Mapmaking,science and state building in Russia before Peter the Great

While Peter the Great (ruled c1694–1725) can be credited with a concerted attempt to introduce modern European science, technology and other achievements to Russia, the fact that he built upon earlier processes of change which tended in the same direction is frequently underemphasized. The paper challenges the idea that Russia was totally isolated and static before Peter, but emphasizes the very different context in which science, technology and related pursuits developed there by comparison with Europe. It is asserted that the effects of state building in both the European and Russian cases gave rise to certain parallels and similarities. Using mapmaking as an example the paper suggests that its growing importance in both regions during this period was a reflection of the requirements of state building and not merely a product of the rise of commercial capitalism (the latter being as yet relatively insignificant in Russia). The frequently postulated links between commercial capitalism, the rise of mathematical sciences and a growing interest in mapmaking are questioned as being largely inapplicable to Russia before Peter and sometimes overstressed in the case of Europe. The paper presents an analysis of the early seventeenth century Book of the Great Map, a written artefact of pre-Petrine cartography which reflects the priorities and also some of the limitations of Russian mapmaking during the period.     

Paradoxes of Gender: Writing History in Post-Communist Russia 1987–1998

The paper analyses the main trends in Russian historiography concerning women's history and gender studies between 1987 and 1998. These developments are evaluated in the context of social, political and cultural changes in Russia in the period of transition from socialist to market economy. The paper argues that, despite the liberalisation of political and intellectual life in Russia following Gorbachev's reforms, the research on gender in the past years and present-day Russia is impeded, on the one hand, by the economic strains on Russia's academic community, which faces a Darwinian struggle for survival, and, on the other, by the persistence of dominant paradigms of history writing inherent in the Soviet ideology. However, the positive developments in the field of gender studies, which should be seen in the context of general regeneration of historical discipline from the ideological constraints, must not be neglected. The paper also draws attention to the field of gender studies and religion, focusing on the outcomes of recent research on Old Believer communities in nineteenth-century Russia.     

China’s geographical position in Europeans’ hierarchical imagination: A study on maps of Europeans from the perspective of intellectual history

Maps act not only as the carrier of the geographical information but also as the symbolic expression of particular cultural and political concepts, by which we can understand those people’s knowledge about themselves as well as about others. The maps drawn by the Europeans from the 16th to the 18th centuries vividly express the self-centeredness of the Europeans influenced by both the Christian and modern civilization concepts, and the maps also expressed their comments on the other parts of the world in such a mentality. Some characteristic maps and illustrations in the atlas of European history demonstrated how the Europeans formed and expressed their hierarchical perspective of the world geography. The position of China in the hierarchical world is one of the most important expressions of the European concept of China, and well served the purpose of our reflection on the cultural intercommunion.     

Information and Confusion: Russian Resident Diplomacy and Peter A. Tolstoi’s Arrival in the Ottoman Empire (1702–1703)

Abstract

This article explores the arrival of the first Russian resident ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in a period when Russian diplomacy underwent major transformations. It focuses on Peter A. Tolstoi’s network and the management of information gathered during the first year of his appointment in Adrianople (1702–03). The article revisits the notion of resident ambassador, not as a hallmark of ‘modern European diplomacy’ with an overemphasis on the diplomat as a state-representative and office-holder, on the states system, or on institutional reform, but to suggest that a resident embassy in the early modern period was more than a formal, self-contained, and sovereign institution located in a particular place. The transformation from ad-hoc to resident diplomacy in Russian–Ottoman relations did not originate from the adoption of European diplomatic norms alone: it created new or relied on the existing trans-imperial networks of the ambassador rather than on bilateral inter-state relations. The example of Russian–Ottoman relations demonstrates that while the new diplomacy introduced by Peter I was driven by Europeanization and reform, the transformations emerged from the adaptation to circumstances in different locations and depended on the development of contacts embedded in the geo-cultural and religious entanglements of the region.     

