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Viewing the development of French trade and manufacturing between 1650 and 1820, Jeff Horn underscores their great success based largely on overseas markets. His evidence supports the view of Friedrich Engels and Perry Anderson that capitalism developed within the pores of the Old Regime. Yet Horn attempts to deny the leading role of the bourgeoisie in this advance. He claims that it was through the OldRegime system of economic privileges rather than the agency of bourgeois capital accumulation that such progress was made. This article rejects Horn's exclusive preoccupation with the positive economic role of the privileges granted by the state. It reasserts the importance of the agency of the bourgeoisie in furthering economic development. Moreover, it contends that for all the economic gains made by the system of state privileges, such privileges were more than offset by the weight of rents on the peasantry and to the benefit of the nobility and Church imposed by this same regime of privileges. The distorted development that privileges imposed on economic and social life became an important factor behind the outbreak of the Revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract In the immediate postwar period, liberal internationalism was the hallmark of Canadian foreign policy. In part this position was intended to protect Canadian sovereignty from the too-close embrace of US Cold-War imperialism. But this multilateral and peacekeeping approach was partly a veneer meant to disguise the fact that Canada was of necessity a close American ally in the fight against communism. This strategy was abandoned by the Canadian state in the late 1990s in favour of a more militaristic and aggressive approach. The dependency-school of Canadian Marxist political economy that flourished from the 1970s argued that Canadian conformity with American foreign policy resulted from the fact that American economic dominance over Canada and lack of a strong national bourgeoisie made it a willing instrument of American foreign policy. Reflecting a challenge by a new school of Marxist political economy, Todd Gordon argues convincingly that Canada is an imperialist entity with its historic roots lying in the dispossession of the indigenous peoples. It is based on its strong national bourgeoisie which is flourishing under neoliberalism. But whether imperialist Canada is independent of the United States is more contestable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Heide Gerstenberger's book offers a comparative view of the origins and emergence of the bourgeois state in England and France. Both, according to her, emerged out of ancien-régime type structures which were themselves distinct from feudalism. Whilst recognising the value of Gerstenberger's attempt to avoid economic reductionism when explaining changing power-structures, it is suggested that analytical tools such as 'class', 'mode of production' and the 'state', which she confines to capitalism, do have considerable utility for the analysis of precapitalist régimes. More importantly, it is suggested that her attempt to maintain that in England, as in France, an ancien-régime type society endured at least to the end of the eighteenth century obscures the fundamentally divergent paths taken by the two countries. This is compounded by her rejection of the idea of a French absolutism and an underestimation of the extent to which power-structures in England were modified by the precocious development of capitalism. Whilst suggesting that a bourgeois public space was able to develop in the interstices of structures of the ancien régime, Gersternberger fails to recognise the extent to which this had transformed the English polity by the mid-seventeenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews a book dealing with the establishment in 1945 of the Courts of Honor in Serbia, and to a lesser extent in the Province of Vojvodina, for the trial of individuals and collectives accused of committing crimes and/or offenses against the national honor by acting against their own people. The tribunal was made up mainly of lay persons, but their judgment was final, and, in effect, there was no recourse to appeal. Although short-lived, the significance of these special courts was manifold for the future state; for example, they served to discredit the bourgeoisie, whose loss of honor implied the loss of all civil rights, while their confiscated property was transferred to the state treasury.