The British empire was a huge enterprise. To foreigners, it more or less defined Britain in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Its repercussions in the wider world are still with us today. It also ...had a great impact on Britain herself: for example, on her economy, security, population, and eating habits. One might expect this to have been reflected in her society and culture. Indeed, this has now become the conventional wisdom: that Britain was steeped in imperialism domestically, which affected (or infected) almost everything Britons thought, felt, and did. This book examines this assumption critically against the broader background of contemporary British society. It argues that the empire had a far lower profile in Britain than it did abroad. Although Britain was an imperial nation in this period, she was never a genuine imperial society. As well as showing how this was possible, the book also discusses the implications of this attitude for Britain and her empire, and for the relationship between culture and imperialism more generally, bringing his study up to date by including the case of the present-day United States.
Universal Empire Bang, Peter Fibiger; Kolodziejczyk, Dariusz
08/2012
eBook
The claim by certain rulers to universal empire has a long history stretching as far back as the Assyrian and Achaemenid Empires. This book traces its various manifestations in classical antiquity, ...the Islamic world, Asia and Central America as well as considering seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European discussions of international order. As such it is an exercise in comparative world history combining a multiplicity of approaches, from ancient history, to literary and philosophical studies, to the history of art and international relations and historical sociology. The notion of universal, imperial rule is presented as an elusive and much coveted prize among monarchs in history, around which developed forms of kingship and political culture. Different facets of the phenomenon are explored under three, broadly conceived, headings: symbolism, ceremony and diplomatic relations; universal or cosmopolitan literary high-cultures; and, finally, the inclination to present universal imperial rule as an expression of cosmic order.
En esta intervención se revisan crÃticamente los conceptos de sociedad mundial y de imperialismo según son planteados por Esteban Torres en su libro La gran transformación de la sociologÃa. Se ...observa la arquitectura y las relaciones lógicas del primero y la insuficiencia económica del segundo. En ambos casos, la crÃtica es sucedida por la sugerencia de alternativas basadas en la TeorÃa de sistemas sociales.
En la historiografía antiimperialista de Latinoamérica, el caso nicaragüense tiene la particularidad de presentarse como un proceso de continuidad entre la guerrilla encabezada por Augusto C. Sandino ...y el Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN). El presente trabajo problematiza la solidaridad latinoamericana con las guerrillas nicaragüenses como una de las aristas que sostiene la narrativa de dicha continuidad. Palabras clave: red; antiimperialismo; solidaridad; Sandino; FSLN In the anti-imperialist historiography of Latin America, the Nicaraguan case has the particularity of being presented as a process of continuity between the guerrilla led by Augusto C. Sandino and the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN). This paper problematizes Latin American solidarity with the Nicaraguan guerrillas as one of the aspects that perpetuates the narrative of such continuity. Keywords: network; anti-imperialism; solidarity; Sandino; FSLN
Editorial Bialostocka, Olga
Africa insight,
03/2022, Letnik:
51, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
While the colonial rule in Africa formally ended in the previous century, the shadow of colonial hegemony still lies in the forms of knowing and understanding the world that are practised on the ...continent, and the imperial power holds an iron grip over the socio-economic realities of Africans. Colonial powers constructed their culture and values as universal, denigrating the ways of being, having and doing of the peoples they subdued and oppressed. The economic and political systems of the colonised societies have been reconfigured to exploit local populations and through their labour accumulate capital for the benefit of the West. African cultures, deemed useless, were mostly neglected, often negated and excluded, which eventually ‘allowed them to survive in silence, in the shadows, simultaneously scorned by their own modernised and westernised elites’.sup.1 Today, the challenges posed by economic and cultural imperialist designs, such as globalisation or the capitalist development model, further threaten African cultures, which risk erosion as a result of imbalanced cultural interactions between the local and the global, and lack of validation of African axiological categories among the people of the continent themselves, which leads to the process of acculturation. Few are the communities that, in the face of globalised culture, still carry remnants of economic and political models different from the European ‘norm’ and reveal scientific and technological innovations created in response to the real needs and experiences of the people more than the commercial desires enthroned by modernity.
