The Other Green Revolution: Land Epistemologies and the Mexican Revolutionary State

This paper explores the development of Mexican Revolutionary land epistemologies in the years following the global Great Depression. Demonstrating how ideas about agrarian life informed national development efforts across multiple spheres, including public education, state‐sponsored media, and governmental conservation projects, it argues that human–nature relations were constitutive of state visions of Revolutionary citizenship. Scholarly work interrogating the role of scientific knowledge in land politics has focused on the ways that territorial dispossessions are routed through expert truth claims; this study deviates from that work by asking how resource conflicts can also produce new knowledge to support progressive platforms for change.     

Wrestling with the Revolution: The Iron Sheik and the American Cultural Response to the 1979 Iranian Revolution

This paper maps how American popular culture came to terms with the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran through a study of Hussein Khosrow Vaziri. Vaziri, better known by his moniker, “The Iron Sheik,” was active in professional wrestling in the 1980s and remains to this day one of the most well-known Iranians in American cultural memory. Through an analysis of his character and how he has been represented in the popular media, I argue that he was chiefly utilized as a figure through whom Americans could cope with the devastating blow that the Revolution caused to American power. I argue that this reaction continues to this day, albeit focusing not on Iran but on the current political tensions involving the attacks of September 11, 2001.     

构建民族国家：辛亥革命前后的中国边疆

本文着重从民族国家构建的角度探讨辛亥革命前后蒙、藏等边疆地区的政治变迁。辛亥革命使“五族共和”、“中华民族”学说从思想变成了政治实践,实际上成为梁启超政治思想、价值体系的代行者。可以说,因辛亥革命而昌盛的“五族共和”、“中华民族”观念作为民国初期政府整合中央与边疆地方的意识形态,对边疆地方的民族国家之认同影响极深。     

No Race in Any Direction: State Welfare and Income Regimes

This paper has two objectives. First, we examine state adoption and implementation of income support policies under the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. We develop a composite measure of income support that includes welfare programs that scholars traditionally investigate and adds optional policies that encourage independence through work. Second, we engage a substantive focus on the administrative ability and willingness of states to adopt and implement sophisticated income support policies. We investigate the extent to which state government professionalism, ideology, economic resources, and racially based policies have shaped state policy. We find that the percentage of the state population is liberal; state racial demographics and governmental professionalism are critical determinants of state welfare and income support regimes. Significantly, we find no evidence that states are converging toward high‐quality, effectively financed welfare policies or income regime policies to help the poor move into and economically survive in the job market.     

The German Reaction to the Dreadnought Revolution

Abstract

The former Conservative and Unionist prime minister, Arthur Balfour, contributed an article in 1912 to the German magazine Nord und Süd in which he explained why the ‘English point of view’s viewed Germany with ‘deep uneasiness’s. His theme was the role of narrative in Anglo-German relations: British anxieties stemmed from the interpretation that people ‘have thought themselves obliged to place upon a series of facts, or supposed facts, each of which taken by itself might be of small moment, but which taken together can neither be lightly treated nor calmly ignored’s. The building of a large fleet, the arms race, the demands for territory, and the threats to Europe's small states, notably the Netherlands and Belgium, made an Anglo-German war appear increasingly likely. If Germany wanted to improve relations with Britain, Balfour concluded, it had to prove its love for peace by co-operating with other states. A longer narrative underlay the famous memorandum written five years earlier by the head of the western department of the foreign office, Eyre Crowe. For him, the ‘maintenance of a state of tension and antagonism between Third Powers’s had characterized German foreign policy since the time of Prince Bismarck, whose bid for colonies had been an act of ‘direct and unmistakable hostility’s to Britain. By the time Crowe put pen to paper, in January 1907, German antagonism had become a feature in the landscape of British foreign policy-makers.     

The Electrophoretic Revolution in the 1960s: Historical Epistemology Meets the Global History of Science and Technology**

This paper uses zone electrophoresis, one of the most frequently used tools in molecular biology, to explore two ideas derived from Hans-Jörg Rheinberger's reflections on experiments. First, the constraining role played by technical objects—instrumentation and material conditions—in the production of knowledge or epistemic things. Second, the production of interconnected experimental systems by such technical objects, which results in the unexpected entanglement of research fields and experimental cultures. By the beginning of the 1960s, the inception of zone electrophoresis in laboratories around the world transformed—some say, revolutionized—the study of proteins. Even today, electrophoresis continues to open research venues and questions in biomedicine, molecular biology, human genetics, and in the field of molecular evolution. In my essay, I seek to look at the interconnected lives of zone electrophoresis and address the broader social, and even global context, in which this apparently humble technique became a salient tool in the production of biological knowledge. In so doing, I aim to take the past and present of the history and historiography of experimental systems to the future, where experiments and technologies are interrogated as they are used in different geographies and contexts, including contexts of poverty.     

墨西哥革命:从官方史学到修正派史学

墨西哥革命史学思潮的发展趋势与革命后墨西哥经济、政治、思想和学术潮流的变化密不可分。革命期间到20世纪30年代,各革命派系皆站在自身的立场上评价墨西哥革命;30年代后,为了促进国家的统一,在墨西哥政府和执政党的直接倡导和参与下,创立了墨西哥革命的官方史学;四五十年代后,特别是1968年特拉特洛尔科事件后,随着墨西哥经济增长和政治稳定奇迹的终结,以及国内历史学科的发展和国际学术交流的影响,产生了修正派史学。然而,80年代以后,修正派史学在某些方面也受到一定的质疑。     

The Infrastructures of Internal Colonialism: State,Environment, and Race in Lerma,Mexico

This article explores the relations between infrastructures, labour, and internal colonialism in Lerma, Mexico. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research of two hydraulic projects there, the article argues that infrastructures are productive of the racial, environmental, and political relations that constitute internal colonialism both historically and contemporarily. I show how these infrastructural projects imagined and produced colonial relations between the environment, racialised workers, and the nation-state, and how these colonial logics endure today through infrastructures and the forms of racialised labour that maintain them. In doing so, this article contributes to literature that interrogates the relations between infrastructure and coloniality by focusing on how infrastructural labour makes internal colonialism enduring. The article concludes by reflecting on how the labour practices that make internal colonialism enduring also point to ways of producing infrastructures otherwise.     

The Formation of the Qing State in Global Perspective: A Geopolitical and Fiscal Analysis

This article re-examines the formation of the Qing state and its nature from a global perspective. It underscores the key roles of geopolitical setting and fiscal constitution in shaping the course of frontier expeditions and territorial expansions, unlike past studies that have centered on the dynasty’s administrative institutions and the ruling elites’ ideologies or lifestyles to defend or question the thesis of “Sinicization” in Qing historiography. This study demonstrates the different motivations and varying strategies behind the Qing dynasty’s two waves of military conquests, which lasted until the 1750s, and explains how the Qing state’s peculiar geopolitical interests and the low-level equilibrium in its fiscal constitution shaped the “cycles” in its military operations and frontier building. The article ends by comparing the Qing with early modern European states and the Ottoman empire to discuss its vulnerability as well as resilience in the transition to modern sovereign statehood in the nineteenth century.