The Blacksmith’s Feet

Although it has been widely acknowledged that quite a high percentage of historical works in Taiwan contributed to the field of modern Chinese history, such understanding remains impressionistic. This paper gives a quantitative analysis in how such academic trend has emerged and changed over the years. The authors examines eight major historical journals, M.A. theses, and dissertations finished between 1945 and 2000 to see how the research trend has shifted during this period. The paper will, on the one hand, concentrate on describing the phenomenon in the field. It will also, on the other, analyze the distribution of works in each sub–field, e.g., econcmic history, political history, social history, etc. to compare with Works in Chinese history as a whole. The period between 1945 and 2000 can be divided into five time span s. In each of the five studies of modern Chinese history possesses the highest percentage among works in Chinese history. Moreover, there are more theses and dissertations than journal papers contributed to this field. By the fifth time span, however, the percentage of theses and dissertations contributed to modern Chinese history is close to that of journal papers. Of 627 theses and dissertations in this field 27.4% works on political and military history, 16.3% intellectual and cultural history, 15.6% international relationship, 14.5% social history, 13.2% economic history, 4.5% educational history, and less than 3% unidentifiable. The lowest percentage among the field are: institutional history (0.3%), history of science (0.5%), history of books (0.5%), art history (1.0%), historiography (1.9%). Of 1,010 journal papers on modern Chinese history, intellectual and cultural history possesses 30.8% of works, political and military history 28.2%, historiography 10.0%, international relationship 8.7%, economic history 8.7%, and social history 5.9%, unidentifiable less than 3.0%. The lowest percentage in the field are: history of women 0.5%, art history 0.6%, history of science (0.6%), history of books (0.6%), history of religion 1.3%.

From the seventeenth century, pearling had been the economic mainstay of Bahrain. By the 1930s, however, pearling had faded, and was replaced as the mainstay of the Bahrain economy by the extraction of crude oil. But oil production in turn faded, as Bahrain’s reserves declined by the 1970s, and the country underwent a third economic transformation. In recent decades, Bahrain has created an innovative financial sector to serve Bahrain’s oil-rich neighbours, a hub of Islamic finance. In this it has been assisted by the inflow of oil wealth from the Gulf producers, revenues that have driven the urbanization, industrialization, and the financial expansion of Bahrain. From the final decades of the twentieth century, oil capital has transformed Bahrain’s economy. It is important to explore the social, religious, and political contexts in which that transformation took place. Thus, the creation of a powerful capacity in Islamic finance clearly has a crucial religious context, in the need to secure compliance with Shari’ah law. Or again, a vastly growing financial sector as well as rapid urbanization and industrial expansion clearly had substantial demographic implications, for territorially small Bahrain had always been highly dependent on immigrant labour and immigrant skills. And finally, economic transformation inevitably brought social and political tensions. It is the exploration of those contexts and impacts that drive this book. First, however, it is essential to provide detail on Bahrain’s economic, social, and political history, for that history has had a long reach and profoundly shapes modern Bahrain.

The term cliometrics (a neologism linking the concept of measurement to the muse of history) was apparently coined at Purdue University, Indiana, US, in the late 1950s. Originally applied to the study of economic history as undertaken by scholars trained as economists (and also called, by its practitioners and others, the ‘new economic history’, ‘econometric history’, and ‘quantitative economic history’), more recently cliometrics has been applied to a broader range of historical studies (including the ‘new political history’, the ‘new social history’, and, most inclusively, ‘social science history’).

