88 research outputs found
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Maintaining (Environmental) Capital Intact
The idea of sustainability is an odd composite of imagination and accounting. Environmental history is a permissive historical subdiscipline, and this essay is about the environmentalâeconomicâintellectual history of an environmental idea, sustainability, which is historical in the sense that it is very old, and historical, too, in the sense that it is an idea about history, or about imagining the future in relation to the past. One of the oddities of the last several decades is that these old ideas have been transformed into the most celebrated of all the dicta of environmental policy, or an aspiration of UN commissions, âstrategy consultanciesâ, and very large government agencies (âsustainability is our âtrue north.ââ)Histor
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Values, Classical Political Economy, and the Portuguese Empire
The article explores early criticisms of Adam Smith, with particular reference to long-distance commerce, the Portuguese empire, and the writings of William Julius Mickle. The changing relationship between merchants and sovereigns, and between economic and political power, was of central importance, the article suggests, to disputes over Smith's ideas of self-interest.Histor
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The Archives of Universal History
This article looks at early proposals for an international archive, at the different respects in which archives are international or transnational, and at the development since 1946 of the archives of international organizations. It suggests that the history of the UN's involvement with archives is itself a development of historical and even political interest.Histor
Security: Collective good or commodity?
This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2008 Sage.The state monopoly on the legitimate use of violence in Europe and North America has been central to the development of security as a collective good. Not only has it institutionalized the state as the prime national and international security provider, it has helped to reduce the threat from other actors by either prohibiting or limiting their use of violence. The recent growth of the private security industry appears to undermine this view. Not only are private security firms proliferating at the national level; private military companies are also taking over an increasing range of military functions in both national defence and international interventions. This article seeks to provide an examination of the theoretical and practical implications of the shift from states to markets in the provision of security. Specifically, it discusses how the conceptualization of security as a commodity rather than a collective good affects the meaning and implementation of security in Western democracies.ESR
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