There can be no bigger compliment to George Lawson’s new book Anatomies of Revolution, than to invoke the figure of Fred Halliday. For the last six years of teaching a course on revolutions in the making of “the international”, I have used a quote to try and grab students’ attentions about [...]
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As George Lawson observes in the introduction to Anatomies of Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2019), there is something elusive about the concept of revolution in the twenty-first century. Revolutions seem to be everywhere and nowhere. Listen to the news and you get the impression [...]
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My recent book Jurisdictional Accumulation develops a new account of extraterritoriality, which is the exercise of jurisdiction beyond its limits. This device is poorly studied in the early modern period, too quickly and narrowly associated with either the Ottoman capitulations, or with the [...]
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When Vivek Chibber’s Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (PTSC) – a rigorous critique of the work of Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee, and Dipesh Chakrabarty – made its appearance in 2013, it met with a highly polarised reception. For some Marxist critics, the book constituted a [...]
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The transition from pre-capitalist to capitalist property relations…must be understood as an unintended consequence of the acts of … pre-capitalist classes, Robert Brenner, ‘The Social Bases of Economic Development’, in John Roemer (ed.) Analytical Marxism, p. 26.
The [...]
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For thirty-odd years, American historian Marcus Rediker (University of Pittsburgh) has been writing about the sea, deep-sea sailing ships, seafaring proletariats, and seafaring rebels, during the seventeenth through to the early nineteenth centuries. Internationally, his landmark study of [...]
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Up to the Greek insurrection Turkey was, to all intents and purposes a terra incognita, and the common notions floating about among the public were based more upon the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments than upon any historical facts . . . It is true that during the last thirty years much has [...]
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