Reviewed by Allyson M. Poska University of Mary Washington Felipe V y su tiempo: Congreso internacional celebrado en Zaragoza, 15 al 19 de Enero de 2001. Edited by Eliseo Serrano. 2 vols. (Zaragoza: Institución "Fernando el Católico," C.S.I.C. 2004. Pp. 1062, 898. Paperback.) For decades, eighteenth-century Spain and the Spanish kingdoms during the first half of the century in particular have received little scholarly attention. The eighteenth century had neither the allure of early modern imperial power, nor the appeal of impending modernity. Indeed, to many historians, the War of the Spanish Succession and Philip of Anjou´s succession was a vague interim after the Habsburg decline but before the full expression of the Enlightenment under Charles III. However, as a recent spate of new monographs and these volumes reveal, historians have breathed new life into eighteenth-century studies. In January 2001, many of Spain's best scholars gathered to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the Bourbon dynasty's ascent to the Spanish throne. The result is a remarkable two-volume set of seventy-five essays that provide detailed, useful discussions of nearly all aspects of Spanish history and culture during the reign of Philip V (r.1700-1746). Some essays provide broad overviews of the political, economic, and social contexts. For example, Elisa Torres Santana examines marginalized people, including gypsies, prostitutes, and slaves; José Manuel Pérez García lays out the changing demography of the period; and Manuel Lobo Cabrera provides a broad look at the Spanish economy. Other essays provide a glimpse into regional differences. As the conference was held in Zaragoza, the kingdom of Aragón is particularly well represented, but other regions including Galicia receive some attention as well. The most striking aspect of this collection is its topical and methodological range. In addition to political, economic, and social history, diplomatic history, literature, musicology, architecture, and ritual all receive interesting and up-to-date treatment. In terms of the readership of this journal, seven of the seventy-five essays deal directly with religion or the Catholic Church. Historians of eighteenth-century Spain, like their counterparts in other parts of Europe, have demonstrated greater interest in Enlightenment ideas and increased secularization [End Page 675] during the eighteenth century than what is often viewed as a stagnant or even declining Church. Nevertheless, this handful of articles offers much to the religious historian, and they provide the same variety of breadth and detail as the rest of the collection. Maximiliano Barrio Gozalo provides an excellent "state of the clergy." He includes statistical data and provides some basic analysis on an array of issues including the moral and intellectual state of the clergy and the effect of the ascent of the French dynasty on the Spanish church. Teófanes Egido takes up the impact of Gallicanism on the peninsula and whether the Spanish clergy formed a new relationship with the monarchy in the wake of Philip´s 1709 break with Rome. Ricardo García Cárcel argues that the Inquisition did not suffer any assumed decline during the eighteenth century. Rather, the tribunals pursued more than 3000 cases with heretical propositions, solicitation, superstition, and judaizing topping the list. Articles on religious discourse and the press in Barcelona and the Aragonese clergy's support of the Austrian candidate in the War of the Spanish Succession connect local issues to broader national concerns. Finally, an examination of Bishop Belluga of Cartagena's visitations ad limina and a piece on music in the Cathedral of Barbastro offer interesting views of the Church in its local context. These volumes will prove to be very useful for all scholars of the period. As we work to better understand this transitional century, these clearly written, up-to-date discussions will be critical references for a wide array of studies.

Today, in the Anthropocene, humans are changing global and local ecologies as fast as, or faster than, we can study them (eg. Rose 2009, Palmer et al. 2004). For primates this has a dire impact; nearly half of all primate taxa are under serious threat of population reduction/fragmentation, substantive landscape/ecology alteration and for many even extinction. In the practice of primatology this fact is at the forefront of any project and every analysis. It has become a necessity to employ a revised primatological practice, one that places humans and other primates in integrated and shared ecological and social spaces. This approach is epitomized by the current practice of ethnoprimatology. In ethnoprimatology the “ethno” prefix represents the inclusion of anthropogenic aspects, including the social, economic, and political histories and contexts as core components in the ecologies, and lives, of other primates (Sponsel 1997; Fuentes 2012; Malone et al. 2014). It is at the interface of human and other primate lives that much of the challenge to primatology exists, and at that boundary conservation, sustainability and management come to the forefront (Fuentes 2012; Fuentes & Hockings 2010; Fuentes & Wolfe 2002; Riley 2007). Ethnoprimatological approaches “affirm the role of humans as primates, of other primates as co-participants in shaping social and ecological space, recognizing mutual roles in both ecological and cultural interconnections” (Fuentes 2012: 102). Here we draw on a range of recent work in ethnoprimatology and allied areas to demonstrate how such approaches create a fruitful venue for integrating primatological inquiry and conservation and management practice via assessing the mutual ecologies, evolutionary histories, and social lives at the interface of humans and other primates (e.g., Fuentes & Wolfe 2002; Paterson & Wallis 2005; Fuentes & Hockings 2010; Riley et al. 2011; Malone et al. 2014).

