How the rise of the West was a temporary exception to the predominant world order
What accounts for the rise of the state, the creation of the first global system, and the dominance of the West? The ...conventional answer asserts that superior technology, tactics, and institutions forged by Darwinian military competition gave Europeans a decisive advantage in war over other civilizations from 1500 onward. In contrast,Empires of the Weakargues that Europeans actually had no general military superiority in the early modern era. J. C. Sharman shows instead that European expansion from the late fifteenth to the late eighteenth centuries is better explained by deference to strong Asian and African polities, disease in the Americas, and maritime supremacy earned by default because local land-oriented polities were largely indifferent to war and trade at sea.
Europeans were overawed by the mighty Eastern empires of the day, which pioneered key military innovations and were the greatest early modern conquerors. Against the view that the Europeans won for all time, Sharman contends that the imperialism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a relatively transient and anomalous development in world politics that concluded with Western losses in various insurgencies. If the twenty-first century is to be dominated by non-Western powers like China, this represents a return to the norm for the modern era.
Bringing a revisionist perspective to the idea that Europe ruled the world due to military dominance,Empires of the Weakdemonstrates that the rise of the West was an exception in the prevailing world order.
How chartered company-states spearheaded European expansion and helped create the world's first genuinely global order From Spanish conquistadors to British colonialists, the prevailing story of ...European empire-building has focused on the rival ambitions of competing states. But as Outsourcing Empire shows, from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, company-states—not sovereign states—drove European expansion, building the world's first genuinely international system. Company-states were hybrid ventures: pioneering multinational trading firms run for profit, with founding charters that granted them sovereign powers of war, peace, and rule. Those like the English and Dutch East India Companies carved out corporate empires in Asia, while other company-states pushed forward European expansion through North America, Africa, and the South Pacific. In this comparative exploration, Andrew Phillips and J. C. Sharman explain the rise and fall of company-states, why some succeeded while others failed, and their role as vanguards of capitalism and imperialism.In dealing with alien civilizations to the East and West, Europeans relied primarily on company-states to mediate geographic and cultural distances in trade and diplomacy. Emerging as improvised solutions to bridge the gap between European rulers' expansive geopolitical ambitions and their scarce means, company-states succeeded best where they could balance the twin imperatives of power and profit. Yet as European states strengthened from the late eighteenth century onward, and a sense of separate public and private spheres grew, the company-states lost their usefulness and legitimacy.Bringing a fresh understanding to the ways cross-cultural relations were handled across the oceans, Outsourcing Empire examines the significance of company-states as key progenitors of the globalized world.
Using a methodology that both analyzes particular constitutional texts and theories and reconstructs their historical evolution, Chris Thornhill examines the social role and legitimating status of ...constitutions from the first quasi-constitutional documents of medieval Europe, through the classical period of revolutionary constitutionalism, to recent processes of constitutional transition. A Sociology of Constitutions explores the reasons why modern societies require constitutions and constitutional norms and presents a distinctive socio-normative analysis of the constitutional preconditions of political legitimacy.
Small states have learned in recent decades that capital accumulates where taxes are low; as a result, tax havens have increasingly competed for the attention of international investors with tax and ...regulatory concessions. Economically powerful countries including France, Britain, Japan, and the United States, however, wished to stanch the offshore flow of domestic taxable capital. Since 1998 the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has attempted to impose common tax regulations on more than three dozen small states.
In a fascinating book based on fieldwork and interviews in twenty-two countries in the Caribbean, North America, Europe, and islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, J. C. Sharman shows how the struggle was decided in favor of the tax havens, which eventually avoided common regulation. No other book on tax havens is based on such extensive fieldwork, and no other author has had access to so many of the key decision makers who played roles in the conflict between onshore and offshore Sharman suggests that microstates succeeded in their struggle with great powers because of their astute deployment of reputation and effective rhetorical self-positioning. In effect, they persuaded a transnational audience that the OECD was being untrue to its own values by engaging in a hypocritical, bullying exercise inimical to free competition.
