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This book looks at India in the context of a globalized world. It starts by looking at the history of Indian civilization, exploring the roots of Indian identity and highlighting processes such as foreign invasions, foreign trade, cultural imperialism, colonial rule and the growth of Indian nationalism. The founding fathers wanted India to be a liberal democracy and the values enshrined in the constitution were expected to form the basis of a society more in tune with the modern world. The book examines the gradual democratization of Indian politics. Cultural and ethnic divisions in Indian society are examined in depth, as are the problems that have prevented economic development and stood in the way of economic liberalization. The history of India's integration into the global economy is considered, and the opportunities available to the country in the early years of the twenty-first century are detailed. Alternative approaches to the development of the country, such as those put forward by Gandhi, are discussed, and the final chapters consider the Indian government's perception of the Indian diaspora, as well as the changing priorities reflected in India's foreign policy since 1947.
significant that they were willing to make political use of a mode of discourse that was almost universally associated with the seditious multitude. The encouragement and exploitation of common rumours was to reach its height during the Long Parliament, when at critical moments, Pym and his allies sought to excite popular fears by evoking the threat of internal Catholic conspiracy and foreign invasion.183 Notes 1 John Castle to William Trumbull, 6 December 1622, Add. 72276, fol. 19r. 2 Castle to Trumbull, 2 August 1621, Add. 72275, fol. 119r. 3 Giles Mompesson to
Model and metaphor in botanical taxonomy IN LATE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY Britain, in a climate rife with anxieties over disorder and the threat of foreign invasion, botany became bound up with concerns over order and national identity. An anonymous poem – there are good reasons to attribute it to Anna Seward – written to commemorate the Lichfield Botanical Society’s translation
This chapter focuses on the history of India. It explores the roots of Indian identity and discusses how the Indian civilisation was influenced by various processes such as foreign invasions, foreign trade and cultural imperialism. This chapter suggests that these processes have forged links between Indian and other societies and explains that these links are being emphasized by both the Indian government and the media in this age of globalisation.
(western and eastern) 405 years, and the Qin only 14 years, after having united and founded the Middle Kingdom. Many dynasties began with great momentum; some entered their prime in the first 60–80 years; some declined sooner than others after the first few hardworking Emperors left the scene. All would end by peasant rebellion, rival takeover or foreign invasions. Will the Communist dynasty escape this pattern? Full of drama, suspense and unexpected turns, the story of modern China is rich and extremely colourful. It is a tale of national survival, economic
The years 1638 through 1644 straddle a crucial divide in British history, as calls for religious reform and renewal mutated into political revolution. This book seeks to bring coherence to a pre-revolutionary historiography that focuses on questions of conformity to and semi-separatism from 'the church by law established' and a post-1642 historiography built around a coarse polarity between 'presbyterianism' and 'independency'. It recognises that the 1640s brought new men to the fore and an intense interaction between religious divines and lay Members of Parliament (MPs) who struggled for control of a nation and the future of its church. While the historiographical rediscovery since the 1980s of Protestant scholasticism has helped to rescue post-Reformation English puritanism from the realms of pietistic platitudes, it has not been equally applied to the field of ecclesiology. The book questions the use of various pamphlet sources and also engages in a careful analysis of several well-known, but relatively unused, texts. It provides a methodology for how to approach the published volumes on the Westminster assembly edited by Chad Van Dixhoorn. Presbyterianism, much less Scottish presbyterianism, was not a forgone conclusion when the Westminster assembly first met. The book seeks to show that the dynamics in the Westminster assembly owes far more to esprit de corps within a body confident in the calling of its members by God without any need to seek puppet-masters across the road from the Abbey Church of St Peter.
