issue is that, for too long, comparative historical sociology has failed to look beyond, through, or across national processes and inter-national systems to explore transnational and global dynamics: that is, connections, relations, and processes that traverse conventional state boundaries. Note the main themes of the 'second wave' of historical sociology as developed by leaders like Theda Skocpol or Charles Tilly. They were largely about class-formation, revolution, political regimes, the welfare state and state-formation, collective action, and related matters. In any case these were all about national states or processes within national states. They also sometimes assumed, implicitly or explicitly, that the state and the social aligned. And while the 'international' sometimes appeared onto the second wave's analytic radar, it did so fleetingly at best. Even then, the key dynamics and dimensions of the global were not adequately theorized. Instead second-wavers tended to offer only an impoverished conception of the 'international' So why has historical sociology, for so long, avoided the global and transnational dynamics, dimensions and dialectics of modernity? The intuitive answer seems simple enough: lack of interest. If we are interested in the French revolution, or English stateformation, we are already interested in a national process, and global or transnational processes are supposedly irrelevant. Yet, the argument of this essay is that the answer is not as simple as that. This essay reconsiders the 'second wave' of historical sociology, related social theories of European modernity, and studies of British industrialization to show that the occlusion of the extra-national processes and forms lies in a deeper analytic infrastructure that has (mis)guided our conventional studies. The culprit is two-fold: analytic bifurcation and causal scientism. It is by recognizing this infrastructure that a forward advance can be made, for unless it is recognized and hence Journal of Globalization Studies • May 124 dismantled, historical sociology cannot be properly globalized. It is for this reason that this essay, to forge ahead, first looks back at the second wave. Accordingly, I conclude the essay by highlighting some ways that a global historical sociology might proceed. Bifurcating Relations One part of the infrastructure that has served to occlude the global is analytic bifurcation. What is 'analytic bifurcation'? The critique of 'state-centric' thought by Historical sociology would also fall under the rubric of this critique, and this might explain why the second wave overlooked global and transnational processes: its categories and objects are simply part and parcel of state-centric structures of thought in social science. Barrington Moore's work, for instance, was taken as exemplary by Theda Skocpol for its latent Millsian methodology, but both scholars took the national state as the primary unit: Moore studied political forms in different nations (dictatorship or democracy), while Skocpol famously explained revolutions in different states Go • Occluding the Global 125 in this work were always national states -rarely if ever empire-states, city-states, or regional associations. After all, one of the founding themes of the second-wave was 'bringing the state back in', by which was meant the national state and which carried the implicit notion that state, society, and territory easily overlapped. Still, while state-centric thought has been a fetter, so too has a related structure of thought that I call analytic bifurcation. By this I mean the tendency to conceptually slice or divide relations into categorical essences that are not in fact essences. Postcolonial theory alerts us to this by critiquing Eurocentric knowledge's tendency to separate metropole from colony To better understand this, let us first take an example from an influential theorist whom many historical sociologists have adopted as their own: Michel Foucault. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault argues that the spectacle attendant with punishment in the ancien regime 'disappears' and is replaced by the prison (Foucault 1979: 7-8). Foucault restricts this 'transformation' (in his words) to Europe, but the realities of imperial history upend his characterization and this reflective spatial qualifier. The British colonial state in India did not respond to the 'Indian Mutiny' with a panopticon but with public brutality that involved executions, 'hangings and floggings' and spectacles such as 'blowing rebels from the cannon's mouth' (Connell 2006: 261). France's colonies from Saigon to Senegal to Algeria saw spectacular violence too. As Rosalind Morris points out, 'if it is true that the "slackening of the hold on the body" and the "decline of spectacle" marked the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Europe… it remained profoundly central to colonial regimes' (Morris 2002: 265). Perhaps to defend himself against such criticisms, Foucault qualifies his narrative spatially to Europe. But this is exactly the 'slicing' that is questionable, for by this means Foucault arbitrarily cuts 'Europe' off from its colonies -as if colonies of the French empire were not also, by virtue of being subject to the sovereignty of the French state, part of 'Europe' in that sense; as if imperial and colonial history were not also Europe's history. Such is the work of analytic bifurcation which impedes a more global analysis. We can now turn to a classic work of second-wave historical sociology and see more clearly how analytic bifurcation works and how it occludes a more global analysis: Charles Tilly's Coercion, Capital, and European States (Tilly 1990). This is an exemplary work in historical sociology, for it seeks, as the best historical sociology does, to explain key aspects of modernity; in this case, the formation of the nation-state or, as he calls them 'national states', and their rise to dominance. We would think that this book would make transnational and global relations a key part of the analysis. After all, the book seeks to explain, rather than take for granted, the national-state form. There should be little threat of falling prey methodological nationalism. Furthermore, when we think about European states from AD 990-1992, surely European empires would come to the foreground; and empires were transnational phenomenon through and through. Not only did they expand globally and interact on a global stage, they were Journal of Globalization Studies 2014 • May 126 themselves complex transnational formations that bled over, and across, different political spaces. Indeed, empires should be central to Tilly's analysis. The book's entire point is to explain how the national-state came to become the dominant form over other possible sociopolitical forms, including city-states and -yes indeed -empires! 