Transnational solidarities and the politics of the left, 1890–1990 – introduction

The ten articles in this special issue of the European Review of History—Revue européenne d'histoire explore the operation of transnational solidarity movements from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century. This introduction highlights the endurance of methods and strategies across this period, even while the contexts for transnational activism changed. It points to the opportunities presented by expressions of transnational solidarity, but also their inherent limitations.     

Prony et babbage: apercus sur l'histoire de la division du travail mental∗

Hobbes and Hume on the imagination can initiate a discussion of empiricism in the 17th and 18th centuries: here, however, it provides the opportunity to focus on Kant's attempt to overcome the limits of their sense originating, naturalist ethics. I argue the general point that Kant's response to his predecessors, both empiricist and non-empiricists, is to modify their focus on nature without falling into skepticism; indeed, his speculative metaphysics also is a response to classical ontological metaphysics. Kant by providing two realms or perspectives, a natural and a noumenal, avoids many difficulties resulting from Hobbes and Hume's starting point in sense leading to imagination and a non-normative reason. Yet, challenged by Herder and the romantics, he uses a sort of residual view of the imagination in relation to the freedom of the noumenal, which results in difficulties for his speculative, noumenal metaphysics.     

Tell el-Hesi: A type site for reevaluating so-called ‘Egyptian Governors’ Residencies’ of the south

In 1984 Eliezer Oren identified a series of structures found at 13th and 12th centuries BCE sites of southern Canaan, calling them Egyptian Governors’ Residencies. He identified Bliss’s City IV as a defining site. In 2000 Blakely identified Petrie’s Pilaster Building as a second example from Tell el-Hesi. It is now clear that Bliss’s City IV dates to the 13th century and that some of its architectural elements were salvaged after its destruction to build Petrie’s Pilaster Building in the 12th century. All of the southern examples are found in an agricultural zone of uncertainty where there is no clear likelihood of a harvestable crop in any given normal year. As it happens, the 13th and especially the 12th centuries BCE were far from normal, being a period of drought and extreme drought. Thus no crops could have been expected. This suggests the structures could not have been centres for the collection of a grain harvest tax, the accepted view. Rather, one wonders if the sites did not monitor a large pasturage.     

Count Karl von Zinzendorf 's ‘New Accountancy’: The Structure of Austrian Government Finance in Peace and War, 1781–1791

This article examines various British proposals for co-operation with other European imperial powers to counter the rebellion of the American colonies or curb the pretentions of the new United States. Historians have paid little attention to these projects, mainly because none of them eventuated in the co-operation their authors envisaged. But their lack of success is not a reason to dismiss them as unimportant; their failure reveals much about British attitudes at the time.