The Failure of ‘Liberal Developmentalism’: The United States's Anti-Communist Showcase in Guatemala, 1954–1960

This article examines the British involvement in the reorganisation of the Ottoman Empire's customs service. The study focuses particularly on the role of Sir Richard Crawford, who was appointed as a consultant to the Ottoman customs administration in 1909. In doing so, the article sheds fresh light on the position of European advisers as well as on British commercial diplomacy in the Ottoman Empire during the years preceding the First World War. This topic warrants further historical research as previous studies have not considered Crawford's position and the progress of the customs reform in detail. He introduced some important reforms, but proved unable to solve the complex question over the porterage service or to increase customs revenue as much as had been anticipated. War and revolution as well as the consequent disruption of trade; the vast geographical scope of the Ottoman Empire; and opposition from local and international stakeholders to his reforms explain to some extent why Crawford was unable to modernise the customs service as effectively as had been planned. In addition, Crawford's professional background and his personal characteristics were in some ways incompatible with the requirements of the demanding diplomatic world of Constantinople.     

Women,Gender and Migration along a Mediterranean Frontier: Pre‐Colonial Tunisia,c.1815–1870

This paper investigates gendered mechanisms for regulating migrants and migration in a pre‐colonial Muslim state, Tunisia, from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the eve of colonialism. Trans‐Mediterranean migration to, and permanent settlement in, nineteenth‐century Tunis, the capital city, constituted a major stimulus for political, cultural and social transformations that endured into the colonial period. Employing diverse documentation, the case study analyses this Mediterranean migratory current of ordinary women and men to test the theoretical literature based primarily on trans‐Atlantic movements, which has emphasised the ‘diversity of social positioning’ for women migrants. The paper argues that for pre‐colonial Tunisia, a state that was both an Ottoman province and a part of the larger Mediterranean world, the system of diplomatic protection represented a critical form of positioning. Moreover, Mediterranean states, both European and Muslim, had a long tradition of controlling the movements of women in port cities. Two distinct historical moments in the settlement of women from the Mediterranean islands in pre‐colonial Tunisia are compared. This approach not only enables an assessment of whether women's movements across international borders can attenuate, if only momentarily, patriarchal authority, but also encourages reflection on how gender explains historical variations in global migratory displacements as well as to what extent colonialism serves as an satisfactory explanatory framework for the gendering of communal boundaries.     

‘Proportioning violence’: Ethnographic notes on the contingencies of police reform in Turkey

In spite of years of efforts in Turkey to reform the police, including an increase in budget allocations for ‘democratic policing training’, ‘capacity building programmes’ and ‘non‐lethal technologies and tools’, police violence persists. How might we conceptualize the relationship between the upsurge of police violence and such investments? In this article, the author suggests that instead of taking ‘reform’ or ‘transformation’ discourses at face value, we look at some of the ways in which police violence is reformatted through the very tools, discourses and idioms of police reform itself. The article draws on 18 months of fieldwork research on police and security in Turkey, where the author observed the on‐site implementation of police reforms in several venues: police academy classes, practical training programmes that also involved ‘international’ security experts, and local police stations and neighbourhoods. The article examines how the processes of reforming expand the contours of not only policing practice but also the boundaries of police violence – ostensibly what these reforms were supposed to restrain.     

Chinese Objects in Eurasian Empire: On the Cultural Meaning of Chinese Art in Russia in the Late 17th–Early 18th Centuries

This article examines special features of “Chinoiserie” or “Chinese fashion” (“Kitaischina”) in Russia from the late 17th to the early 18th century: The reign of Peter the First. It discusses this cultural phenomenon’s historical origins, demonstrates the role of Chinese luxury goods and art objects in the era’s Russo-Chinese cultural exchange, and illustrates how Chinese decorative arts were used in Russian palaces. While Chinoiserie in Russia was influenced by similar trends in Western Europe, it was rooted in the unique history of regular contacts between Russia and the Qing Empire. Chinese objects not only appeared as commodities in the higher levels of Russian society, they also contributed to the prestige of the Russian state. Peter the First had a political purpose behind the collection, display and imitation of Chinese art objects in Russian palaces, as these practices demonstrated the growing wealth and power of newly established Russian Empire, which enjoyed trade connections with the Qing Empire. While contemporary perceptions of China in Russia were derived mostly by the exotic images of export art, ethnographic collections of genuine Chinese utensils, which were founded during that period, also contributed to Russian views of China. This research uses a comprehensive methodology, combining studies of material objects preserved in Russian museums and written sources, including archival records.     

