Empire at the Margins


Book Description

Focusing on the Ming and Qing eras, this book analyses crucial moments in the formation of cultural, regional and religious identities. It demonstrates how the imperial discourse is many-faceted, rather than a monolithic agent of cultural assimilation.




The Margins of Empire


Book Description

At the turn of the twentieth century, the Ottoman state identified multiple threats in its eastern regions. In an attempt to control remote Kurdish populations, Ottoman authorities organized them into a tribal militia and gave them the task of subduing a perceived Armenian threat. Following the story of this militia, Klein explores the contradictory logic of how states incorporate groups they ultimately aim to suppress and how groups who seek autonomy from the state often attempt to do so through state channels. In the end, Armenian revolutionaries were not suppressed and Kurdish leaders, whose authority the state sought to diminish, were empowered. The tribal militia left a lasting impact on the region and on state-society and Kurdish-Turkish relations. Putting a human face on Ottoman-Kurdish histories while also addressing issues of state-building, local power dynamics, violence, and dispossession, this book engages vividly in the study of the paradoxes inherent in modern statecraft.




Tribes and Empire on the Margins of Nineteenth-Century Iran


Book Description

Tribes and Empire on the Margins of Nineteenth-Century Iran traces the history of the Bakhtiyari tribal confederacy of the Zagros Mountains through momentous times that saw the opening of their territory to the outside world. As the Qajar dynasty sought to integrate the peoples on its margins into the state, the British Empire made commercial inroads into the once inaccessible mountains on the frontier between Iran and Iraq. The distance between the state and the tribes was narrowed through imperial projects that included the building of a road through the mountains, the gathering of geographical and ethnographic information, and the exploration for oil, which culminated during the Iranian Constitutional Revolution. These modern projects assimilated autonomous pastoral nomadic tribes on the peripheries of Qajar Iran into a wider imperial territory and the world economy. Tribal subjects did not remain passive amidst these changes in environment and society, however, and projects of empire in the hinterlands of Iran were always mediated through encounters, accommodation, and engagement with the tribes. In contrast to the range of literature on the urban classes and political center in Qajar Iran, Arash Khazeni adopts a view from the Bakhtiyari tents on the periphery. Drawing upon Persian chronicles, tribal histories, and archival sources from London, Tehran, and Isfahan, this book opens new ground by approaching nineteenth-century Iran from its edge and placing the tribal periphery at the heart of a tale about empire and assimilation in the modern Middle East.




State Crime on the Margins of Empire


Book Description

This book offers a pioneering window into the elusive workings of state-corporate crime within the mining industries. It follows a single, brutal campaign of resistance organised by indigenous activists on the island of Papua New Guinea, who struggled against a decision to close a Rio Tinto owned copper mine, and investigates the subsequent state-corporate response, which led to the shocking loss of some 10,000 lives. Drawing on internal records and interviews with senior officials, Kristian Lasslett examines how an articulation of capitalist growth mediated through patrimonial politics, imperial state-power, large-scale mining, and clan-based, rural society, prompted an ostensibly 'responsible' corporate citizen, and liberal state actors, to organise a counterinsurgency campaign punctuated with gross human rights abuses. State Crime on the Margins of Empire represents a unique intervention rooted in a classical Marxist tradition that challenges positivist streams of criminological scholarship, in order to illuminate with greater detail the historical forces faced by communities in the global south caught in the increasingly violent dynamics of the extractive industries.




From the Margins of Empire


Book Description

Situated at the intersection of the colonial and the postcolonial, the modern and the postmodern, the novelists Christina Stead, Doris Lessing, and Nadine Gordimer all bear witness to this century's global transformations. From the Margins of Empire looks at how the question of national identity is constructed in their writings. These authors--white women who were born or grew up in British colonies or former colonies--reflect the subject of national identity in vastly different ways in both their lives and their work. Stead, who resided outside of her native Australia, has an unsettled identity. Lessing, who grew up in southern Rhodesia and migrated to England, is or has become English. Gordimer, who was born in South Africa and remains there, considers herself South African. Louise Yelin shows how the three writers' different national identities are inscribed in their fiction. The invented, hybrid character of nationality is, she maintains, a constant throughout. Locating the writings of Stead, Lessing, and Gordimer in the national cultures that produced and read them, she considers the questions they raise about the roles that whites, especially white women, can play in the new political and cultural order.




