Empire and the Social Sciences: Global Histories of Knowledge

✍ Scribed by Jeremy Adelman

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 245
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This thought-provoking and original collection looks at how intellectuals and their disciplines have been shaped, halted and advanced by the rise and fall of empires. It illuminates how ideas did not just reflect but also moulded global order and disorder by informing public policies and discourse. Ranging from early modern European empires to debates about recent American hegemony, Empire and the Social Sciences shows that world history cannot be separated from the empires that made it, and reveals the many ways in which social scientists constructed empires as we know them.
Taking a truly global approach from China and Japan to modern America, the contributors collectively tackle a long durée of the modern world from the Enlightenment to the present day. Linking together specific moments of world history it also puts global history at the centre of a debate about globalization of the social sciences. It thus crosses and integrates several disciplines and offers graduate students, scholars and faculty an approach that intersects fields, crosses regions and maps a history of global social sciences.

✦ Table of Contents

Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Acknowledgements
List of contributors
Introduction: Social Science and Empire – A Durable Tension
Notes
Chapter 1: A New System of Imperial Government: Political Economy and the Spanish Theory of Commercial Empire, ca. 1740–50
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 2: Poor Mao’s Almanack? Empire, Political Economy and the Transformation of Social Science
Notes
Chapter 3: Utilitarianism and the Question of Free Labour in Russia and India, Eighteenth–Nineteenth Centuries
Periphery and Freedom: The Invention of the Panopticon in Russia
Identifying ‘free’ labour
Utilitarianism in India
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 4: Geography and the Reshaping of the Modern Chinese Empire
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 5: The Periphery’s Order: Opium and Moral Wreckage in British Burma
Opium and Empire
Morally wrecked: From periphery to Empire
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 6: Custom in the Archive: The Birth of Modern Chinese Law at the End of Empire
Custom as keystone: Law, ethnography and empire
Customary law/modern law
‘Grand Shen’ and the making of modern law
Assessing custom as imperial classification
Notes
Chapter 7: Nitobe Inazo and the Diffusion of a Knowledgeable Empire
Notes
Chapter 8: Modern Imperialism and International Law: Carl Schmitt and Ernst Rudolf Huber on the ‘International Legal Order of Great Spaces’
The Rhineland and modern imperialism
Global arbitration and modern imperialism
Imperialism as universalism
Ernst Rudolf Huber on imperialism, great spaces and international law
Notes
Chapter 9: Knowledge as Power: Internationalism, Information and Us Global Ambitions
Notes
Chapter 10: Knowledge for Empire: American Hegemony, The Rockefeller Foundation and the Rise of Academic International Relations in the United States
Why did the Rockefeller Foundation arrange the 1954 Conference?
Yale Institute of International Studies
The 1954 Conferees’ biographies
The 1954 Conference
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 11: Circumventing Imperialism: The Global Economy in Latin American Social Sciences
Centre-Periphery and the American global order
Crisis of development and dependency
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 12: Western International Theory, 1492–2010: Performing Western Supremacy and Western Imperialism
Inventing and colonizing America through the construction of imperialist international theory, 1492–ca.1900
The bifurcation of Western-centric international theory, ca. 1889–1945
1898–1945 – The ‘Hobson-Wilson Moment’: Maintaining and defending Western supremacy through ‘sane imperialism’
The Western colonial-racist guilt syndrome and the rise of ‘Subliminal’ imperialist Eurocentrism, 1945–1989
Post-1989 international theory: Back to the future
Notes
Epilogue: Empire and the Global Knowledge Regime
Notes
Index