An unprecedented new international moral and legal rule forbids one state from hosting money stolen by the leaders of another state. The aim is to counter grand corruption or kleptocracy ("rule by ...thieves"), when leaders of poorer countries-such as Marcos in the Philippines, Mobutu in the Congo, and more recently those overthrown in revolutions in the Arab world and Ukraine-loot billions of dollars at the expense of their own citizens. This money tends to end up hosted in rich countries. These host states now have a duty to block, trace, freeze, and seize these illicit funds and hand them back to the countries from which they were stolen. InThe Despot's Guide to Wealth Management, J. C. Sharman asks how this anti-kleptocracy regime came about, how well it is working, and how it could work better. Although there have been some real achievements, the international campaign against grand corruption has run into major obstacles. The vested interests of banks, lawyers, and even law enforcement often favor turning a blind eye to foreign corruption proceeds. Recovering and returning looted assets is a long, complicated, and expensive process.
Sharman used a private investigator, participated in and observed anti-corruption policy, and conducted more than a hundred interviews with key players. He also draws on various journalistic exposés, whistle-blower accounts, and government investigations to inform his comparison of the anti-kleptocracy records of the United States, Britain, Switzerland, and Australia. Sharman calls for better policing, preventative measures, and use of gatekeepers like bankers, lawyers, and real estate agents. He also recommends giving nongovernmental organizations and for-profit firms more scope to independently investigate corruption and seize stolen assets.
The development of lasers capable of producing high-intensity pulses has opened a new area in the study of light-matter interactions. The corresponding laser fields are strong enough to compete with ...the Coulomb forces in controlling the dynamics of atomic systems and give rise to multiphoton processes. This book presents a unified account of this rapidly developing field of physics. The first part describes the fundamental phenomena occurring in intense laser-atom interactions and gives the basic theoretical framework to analyze them. The second part contains a detailed discussion of Floquet theory, the numerical integration of the wave equations and approximation methods for the low- and high-frequency regimes. In the third part, the main multiphoton processes are discussed: multiphoton ionization, high harmonic and attosecond pulse generation, and laser-assisted electron-atom collisions. Aimed at graduate students in atomic, molecular and optical physics, the book will also interest researchers working on laser interactions with matter.
Trastuzumab has been approved for patients with human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2)-positive metastatic gastric carcinoma; however, relatively little is known about the role of HER2 in ...the natural history of this disease.
Patients enrolled in the INT-0116/SWOG9008 phase III gastric cancer clinical trial with available tissue specimens were retrospectively evaluated for HER2 gene amplification by FISH and overexpression by immunohistochemistry (IHC). The original trial was designed to evaluate the benefit of postoperative chemoradiation compared with surgery alone.
HER2 gene amplification rate by FISH was 10.9% among 258 patients evaluated. HER2 overexpression rate by IHC was 12.2% among 148 patients evaluated, with 90% agreement between FISH and IHC. There was a significant interaction between HER2 amplification and treatment with respect to both disease-free survival (DFS) (P = 0.020) and overall survival (OS) (P = 0.034). Among patients with HER2-non-amplified cancers, treated patients had a median OS of 44 months compared with 24 months in the surgery-only arm (P = 0.003). Among patients with HER2-amplified cancers, there was no significant difference in survival based on treatment arm. HER2 status was not a prognostic marker among patients who received no postoperative chemoradiation.
Patients lacking HER2 amplification benefited from treatment as indicated by both DFS and OS.
INT-0116/SWOG9008 phase III.
In examining how the United States gained control over the northern borderlands of Spanish America, this work reassesses the diplomacy of President James Madison. Historians have assumed Madison's ...motive in sending agents into the Spanish borderlands between 1810 and 1813 was to subvert Spanish rule, but J. C. A. Stagg argues that his real intent was to find peaceful and legal resolutions to long-standing disputes over the boundaries of Louisiana at a time when the Spanish-American empire was in the process of dissolution. Drawing on an array of American, British, French, and Spanish sources, the author describes how a myriad cast of local leaders, officials, and other small players affected the borderlands diplomacy between the United States and Spain, and he casts new light on Madison's contribution to early American expansionism.
This book elucidates and defends C.S. Peirce’s pragmatist account of truth. Peirce was interested in exploring truth’s connections to the practices of inquiry, belief, and assertion. This distinctly ...pragmatic project resulted in the view that truth is what would be agreed upon, were inquiry to be pursued as far as it could fruitfully go. The view that a belief is true if it would be indefeasible connects truth to human practices, but which takes truth to be something to be discovered. That is, Peirce’s view of truth is much more objectivist than some currently popular brands of pragmatism. In this expanded edition, advances in the understanding of Peirce’s theory of truth are noted, and include a new chapter which shows how Peirce’s view of truth is friendly to moral judgements.
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