Military Anthropology


Book Description

In almost every military intervention in its history, the US has made cultural mistakes that hindered attainment of its policy goals. From the strategic bombing of Vietnam to the accidental burning of the Koran in Afghanistan, it has blundered around with little consideration of local cultural beliefs and for the long-term effects on the host nation's society. Cultural anthropology--the so-called "handmaiden of colonialism"--has historically served as an intellectual bridge between Western powers and local nationals. What light can it shed on the intersection of the US military and foreign societies today? This book tells the story of anthropologists who worked directly for the military, such as Ursula Graham Bower, the only woman to hold a British combat command during WWII. Each faced challenges including the negative outcomes of exporting Western political models and errors of perception. Ranging from the British colonial era in Africa to the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Military Anthropology illustrates the conceptual, cultural and practical barriers encountered by military organisations operating in societies vastly different from their own.




Women on the Margins


Book Description

Maria Sibylla Merian, a German painter and naturalist, produced an innovative work on tropical insects based on lore she gathered from the Carib, Arawak, and African women of Suriname.




Citizens of the Empire


Book Description

As we approach the elections of 2004, U.S. progressives are faced with the challenge of how to confront our unresponsive and apparently untouchable power structures. With millions of antiwar demonstrators glibly dismissed as a "focus group," and with the collapse of political and intellectual dialogue into slogans and soundbites used to stifle protest-"Support the Troops," "We Are the Greatest Nation on Earth," etc.-many people feel cynical and hopeless. Citizens of the Empire probes into the sense of disempowerment that has resulted from the Left's inability to halt the violent and repressive course of post-9/11 U.S. policy. In this passionate and personal exploration of what it means to be a citizen of the world's most powerful, affluent and militarized nation in an era of imperial expansion, Jensen offers a potent antidote to despair over the future of democracy. In a plainspoken analysis of the dominant political rhetoric-which is intentionally crafted to depress political discourse and activism-Jensen reveals the contradictions and falsehoods of prevailing myths, using common-sense analogies that provide the reader with a clear-thinking rebuttal and a way to move forward with progressive political work and discussions. With an ethical framework that integrates political, intellectual and emotional responses to the disheartening events of the past two years, Jensen examines the ways in which society has been led to this point and offers renewed hope for constructive engagement. Robert Jensen is a professor of media law, ethics and politics at the University of Texas, Austin. He is the author of Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream, among other books. He also writes for popular media, and his opinion and analytical pieces on foreign policy, politics and race have appeared in papers and magazines throughout the United States.




Strangers Within the Realm


Book Description

A collection of essays dealing with British expansion in the 17th and 18th centuries. An introduction surveys British imperial history, providing a context for the focus on specific ethnic groups--Native Americans, African-Americans, Scotch-Irish, Dutch, and Germans--and how these groups effected British expansion in Ireland, Scotland, Canada, and the West Indies. A conclusion assesses the impact of North American colonies on British society and politics. Paper edition (unseen), $14.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR




Morality at the Margins


Book Description

This book considers the day-to-day lives of young Muslims on Kenya’s island of Lamu, who live simultaneously on the edge and in the center. At the margins of the national and international economy and of Western notions of modernity, Lamu’s inhabitants nevertheless find themselves the focus of campaigns against Islamic radicalization and of Western touristic imaginations of the untouched and secluded. What does it mean to be young, modern, and Muslim here? How are these denominators imagined and enacted in daily encounters? Documenting the everyday lives of Lamu youth, this ethnography explores how young people negotiate cultural, religious, political, and economic expectations through nuanced deployments of language, dress, and bodily comportment. Hillewaert shows how seemingly mundane practices—how young people greet others, how they walk, dress, and talk—can become tactics in the negotiation of moral personhood. Morality at the Margins traces the shifting meanings and potential ambiguities of such everyday signs—and the dangers of their misconstrual. By examining the uncertainties that underwrite projects of self-fashioning, the book highlights how shifting and scalable discourses of tradition, modernity, secularization, nationalism, and religious piety inform changing notions of moral subjectivity. In elaborating everyday practices of Islamic pluralism, the book shows the ways in which Muslim societies critically engage with change while sustaining a sense of integrity and morality.




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