Much of the writing about The Prince is often at a certain distance from the text, not engaging with it in a critical or textual way. One of the features of the chapters in this book is the extent to which they focus on the complex texture of Machiavelli's writing and on the complex reading processes this in turn calls forth. Indeed, the book argues that it is not simply, as modern theorists have it, that the reader creates the meaning of the text but that certain texts in our culture - texts like The Prince - create and demand a more complicated response from readers as well as different kinds of reading. In other words, they demand a plural approach. The book brings together both a variety of critical viewpoints and a variety of disciplines but also a series of arguments which would allow the reader to engage in a debate that was at once broadly based and intensely focused. That debate has to include proper recognition of the particular circumstances of Machiavelli's writing, an awareness of the modern critical approaches now being explored in relation to The Prince, and a sense of the connection between Machiavelli and the twentieth century. What is clear, however, is that The Prince remains an important text in the attempt to understand cultural history and one that reminds us how difficult but rewarding that task is.
As a historian of late imperial Russia McKean thus defies easy classification. He is both variously optimist and pessimist, at each instance aware of the complexities and contingencies of history. The imperial regime was willing to concede only the façade of a parliament, as an analysis of the Duma between 1905 and 1917 makes clear. Two examinations of late imperial intellectuals perceive some rays of hope for the late imperial regime. Murray Frame puts forward an alternative reading of late imperial civil society. According to Vincent Barnett, one leading student of the late imperial economy thought that it was undergoing an impressive expansion under tsarism. Although it was events in the capital that secured Nicholas II's downfall, the fate of the late imperial regime was perhaps more affected by its relations with the peasantry: the vast majority of the country's population. It is to McKean's credit, however, that he was able to introduce genuine doubt into a scholarly community all too keen to write off Nicholas II, largely accepting Haimson's thesis that there was a crisis of revolutionary proportions affecting late imperial Russia pre-1914. It is a pity that Haimson has not openly responded to McKean's challenging and more nuanced interpretation of late imperial Russia. Further research, particularly into civil society in the provinces, may well yet alter further our perceptions of late imperial Russia's problems and prospects.
This book differs from other books on propaganda in the elasticity it attributes to the term; orthodox literature has erred in restricting meaning to explicit texts such as the polemical tirade or 'black' propaganda. Myth, Symbolism and Rhetoric, the foundation concepts of propaganda, are discussed in detail and seen as animating and structuring the core edifice, or integuments, of the concept, such as hyperbole, ideology, emotion, manipulation, deceit, the search for utopia, otherness and the creation of enemies. Then the focus moves to a series of specific case study analyses of recent political phenomena that embody these elements - the phenomenon of 'Symbolic Government', the rise of single-issue groups, negative political campaigning, and the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Nor could propaganda exist without the myths that rhetoric articulates. Symbols can and frequently do express, embroider, simplify or resurrect myths. To say that propaganda is manipulative is to define a necessary but not sufficient characteristic of the term. Propaganda is a consequence of our need for enemies: they are not just there but necessarily there: they give coherence and definition to our values and they motivate us to action. Negative political advertising is a tried and tested device and a sinister exemplar of propaganda today. At one time it seemed to have become the preferred mode of choice in US politics.
The book begins by attempting to define the theoretical and ideological factors contributing to what the author calls 'late modernism' (schematically, occupying the period 1945-1975). It sets out the historical bases of my argument, and reexamines Pound's use of hermetic sources in the light of recent scholarship on the modernist occult. The hermetic in poetry is generally associated with forms of modernist writing deriving from romantic and symbolist models. The book focuses on Prynne's use of the shaman as a figure mediating between crude archetypal theories of the historical subject and a sophisticated temporal dialectic. It explores Heidegger's influence on late modernist poetics in more detail. Heidegger is a highly problematic figure in modern critical theory because he is at once the modernist thinker par excellence and the architect of postmodernism. The book provides an account of late modernism's revision of the fundamental romantic and modernist tropes of obscurity and fragmentation. It theorises the dialectical grounds of the relationship between hermetic poetry and philosophical commentary. The survival of romantic aesthetics in modernism is considered, leading into preliminary remarks on the deconstruction of the romantic fragment and Heidegger's theory of the Unheimliche. The questions of identity and dispersal, meaning and non-meaning, return to the uncanny by way of the Lacanian problematic of translation and the dream-work, involving the position of the subject called' by the otherness of the obscure text.