3 But where is the global? Where is empire? Some critics have charged this work for falling short because it focuses upon 'European' states rather than other states, but this is really not the problem in my view. The problem is how those so-called European states are conceptualized in the first place. Tilly defines states as 'coercion-wielding organizations that are distinct from household and kinship groups and exercise clear priority in some respects over all other organizations within substantial territories' (Tilly 1990: 1). He defines national states as 'states governing contiguous regions and their cities by means of centralized, differentiated, and autonomous structures' (Ibid.: 2). All good so far: we anticipate, given this conceptual scheme, that Tilly will tell a story of how it is that these national states came to dominate Europe and win out over other possible forms. Hence, would expect him to show us how, around the midtwentieth century, national states in Europe emerged from the ashes of European empire. Why? Because for most of the historical period Tilly covers, European states like Britain and France -which Tilly refers to as exemplary of national states -were not coercion-wielding organizations 'governing contiguous regions and their cities by means of centralized, differentiated and autonomous structures'. They were empirestates; coercion wielding organizations governing expansive regions and cities with a hierarchy of citizen/subject at the core of the system. In the 1920s and 1930s, the British empire-state was at its territorial highpoint, encompassing more than 33 million miles of territory around the world, structured by various hierarchical political divisions and fragmented sovereignties. The French empire encompassed over 12 million miles around the same time. These states only became truly national states later, after World War II. Yet remarkably, this is not Tilly's story. Tilly instead sees the 'national state' winning out over 'city-states, empires, theocracies, and many other forms of government' a century earlier, in the nineteenth century. 'Full-fledged empires flourished into the seventeenth century, and the last zones of fragmented sovereignty only consolidated into national states late in the nineteenth' (Tilly 1990: 23). How can this be? The problem lies in the bifurcation effected by Tilly's understanding of states. He notes, for instance, that just as national states in Europe were emerging, they were also 'creating empires beyond Europe, in the Americas, Africa, Asia and the Pacific' (Tilly 1990: 167). He refers to these as 'external empires ' (Ibid.: 167). In other words, Tilly's theory posits an 'internal' national state 'inside' Europe and its 'external' empire 'outside Europe'. In Tilly's model, there is a 'European' national state and then there is imperialism and an overseas 'empire'; there is a national state in Europe, exerting sovereignty over parts of Europe, and then there is, over there, an 'empire'; as if the latter were an appendage irrelevant to the constitution of the former, as if the model of sovereignty had not been already forged in and by interactions with the periphery out there; as if there could realistically be such an easy distinction between 'inside' and 'outside'. But, of course, national states did not develop their ideas and practices about sovereignty first in Europe and then transpose them outward; they developed first amidst sixteenth cen- Go • Occluding the Global 127 tury colonial claims and disputes between empires about overseas territory (Branch 2012). And the so-called 'external' colonies of Britain were not 'outside' Britain: they were British. They were declared subject to the sovereignty of Britain, just as France's so-called 'external' colonies were subject to the sovereignty of Francehence fully inside it. This is why the English crown fought, so hard and so often, to keep colonies within itself, suppressing the American revolution in the 1770s or, for that matter, violently suppressing the Mau-Mau rebellion in the 1950s. And France's colonies likewise were not 'outside' of France: they were French. Hence France fought the bloody Algerian war in the 1950s to 'keep Algeria French'. That was the mantra after all. In short, Tilly's model analytically bifurcates into distinct domains the 'national state' and 'empire' -'internal' and 'external', 'inside' and 'outside' -that were never really separated in practice. 4 In so doing, his model by its very categorical elision occludes imperial relations and hence a more global analysis. This would be an analysis that would not be restricted 'to Europe', if only because empires never were so restricted. It would be an analysis, instead, that would track the global by tracking the imperial -taking us from, say, London to Calcutta down to Nairobi over to Suva in Fiji, and the relations and connections throughout. This would also be an analysis, by the same token, which could track not just now the national state form came to dominate over other forms like empires, but how it emerged from the dynamics of empires; how global space, in the wake of decolonization, came to appear nationalized; that is cut up into distinct units called 'national states', and how it did so by the very dynamics of coercion and capital within and between empires which Tilly already pinpoints but which he arbitrarily restricts to a regional (European) phenomenon alone. It would be a global analysis that does not presume a sovereign state that then extends itself overseas or contracts and retreats back home but whose very policies, practices, and forms were forged in and through its interactions in transnational and global space in the first place. Because of the analytic bifurcations endemic to his approach, Tilly's model occludes any such analysis. Instead, the 'global' in his analysis boils down to a diffusionist story whereby a 'national state' that ostensibly emerged in Europe then diffuses to the rest of the world. 