Changing Meanings, Changing Institutions: An Institutional Analysis of Patent Legislation

Conceptions of patents have changed significantly over the past two centuries, reflecting broad changes in state structures and the international system. In the late eighteenth century, the creation of democratic states such as the United States and France encouraged the conceptualization of patents as an economic and political right belonging to an individual, rather than to a corporate body such as a guild. A second conception of patents arose in the nineteenth century in which patents become a state-based mechanism for motivating economic growth. In the late twentieth century, patents have become conceptualized as an essential part of the economic infrastructure of a state, for both industrialized and less developed countries. This conceptualization has allowed international development organizations to become central in the diffusion of patent legislation to less developed countries. These changes in conceptions about patents did not always occur smoothly, however. Major controversies over the role and usefulness of patents occurred in each century, implying that the diffusion of patent legislation was by no means inevitable. This paper illustrates these arguments with a historical discussion of patents and a statistical analysis that models the adoption of patent legislation for all countries from 1790–1984.     

The instatement of order: state initiatives and hegemony in the modernization of French forest policy

Theories of France’s political integration, from Tocqueville to the present day, frequently disregard the political achievements of the nineteenth century state and assert that the infrastructures needed for effective governance were created during the absolutist period. Using the case of forest policy, one of the major policy domains for local and national regimes during the absolutist and nineteenth century periods, this study argues against prior accounts. It shows how the nineteenth century state, led by an elite faction of the bourgeoisie, gained infrastructural power by promoting its preferred policies as the only means of avoiding disorder and chaos. These policies advanced private property as the natural (hegemonic) form of land control. It was this project, rather than the earlier absolutist regime, that led to effective state authority over France’s territory and the achievement of the nation’s political integration. This study of forest policy provides an opportunity to evaluate state efforts to regulate economic and political life, as well as the resistance to these efforts that arose.     

A "Small Great National State": An Analysis of the Cultural and Political Factors that shaped Danish Nationalism 1760–1870

Abstract This article provides an analysis of the cultural and political factors that shaped Danish nationalism in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century. Throughout the analysis of the development of Danish nationalism, parallels are drawn to nationalism in late eighteenth and nineteenth century Britain. Finally, consideration is given to the question of whether studies of nationalism can contribute to an understanding of national states’ attitudes towards and willingness to engage in international cooperation.     

Philosophes of the Conservative Nation: Burke, Macaulay, Disraeli

The argument here concerns the myths of the English, and of English history; it suggests that myths of providential England were powerful elements in twentieth-century British political life. Most of all, they powerfully informed Conservative conceptions of civilization, though they also exerted a wider political influence. The essay explores the invention of these myths in three pre-eminent writers: Burke, Macaulay, and Disraeli, and suggests that from their writings emerged a system of narration which came to be 'remembered' as the founding myth of the political nation — the conservative nation — in the twentieth century. By the time of mass democracy, the partisan divisions (between Whig and Tory) had been forgotten in favour of a wider cultural 'transformism,' which did much to cement the emerging coalition of landed and bourgeois politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the process, the very nature of politics itself came to be redefined.     

Global Political Economy: Power, Labour, Politics

This discussion examines the issue of globalisation in terms of the interaction of economy, politics and power. It begins by considering the claims implied by the language of globalisation. How extensive and inclusive is the global economy? The second section goes on to outline the broad geography of globalisation in terms of a balance of power that is both highly uneven but also subject to marked changes. While the global economy as this developed since the 1970s may have reproduced established patterns of colonial and post‐war economic power, in the current century, power is shifting away from these nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century models to a new balance of regional power in which large Asian economies may dominate. Alongside these patterns of regional and national power, third, the discussion considers the uneven geography of capital and labour captured in models of an international division of labour that is organised by flows of capital investment but also of mobile workers. The final section offers an overview of the architecture of global politics, from the level of international institutions and nation‐states, to non‐governmental bodies that operate across borders to support or resist the workings of a global economy.     

