Suchergebnisse

This book produces a major rethinking of the history of development after 1940 through an exploration of Britain's ambitions for industrialisation in its Caribbean colonies. Industrial development is a neglected topic in histories of the British Colonial Empire, and we know very little of plans for Britain's Caribbean colonies in general in the late colonial period, despite the role played by riots in the region in prompting an increase in development spending. This account shows the importance of knowledge and expertise in the promotion of a model of Caribbean development that is best described as liberal rather than state-centred and authoritarian. It explores how the post-war period saw an attempt by the Colonial Office to revive Caribbean economies by transforming cane sugar from a low-value foodstuff into a lucrative starting compound for making fuels, plastics and medical products. In addition, it shows that as Caribbean territories moved towards independence and America sought to shape the future of the region, scientific and economic advice became a key strategy for the maintenance of British control of the West Indian colonies. Britain needed to counter attempts by American-backed experts to promote a very different approach to industrial development after 1945 informed by the priorities of US foreign policy.

With the rise of populism, European solidarity risks being eroded by a clash of solidarities based on nation and religion. Ranging from hospitality to hostility, 'refugees welcome' to 'close the borders', asylum seekers from Syria and other war-torn countries test the very ideas upon which the EU was founded: human rights, tolerance and the free movement of people. European solidarity is not only rooted in philosophical ideas of equality and freedom but also in the memory of nationalism, war and violence. The response to refugees seeking asylum into Europe cannot only be resolved by appealing to emotions, moral sentiments and a politics of pity. Disenchantment with government, fear of terrorism and resentment towards foreigners weaken European solidarity at a time when it is needed most.

AbstractThe propensity for speculation within modernity is well established. It ranges from the artifices of the "as if" – the thrills of imagining that everything that is might also be different, codified by Robert Musil as an inherent "sense of the possible" – to the daring betting on the "what if," invoking better futures with an utopian spark or grim prospects to hedge oneself against. The twin inclinations to imagine the different and to project the future are the hinges of the modern imagination. In the early eighteenth century, three powerful media of speculation came into being almost at the same time: the calculus of probability, paper money, and literary fiction. In different ways, they enabled agencies of correlating what is and what is not – whether in terms of risk assessment, circulation of capital, or social self fashioning. By the beginning of the 21st century, these media of speculation seem to have reached a point of excess. With big data, probabilistic speculation is about to accustom us to read "what if"-questions in an altogether indicative mode, just as big finance has succeeded in reversing the hierarchy between value assets and the media of liquid capital. This then raises the question of what happens to the third medium of speculation in our late modernity, that of fiction? This article attempts to diagnose the fate of fiction in an age of hypertrophied speculation, how practices of fiction-making migrate, how the functions of fiction transform, and eventually how our present notion of fiction is due for a conceptual makeover.