Unravelling the “Thin Blue Line”: Policing as an Engine of Inequality

This paper argues that policing be understood as a creative social force that reproduces important dimensions of earlier iterations of the colour line. The paper advances this argument by integrating findings from two distinct research projects: the first on the household financial losses that follow arrest by immigration officials in Tucson, AZ; and the second focusing on the everyday costs of policing and carceral supervision absorbed by residents of Philadelphia, PA. Together, data from these sites illuminate how exposure to policing exhausts emotional and material resources from expansive family and community networks of care and support. To theorise the connection between financial dispossession and the dispossession of future opportunity, we draw on a heuristic reading of the “thin blue line” symbol. We conclude by suggesting a need for closer attention to how contemporary state interventions drive patterns of dispossession and vulnerability that accumulate across various scales, sites, rhythms, and collectivities.     

Radical Political Theology

Abstract

This essay investigates the claim, advanced by a number of contributors to Theology and the Political, that the potential for political transformation requires an analogical ontology. I argue that this is not the case, and that an ontology of immanence, as found primarily in the work of Gilles Deleuze, provides an alternative and superior paradigm for political transformation. This argument is advanced by examining the manner in which immanence enables a novel approach to creation. Such immanent creation is distinct in that it departs from analogy's dependence on the transcendent as well as from capitalism's dependence on communication.     

印度绿色革命国外研究:路径、观点和问题

在国际学术界,印度的绿色革命成了多门社会科学研究的对象。国际学术界对印度绿色革命的研究通常采取反思的方式,即在与经济、社会和政治发展的联系当中去考察印度的绿色革命问题。本文详细介绍了他们的研究路径、问题和观点,指出农业转型研究构成了国外学术界相关研究中的一个重要面向。但是,他们没有把农业转型当作农业现代化的方式来看待。笔者认为,这是他们在考察印度农业转型时存在的根本问题,而从这样一种新的观点出发去考察印度的农业转型还是一件尚待完成的工作。     

太平天国印书的三种稀世刻本浅析

现存于南京太平天国历史博物馆的太平天国三种原刻本印书,对于太平天国政治、经济、思想、文化、军事等方面的研究具有重要价值。     

圈地运动与英国农业资本主义发展的典型性问题新论——兼与国内学术界某些流行性观点商榷

近年来,国内学术界一些关于圈地运动和英国农业资本主义发展的典型性问题的研究,出现了两种值得引起注意的研究趋向:某些具体问题的研究没有很好地借鉴吸收西方学术界的研究成果,多依从旧说;偏重于生产力或纯经济的研究.在综合吸取国内外相关研究成果的基础上,本文认为:圈地运动兴起的直接原因,主要是牧羊业自身的生产特点及其所决定的远比种植业要高得多的丰厚利润,而不是国内学术界所通常认为的"羊毛价格的上涨";英国16世纪的圈地主要还是在当时的法律框架下,以和平的或协议的方式较为平静地完成的,暴力不是主要手段;英国16世纪的圈地并没有引起土地关系的重大变化;圈地和农场规模的增加并不一定会带来生产力的提高;一直到19世纪中后期,英国的农业整体上还不是典型的资本主义农业.     

Empire,Colonial Enterprise,and Speculation: Cape Breton’s Coal Boom of the 1860s

ABSTRACT

During the 1860s Cape Breton Island’s Sydney coalfield, at the northeastern tip of Nova Scotia, experienced dramatic economic expansion. Historical interpretation of this understudied coal boom has emphasised the transition towards a liberal era of competition and growing dependence upon American capital and markets. This article presents a revised interpretation, and reflects a renewed engagement with empire in the writing of the history of Canadian capitalism. Drawing upon the work of James Belich and John Darwin, it locates this coal boom in an evolving and expanding ‘Angloworld’ and ‘British world-system,’ and demonstrates how the Sydney coalfield was shaped by the social and economic configurations that developed in the region under the British Empire. During this period, established colonial elites captured coal property and sought to integrate Cape Breton coal into the Atlantic economy in which their region had historically operated. They treated coal as a new commodity to trade and profit from, but coal mining required the mobilisation of credit and infrastructure expenditures that exceeded what was typically required to participate in the region’s traditional staples trades. Large fixed investments engendered economic and political commitments that spurred growth even under highly volatile circumstances, as promotion and speculation drove growth from the supply side and attracted London capital. Overcapacity, ruinous competition, and social crisis eventually resulted, as the Atlantic economy that gave rise to the boom fell apart. This episode reveals the operation of colonial networks and an ‘empire effect’ that produced a distinctive pattern of development on the Sydney coalfield whose legacy would be lasting.     

Rethinking the History and Theory of Jus Publicum Universal: The Formation of China as a "Semi-Civilized" Legal Subject

Much of the existing scholarship on the universalization of nineteenth-century international law has framed it in terms of the imperial West's domination of non-Western societies.This article complicates and qualifies this conventional state-centric narrative by investigating the juridical,capitalist production of China as a "semi-civilized" international legal subject.It examines the foundational modem Sino-British/Westem commercial and extraterritorial treaties,as well as the treatises of a new professional class of British international lawyers-James Lorimer (1818-90),John Westlake (1828-1913),William Edward Hall (1835-94),T.E.Holland (1835-1926),Thomas Lawrence (1849-1920),and Lassa Oppenheim (1849-1920).The juridical production of China as a "semi-civilized" legal subject throws into relief the dual capitalist nature and significance of the universalization of nineteenth-century international law.On the one hand,this "civilized" legal discourse underwrote a novel liberal conception of a universal international law (jus publicum universal) within which China was formally included as a quasi-legal subject.On the other hand,it also underwrote a particularistic,Euro-centric international law,which excluded China from its global domain and denied it basic sovereign fights.In this way also,"civilized" international law justified both formal equality in Europeannon-European treaty relations,as well as the real substantive inequality of these international exchanges of rights and obligations.Building on the critical theoretical work of Evgeny Pashukanis (1891-1937),this article argues that a non-orthodox Marxist social theory of legal forms is best suited to explain the abstract,liberal universalism of nineteenth-century "civilized" international law and the contradictory forms of legal and jurisprudential discourse it made available and rendered normatively meaningful to international law practitioners.Through this Marxist theory,moreover,I shall relate said contradictory discourse to modern commodity exchange practices.