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There is an ongoing debate about whether China's growing economic presence in the Middle East will eventually make it more politically assertive on the Middle Eastern affairs. This paper demonstrates, from a theoretical perspective of 'path dependence,' that China's promotion of the 'Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence' since the 1950s as the guiding doctrine of its foreign relations has forged a 'path' for China to follow, along which it has made and repeated promises against interventionism and imperialism to other countries including the Middle Eastern ones. It, in turn, has created a situation where moving away from that 'path against interventionism and imperialism' will cause huge damage to China's reputation as a reliable non-interventionist partner to the Middle Eastern countries, and the 'Global South' in general. As a result, China has refrained, and will arguably continue to refrain, from being too politically assertive on the Middle Eastern affairs., Author(s): Chien-Kai Chen [sup.1] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.262541.6, 0000 0000 9617 4320, Department of International Studies, Rhodes College, , Memphis, TN, USA Introduction China's relations with the Middle East, like [...]

Capitalism and colonialism are so deeply intertwined that it seems that efforts to decolonize capitalist markets are necessarily doomed to failure. However, some Indigenous businesses do attempt to function according to decolonial and Indigenous values and principles, even though they exist within and interface with a larger capitalist context. This article examines such efforts in the Indigenous art market in Canada -- a market that raises issues of both economic and cultural imperialism. It is based on fieldwork conducted in two contexts: (1) in Vancouver, British Columbia, with Northwest Coast artists and entrepreneurs whose objective is to gain greater control over the commodification of their cultural heritage, and (2) in the Upper Mauricie region of Québec with members of the Atikamekw Nehirowisiwok Nation who are working to develop their art market in a way that respects their values and nurtures their ways of life. These two examples provide ethnographic grounding to the following questions: What do on-the-ground attempts to decolonize and indigenize capitalist markets look like? What is the difference between making market relations "less colonial" and making them "more Indigenous," and what is the interplay between the two? To what extent can these processes cross over from reform to the actual dismantlement of colonial power structures and institutions? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I argue that contextually reading two disputes involving Siam— Cheek v. Siam (1898) and the Temple of Preah Vihear (1962)—proves that both private law and public international law are structurally rigged against ex-semi-colonial nations. Nineteenth-century Siam was a political ferment known variously as a semi-colonial, semi-peripheral, non-colonial, or uncolonized polity. Siam bargained under imperial shadows her political independence by the tactical grants of concession contracts, as well as by negotiating treaties with competing European powers. In the post-colonial Temple of Preah Vihear case, colonial stationery—maps, photographs, and communiqués—as well as imperial customs offered evidentiary support to Cambodia, an ex-colonial state, against Thailand. In the early twentieth century, while authors picked Cheek v. Siam as a precedent for the law of international claims, textbooks offer the Temple of Preah Vihear case as a precedent on the form of treaties and estoppel. Conclusively, these two cases allow us to locate, if not exorcise, the ghosts of empires in Asian legal history, exposing, at the same time, Judge Koo's Orientalization of customary international law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Business ethics in China is highly politicized, both within China as well as on the global scene. Over the past years many issues of business ethics have arisen. It turns out that the Chinese often have a different set of ethical priorities with respect to the economy than do their Western counterparts. China possesses rich and well-developed ethical traditions that provide a meaningful basis for evaluating its own problems. This article reviews