5 The global is treated not as a constitutive force but instead merely a blank slate onto which our Eurocentric historical sociologies are etched. 'Hunting' for Variables 6 Besides analytic bifurcation, the other way in which the global has been occluded is through comparative-historical sociology's tendencies towards causal scientism. By this I mean the way in which historical sociology, in an effort to legitimate itself as scientific and to differentiate itself from disciplinary history, has aimed for causal explanation as the goal of research and has treated causal explanation as a matter of 'variable hunting Journal of Globalization Studies 2014 • May 128 macrocausal analysis' to the effect of neglecting historicity (Ibid.: 309). I suggest that causal scientism has had another effect: rather than only serving to occlude historicity, the hunt for variable-based causality has occluded the global, thereby 'domesticating' historical sociology in the sense of keeping the analytic focus on the 'domestic' rather than the transnational. 7 In one of the few works discussing global historical sociology, Take the simple example of the Arab Spring. Because this happened so recently and we all read about it and followed it in the news, we all know that there were important so-called 'global' factors to all of the individual revolutions: surely it would sound silly to us if, for example, someone said that diffusion effects were not at play here; that is, that the revolution in Tunisia did not in turn shape or give inspiration to those in Egypt, Yemen, and Libya. In either of these scenarios just mentioned, the 'global' or at least in this case the regional or international, would be seen by us as important for any meaningful account. But let us fast forward fifteen years from now and imagine that an aspirational young historical sociologist wants to write about the revolutions. Because she is aspirational, this young historical sociologist will likely be compelled -or advised -to think about the revolutions causally -that is to write a dissertation that includes at least some significant bit on why the revolutions occurred. And, because she is aspirational, wants to get a job in a good department and publish in mainstream sociology journals, she will adopt some typical method like Mills' method of agreement or difference -the standard method for assessing causality in comparative-historical research. So she might employ Mills' method of difference to assess causes: she will list all of the countries that had revolution and those that did not and try to find the factors that the former shared that the latter lacked. And if she did so, of course, her analysis will reveal that diffusion was not a cause; that the 'global' did not matter. She will find that in all of the countries after the Tunisian revolution, all had televisions, newspapers or access to the internet that would have let the inhabitants of those countries hear about the Tunisian revolution. In all of the 'cases', then, there must have been diffusion; in other words, all Go • Occluding the Global 129 the countries were enmeshed in a transnational circuit of information about revolution. According to Mills' logic of difference, therefore, the transnational should not be part of our causal story, for if the transnational is constant it cannot explain variation: all of the cases were exposed to the Tunisian revolution, yet only in some of them did a revolution occur. So our young historical sociologist might instead look to national conditions or factors that better explain the variation and, as a result, the 'transnational' or 'global' recedes from view. Of course we today would find such a claim counter-intuitive. While none of us would at all argue that intra-regional ideational influence was the sole 'cause' for revolutions, we would recognize that it was at least perhaps it was a necessary (but not sufficient) one. Yet even this more minimal claim would not appear in our young historical sociologists' analysis; and our young historical sociologist will produce a study where regional influence plays little to no part in the story. Another example is the debate over whether or not European development was positively impacted by global factors -not least by overseas imperialism beginning in the long sixteenth century onward. World-systems and dependency schools of thought, along with postcolonial studies drawing upon those schools, have long contended that European development cannot be understood without recognizing the advantages obtained from overseas imperialism (Wallerstein 1974: 128). Some argue that in fact Western 'take-off' was itself due to the economic surpluses produced from imperialism rather than due to, say, Weber's Protestant ethic or some other factor internal to Europe or individual European countries (Blaut 1993). But there is still a debate: critics assert that imperialism was not important for causing or contributing to European development and instead that various internal factors have more causal power (Usami 2011). On what grounds? There are two arguments. The first argument is qualitative. O'Brien points out that all of the principal powers in Europe in fact remained undeveloped from around 1415-1815 except Britain and arguably Holland, despite the fact that they all had imperial acquisitions. Portugal and Spain, for instance, had massive overseas empires yet neither overtook England and instead suffered from economic stagnation up through their entire periods as empires. If imperialism is connected to economic growth, then these countries should have been as economically successful as Britain (O'Brien 2005: 77; The second argument for why imperialism is not important for European economic development is quantitative. O'Brien collects data to show that fortunes from overseas commerce between 1450 and 1750 were miniscule and did not represent any significant increase from previous (presumably non-imperialist) periods; and that, even in the late 1700s, European exports and imports to the periphery amounted to only a per cent and two-four per cent total economic output respectively (as late as the 1840s, total exports Journal of Globalization Studies • May 130 and imports never amounted to more than 15 per cent). O'Brien makes similar points about bullion extraction. We can immediately see, then, that this argument occludes the global by reducing the global to a quantitative variable (amount of trade) (O'Brien 2005: 77). The implication is that imp