Socio-political issues are important in environmental policy outcomes but are often overlooked in conservation planning. We analyze the effects of historical social, political, and ecological contexts on conservation policy outcomes as applied to the Upper Gulf of California and Colorado River Delta Biosphere Reserve. A rushed implementation, perhaps necessary for the protection of endangered totoaba (Totoaba macdonaldi) and vaquita (Phocoena sinus), occurred with little community consultation, resulting in enduring disgruntlement among stakeholders that undermined its effectiveness. Overfishing and habitat degradation continue both inside and outside the reserve, and totoaba and vaquita remain Critically Endangered, with the latter's population estimated at approximately 90 individuals. Marine reserves can be useful, but when top-down enforcement is unfeasible, effective environmental policy requires full recognition and integration of political history and social structures and needs, and open discussion on trade-offs when win-win situations are not possible.

This study seeks to explore how the French and Italian communist parties responded to the role of the United States in (West) European reconstruction in the wake of the Second World War and during the Cold War, from the mid-1940s to the rise of Eurocommunism in the 1970s. Alessandro Brogi’s study is not, however, a history of French and Italian communism from the perspective of political and social history. Instead, Brogi is interested in delineating intellectual responses in the context of international history. It is an extremely rich and learned survey of forty years of transatlantic relations. It is therefore an important contribution to post-1945 French history and one of the few studies that seek explicitly to explore France’s position in the comparative and transnational context of Cold War politics. This important book, therefore, adds to the studies on attitudes towards the United States in France and other West European countries during the Cold War, such as Rob Kroes’s and Philippe Roger’s work. But it does so on a more pronouncedly diplomatic and intellectual history (as opposed to social and cultural history) footing. Moreover, the comparative perspective helps us understand French developments in the context of broader West European patterns. Brogi argues that, after a more aggressive posture in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the United States followed a more liberal and tolerant path towards dealing with what it regarded as a key threat to the stability of Western Europe: its strategy became one of undermining the appeal of communism by highlighting the soft power of capitalism and modernity. Brogi’s argument is therefore a more positive and affirmative take on what Victoria de Grazia, arguing from the perspective of a socio-cultural historian, has called the United States’s ‘irresistible empire’. Rather problematically, however, this means that the book’s key argument essentially rehashes those of the New Deal liberals on both sides of the Atlantic: namely that the models of society and culture promoted by the United States were, because of their flexibility and tolerance for difference, infinitely better equipped to deal with the problems of modernity – consumer culture, the politics of identity, political representation beyond party political organisation – than the equivalent communist model. We also learn unfortunately little on the processes of policy making within the parties and within the United States, especially about the parties’ relationships to the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, this important and comprehensive study will serve as a standard work not only for those interested in the impact of the Cold War on French politics in a West European and transatlantic context as well as for those keen to learn more about the role of ‘soft power’ during the Cold War.

