探寻美国革命的思想渊源——保罗·拉厄的《古代和现代的共和国》与共和主义范式之争

保罗.拉厄的《古代和现代的共和国:古典共和主义与美国革命》以共和主义为主题探讨了古典共和主义与美国革命的关系。拉厄力图开辟研究美国革命和建国的新路径,对共和学派的主旨和研究方法提出修正。《古代和现代的共和国》不仅体现了拉厄对共和学派主将波科克的挑战与批判,而且反映了20世纪60年代以来美国早期史研究领域的派别之争以及史学理论和研究方法的变动。他同时受到施特劳斯学派和自由主义传统史学的影响,卷入了施特劳斯学派与共和学派之间,"新洛克派"与共和学派之间的学术辩论。但他又不是完全照搬两派的主旨和研究方法,而是在两派的核心观点和研究方法基础上提出了新见解。     

The shaping of the American Empire

This paper creates a traditional, counterfactual, historical geography that proposes the rise of an American Empire in the 1800s instead of the British. The industrialization of the British world-economy of the early 1800s, victory in the Napoleonic Wars, and the consequent success of the British Empire fundamentally depended on cotton textiles, thus on American cotton agriculture. Cotton was, to the economies of the nineteenth century, very much like oil is to those of the late twentieth and early twenty-first enturies. The development of the American cotton South after 1800 was based heavily on the reproduction of slaves within the South. Had Jefferson ended slavery, as he at one time considered, I suggest that an alternative America would have arisen in which Jeffersonian idealism would have encouraged family farms as the principal units of agricultural production. I further argue that, absent the availability of cheap British manufactures, the Philadelphia School of Protectionists would also have likely triumphed early and an American industrial development based on internal growth fueled by cotton grown on family farms would have allowed America to come to dominate the world-economy of the late 1800s. Protectionist policies would have similarly excluded French manufactures and the industrial development based on cotton the French were also attempting in the late 1700s would have failed just as did that of Britain. French military victory in the Napoleonic Wars would not have produced a French world-economy. An America without serious global opposition would not have resisted annexing all of Mexico and Canada in the 1840s and expanding aggressively into Asia via the Pacific basin and Hawaii to create an American Empire.     

A Technocratic Vision of Empire: Lord Montagu and the Origins of British Air Power

This article advances the existing literature on British imperial aeronautics by explaining how Lord John Montagu’s extensive collaboration with military and government officials during the first decades of powered flight expanded the global distribution of the air forces and anticipated their important later role in facilitating international communication and security. In reconsidering problems of conquest and governance through an aeronautical perspective, Montagu strengthened critical junctures between British civil and military affairs, while his innovative employment of the new technology also complicated divisions between the metropolis and periphery in ways that would intensify the destructiveness of modern warfare across the planet.