China's ethical heritage and, at the same time, takes note of Western ethical concerns of human rights, property and so forth that have been injected into the debate. The article further reviews the principal issues of ethical analysis and, within the context of China/U. S. inter-relations, suggests ethical paths to pursue on four levels: government to government, multinational corporations, interest groups and international fora, and individual initiatives and commitment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the influence of Robbins’s thought on the subsequent development of economics imperialism. First, the analysis of some passages that have been overlooked up to the present, in which the author explicitly expresses his disbelief in the omnipotence of the economic method, makes it possible to argue that Robbins did not share the confidence exhibited by the advocates of economics imperialism in the capacity of economics to explain non-economic phenomena. Second, this article shows that Robbins describes the influence of real scarcity on human behaviour in terms of a (static) constrained maximization problem, thereby confusing issues of method and scope in his writings. This confusion facilitated the view that economics is a method without a proper subject matter and its later expansion into other fields. In conclusion, although Robbins cannot be counted as an earlier promoter of economics imperialism, the misunderstandings implicit in his writings paved the way for the emergence of this intellectual movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In 1910, Japan annexed Korea and integrated it into the Empire of Japan. According to its policy of assimilating colonies, the Japanese government intended to remove the tariffs between Japan and Korea, an aim which had almost been realized by 1923. The removal of the tariff barrier was supposed to improve market access between Japan and Korea. This article explores the implications of this event, focusing on the spatial distribution of economic activity in Japan. The regression results suggest that the integration of the Korean market increased population growth rates more in the regions close to the former border between Japan and Korea than in the other regions. Furthermore, after integration, the regions close to Korea that specialized in the fabric industry, whose products were the primary goods exported from Japan to Korea, experienced more population growth than other regions close to Korea did. These results suggest that market accessibility was indeed a determinant of the spatial distribution of economic activity. Our findings also indicate that the economic effect of colonization on the mainland was spatially heterogeneous and that a spatial viewpoint of the history of imperialism is important. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In November 1970, Black Panther Party leader Huey P. Newton gave a lecture at Boston College where he introduced his theory of intercommunalism. Newton re-articulated Marxist theories of imperialism through the lens of the Black liberation struggle and argued that imperialism had entered a new phase called ‘reactionary intercommunalism’. Newton’s theory of intercommunalism offers nothing less than a proto-theorisation of what we have come to call neo-liberal globalisation and its effects on what W. E. B. Du Bois had seen as the racialisation of modern imperialism. Due to the initial historical dismissal of the Black Panther Party’s political legacy, Newton’s thought has largely been neglected for the past 40 years. This paper revisits Newton’s theory of intercommunalism, with the aim of achieving some form of epistemic justice for his thought, but also to highlight how Newton’s recasting of imperialism as reactionary intercommunalism provides critical insight into the rise of Trumpism in the US. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on the political condition of Russia, specifically on the issues of empire, the Balfour Declaration and Zionism. Topics discussed include an overview and development of the Zionism in the country, the rivalry of Great Britain with Germany and France, the stance of the Jewish people in Palestine, and its Empire. Information is presented about the Balfour Declaration, which is considered significant in the Arab, Jewish and the world history. The complicating factors of the Declaration are also noted.

