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builds on an internal capitalisation exercise conducted for the purpose of documenting the history of the MSF project in Agok from its opening in May 2008 until its official closure in April 2023, with a goal to critically reflect on the risk of humanitarian aid resources being siphoned to finance war or instrumentalised to escalate intercommunal resentment. Three key questions will be addressed. First, in what way could MSF have disrupted local balances? Second, to what
This book describes the explosion of debt across the global economy and related requirement of political leaders to pursue exponential growth to meet the demands of creditors and investors. It presents a historical account of the modern origins of capitalist debt by looking at how commercial money is produced as debt in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The book identifies the ways in which the control, production, and distribution of money, as interest-bearing debt, are used to discipline populations. It focuses on the histories of the development of the Bank of England and the establishment of permanent national debt with the intensification and expansion of debt, as a "technology of power", under colonialism in a global context. The book investigates the modern origins of debt as a technology of power by focusing on war, the creation of the "national" debt, and the capitalization of the organized force of the state. It addresses the consequences of modern regimes of debt and puts forward proposals of what needs to be done, politically, to reverse the problems generated by debt-based economies. The book utilizes the term "intensification" rather than spread or proliferation to think about both the amplification and spatial expansion of debt as a technology of power during the era of European colonialism and resistance. Finally, it also presents a convincing case for the 99" to use the power of debt to challenge present inequalities and outlines a platform for action suggesting possible alternatives.
conquests (O’Brien 1988; Brewer 1989). But this could not have had any effect and, indeed, would have destroyed the economy without an expansive monetary supply first occasioned by the Bank of England issuing loans originally backed by silver coinage (Carruthers 1996; Davies 2002; Wennerlind 2011). What is often forgotten is that before the sovereign was made subordinate to Parliament, financing war was the personal responsibility of royal authority. With relatively strict limits placed upon taxation, and with a limited money supply, this meant that if the sovereign
The first collection of its kind, Chartist Drama makes available four plays written or performed by members of the Chartist movement of the 1840s. Emerging from the lively counter-culture of this protest campaign for democratic rights, these plays challenged cultural as well as political hierarchies by adapting such recognisable genres as melodrama, history plays, and tragedy for performance in radically new settings. A communal, public, and embodied art form, drama was linked for the Chartists with other kinds of political performance: the oratory of the mass platform, festival-like outdoor meetings, and the elaborate street theatre of protest marches. Plays that Chartists wrote or staged advanced new interpretations of British history and criticised aspects of the contemporary world. And Chartist drama intervened in fierce strategic arguments within the movement. Most notably, poet-activist John Watkins’s John Frost, which dramatises the gripping events of the Newport rising of 1839, in which twenty-two Chartists lost their lives, defends the rebellion and the Chartist recourse to violence as a means for the movement to achieve its aims. The volume’s appendices document over one hundred Chartist dramatic performances, staged by activists in local Chartist associations or at professional benefits at some of London’s largest working-class theatres. Gregory Vargo’s introduction and notes elucidate the previously unexplored world of Chartist dramatic culture, a context that promises to reshape what we know about early Victorian popular politics and theatre.
By expanding the geographical scope of the history of violence and war, this volume challenges both Western and state-centric narratives of the decline of violence and its relationship to modernity. It highlights instead similarities across early modernity in terms of representations, legitimations, applications of, and motivations for violence. It seeks to integrate methodologies of the study of violence into the history of war, thereby extending the historical significance of both fields of research. Thirteen case studies outline the myriad ways in which large-scale violence was understood and used by states and non-state actors throughout the early modern period across Africa, Asia, the Americas, the Atlantic, and Europe, demonstrating that it was far more complex than would be suggested by simple narratives of conquest and resistance. Moreover, key features of imperial violence apply equally to large-scale violence within societies. As the authors argue, violence was a continuum, ranging from small-scale, local actions to full-blown war. The latter was privileged legally and increasingly associated with states during early modernity, but its legitimacy was frequently contested and many of its violent forms, such as raiding and destruction of buildings and crops, could be found in activities not officially classed as war.
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) returned to public discourse in the 1990s, when the Soviet Union imploded and globalization erupted. Best known for The Great Transformation, Polanyi’s wide-ranging thought anticipated twenty-first-century civilizational challenges of ecological collapse, social disintegration and international conflict, and warned that the unbridled domination of market capitalism would engender nationalist protective counter-movements. In Karl Polanyi and Twenty-First-Century Capitalism, Radhika Desai and Kari Polanyi Levitt bring together prominent and new thinkers in the field to extend the boundaries of our understanding of Polanyi's life and work. Kari Polanyi Levitt's opening essay situates Polanyi in the past century shaped by Keynes and Hayek, and explores how and why his ideas may shape the twenty-first century. Her analysis of his Bennington Lectures, which pre-dated and anticipated The Great Transformation, demonstrates how Central European his thought and chief concerns were. The next several contributions clarify, for the first time in Polanyi scholarship, the meaning of money as a fictitious commodity. Other contributions resolve difficulties in understanding the building blocks of Polanyi's thought: fictitious commodities, the double movement, the United States' exceptional development, the reality of society and socialism as freedom in a complex society. The volume culminates in explorations of how Polanyi has influenced, and can be used to develop, ideas in a number of fields, whether income inequality, world-systems theory or comparative political economy. Contributors: Fred Block, Michael Brie, Radhika Desai, Michael Hudson, Hannes Lacher, Kari Polanyi Levitt, Chikako Nakayama, Jamie Peck, Abraham Rotstein, Margaret Somers, Claus Thomasberger, Oscar Ugarteche Galarza.
with explosive media reports, dramatic Hollywood recreations, countless non-governmental organisation (NGO) programmes and masses of academic research reveal an increasing concern over these economies, and have in turn led to a growing interest in and need for policies which limit the degree to which commodities can be used to either finance war, or become a dominant motivation for individuals to take up arms. Seen as a major threat to peace, stability and development, the international community has increased its focus on creating and improving upon policies which
power, finance war, and found a transatlantic empire. This was accomplished with surprising speed: Spaniards overturned the major indigenous states in little more than a generation, and after the ‘age of conquest’ (c.1500–50) the levels of violence generated by the Spanish rush for riches receded. Spaniards rapidly consolidated their control over the main areas of indigenous civilization and embarked on transforming their inhabitants into Christianized participants in a European-style money and wage economy. This inaugurated the American Pax Hispanica, the long period
—which was war—is already stamped with the financial machinations of the Dutch empire, Italian city-states of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Atlantic slave trade, and the conquest of North America and India by capitalized joint-stock companies such as the East India Company. The main argument in this chapter is that the invention of a funded long-term national debt was principally born not to finance wars to aggrandize the power of the Crown per se but more importantly to aggrandize the power of what Justin Rosenberg (1994) has called “the empire of civil
significant matter of honour or privilege was at play. On 8 March, for instance, the Commons agreed in a 226–166 division to consider the Lords’ request to turn their attention to what Archbishop Abbot had told them was the one matter that ‘most mainly concerns the honour and safety of the King and kingdom’: financing war against Spain. Unlike a host of other decisions to which the matter of Buckingham was related, this one was loaded with status implications that extended beyond the one Abbot had cited. Many members