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The study of the early modern Atlantic world has come of age in the twenty-first century. Books on the subject pour off the presses in dazzling – and dizzying – profusion. In recent years at least sixty books with the words ‘Atlantic’ or ‘Atlantic World’ in their titles have been published annually. A decade ago, the comparable number could be counted on the fingers of one hand. 1 This dramatic increase in such a short space of time is a testament to the cascading interest in the subject. Works that explore some aspect of the movement and
European states assumed a monopoly on the use of violence through dual processes of internal pacification and international war making. Even allowing for contemporary trends towards asymmetric conflict, the state has proven itself as a potent war-fighting institution. Closely related to the demonstrated capacity of the state to conduct war was the emergence in the early modern period of the idea of raison
Early Modern European ‘Military Revolution’, a concept pioneered by Michael Howard and later modified and developed by Geoffrey Parker. 3 This holds that technological and tactical changes – gunpowder, musketry and artillery – lead to the creation of large standing armies and the growth of fiscal-military states over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The French Revolutionary
violence and statehood have historically been closely linked. 16 Across the early modern era, the growing demands of war assisted in state consolidation through the maintenance of large standing armies, the increasing professionalisation of the military classes, the integration of war materiel into industrialisation processes, and mass state taxation. 17 Prior to modernity
fluidity ‘of all those boundaries that the early modern taught us to construct as sharp lines between self and other, this state and that state’, and they converge ‘as a consequence of contemporary reengagements with all those hard questions about who we are and what we can be that Hobbes and his successors thought had been answered once and for all in the twin absolutes of a unitary sovereignty and a
economic model it provides a means for underprivileged workers to improve their quality of life. This has proven a popular fallacy, inconsistent with the reality of much neoliberal economic enterprise. A core philosophical contradiction of neoliberalism is that it promotes the values of individualism and competition, despite the fact that the means by which people can compete to improve their socio-economic situations are often limited. Resembling the individualising ideals of early modern capitalism, the individualist ideology of neoliberalism is reinforced by
with respect to the Ottomans … Europeans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries could not and did not imagine themselves as a united, superior and self-sufficient territory, which could provide a basis for Orientalist thinking as Said assumes’. 10 As examples of this variegated discourse in Britain during the early modern period, Çırakman cites Richard Knolles’ The General Historie of the Turkes (1603); George Sandys’ A Relation of a Journey (1615); Henry Blount’s Voyage into the Levant (1634); and Francis Osborne’s Political Reflections upon the
, ‘Sir Thomas More’s Utopia and the Language of Renaissance Humanism’, in A. Pagden (ed.), The Language of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 123–6, 152. 43 A. Esmein, ‘La théorie de l’intervention internationale chez quelques publicists français du XVIe siècle’, Nouvelle revue historique, de droit français et étranger , 24 (1900), 558
capitalism. In the 1940s, these reforms were guided by the protectionist welfare principles recommended in John Maynard Keynes’ The general theory of employment, interest, and money ( 1936 ). After several decades of Keynesian influence, a global order characterised by relatively unrestricted markets with allowances for state capital controls came to be described as ‘embedded liberalism’ ( Ruggie 1982 ). While for some, contemporary neoliberalism represents an extension and intensification of nineteenth-century early modern capitalism and twentieth-century embedded
instrumentalist approach with his views concerning the deep-rooted and durable cultural qualities of national identity. He believes that these are firmly rooted in early modern ethnic communities, which he calls ‘ethnies’. He considers many cultural attributes, but for him language is clearly one of the most important elements of national identity: Authenticity and dignity are the