The exploitation of African Congo during colonial period is an interesting case study. From 1885 to 1908, it remained in the clutches of King Leopold II. During this period the Congo remained a victim of exploitation which has far sighted political, social and economic impacts. The Congo Free State was a large state in Central Africa which was in personal custody of King Leopold II. The socio-politico and economic study of the state reflects the European behaviour and colonial policy, a point of comparison with other colonial experiences. The analysis can be used to show that the abolition of the slave trade did not necessarily lead to a better experience for Africans at the hands of Europeans. It could also be used to illustrate the problems of our age. The social reformers, political leaders; literary writers and the champion of human rights have their own approaches and interpretations. Joseph Conrad is one of the writers who observed the situation and presented them in fictional and historical form in his books, Heart of Darkness, The Congo Diary, Notes on Life and Letters and Personal Record. In this paper a brief analysis is drawn about the colonialism and its socio-political and psychological impact in the historical perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the causes and consequences of colonial rule? This introduction to the special issue "Comparative Politics of Colonialism and Its Legacies" surveys recent literature in political science, sociology, and economics that addresses colonial state building and colonial legacies. Past research has made important contributions to our understanding of colonialism's long-term effects on political, social, and economic development. Existing work emphasizes the role of critical junctures and institutions in understanding the transmission of those effects to present-day outcomes and embraces the idea of design-based inference for empirical analysis. The four articles of this special issue add to existing research but also represent new research trends: increased attention to (1) the internal dynamics of colonial intervention; (2) noninstitutional transmission mechanisms; (3) the role of context conditions at times of colonial intervention; and (4) a finer-grained disaggregation of outcomes, explanatory factors, and units of analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a new dataset with 15 indicators for the political, economic and social impact of colonialism. This dataset and our four indices for the impact of colonialism create for the first time the opportunity to compare directly the levels of colonial transformation for a sample of 83 African and Asian countries. Some of our exploratory findings on the interrelation of the dimensions show that in British colonies political domination was in general less direct and less violent. Plantation colonies experienced more investment in infrastructure and more violence during decolonization. The correlations between indicators for economic distortion (trade policy, trade and FDI concentration) show that the economic re-direction of some colonies towards a more exclusive exchange with the metropole country was an interdependent process. In general, a more intense political domination came along with a higher level of economic transformation. If an area was transformed economically, however, a social transformation was likely to take place too, but these processes should not be confounded. In areas that were politically united for the first time under colonialism, economic distortion and social transformation were more profound. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Khejuri- Hijili coastal area, now extends over the Khejuri police station, is situated in the southeastern part of the district of Purba Medinipur of West Bengal, on the western bank of the Hugli river. Between 21°47'42"N-22°4'N latitudes and 87°45'4"E-88°18"E longitudes the area covers about 267.97 sq. km. At the confluence of the rivers Bhagirathi-Hugli and the Bay of Bengal, Hijili emerged as an island from the estuarine surroundings around 1400-1500 A.D. afterward the island became covered with natural mangroves. Gradually it became the abode of fishermen. To gather some primary data, household survey by different questionnaire, topographic survey was done. Secondary data are mainly produced by assembling historical charts, maps, literatures for the specified work of the area concerned. Historical records including documents, survey notes, maps and photographs provided valuable information about the study area. Remains of early structures, monuments, and office buildings have been vigilantly watched and written reports and research articles have been carefully studied for sequencing the socio-economic history of the area. Later on accuracy assessment was performed by comparing two sources of information: classification of map derived from old records and maps and the ground truth information. The output obtained by performing the above steps includes land use and other maps and charts. These outputs were then analyzed to detect the historical significance of Khejuri-Hijili sector of the Hugli estuary and its sequential deterioration. These changes in the study area that were identified from classified maps, charts and diagram were tabulated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article discusses white planters of the British West Indies' efforts to attract Chinese indentured labourers to address labour shortages following the emancipation of slaves during the first half of the 19th century, including in regard to their refusal to pay free blacks higher wages to work on their plantations. The economic implications for the British Empire's imperial policy towards labour are discussed.