Targeted pruning of a neuron's dendritic tree via femtosecond laser dendrotomy

Neurons are classified according to action potential firing in response to current injection. While such firing patterns are shaped by the composition and distribution of ion channels, modelling studies suggest that the geometry of dendritic branches also influences temporal firing patterns. Verifying this link is crucial to understanding how neurons transform their inputs to output but has so far been technically challenging. Here, we investigate branching-dependent firing by pruning the dendritic tree of pyramidal neurons. We use a focused ultrafast laser to achieve highly localized and minimally invasive cutting of dendrites, thus keeping the rest of the dendritic tree intact and the neuron functional. We verify successful dendrotomy via two-photon uncaging of neurotransmitters before and after dendrotomy at sites around the cut region and via biocytin staining. Our results show that significantly altering the dendritic arborisation, such as by severing the apical trunk, enhances excitability in layer V cortical pyramidal neurons as predicted by simulations. This method may be applied to the analysis of specific relationships between dendritic structure and neuronal function. The capacity to dynamically manipulate dendritic topology or isolate inputs from various dendritic domains can provide a fresh perspective on the roles they play in shaping neuronal outpu

CDH11 Expression is Associated with Survival in Patients with Osteosarcoma

Previous studies have shown that cadherin-11 (CDH11) may be involved in the metastatic process of osteosarcoma. The correlation of the expression levels of CDH11 in osteosarcoma samples with the risk of disease progression and metastasis was examined. Real time qRT-PCR was used to quantify CDH11 expression in a set of newly established osteosarcoma cell lines, 11 primaries and five metastases, compared to the levels in 12 normal osteoblast cell lines established from healthy bone, and also in a set of 10 snap-frozen osteosarcoma samples. In all cases long term clinical follow-up data was available. The CDH11 expression level decreased gradually from the osteoblast to the primary cell lines (p=0.2184) and further to those established from the tumor metastases (p=0.0275). Importantly, the level of CDH11 expression correlated significantly (p=0.01) with patient survival (Kaplan-Meier survival analysis) in both sample sets (p=0.0128 for the cell lines, p=0.0492 for the biopsies). In conclusion, the results indicate that CDH11 may be useful as a prognostic marker of disease progression and survival in osteosarcoma