18-20世纪俄国的国家与现代化

传统社会向现代社会的过渡常常导致社会冲突,解决冲突的方式不一,其中以改革和革命为主.当改革不足以解决尖锐的社会冲突之时,革命便不可避免,旧制度随之寿终正寝,而由国家实施的改革模式则力主法律的继承性和合理化变化.19-20世纪初的俄国则成为这样两种社会发展模式博弈的舞台.俄国通过革命解决了当时的社会冲突,其革命模式对许多亚非拉国家产生了深远影响.然而,这些采取革命方式解决冲突的国家多以失败告终,不仅未能步入现代化道路,反而使国家陷入混乱状态.现代化进程顺利与否完全取决于其自身的历史条件与外部因素,盲目效仿他人不足取.     

Beyond the Property Rights Approach: Welfare Policy and the Reform of State‐Owned Enterprises in China

During the pre‐reform era, Chinese state‐owned enterprises (SOEs) operated not only as firms, but also as mini‐welfare states, providing employees with lifetime employment, inexpensive housing, free health care, and pensions. Since China’s market transition began in the late 1970s, however, SOEs have had to bear increasingly heavy burdens for welfare provisions to their employees. The steep increase in welfare spending has not only eroded the base of state revenue, but has also impeded further SOE reforms. To lighten welfare burdens upon SOEs and to remove institutional obstacles to marketization and privatization embedded in the existing welfare system, the Chinese state has imposed many welfare reforms aimed at shifting responsibilities for welfare provision from SOEs to a combination of government, enterprises, communities, and individuals. This article examines the belated welfare reforms in China’s state sector and their impact upon the reform of SOEs. It finds that reform implementation has been sluggish. To achieve the policy goal of welfare reforms, high degrees of state autonomy and capacity are needed.     

The Redevelopmental State: Governing Surplus Life and Land in the ‘Urban Age’

This article theorizes changing configurations of development governance emerging as states attempt to reconcile two contradictory pressures of global urbanization: dispossessing capitalist accumulation and demands for inclusive welfare. It introduces the ‘redevelopmental state’ as a dynamic spatio‐political framework for understanding how hegemonic rule is tenuously forged amid potentially volatile urban land struggles. Whereas Northern urban redevelopment theories are less attentive to post‐colonial urbanization processes and most developmental state scholarship has not focused on cities, the redevelopmental state offers an alternative conceptualization. It centres on how emerging regimes of territorial rule, development and political participation contour access to land and social benefits in Southern cities. Forged at key conjunctures of social pressure, these redevelopmental state spaces work through and beyond formal policies and institutions, and articulate with nationalist cultural politics of belonging and aspiration that foster consent for redevelopment while also legitimating exclusions, violence and dispossession. A case study of Mumbai illustrates redevelopmental state spaces that suture ethno‐religious nationalism, urbanized accumulation and populist welfare to unevenly distribute life capacities, garnering both cooperation and contestation. The article concludes by suggesting ways this spatially attuned framing can provide insights into the recent rise of ethno‐nationalism and authoritarian populism around the world.     

State building and European integration in Ukraine

ABSTRACT

The article analyzes the impact on statebuilding as an aspect of Ukraine’s integration with the EU. The Euromaidan had a profound, yet hardly recognized, effect on EU-Ukraine relations, particularly in terms of the EU’s subsequent support of domestic reforms in Ukraine. Following the Euromaidan, the EU supported Ukraine’s aspirations to enter “economic integration and political association” by concluding an Association Agreement – an agreement which exceeded the capacity of the Ukrainian state to implement it. To increase this capacity, the EU has supported reform of public administration and has provided far-reaching assistance on capacity building in the government. This article posits that since 2014 European integration has become tantamount with (re)building the state structures in Ukraine. Therefore, the significance of European integration for Ukraine goes beyond the implementation of the Association Agreement and extends to root-and-branch reform of Ukrainian state structures.     