An essay is presented on neo-extractivism in relation to the colonial powers for land ownership in Northern Idaho. Topics discussed include the primary resource extraction analyses, the concept and rationality of global commodity chains, mega-load shipments, mega-load resistance to natural resource extraction, and the policy for intensive extractive practices.

An essay is presented which discusses the economic aspects of U.S. imperialism during the Philippine-American War, including the role that capitalism played in the war and U.S.'s efforts to establish the U.S. dollar currency, based on the gold standard, in the early 20th century U.S. Philippine colony. An overview race relations between Americans and people of the Philippines is provided.

Though welcome, Cohen's call for exchange across diverse perspectives in international political economy (IPE) evades the question: why have we remained unaware of or insensitive to the diversity that already exists? We follow John Hobson's claim that racism, imperialism and Eurocentrism disallow a western-dominated social science from engaging with diverse viewpoints. We argue further that a disciplinary bias towards a unit-level or atomistic understanding of social science precludes and disallows epistemological encounters in which actual diversity might be harnessed. We support this claim in two steps. First, we draw on Ghassan Hage's analysis of exigophobia, or the fear that social explanation inadvertently justifies horrendous actions and humanises their perpetrators. Exigophobia activates what we call the condemnation imperative: an eagerness to condemn an individual or group act, of fierce violence, for example, before one has tried to understand or explain it. Second, building on Nicholas Onuf's work on levels, we show that the disciplinary bias towards explanations which ‘see' from the level of individual actors treats Europe or the west, in Hobson's terms, as ‘self-constituting and exceptional'. When one neglects the structuring features of the whole, and assumes western ‘pioneering agency', it is easy to treat non-western inferiority (irrationality, backwards culture, and so on) as an explanation of the relative successes and failures of a flattened planet of autonomous units. Though we endorse forms of social explanation that start from the whole as opposed to the parts, we favour the view that there are only simultaneous and continuous processes whose seeming mystical flow our descriptions cannot but freeze. We suggest that there are no levels, simply parts and wholes in process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent times, social security has been one of the most popular instruments for promoting human development worldwide. Nearly all countries of the world have implemented some kind of social security legislation. While the emergence of social security in the OECD-world has been extensively analyzed, we know very little about the origins of social security beyond the OECD-world. By analyzing 91 Spanish, French, and British colonies, and former colonies from 1820 until the present time, this paper demonstrates that the colonial heritage is a crucial factor in explaining the adoption and form of social security programs in countries outside OECD-world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By drawing on testimonies gathered in rural Vietnam, this article focuses on the violence to which local inhabitants were subjected when Vietnam was under French rule (1883–1954). On a self-imposed ‘civilizing mission’, the control of local bodies was critical for the colonial powers and they became the subject of brutal abuse. Violence was exercised with impunity in the occupied areas and rendered ‘logic’ in accordance with western imaginations about racial superiority. While such ideas informed colonial terror in general, the differentiated registers of terror implemented in regard to women and men disclose how sovereign attempts of reducing local inhabitants to bare life were designed, in addition to race, along the lines of gender and sexuality. Vietnamese testimonies from the French colonial period reveal experiences of a reality of horror which in the article is considered through the prism of four different body typologies; typologies which elucidate the symbolic, physical, and imaginary metamorphoses through which women and men in differentiated ways were being increasingly dehumanized in the encounter with the colonial power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of the Anthropocene is creating new openings around the question of how humans ought to intervene in the environment. In this article, we address one arena in which the Anthropocene is prompting a sea change: conservation. The path emerging in mainstream conservation is, we argue, neoliberal and postnatural. We propose an alternative path for multispecies abundance. By abundance we mean more diverse and autonomous forms of life and ways of living together. In considering how to enact multispecies worlds, we take inspiration from Indigenous and peasant movements across the globe as well as decolonial and postcolonial scholars. With decolonization as our principal political sensibility, we offer a manifesto for abundance and outline political strategies to reckon with colonial-capitalist ruins, enact pluriversality rather than universality, and recognize animal autonomy. We advance these strategies to support abundant socioecological futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of imperialism has returned to political and theoretical debates. But there are open theoretical questions. In opposition to treating imperialism in terms of a territorial logic, we insist on the nonterritorial character of capitalist imperialism. We go back to Lenin's theoretical contribution to a possible Marxist theory of imperialism in order to distance it from theories of empire building and territorial expansion. We attempt to combine such a reading of Lenin's writings on imperialism with a conception of political power and hegemony on the international plane, stressing the relative autonomy of the state and political power. We highlight Lenin's discussion of imperialism's class character, in terms of condensed class strategies. Consequently, the aim of this paper is to offer elements of a theory of the specifically capitalist form of nonterritorial imperialism, stressing the importance of articulating Lenin's concept of the imperialist chain with Gramsci's concept of hegemony. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Debunking the common laissez-faire myth surrounding turn-of-the-century American foreign relations allows for a reconceptualization of American imperialism from 1890 to 1913. The Republican Party, the party of protectionism, found itself riven by internal disagreements over the future of the protectionist system and U.S. imperial expansion. From within Republican protectionist ranks arose a progressive wing that increasingly looked beyond the home market for the country’s growing American agricultural and manufacturing surpluses. They did so against staunch anti-imperial opposition not only from American free-trade independents, but also from the Republican Party’s isolationist home-market protectionists, who yet feared or disdained foreign markets and colonial acquisitions. These progressive Republican proponents of empire combined coercive trade reciprocity with protectionism—an expansive closed door—and worked hard to extend American imperial power through informal means of high tariff walls, closed U.S.-controlled markets, and retaliatory reciprocity if possible, by formal annexation and military interventionism when necessary. The American Empire thus arose owing to the imperialism of economic nationalism, not the imperialism of free trade. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Copyright of Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales is the property of Cambridge University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article presents a report from an October 15-18, 2014 conference in Siegen, Germany on colonialism and decolonization in European memorial culture and politics. Topics of presentations delivered included economic aspects of colonialism in Swiss trade and racial policies, the influence on hip hop music of the history of Belgian colonialism in Africa, and colonial relationships between Eastern and Western European nations.