The Boss's “Brains”: Political Capital,Democratic Commerce and the New York Tweed Ring, 1868–1871

Departing from Pierre Bourdieu's contention that capital takes on many forms beyond the economic, including a political form, this article examines how commodification patterned nineteenth century American politics. A case study of the Tweed Ring, which briefly governed Gilded Age New York, is reevaluated as a speculative political bubble that produced empirically identifiable political profits. From an election sweep in 1868 to a bank run in 1871, William Tweed gained and lost political power and material wealth through management of what the editorial cartoonist Thomas Nast hailed as the boss's “Brains,” or democratic commerce, the market in political commodities.     

Divergence of the world city system from national economies

This study shows that the position of cities in the world economy has diverged from national economies. Using data from 2016, we evaluate a network of 12,802 cities formed by the location decisions of 24,355 firms in terms of their point centrality, and show that the inter-city and inter-national systems have measurably decoupled, disrupting the previously-observed pattern in which the most powerful cities in the world city system were located in core countries, "mid-level" cities were in the semi-periphery,and the least powerful cities were in peripheral countries. Our findings support predictions that globalizing cities would diverge from national economies and that globalization would generate a new global geography that transects long-standing cleavages in the world system.     

Allodial Land Rights (The Odelsrett) and Early Nineteenth Century Norwegian Nationalism: Propertied Sovereignty as National Sovereignty

The early nineteenth century was a transitional time in western Europe; from the old feudal and imperial order, modern nation states and capitalism emerged. The Norwegian nation state emerged out of the flames of the Napoleonic Wars in 1814. But changes in landed property structures in the eighteenth century lay the ground for Norwegian nationalism in the early nineteenth century. This article explores early nineteenth century nationalism through a focus on property rights and the positive view on the odesrett – an allodial right to land – arguing that an examination of the positive view on the odelsrett can shed new light on Norwegian nationalism in the early nineteenth century. Such an examination suggests that the Norwegian property structure contributed to reinforcing certain property rights element in the Norwegian nationalism where ownership of landed property and national, popular sovereignty were closely interconnected.     

ALIEN-NATION: IMMIGRATION,NATIONAL IDENTITY AND TRANSNATIONALISM

This article examines recent anti-immigration initiatives, like California's Proposition 187, in light of the contemporary processes of economic and political reorganization that seem to have undermined the viability of the nation state (i.e. the globalization of the market economy and the end of the cold war). It argues that anti-immigration discourse works on a symbolic level to recuperate a coherent sense of national identity in response to the social and psychic ‘alien-nation’ caused by the global penetration of capitalism. The study compares two similar yet distinctly different moments of mass immigration- Chinese immigration in the late nineteenth century and ‘illegal’ immigration in the late twentieth- to determine (1) why these mass migrations have elicited legal regulation when others have not, and (2) what might be done to disrupt the re-emergence of a paradigm of legislated exclusion in the current case. It concludes by examining the conditions of possibility for collective political action within a mass-mediated public sphere. Specifically, I ask how resistance to the historical paradigm of legislated exclusion might best be mobilized from within a public sphere dominated by visual media that not only personalize the political, but also exacerbate the inequalities of access to public life endemic to liberal democratic political theory.     

Sexuality and the Second Slavery: Figuring Sexuality in Racialized Labor Formations

From the seventeenth to the late nineteenth century, sexuality was a key factor in the reorganization of New World slavery through the period described as the Second Slavery. With the early nineteenth century bans on the transatlantic slave trade initiated by the United States and the British Empire, there was a corresponding transition from prior plantation economies focused on US Upper South tobacco and Caribbean sugar islands toward more differentiated forms of labor based on hiring out in domestic services, manufacture, and the expansion into new frontiers of accumulation in the New South of the Mississippi Delta, Cuba, and Brazil. This qualitative change and expansion of New World slavery carried gendered understandings based on the sexuality and reproductive capabilities of enslaved people. Using Tomich's conception of the Second Slavery, I incorporate an analysis that demonstrates how conceptions of sexuality were integral to racializing and gendering processes of subordination that reveal the heterogeneity of the historical and economic moment.     

