The intellectual origins of Leninism, 1977

This essay is a general introduction to the special number on recent research on Atlantic history. While the topics here presented are diverse, most focusing on the first French Empire, particularly in North America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the authors share several common themes: (1) In Africa and the Americas, they seek to view the question of the Empire as a series of contested, temporary, and uncertain alliances and collaborations, in which negotiation rather than submission was most often the basis of power relations; (2) In the realm of political economy in theory and practice, the authors refuse pre-established notions of an Atlantic “community” of commodities and merchants functioning within an Atlantic “system.” Instead, they focus on closed networks of merchants functioning within the dynamics of merchant capitalism. (3) The authors seek alternatives to traditional approaches focusing on the nation-state and its institutions. Instead, they examine communities and regions in the Atlantic that include social elites, such as, merchants, the nobility, the gentry, and intellectuals, as well as neglected native peoples and forgotten spaces such as Africa.     

The Atlantic Challenge: How Political Science Understands Canada’s Smallest Region

ABSTRACT

This paper examines how Canadian political science portrays Atlantic Canada, along with some of the consequences of persistent misrepresentations. I first explore traditional portrayals of Atlantic Canada as well as arguments challenging those conceptions, demonstrating that it is no longer appropriate to treat Atlantic Canada as primarily defined by either economic processes or common political culture. I then survey the Canadian Journal of Political Science, Canadian Public Administration and Canadian Public Policy to determine the extent to which discussions of Atlantic Canada still, (a) emphasize economic phenomena, and (b) assume a common Atlantic political culture. I find that, while political scientists are now less likely to study the region in terms of economic phenomena, they still perpetuate outdated depictions of Atlantic political culture. This tendency results in a certain degree of methodological imprecision and reinforces problematic assumptions about Atlantic political life.     

The Origins of American Expansion in Hawaii and Samoa, 1865–1900

From Nixon to Reagan, official US perceptions of West German trade with the Soviet Union (Osthandel) underwent a remarkable evolution. Despite initial skepticism, the Nixon and Ford administrations placed no major obstacles to West German–Soviet economic relations. Carter, however, changed the situation. His stance on human rights and economic sanctions against the Soviets for various developments - along with his belief that West Germany should follow the United States' lead - led Carter to ask Schmidt to curtail Osthandel, an action that contributed to Schmidt's notoriously poor relationship with the US President. Despite coming from a different political party, Reagan initially continued Carter's outlook on Osthandel. Yet rather than emphasize human rights, he publicly stressed Poland's self-determination as the reason to implement his aggressive policy to curb trade with the USSR, even though his advisers feared the strategic implications of greater German dependence on Soviet energy. Carter's and Reagan's early approaches were ineffective. Their actions, especially the latter's, strained US relations with Germany, the United States' most important ally in central Europe. Equally important, both Carter's and Reagan's policies undermined détente with Moscow. Because Nixon and Ford's approach to Osthandel harmed neither US–German relations nor US–Soviet relations, these presidents' responses had conspicuous advantages over succeeding administrations.     

The Challenges of Managing an Archaeological Heritage Site in a Declining Economy: The Case of Khami World Heritage Site in Zimbabwe

Abstract

This paper explores the case of the Khami archaeological site, whose degradation by the local communities in recent years was as a result of socio-economic problems caused by the collapse of the Zimbabwean economy combined with the inability of the Zimbabwean government to support the site. We argue that the negative attitude by the local communities towards the management of cultural heritage sites is embedded in the colonial history of the country, and has been driven by the socio-economic difficulties emanating from the collapse of the Zimbabwean economy in recent years. We begin by explaining the history of Khami, its architecture, and the local communities residing around it. We then show and assert that the subsequent degradation of Khami and the landscape around it by the local communities is linked to the socio-economic problems of the country and poverty, which emanated from the collapse of the Zimbabwean economy. In the end, we contend that the economic constraints are part of the reasons why the local communities have from time to time failed to respect the importance of protecting cultural heritage sites in the country.     

The Italian political system and détente (1963 - 1981)

This article examines the impact of détente on the Italian political system, linking together internal and international dynamics in both the political and the economic spheres. Relying on various new archival sources, it analyzes the conflicting effects on Italy of both the relaxing of Cold War tension and bipolarism, and the 'bipolar' strategy to reassert US hegemony: the failure of the reformist design of the center?-?left of the 1960s; the 'strategy of attention' in 1969?-?71 and its sudden halt; the building of a 'devaluation model' after the end of Bretton Woods, and the consequent shift from Kissinger's neo-centrism to 'national solidarity'. Détente favoured a crisis of the centrist pattern of Italian politics but at the same time the 'bipolar' features of both the US and the Soviet 'strategies of détente' led to a decline in US hegemony, relaunching the DC's centrality and its ability to manage external constraints. Reaganism was to recast US hegemony on a new basis.     