Reviewed by: Marabi Nights: jazz, ‘race’ and society in early apartheid South Africaby Christopher Ballantine Nishlyn Ramanna (bio) Christopher Ballantine (2012) Marabi Nights: jazz, ‘race’ and society in early apartheid South Africa 2 nded. Pietermaritzburg: UKZN Press * Being a part of this event is a big deal to me because Marabi Nightsis not as Gwen Ansell describes the first edition of Christopher Ballantine’s book “one of a few seminal works in SA jazz history”. Rather, it is theseminal work in South African jazz studies. For the few that may need reminding, the first edition of Marabi Nightswas groundbreaking. Based on painstaking archival and oral history research in the 1980s with some 60 interviewees, it brought to national and international attention a vital South African music culture that was in danger of being forgotten forever. Although his sources were widely dispersed and, I would guess, often difficult to track down, Chris Ballantine fashioned these disparate fragments of information into a history that is compellingy rich and evocative. Direct quotations from interviews and other primary sources are so deftly interwoven into the narrative that the book along with the fantastic CD that accompanies it, is often a portal tothe times and places it describes. Here’s critic Walter Nhlapo describing pianist Toko Khampepe (on page 22): It is wonderful how he pounds the piano. As time marches on, charmed by the strains of music, for it is said, ‘music hath its charms’, he becomes hotter and hotter, bangs the instrument, leaves his stool, knees on the ground, plays with his back towards the piano, sits on the keyboard and plays with his haunches. Such playing is seen in Harlem. [End Page 157] Or Peter Rezant on the Merry Blackbirds (27): So when the crowds would hear ‘Chattanooga Choochoo’, after the picture had been shown, oh, they would go mad, mad, mad, mad, mad! The police couldn’t stop them away from the doors in the places outside Johannesburg where we would go to, when they hear that sound. As Sibongile Khumalo remarks in the foreword, the author captures “beyond academic pursuance, the ‘feel’ of how township jazz evolved”. And if that is all the book did, that would be more than enough. But Marabi Nightsis as intellectually provocative as it is emotionally evocative. As Ballantine puts it (13): All stories … are about more than just the flows, tensions, and details of their own narrative. They also open upon broader perspective, provide ways of thinking about more general issues, support and undermine related arguments, developed elsewhere in other narratives. Key among those other narratives for Ballantine, is the work of Theodor Adorno who emphasises the ways in which music cultures are shaped by their social and political contexts. Bringing Adorno’s thought into dialogue with the work of important South African scholars like Tim Couzens, William Beinart, Shula Marks and Richard Rathbone, Ballantine lays bare the grammars of oppression and resistance that shaped the development of township jazz. In the process he develops a uniquely postcolonial take on Adorno’s philosophy by escorting the pessimistic, Eurocentric Adorno into an irrepressibly optimistic, African, proletarian musical and social context that Adorno might have found rather educational. Likewise the book teaches us that the arts and social sciences have much to learn from one another. In this sense, Marabi Nightswas and remains epistemologically pioneering. Informed by a deeply dialectical ethos, it achieves a genuinely interdisciplinary synthesis of humanities and social science modes of thinking. No wonder Sibongile Khumalo’s mentor and father Khabi Mngoma insisted she read the book when it first came out! Empirically rich, theoretically adroit, and elegantly written, Marabi Nightsis needless to say, an outstanding teaching resource. In addition to acquainting students with a vital history, the book is great for teaching them how to write rich descriptions; how to tease out the reasearch questions that frame an author’s argument; how to ask and effectively answer complex questions about the interrelationships among musical sounds and their social histories. It helps no end that the book is so astutely paced. The [End Page 158]‘Concert and Dance’ chapter is predominantly descriptive; the ‘music...

This article focuses on peculiarities of historiography in Germany in the light of German historians’ works from Chladni to Lamprecht. It deals with both continuities and periodical differentiations. The distinctive features of historicism consisting the main tradition in the historiography in Germany can be formulated as “history as an empirical science”, “history for history”, “respect for the particular” and “knowledge of inevitability of historian’s subjectivity”. Historiography in Germany has been loyal to aims of “cultural history” (Kulturgeschichte) and “universal history” (Universalgeschichte) put forward by Herder, and developed the “universal cultural history” program. This program advocates that fields of human activities such as politics, economics, religion, culture, besides old ages and foreign cultures have to be dealt with “as of themselves”. Thus works of “universal cultural history” written beginning from 1750s in Germany can be seen as a kind of early forerunners of the attempt of “social history”, even of “history of civilizations” meaning “integrative history” in Braudelian terms. Even if the pendulum of historiography in Germany swung from 1750 to 1900 between Ranke’s naive objectivism and Droysen’s subjectivism, or between “political history” as put by Iggers and “cultural history” devoid of political and economic base as put by Braudel, its main axis has been defined by the holistic program of “universal cultural history”, which combined “cultural history” and “political and economic history”, and surpassed “national history”.

Recent scholarship in the history of American art has uncovered the deep social, political, and economic context within which specific inividuals invented highly charged (and frequently contested) visions of the American landscape. Drawing attention away from the naturalizing tendency of criticism that emphasizes landscape painting as a reflection of national and transcendental ideals, this kind of analysis has brought new richness to the study of landscapes, weaving political and social history into the criticism of American art. Charting paintings as they function within the constellations of patronage, intellectual history, and reception, these new histories help us understand the cultural work of landscape in the 19th-century United States.