POLITICAL DEMOCRACY, ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT, DISARTICULATION, AND SOCIAL WELL-BEING IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

The level of political democracy is hypothesized to have an independent positive effect on social well-being irrespective of either level of economic development or level of disarticulation of economies of developing countries, which is considered to be the most socially harmful structural feature created by dependency. In addition, political democracy is hypothesized to buffer the negative effects of disarticulation on social well-being. Findings from the analysis of data from eighty-two developing countries confirm these hypotheses. Political democracy showed a consistent positive effect on social well-being measures, and the least democratic countries were more vulnerable to the negative effects of disarticulation. These findings underscore the independent positive role that political democracy may play in improving social well-being in developing countries.     

Women in Political Life:

Data regarding the participation of women in elective and appointive office at local and national levels in 60 countries are analyzed. Included are data from both industrializing and industrialized countries. Overall, the data reveal that, globally, women's presence among political elites remains low, significant variations in the proportion of women elected to public office exists among the industrializing countries andthe industrialized centrally planned and market oriented economies. Regional differences are significant for women's appoinment to the diplomatic service in the industrializing countries.     

Adjustment strategies revisited: Agricultural change in the Welsh Marches

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, much attention was paid by British agricultural geographers to the restructuring of the farm sector under pressures of national, European and global change. The need to adopt a perspective capable of looking beyond the farm gate inspired the introduction of modified political economy approaches into agricultural research. One important cornerstone of the empirical application of this thesis was the concept of the ‘farm adjustment strategy’. This attempted to map out the responses, especially those of survival, made by farm family businesses to rapidly changing agrarian conditions. Subsequently, the farm adjustment strategy became remarkable for its popularity as a way to organise research into agricultural change in developed market economies. Following a retreat in the 1990s, there has been something of a recent revival in the use of the term ‘strategy’ relating to agricultural adjustment. Revisiting this concept is therefore timely. Using empirical evidence from studies of farming change in the Welsh Marches, this paper examines two issues. First, it makes a critical re-examination of the concept to resolve differences with interpretation linked to theoretical perspectives so that future misuse can be minimised. Second, an attempt is made to assess the relevance of defined elements of farm adjustment strategies to analyses of farm business change. In so doing, there is an attempt to recover our knowledge of agrarian restructuring and to help situate newly encultured investigations into the likely survival of family labour-based forms of production.     

'For England and For Christ': The Gospel of Liberation and Subordination in Early Nineteenth Century Southern Africa

Abstract This paper argues that British evangelical missions in the early nineteenth century provided a cultural site for the building of national imaginings. Just as success in proselytizing confirmed the self-knowledge of salvation for individuals, so missionary enterprise demonstrated divine favour toward the nation. It is suggested that the mythological language of national self identity, elaborated by missionaries to South Africa, enabled, and even required, the projection of images of African inferiority. The implication is that the language of racial stereotyping and domination in nineteenth century South Africa was not simply an expression of competing claims to land and labour.     

REDUNDANT TARIFFS AS RATIONAL ENDOGENOUS PROTECTION

Redundant protection, tariffs that exceed the domestic import-price differential, is an important feature of nineteenth century U.S. tariff history and remains a common practice in many developing countries. This paper develops political-economy models of the tariff setting process when the world price of the importable product is stochastic. The optimal endogenous tariff may involve redundant protection even if agents are risk neutral. These political-economy models also permit us to assess the comparative static effects of changes in the mean-preserving spread of the world price under differing assumptions about the political process.     

