Read more
List of contents
Introduction: Social Science and Empire: A Durable Tension, Jeremy Adelman (Princeton University, USA)
1. Campillo’s Theory of Commercial Empire: Political Economy and Commercial Reform in the Spanish Empire, Fidel Tavarez, (University of Chicago, USA)
2. Poor Mao’s Almanack? Empire, Political Economy, and the Transformation of Social Science, Sophus A. Reinert, (Harvard University, USA)
3. Utilitarianism and the Question of Free Labor in Russia and India in the Eighteenth Century, Alessandro Stanziani, (EHESS, Paris, France)
4. Geography and the Reshaping of the Modern Chinese Empire, Shellen Wu, (University of Tennessee, USA)
5. The Periphery’s Order: Opium and Moral Wreckage in British Burma, Diana Kim, (Georgetown University, USA)
6. Custom in the Archive: The Birth of Modern Chinese Law at the End of Empire, Matthew Erie, (Oxford University, UK)
7. Nitobe Inazo and the Diffusion of a Knowledgeable Empire, Alexis Dudden, (University of Connecticut, USA)
8. Modern Imperialism and International Law, Josh Derman, (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, China)
9. Knowledge as Power: Internationalism, Information, and US Global Ambitions, David Ekbladh, (Tufts University, USA)
10. American Hegemony, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Rise of Academic International Relations in the US, Inderjeet Parmar, (City, University of London, UK)
11. Circumventing Imperialism: Latin American Social Sciences and the Making of a Global Order, 1944-1971, Margarita Fajardo, (Sarah Lawrence College, USA)
12. Western International Theory, 1492-2010: Performing Western Supremacy and Western Imperialism, John M. Hobson, (University of Sheffield, UK)
Index
About the author
Jeremy Adelman is Henry Charles Lea Professor of History and Director of the Global History Lab at Princeton University, USA. He has been the recipient of the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and the ACLS Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship, as well as recognitions for his pioneering teaching at Princeton. Chair of the Princeton History Department for the last four years, he is also the founder of the Council for International Teaching and Research.
Summary
This thought-provoking and original collection looks at how intellectuals and their disciplines have been shaped, halted and advanced by the rise and fall of empires. It illuminates how ideas did not just reflect but also moulded global order and disorder by informing public policies and discourse. Ranging from early modern European empires to debates about recent American hegemony, Empire and the Social Sciences shows that world history cannot be separated from the empires that made it, and reveals the many ways in which social scientists constructed empires as we know them.
Taking a truly global approach from China and Japan to modern America, the contributors collectively tackle a long durée of the modern world from the Enlightenment to the present day. Linking together specific moments of world history it also puts global history at the centre of a debate about globalization of the social sciences. It thus crosses and integrates several disciplines and offers graduate students, scholars and faculty an approach that intersects fields, crosses regions and maps a history of global social sciences.
Foreword
An exploration into how the social sciences and their intellectuals were entangled in the rise and fall of empires, asking classical questions about empire-building and examining the role of ideas, experts, and expertise in their creation.
Additional text
An excellent book for scholars of expertise, empire, and global history alike.
