How the Long-Gone Habsburg Empire Is Still Visible in Eastern European Bureaucracies Today
deeper social and psychological footings in the shifting sands that most explanations of the Industrial Revolution are built on.
Joseph Henrich • The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous
Suddenly, processes as disparate as the creation of permanent last names, the standardization of weights and measures, the establishment of cadastral surveys and population registers, the invention of freehold tenure, the standardization of language and legal discourse, the design of cities, and the organization of transportation seemed comprehensi... See more
James C. Scott • Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy St)
Just consider the case of Leibniz: over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, European governments gradually came to adopt the idea that every government should properly preside over a population of largely uniform language and culture, run by a bureaucratic officialdom trained in the liberal arts whose members had succeeded in pas... See more
David Graeber • The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
On Europe’s Inner Asian frontier, demographic expansion long seemed as hobbled as it was in mainland North America until the 1750s.
John Darwin • After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000
Since it is now clear that a certain amount of stability is necessary for cultural vibrancy, the question to be asked is: how can this stability be provided, and by what agencies?
Mark Fisher • Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative?
Why Nations Fail is a bit longer than The Communist Manifesto , but it is essentially The Bourgeois Manifesto . Merchants having become wealthy from the Atlantic trade win property rights in England, already primed for this breakthrough. Resultant regime called inclusive , though the merchants were primarily slavers.
They will underline however tha... See more
They will underline however tha... See more