Suchergebnisse

Green energy investment is one avenue through with the Chinese government is beginning to create a new relationship with the Middle East. Chinese solar panel firms have research and production advantages in the world market, but face rising labor costs at home. The Communist Party under Xi Jinping has pursued two major policies, "Go out!" and "One Road, One Belt." The first refers to Chinese firms creating factories abroad to benefit from cheap labor and from local low-tariff trade blocs. China will therefore set up solar panel factories in the United Arab Emirates and in Morocco. Both countries have strong national commitments to renewable energy, but also have access to a wide range of export markets. This sort of investment changes China's relationship to the region from being one of buying hydrocarbons to a much more intensive set of interactions, including acting as employer for local labor.

This is the first issue of the journal that I edited and sent off to the press, but I did so as part of a team rather than as an individual. I must offer warm thanks to my predecessor as editor, R. Stephen Humphreys, for having done much of the pre-production editing, with his usual attention to detail and search for excellence, and for consulting so closely with me on acceptances. And, of course, I am deeply in his debt for having done such a fine job with the journal for the past five years, leaving to my charge a flourishing enterprise. Thanks, too, are owed to Liz Montana and the others at the Santa Barbara office who shepherded these pieces through the editorial process, as well as to our book-review editors.

The intellectual model of european nationalism had a powerful impact in the second half the nineteenth century upon Qajar intellectuals and officials, many of whom lived abroad, were fluent in some European language, or were influenced by translations of European works. These thinkers, beginning in the 1850s, were the first to attempt to "imagine" an Iranian nation. That they made this attempt is a result not only of the influence upon them of the modular nationalist experience, but also of their own encounter with the same forces of modernity that were hammering Europe itself—new media of communication, new forms of transportation, and processes of economic differentiation deriving from the rise of core industrial economies and vastly increased world trade—all of which afforded states and other institutions the resources for disciplinary technologies that reshaped the Self.

Between 1905 and 1911, Iranians were engaged in a protracted struggle over whether a constitutionalist regime would replace royal absolutism.1 Little in Iran's political culture before 1905 had hinted at this conflict before it broke out, and for the past thirty years historians have been seeking this genealogy for it. Most have searched among the papers of officials and diplomats, often examining unpublished or posthumously published manuscripts with little or no contemporary circulation, at least before the revolution,2 but we might get closer to its context if we look at what was going on outside the governmental elite. Here I will explore the growth of belief in representative government within an Iranian millenarian movement, the Bahai faith, in the last third of the 19th century, as an example of how the new ideas circulated that led to the conflict.3 Historians have noted a link between millenarianism and democratic or populist thought elsewhere, after all; for instance they have long recognized the importance of chiliastic ideas in e English Revolution of the 17th century. The republicanism of American dissidents and revolutionaries was also sometimes tinged with a civil millennialism. The Bahais of Iran, too, combined democratic rhetoric with millenarian imagery in the generation before the Constitutional Revolution.4