Argentina is a democratic, republican country with a rich and varied social, political and economic history. It has developed from agricultural exports that began in the late 19th century, through import substitution to focus on industrial development today. Public relations (PR) thus was born and developed in an ever-changing economic, political and social context. The history of PR in Argentina can be traced from the beginnings of the struggle for emancipation from Spain at the start of the 19th century, expressed in lobbying and public affairs activities, and grew through the years with increasingly sophisticated methods applied by government, social groups and commerce.

The publication of the 1619 Project in 2019 by the New York Times Magazine has proved to be a discursive pivot for historiographic debate over the place of liberty, justice and servitude in the social history of the USA. Discussion around this event has been focused and intense, but little has been done to situate the Project in either a wider field of historical sociology or a longer trajectory in the discourses of social and political history. By tracing a certain genealogy in this historiography back through the recent New History of Capitalism to a broader Atlantic and even global set of concerns in late-twentieth century social and cultural history, the article focuses on something I have named the Hall-Colley debate. Back in the early 2000s, this debate struck at the very heart of how liberty, captivity, servitude and domination are conceptualized and experienced historically, and it indicates an early formation of something much more developed by the time of the 1619 Project. While delving into the historiographic particulars of this debate around empire, freedom and capitalism, the purpose of this analysis is to identify how something one might call the ‘hierarchy of unfreedoms’ has gradually insinuated its way into the discourses of historical sociology up to and including the 1619 Project. The implication of this development has been a growing censoriousness in how we do social history, an increasingly maladroit handling of historical revision and reassessment, and a strengthening tendency towards closure in how we explore socially heterogenous experiences of unfreedom in unanticipated places.

A contemporary politics of contestation and dissent is linked to the development of what have been termed new social movements (NSMs).1 This chapter discusses key aspects of discourse theory in relation to studies of the Internet and the mediation of political identities in the politics of NSMs. These have grown out of a complex social and political history — a history in which politics itself has shifted from a traditional focus on institutions processed via organized systems to a concern with more disparate social movement alignments. This shift has challenged traditional forms of political representation and articulation within the public realm while responding to the changed social, political, and technological conditions and circumstances under which political citizenship is enacted. Contemporary transnational social movements are a combination of collective action and individual subjectivities that mix personal expressions of political allegiance with public debate in an online context. The spaces of action and debate have shifted from local/national configurations and terrestrial media to "global" counter-summits and the Internet (although the latter does not exclude the former). One of the striking differences between the counter-publicity of transnational social movements and the counter-politics of the nation-state is the lack of a common identity and rejection of unifying meta-narratives of organization.KeywordsSocial MovementPolitical ParticipationPolitical IdentityNorth American Free Trade AgreementPolitical EngagementThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Taken together the essays in this work not only provide research essential to the study of Islamic societies and Muslim peoples, but also set a standard for the concrete study of local situations and illuminate the forces shaping the of modern Muslim societies. This collection is unique in its sophisticated interpretation of the social protest and political resistance movements in Muslim countries during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The contributors take two principal approaches to the study of their subject. Utilizing new cultural history, they explore how particular movements have deployed the cultural and religious resources of Islam to mobilize and legitimize insurgent political action. Others rely on new social history to study the economic, political, and social contexts in which movements of anti-colonial resistance and revolution have developed. This work brings together contributions from specialists on Islamic North Africa, Egypt, the Arab fertile crescent, Iran and India.

Spaces of Contention: Spatialities and Social Movements. Walter Nicholls, Byron Miller, and Justin Beaumont (eds.). Ashgate. July 2013. --- As social movements have become more complex, geographers are increasingly studying the spatial dynamics of collective resistance, and sociologists and political scientists are increasingly analysing the role of space, place and scale in contentious political activity. Occupying a position at the intersection of these disciplinary developments, this book aims to examine how social movements have employed spatial practices to respond to and shape changing social and political contexts. Reviewed by Jenny Walklate.