Empire and the Social Sciences
by Jeremy Adelman
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.
Hardcover
English
Brand New
Author Biography
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.
Table 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
Review
This superb compilation of essays situates the history of the social sciences from the 18th century onward in the contexts of various imperial formations. It provides us with rich accounts of how the social sciences were shaped by diverse forms of imperial order while at the same time they also contributed to shaping them. Authored by an international group of leading scholars, all essays manage to combine global historical questions with due attention to local contexts. The book crosses many academic disciplines, and it fills an important gap in the currently available literature on the global history of knowledge in general and the social sciences in particular. * Dominic Sachsenmaier, Professor of Global History, Georg-August-University Göttingen, Germany *
The foundational moment of the modern social sciences in the 19th century coincided with a time of empire. Imperial logics, mostly implicitly, seeped into the terms and categories that social scientists use. It is high time to de-imperialize the social sciences. This book makes important strides towards a critique of what we could call, for want of a better term, 'methodological imperialism.' * Sebastian Conrad, Professor of Global History, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany *
An excellent book for scholars of expertise, empire, and global history alike. * Isis Journal *
Promotional
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.
Review Quote
"This superb compilation of essays situates the history of the social sciences from the 18th century onward in the contexts of various imperial formations. It provides us with rich accounts of how the social sciences were shaped by diverse forms of imperial order while at the same time they also contributed to shaping them. Authored by an international group of leading scholars, all essays manage to combine global historical questions with due attention to local contexts. The book crosses many academic disciplines, and it fills an important gap in the currently available literature on the global history of knowledge in general and the social sciences in particular." -- Dominic Sachsenmaier, Professor of Global History, Georg-August-University G
Promotional "Headline"
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.
Feature
Takes a truly global approach to empire, social sciences and intellectual thought
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