Waste prevention for sustainable resource and waste management

Although the 2Rs (reduce and reuse) are considered high-priority approaches, there has not been enough quantitative research on effective 2R management. The purpose of this paper is to provide information obtained through the International Workshop in Kyoto, Japan, on 11–13 November 2015, which included invited experts and researchers in several countries who were in charge of 3R policies, and an additional review of 245 previous studies. It was found that, regarding policy development, the decoupling between environmental pressures and economy growth was recognized as an essential step towards a sustainable society. 3R and resource management policies, including waste prevention, will play a crucial role. Approaches using material/substance flow analyses have become sophisticated enough to describe the fate of resources and/or hazardous substances based on human activity and the environment, including the final sink. Life-cycle assessment has also been developed to evaluate waste prevention activities. Regarding target products for waste prevention, food loss is one of the waste fractions with the highest priority because its countermeasures have significant upstream and downstream effects. Persistent organic pollutants and hazardous compounds should also be taken into account in the situation where recycling activities are globally widespread for the promotion of a material-cycling society

A Genome Wide Association Study of arabinoxylan content in 2-row spring barley grain

In barley endosperm arabinoxylan (AX) is the second most abundant cell wall polysaccharide and in wheat it is the most abundant polysaccharide in the starchy endosperm walls of the grain. AX is one of the main contributors to grain dietary fibre content providing several health benefits including cholesterol and glucose lowering effects, and antioxidant activities. Due to its complex structural features, AX might also affect the downstream applications of barley grain in malting and brewing. Using a high pressure liquid chromatography (HPLC) method we quantified AX amounts in mature grain in 128 spring 2-row barley accessions. Amounts ranged from ~ 5.2 μg/g to ~ 9 μg/g. We used this data for a Genome Wide Association Study (GWAS) that revealed three significant quantitative trait loci (QTL) associated with grain AX levels which passed a false discovery threshold (FDR) and are located on two of the seven barley chromosomes. Regions underlying the QTLs were scanned for genes likely to be involved in AX biosynthesis or turnover, and strong candidates, including glycosyltransferases from the GT43 and GT61 families and glycoside hydrolases from the GH10 family, were identified. Phylogenetic trees of selected gene families were built based on protein translations and were used to examine the relationship of the barley candidate genes to those in other species. Our data reaffirms the roles of existing genes thought to contribute to AX content, and identifies novel QTL (and candidate genes associated with them) potentially influencing the AX content of barley grain. One potential outcome of this work is the deployment of highly associated single nucleotide polymorphisms markers in breeding programs to guide the modification of AX abundance in barley grain

Optimasi Portofolio Resiko Menggunakan Model Markowitz MVO Dikaitkan dengan Keterbatasan Manusia dalam Memprediksi Masa Depan dalam Perspektif Al-Qur`an

Risk portfolio on modern finance has become increasingly technical, requiring the use of sophisticated mathematical tools in both research and practice. Since companies cannot insure themselves completely against risk, as human incompetence in predicting the future precisely that written in Al-Quran surah Luqman verse 34, they have to manage it to yield an optimal portfolio. The objective here is to minimize the variance among all portfolios, or alternatively, to maximize expected return among all portfolios that has at least a certain expected return. Furthermore, this study focuses on optimizing risk portfolio so called Markowitz MVO (Mean-Variance Optimization). Some theoretical frameworks for analysis are arithmetic mean, geometric mean, variance, covariance, linear programming, and quadratic programming. Moreover, finding a minimum variance portfolio produces a convex quadratic programming, that is minimizing the objective function ðð¥with constraintsð ð 𥠥 ðandð´ð¥ = ð. The outcome of this research is the solution of optimal risk portofolio in some investments that could be finished smoothly using MATLAB R2007b software together with its graphic analysis