George Woodcock and the Doukhobors: peasant radicalism,anarchism, and the Canadian state

For the British-Canadian writer and intellectual George Woodcock, the Doukhobors – a persecuted radical Christian sect, many members of which emigrated from Russia to Canada at the turn of the twentieth century – were a continual source of fascination. A cause célèbre for a host of nineteenth-century thinkers, including Leo Tolstoy and Peter Kropotkin, the Doukhobors were frequently portrayed as the exemplars of the viewer’s particular ideological beliefs. The present article examines Woodcock’s shifting interpretation of the Doukhobors, mapped onto the development of an intellectual career that saw him emerge as a leading anarchist thinker, and his broader transition from a British writer to a Canadian public intellectual. Where once he saw the Doukhobors representing anarchism in action, as his politics matured his view of the sect became more complex. Rather than living anarchists, he came to see the Doukhobors’ experience as a powerful reminder of the forces of assimilation at work in modern democracies that threatened the liberties of dissenters. Reflecting Woodcock’s revised anarchist politics, the Doukhobors’ story now became a key component of an intellectual vision that cast a probing light on Canadian history and Canadian cultural politics.     

Re‐mythologizing the State: Public Security, ‘the Jesus Strategy’ and the Fiji Police

ABSTRACT My primary concern is with tracing how the police force has been transformed from a secular institution into an overtly religious one. Drawing from scholarly work on charismatic leadership and its routinization in institutional forms, much of it inspired by Max Weber's early work on these themes, my overarching aim is to grapple with the significance of Commissioner Teleni's reforms not only for the Fiji police force but more broadly for the shape of the Fijian state. While recognizing the acute importance of international relations in establishing and supporting Fiji's various political regimes, my focus here is firmly on the domain of the nation‐state as I wish to assess how politicians, military leaders, and now the Commissioner of Police attempt to constitute mass public support through their use of Christian rhetoric.     

欧洲人等级制世界地理观下的中国——兼论地图的思想史意义

Maps act not only as the carrier of the geographical information but also as the symbolic expression of particular cultural and political concepts, by which we can understand those people’s knowledge about themselves as well as about others. The maps drawn by the Europeans from the 16^th to the 18^th centuries vividly express the self-centeredness of the Europeans influenced by both the Christian and modern civilization concepts, and the maps also expressed their comments on the other parts of the world in such a mentality. Some characteristic maps and illustrations in the atlas of European history demonstrated how the Europeans formed and expressed their hierarchical perspective of the world geography. The position of China in the hierarchical world is one of the most important expressions of the European concept of China, and well served the purpose of our reflection on the cultural intercommunion. Translated by Deng Hegang from Zhongguo Shehui Kexue 中国社会科学 (Social Sciences in China), 2007, (2): 188–203     

West European Countries and Their Foreign Policy in the Views of the Russian Liberals of Mid-to-Late Nineteenth Century

The article analyses the perception of the mid-to-late nineteenth-century Russian liberals of the West European states and their foreign policy of the time towards Russia. The article discloses the main features and differences in assessing the West and Russia as its part. It allows to reveal such features in Russian liberalism as common provisions and values typical of world liberal theory and a number of special features which resulted in developing different schools of liberal movement in Russia. The article underlines that the range of liberal ideas varied from selective borrowing of some elements of the western political system to their complete adaptation in Russia. The article focuses on the opinion of a number of national-oriented Russian liberals of the time who put forward a priority task to modernize the country, to implement liberal reforms, but not to strengthen its foreign policy power which, according to them, prevents improving well-being of the people and social stabilization.

The study allows to define a main vector of the ideological pursuit of the Russian liberals, the part of whom tried to enroot the liberal ideas in the backward peasant country.     

