Empire and the Social Sciences

Global Histories of Knowledge

Jeremy Adelman

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781350196230
• eBook ISBN: 9781350102538
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: Social science and empire – A durable tension
• A new system of imperial government: Political economy and the Spanish theory of commercial empire, CA. 1740–50
• Poor Mao’s Almanack? empire, political economy and the transformation of social science
• Utilitarianism and the question of free labour in Russia and India, eighteenth–nineteenth centuries
• Geography and the reshaping of the modern Chinese empire
• The periphery’s order: Opium and moral wreckage in British Burma
• Custom in the archive: The birth of modern Chinese law at the end of empire
• Nitobe Inazo and the diffusion of a knowledgeable empire
• Modern imperialism and international law: Carl Schmitt and Ernst Rudolf Huber on the ‘international legal order of great spaces’
• Knowledge as power: Internationalism, information and US global ambitions
• Knowledge for empire: American hegemony, the Rockefeller foundation and the rise of academic international relations in the United States
• Circumventing imperialism: The global economy in Latin American social sciences
• Western international theory, 1492–2010: Performing Western supremacy and Western imperialism
• Epilogue: Empire and the global knowledge regime
• Index
• Copyright