Sweet death: indigenous labour exploitation in the San Martín de Tabacal Sugar Mill,Salta, Argentina

During the national consolidation process in Argentina, throughout the nineteenth century, a new map of local power was designed based on appropriated territories and the consolidation of ‘internal frontiers’ denominated ‘desert’ by hegemonic discourses. The indigenous presence was denied discursively, yet military crusades of extermination, and a very massive process of labour incorporation of these groups was forced in order to develop the incipient agribusiness activity in certain areas of the country. This article explores life conditions and resistance strategies developed by the indigenous kolla communities, victims of the exploitation performed by the owners of the San Martín de Tabacal Sugar Mill, located in Salta, northwestern Argentina, throughout the twentieth century.     

Intellectual spaces of practice and hope: power and culture in Portugal from the 1940s to the present

This paper examines configurations of power, authority and culture in Portugal in the twentieth century, and intellectual practices and spaces related to those configurations and in opposition to them. Portuguese national history and essentialized versions of Portugueseness are analysed in the work of such distinguished and influential intellectuals as António Sérgio, António José Saraiva and Eduardo Lourenço, in articulation with the role of high culture in the process of nation building throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One particular structure of attitude and reference, constructed in the latter half of the nineteenth century, is foregrounded with reference to the History of Portugal by Oliveira Martins, in the context of the persistent contradictions and conflicts between progressive and conservative, modernizing and traditional, ‘historical’, formations and projects. In such a context, moments of oppositional, alternative and independent projects are worth looking into. Two decisive moments of social change in the second half of the twentieth century were the 1940s, and the late 1960s and early 1970s. The paper pays attention to the politics of culture of Neo-Realismo in the 1940s and its consequences for high and popular culture over the following decades, especially in the years leading to the democratic revolution of 25 April 1974. A brief analysis of the 1990s is articulated to the study of the change-producing projects in the 1940s and 1960s as part of the cultural studies practice the paper argues for.     

Global Studies: Have Catechism,Will Travel

This second response to comments on my article ‘What is Global studies?’ (Globalizations 10, 4, 2013) notes that the comments feature research agendas. These provide scaffolding for global studies but not of course a complete building. Among themes that need further attention are political economy and finance, the dimension of time and history, and the dynamics of twenty-first century globalization and the role of emerging economies.     

Nativist Cosmopolitans: Institutional Reflexivity and the Decline of "Double-Consciousness" in American Nationalist Thought

Debate in the field of historical sociology on the subject of American citizenship and nationality tends to support one of two theories. The exceptionalist argument holds that American nationalist discourse has historically been based on the universal ideals of liberty enshrined in the Constitution, and has been inclusive in character. Critics contend that this was not the case – arguing that the narrative of American national identity has typically been grounded on exclusive ethno‐cultural criteria like race, religion or language. This essay attempts to demonstrate that the truth encompasses, yet transcends, both positions. This is not because there were conflicting parties in the nineteenth century nationality debate – indeed, there was a great deal of elite consensus as to the meaning of American nationhood prior to the twentieth century which simultaneously affirmed both the universalist and particularist dimension of Americanism. How to explain this apparent contradiction, which Ralph Waldo Emerson termed “double‐consciousness?” This paper suggests that the nineteenth century popularity of dualistic statements of American nationhood, and the eclipse of such conceptions in the twentieth, is a complex sociological phenomenon that can only fully be explained by taking into account the development of institutional reflexivity in the United States.     

Two Assemblages of Cultural Transmission: Musicians,Political Actors and Educational Techniques in the Ottoman Empire and Western Europe

In this study I aim to develop a sociological understanding of why certain techniques of cultural transmission are more easily accepted in some societies than in others. With this aim in mind, I present a comparative analysis of the contrasting approaches to music education in Western Europe and the Ottoman Empire. While, as a major technique of cultural transmission music notation found relatively widespread acceptance in Western Europe at least since the eleventh century onwards, most musicians in the Ottoman Empire resisted its adoption until the end of the nineteenth century. The analysis focuses on the ways in which the choices of Ottoman and West European musicians interacted with broader social and political processes in the two societies. In the light of this analysis, it is suggested that technologies used in cultural transmission can be seen as parts of a broader assemblage and their rejection or acceptance can be conditioned by a series of socio‐political concerns.