21世纪的中国与中国地理学:一场文化(地理)革命?

一位著名的新加坡文化地理学家,兼亚洲问题研究专家从更广的视角回顾了近年出现的中国国内外地理学者关于中国文化地理的研究,以及中国的崛起对21世纪文化地理学的影响。作者指出了中国目前正面临的六大问题,并认为如果从文化地理学的视角来看这些问题,不仅可以加深对中国的了解,还可以重塑文化地理学作为分支学科的实用性形象。这六大问题分别是:农业改革、经济改革、城市变迁、城乡移民和与其密切相关的社会不公平、不断改变的家庭结构和环境变化。作者认为,如果中国文化地理学希望最大限度地帮助本学科开发一个更加国际化的,更为包容的研究方法,就要考虑到中国面临的这些重大问题,给出有建设性的答案,并导出新的理论观念,使地理学的理论思维更加多样化。     

China and Geography in the 21st Century: A Cultural (Geographical) Revolution?

A noted Singapore-based cultural geographer and specialist on Asia reviews the recent emergence of cultural geographic research on and within China and the implications of China's rise for the study of 21st century cultural geography more broadly. She identifies six major issues modern China is confronting that, when addressed from a cultural geographical perspective, may both enhance an understanding of the country and reshape the practice of cultural geography as a subdiscipline: agricultural reform, economic reform, urban change, rural-urban migration and related social inequalities, the changing family structure, and environmental change. The author argues that if China's cultural geography is to help the subdiscipline at large develop a more international and inclusive approach, it must be driven by questions of significance in China, yield constructive answers of relevance to China, and at the same time derive theoretical ideas that diversify the collective geographical imagination.     

State Withdrawal and the Impact of Marketization on Rural Russia

The role of the state is greatly misunderstood in post-Soviet affairs. In particular, neither urban bias nor corporatist models help to understand the impact of reforms in rural Russia. The article argues that the best way to understand the impact of marketization on the rural sector is through the concept of state withdrawal. State withdrawals is distinct from state weakness, the former reflecting policy choices and the latter concerning state capacities. This article focuses on several central economic aspects from which the state has withdrawn: state control over wholesale food trade and purchase prices, state regulation of the terms of trade, and state direction over rural capital investment policy. State withdrawal reflects political choices. Policy choices flow from ideological principles that emerge from neoliberal philosophical conceptions of the role of the state in the economy. As a result of neoliberal philosophies of the state, the rural sector has experiences sever economic and social consequences.     

Aby Warburg's Hamburg Comedy: Wilhelmine Culture from the Perspective of a Pioneering Cultural Historian

This article examines an unpublished play written by Aby Warburg(1866–1929), entitled Hamburg Conversations on Art: HamburgComedy, 1896. The play offers a glimpse into Warburg's viewson modern art and into his thinking on the various processesof modernization. It demonstrates how his enthusiasm for innovativeart forms emerged, in part, as an expression of his rebellionagainst the religious, social and professional conventions ofthe German–Jewish economic élite into which hewas born. As with many of his generation, Warburg claimed socialand cultural progress under the banner of artistic innovation.The play also provides a focus for a discussion of the waysin which Warburg's interest in modern art was closely alliedwith pioneering research into the role of symbolism and artin European history. To this end, the article explores Warburg'sconcern about the prospect of a culture in which symbolic andmythical thinking was replaced by a technology that destroyedhumanity's contemplative bond with the world. It also demonstratesthat Warburg's perspective on social and cultural modernizationcombined seemingly different attitudes: it blended the future-orientatedoptimism of an urban, liberal and cosmopolitan outlook withthe nostalgic pessimism of an ardent patriot whose life wasshaped by traditional values and who was uneasy about the increasinglyrationalized and materialistic society in which he lived. Inconclusion, the article suggests that this attitude was notuncommon among the Bürgertum and points to the difficultiesof conceiving of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’in Imperial Germany in terms of mutual exclusivity.