What Objects Know: Circulation,Omniscience and the Comedy of Dispossession in Victorian It-Narratives

Modern self-possessing subjects must learn how to alienate parts of themselves economically – their labour, ideas, recorded voices, photographed faces – without alienating themselves psychologically. Victorian it-narratives provide object lessons for such subjects: they tell the stories of their owners, suggesting that inalienability need only be imagined – in the shape of talking umbrellas, feathers, and needles – to be effective. Object narrators also enact a form of omniscience unavailable to human narrators. Rather than traversing the consciousness of characters, they more ‘realistically’ simply over-hear the innermost thoughts of their owners. They circulate among a much wider range of subjects than do the narrators of mainstream fiction. Royals, gypsies, aristocrats, thieves, actors, and shopkeepers are witnessed intimately and accurately by their possessions. Their circulation is comic: they knit the social world together in collecting the stories of their disparate owners. They suggest that the subjects who are most like objects in Victorian Britain and its empire (women, the colonized, slaves, children, the poor) have a specific power: a certain omniscience, and therefore the power to confer, contain and preserve inalienability. Silas Wegg, of Our Mutual Friend, has suffered radical dispossession – his leg belongs to someone else. He is the modern subject par excellence, resolutely optimistic about the inalienability of his leg, which he refers to as ‘I’. Wegg, like the object narrators this essay discusses, suggests to us the necessary porousness of the subject–object boundary given the self-possession of liberal individuals. That boundary has become more porous since the Victorian period: we now alienate our DNA, organs and infants. It is the disavowal of this permeability that marks the great divide between then and now.     

‘What remains? An empty doll-case’: Deconstruction and Imagination in Victorian Narratives of Doll Production

Increasing interest in the Victorians' relationships with the material world has led many critics to turn to periodical publications and, in particular, to process articles and other forms of industrial writing as sources for new insight. This article contributes to this growing body of scholarship by examining narratives of doll production. Because dolls are objects that Victorians celebrated for their imaginative potential and that were often not intended to be treated as ordinary commodities, such narratives can shed light on the intricate relationships between materiality and the imagination. In revealing the process of production, these narratives deconstruct dolls, reducing them to a collection of material parts. By some accounts, these parts are brought to life through a specialized process of manufacture that dehumanizes the workers who make them and robs them of their imaginative agency. While this deconstructive exploration can be seen as an extension of the ‘melancholy and gloom’ that Baudelaire describes as the result of children's destructive compulsion to see the insides of their toys, it could also generate new imaginative possibilities. By inviting readers to behold commodities in a state of transformation, I argue, narratives of doll production demand a more imaginative attitude towards commodities as objects shaped by their material histories.     

旅游产品交换过程中的价格与价值关系探讨

旅游产品的随意涨价,让很多游客感到头痛和不爽,然而业界还在蠢蠢欲动,继续运筹涨价。旅游产品的价格问题实际上关系到一重大的理论问题:由什么来衡量旅游产品价值量。旅游产品在其实现过程中没有物质性的产品传递过程,因此用"商品的价值量取决于社会必要劳动时间,商品按照价值相等的原则互相交换。价格围绕价值上下波动",已经明显解释不通了。感受才是决定旅游产品是否有价值的关键因素。旅游过程中旅游者所获得的感受越深,旅游产品的价值越大,因此它遵循刘氏"发汗定律"。也就是感受的程度是决定价格高低的直接因素。但是感受是一种纯粹的主观心理体验,它是人类社会经济文化背景的直接反映,也是人类文明的区域再现。     

成渝经济区县域经济差异的空间分析

借助ARCGIS软件中ESDA分析模块和统计功能,并与传统统计方法加权变异系数相结合,以县域为研究单元,以人均GDP和GDP为测度指标,初步探索了1999-2008年成渝经济区县域经济差异的空间格局变化。结果表明,成渝经济区县域经济总体差异呈逐渐扩大趋势,经济发展水平、经济增长能力和经济密度的空间特征三者的空间格局基本吻合,形成以成都市区和重庆市区为核心的圈状空间结构,且这种格局在不断的强化;高速公路发展轴经济带动作用不明显,广大地区经济仍处于落后状态;现发展阶段,核心区的极化作用占主导,区域经济发展极不平衡。     

Canada in a global economy

This paper questions the neoliberal understanding of globalization as a coherent and progressive force representing the apotheosis of late capitalism. Here, globalization is seen as a contested and sometimes even chaotic process, which needs to be interpreted in the context of the local geographies and histories in which it is embedded. Viewed as a socio-economic process, globalization is characterized by a recurring interplay between local and global interests, implying that Canada's relations with the global economy have been socially constructed in diverse ways, at different times, in different places. Five distinct relations are examined here, each one being linked to a well known historical figure, as follows: the ecological depletion of resources (John Cabot); technological dependence (Alexander Graham Bell); continental integration (C.D. Howe); cultural deterritorialization (Walt Disney); and the new geometries of power (Conrad Black). Each of these five relations has found distinctive local expression.