The Matter Of History

The Matter of History links the history of people with the history of things through a bold new materialist theory of the past.

Craig Calhoun, one of the most respected social scientists in the world, re-examines nationalism in light of post-1989 enthusiasm for globalization and the new anxieties of the twenty-first century. Nations Matter argues that pursuing a purely postnational politics is premature at best and possibly dangerous. Calhoun argues that, rather than wishing nationalism away, it is important to transform it. One key is to distinguish the ideology of nationalism as fixed and inherited identity from the development of public projects that continually remake the terms of national integration. Standard concepts like 'civic' vs. 'ethnic' nationalism can get in the way unless they are critically re-examined – as an important chapter in this book does. This book is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students of sociology, history, political theory and all subjects concerned with nationalism, globalization, and cosmopolitanism.

The visual turn recovers new pasts. With education as its theme, this book seeks to present a body of reflections that questions a certain historicism and renovates historiographical debate about how to conceptualize and use images and artifacts in educational history, in the process presenting new themes and methods for researchers. Images are interrogated as part of regimes of the visible, of a history of visual technologies and visual practices. Considering the socio-material quality of the image, the analysis moves away from the use of images as mere illustrations of written arguments, and takes seriously the question of the life and death of artifacts – that is, their particular historicity. Questioning the visual and material evidence in this way means considering how, when, and in which régime of the visible it has come to be considered as a source, and what this means for the questions contemporary researchers might ask.

"Making History Matter explores the role history and historians played in imperial Japan’s nation and empire building from the 1890s to the 1930s. As ideological architects of this process, leading historians wrote and rewrote narratives that justified the expanding realm. Learning from their Prussian counterparts, they highlighted their empiricist methodology and their scholarly standpoint, to authenticate their perspective and to distinguish themselves from competing discourses. Simultaneously, historians affirmed imperial myths that helped bolster statist authoritarianism domestically and aggressive expansionism abroad. In so doing, they aligned politically with illiberal national leaders who provided funding and other support necessary to nurture the modern discipline of history. By the 1930s, the field was thriving and historians were crucial actors in nationwide commemorations and historical enterprises.Through a close reading of vast, multilingual sources, with a focus on Kuroita Katsumi, Lisa Yoshikawa argues that scholarship and politics were inseparable as Japan’s historical profession developed. In the process of making history matter, historians constructed a national past to counter growing interwar liberalism. This outlook—which continues as the historical perspective that the Liberal Democratic Party leadership embraces—ultimately justified the Japanese aggressions during the Asia-Pacific Wars."

This book discusses two of the oldest and hardest problems in both science and philosophy: What is matter?, and What is mind? A reason for tackling both problems in a single book is that two of the most influential views in modern philosophy are that the universe is mental (idealism), and that the everything real is material (materialism). Most of the thinkers who espouse a materialist view of mind have obsolete ideas about matter, whereas those who claim that science supports idealism have not explained how the universe could have existed before humans emerged. Besides, both groups tend to ignore the other levels of existence—chemical, biological, social, and technological. If such levels and the concomitant emergence processes are ignored, the physicalism/spiritualism dilemma remains unsolved, whereas if they are included, the alleged mysteries are shown to be problems that science is treating successfully.

The Matter of Empire examines the philosophical principles invoked by apologists of the Spanish empire that laid the foundations for the material exploitation of the Andean region between 1520 and 1640. Centered on Potosi, Bolivia, Orlando Bentancor’s original study ties the colonizers’ attempts to justify the abuses wrought upon the environment and the indigenous population to their larger ideology concerning mining, science, and the empire's rightful place in the global sphere. Bentancor points to the underlying principles of scholasticism, particularly in the work of Thomas Aquinas, as the basis of the instrumentalist conception of matter and enslavement, despite the inherent contradictions to moral principles. Bentancor grounds this metaphysical framework in a close reading of sixteenth-century debates on Spanish sovereignty in the Americas and treatises on natural history and mining by theologians, humanists, missionaries, mine owners, jurists, and colonial officials. To Bentancor, their presuppositions were a major turning point for colonial expansion and paved the way to global mercantilism.