The 2008 financial crises led to a scramble for land and other natural resources reminiscent of colonialism by foreign governments and multinational corporations to feed their populations and pre-empt the eventuality of another food crises through large-scale agricultural investment. This paper discusses the creation of capitalist frontiers in the colonial agricultural enclaves of Cameroon's Littoral region where three multinational plantation companies hold sway. It demonstrates how the coming into the country of foreign investors has transformed the meaning of land and led to contesting legal orders between customary and statutory land tenure, the transformation of man-nature relationship and the dispossession of local communities due to the developmentalist state's production of territory. In the present neoliberal context, the state is increasingly controlling people and their relations to natural resources including land through the production of territory that is subsequently handed over to foreign investors. The paper adopts the view that the use of the expression 'new enclosures' is a misnomer because these developments are taking place at the very sites of the colonial frontier in Cameroon's Littoral region. It calls attention to the need for land governance reforms so as to restitute local land rights and for the need to respect internationally recognized environmental standards by multinational corporations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The East India Company stockholders' election of its Court of Directors for the upcoming year in 1764 crystallised the basic factional and ideological divisions that characterised the ‘India Question’ in the crucial first decade and a half of the post-Plassey era. Scarcely noted by historians, who have failed to seriously address the political constitution of the empire in India, the Company election of 1764 arguably merits pride of place over other near contemporaneous events, such as the 1764 Battle of Buxar or the 1765 acceptance by the Company of thediwani, the right to collect the revenues of Bengal, as the true founding of the British Empire in India. Certainly neither the Battle of Buxar (and the subsequent conquest Awadh) nor the acceptance of thediwanican be fully understood apart from a recognition of the very different politics behind each. Recognising the importance of the 1764 Company election in this sense involves understanding that politics emanating from Britain, and not simply the sub-imperialism associated with private trade, provided the fundamental precondition for the despotism and illiberal political economy of the emerging Company state in Bengal. If this is lost sight of we risk incomprehension of the most basic impetus of the military events and, indeed, of the economic developments on which historians have chiefly focused hitherto. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

"Russia's wealth has catapulted it into new power relationships not only with its energy customers, but also with what is still its main rival, the United States."

Copyright of Historia Contemporanea is the property of Historia Contemporania and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Insisting on the status of money as a creature of both the market and the state, this article challenges dualistic understandings of capitalist imperialism as entailing two fundamentally distinct logics, one capitalist, the other territorial. In opposition to the dual-logics position, the article argues for the distinctiveness of capitalist money in terms of a complex but unitary socio-economic logic. The social dynamism of this logic involves the spatial-territorial extension of the domain of modern value relations, embodied in fully-capitalist money. Departing from the development of coinage in ancient Greece, the article proceeds to identify the 1690s in Britain as the decisive moment in the emergence of a new and distinctively capitalist form of (world) money, institutionally based upon the Bank of England, in which state debt was thoroughly integrated with private financial markets. The crucial role of the Bank of England in this new monetary system is shown to have pivoted on its capacities to finance Britain's inter-colonial wars. Colonialism, war, slavery and dispossession underline the omnipresence of 'blood and dirt' (Marx) in the development and reproduction of capitalist impersonal power as expressed in world money. Undoing the impersonal power characteristic of bourgeois money thus entails undoing the economic dispossession of the labouring poor, which forms the basis of their 'possession' by capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the conference "Beyond Sweetness: New Histories of Sugar in the Early Atlantic World" held at the John Carter Brown Library, Brown University from October 24-25, 2013 in Providence, Rhode Island. Topics discussed include technological advancements in sugar production, sugar's economic position within models of colonial production, and slave labor.

Was colonization costly for France? Did French taxpayers contribute to colonies’ development? This article reveals that French West Africa's colonization took only 0.29 percent of French annual expenditures, including 0.24 percent for military and central administration and 0.05 percent for French West Africa's development. For West Africans, the contribution from French taxpayers was almost negligible: mainland France provided about 2 percent of French West Africa's revenue. In fact, colonization was a considerable burden for African taxpayers since French civil servants’ salaries absorbed a disproportionate share of local expenditures. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]