Feb 12, 2018 08:46 PM
(This post was last modified: Feb 12, 2018 08:56 PM by C C.)
The Scandinavians ‘hitchhiked’ their way to the boons of empire
https://aeon.co/ideas/the-hitchhiking-sc...ial-riches
EXCERPT: For many of the most successful imperialist countries, empire was just not worth the trouble. Scandinavian monarchies in the 17th and 18th centuries endeavoured to build empires that would rival the Dutch or even the British, but come the 19th century they sold up the remnants of these overseas ambitions, and largely escaped the administrative responsibility, and moral condemnation, for the age of High Imperialism. Nevertheless, though they gave up administering colonies, a closer look reveals that, by hitchhiking on the back of the British, French and German empires, the little Scandinavian monarchies benefitted greatly from European colonialism. In profound ways, talking of a European colonialism, or a colonialism enriching a collective Europe, makes sense.
[...] The Scandinavians are still hitchhiking away. [...] small, globally orientated European countries such as Denmark, Sweden and Norway exist because the arrangement of world geopolitics leaves them a particular space in which to thrive. More than a century after they sold their colonies, the hitchhiking strategy still seems to be paying off....
MORE: https://aeon.co/ideas/the-hitchhiking-sc...ial-riches
How the idea of family relationships shaped racial thought
https://aeon.co/ideas/how-the-idea-of-fa...al-thought
EXCERPT: . . . Surprisingly enough, the fields which first developed the idea of thinking about genealogical relationships in terms of trees had nothing to do with living beings, but instead with the study of languages and of manuscripts. Thinkers began writing in the 17th century of ‘mother’ languages and the ‘daughter’ languages that developed from them, although without a good sense of how to differentiate descent from borrowings of vocabulary. Classicists and Biblical scholars added rigour to this method in the 18th century, when they painstakingly traced the histories of hand-copied manuscripts in the hopes of reconstructing accurate originals. Each time a mistake was introduced by a copyist, that mistake would be integrated into all later copies made from it – its daughters and granddaughters – providing a sign that allowed scholars to organise manuscripts into lineages. Any new copying error caused a split within a lineage on such a family tree. Linguists, historians of religion, race theorists and eventually biologists would adapt this structure of splitting through deviation to describe the development and diversification of their own objects of study.
Manuscript studies had an advantage over other genealogical fields because a manuscript is a discrete entity with clear boundaries, something that cannot be said of languages, species, races and religions. And yet, it was only as the genealogical method came to organise these more complex entities that its power as an organising principle – right or wrong – was revealed. By transforming the biological and cultural world into families, the genealogical method invested knowledge with emotion and turned scholarship across the sciences, social sciences and humanities into identity politics. Once applied to living things and cultural phenomena, after all, genealogy became personal. You were said to belong to a language family, to a race, to a religion, to a nation, to a species. And others across the globe either belonged to the same family or not. The systems were therefore never neutral. And precisely that lack of neutrality made them wildly successful in promoting new ideologies of personal identity, of group belonging, of social hierarchies, and in bolstering the authority of science.
[...] The success of the genealogical method did not match up with accuracy and, indeed, many of the genealogical sciences were extraordinarily pernicious. Europeans divided the world into genealogical races, and concluded that their own was the one best adapted for self-governance and intelligence [...] The tree is no longer seen as an adequate structure even in the fields for which it was most productive, such as evolution, linguistics and anthropology. [...] Classification remains necessary for understanding the world. But we would benefit from acknowledging the contingency of classification systems, recognising their fluidity over time as we adapt them to new situations and purposes. Projecting our own thought processes onto nature, and then believing we found them there, is always a dangerous precursor to injustice....
MORE: https://aeon.co/ideas/how-the-idea-of-fa...al-thought
https://aeon.co/ideas/the-hitchhiking-sc...ial-riches
EXCERPT: For many of the most successful imperialist countries, empire was just not worth the trouble. Scandinavian monarchies in the 17th and 18th centuries endeavoured to build empires that would rival the Dutch or even the British, but come the 19th century they sold up the remnants of these overseas ambitions, and largely escaped the administrative responsibility, and moral condemnation, for the age of High Imperialism. Nevertheless, though they gave up administering colonies, a closer look reveals that, by hitchhiking on the back of the British, French and German empires, the little Scandinavian monarchies benefitted greatly from European colonialism. In profound ways, talking of a European colonialism, or a colonialism enriching a collective Europe, makes sense.
[...] The Scandinavians are still hitchhiking away. [...] small, globally orientated European countries such as Denmark, Sweden and Norway exist because the arrangement of world geopolitics leaves them a particular space in which to thrive. More than a century after they sold their colonies, the hitchhiking strategy still seems to be paying off....
MORE: https://aeon.co/ideas/the-hitchhiking-sc...ial-riches
How the idea of family relationships shaped racial thought
https://aeon.co/ideas/how-the-idea-of-fa...al-thought
EXCERPT: . . . Surprisingly enough, the fields which first developed the idea of thinking about genealogical relationships in terms of trees had nothing to do with living beings, but instead with the study of languages and of manuscripts. Thinkers began writing in the 17th century of ‘mother’ languages and the ‘daughter’ languages that developed from them, although without a good sense of how to differentiate descent from borrowings of vocabulary. Classicists and Biblical scholars added rigour to this method in the 18th century, when they painstakingly traced the histories of hand-copied manuscripts in the hopes of reconstructing accurate originals. Each time a mistake was introduced by a copyist, that mistake would be integrated into all later copies made from it – its daughters and granddaughters – providing a sign that allowed scholars to organise manuscripts into lineages. Any new copying error caused a split within a lineage on such a family tree. Linguists, historians of religion, race theorists and eventually biologists would adapt this structure of splitting through deviation to describe the development and diversification of their own objects of study.
Manuscript studies had an advantage over other genealogical fields because a manuscript is a discrete entity with clear boundaries, something that cannot be said of languages, species, races and religions. And yet, it was only as the genealogical method came to organise these more complex entities that its power as an organising principle – right or wrong – was revealed. By transforming the biological and cultural world into families, the genealogical method invested knowledge with emotion and turned scholarship across the sciences, social sciences and humanities into identity politics. Once applied to living things and cultural phenomena, after all, genealogy became personal. You were said to belong to a language family, to a race, to a religion, to a nation, to a species. And others across the globe either belonged to the same family or not. The systems were therefore never neutral. And precisely that lack of neutrality made them wildly successful in promoting new ideologies of personal identity, of group belonging, of social hierarchies, and in bolstering the authority of science.
[...] The success of the genealogical method did not match up with accuracy and, indeed, many of the genealogical sciences were extraordinarily pernicious. Europeans divided the world into genealogical races, and concluded that their own was the one best adapted for self-governance and intelligence [...] The tree is no longer seen as an adequate structure even in the fields for which it was most productive, such as evolution, linguistics and anthropology. [...] Classification remains necessary for understanding the world. But we would benefit from acknowledging the contingency of classification systems, recognising their fluidity over time as we adapt them to new situations and purposes. Projecting our own thought processes onto nature, and then believing we found them there, is always a dangerous precursor to injustice....
MORE: https://aeon.co/ideas/how-the-idea-of-fa...al-thought