Global Intellectual History

This article is an introduction to a special issue on 'Contexts of Religious Tolerance: New Perspectives from Early Modern Britain and Beyond', which contains essays on the contributions to the debates on tolerance by non-canonical philosophers and theologians, mainly from seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Scotland and England.

This article deals with a particular text, Brahmavadi Rsi o Brahmanvidya written by Tarakishore Choudhury, an illustrious High Court lawyer in twentieth century colonial Calcutta who later became the famous Vaishnava saint Swami Santadas Kathiya Baba. The essay aims to highlight the various nuances, contradictions and inflections of power within the intellectual universe of the colonized Western-educated Bengali intelligentsia in order to locate multiple " global " moments within the text. It inspects how the intellectual and theosophical shifts experienced by the author were shaped by the dual forces of a transnational information circuit sustained by a print economy underscored by the contours of the British empire as well as extra-rational indigenous traditions of knowledge-production. It also dissects how the comparativist framework within which ideas, societies and political economies produced in the 'West' and in India are juxtaposed by Choudhury. His aim was to discursively assert the spiritual and material glory of ancient India and construct a notion of a hyperreal India about to emerge on a global theosophical career both appropriating and subverting the intellectually dominant metanarratives of the 'hy-perreal West' and colonial rule. The final section of the article focuses on the ambivalence and implicit assertions of autonomy by this intellectual actor in constructing what constitutes the 'Indic' and determining the terms through which Western discourses, if at all, were to be appropriated and reconstituted in the process.

Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori depict a conceptual map of a range of possible approaches and ways in which Global Intellectual History (GIH) can be formulated as an academic discipline. Various scholars from different fields propose to widen its scope and boundaries-from trans-local and western-centric to intra-regional, trans-continental, trans-national and even beyond the geographical designation. In this writing, an attempt has been made to bring the idea of " Suhl-i-kul " , a state sponsored 'interreligious-dialogue' initiated by Akbar (1556-1605), a mediaeval Mughal emperor of India, as a content of GIH. This study assumes that the concept of " Suhl-i-kul " can be matched with the idea of 'post-secularism' which demands that such concept can create a trans-religious global formation and contribute to establish a peaceful society in a religiously pluralist world, especially from the perspective of multi-religious South Asia.

Standard genealogies of knowledge posit the circulation of modernity in one direction, from the West to “the rest.” This history reveals the waves of influence flowing the opposite way, from nonstate people to the state. The essay introduces a new method for the history of knowledge that traces the travel of narratives, packets of media containing messages. Masks long viewed as objects of collection are seen here anew as subjects of recollection, mnemonic devices that archive the global propagation of knowledge. One set of masks is reunited with the narratives they encode: stories employed as a survival strategy by the Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw, a network of peoples who utilized the anthropologist Franz Boas as a host body to enter and alter the world that came to colonize them. The efforts of the Indigenous intellectual George Hunt to disseminate the masks—and, with the masks, his family message of transformation—directly shaped the concept of culture. Using the masks as teaching tools, Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw thinkers civilized Boas into a new modernity, shifting him from categorization to communication, from signs to messages, and from a Self/Other perception to a global consciousness of Host–Guest relations. The masks recollect a profound yet long suppressed Indigenous influence on modern thought.

This article explores the connectedness between Martin Luther King's, Ernesto Guevara's and Rabindranath Tagore's ideas and anti-colonial resistance in Vietnam. By showing how three different local struggles were linked to the socio-political realities in Vietnam, the three can be seen as representatives of a way of thinking global and local in political struggles under the principle of anti-colonial resistance and universal self-determination. In this way, it is argued that looking through the lens of dissident intellectuals and political activists provides a methodological groundwork through which we can experience global intellectual connectedness that counterbalances existing Westerncentric perspectives on Vietnamese history. However, global intellectual connectedness has to be taken with a pinch of salt, because thoughts and ideas have always been defined by and modified under different socio-political circumstances, in this case: for the purpose of strengthening the national cause.

This article explores the connectedness between Martin Luther King's, Ernesto Guevara's and Rabindranath Tagore's ideas and anti-colonial resistance in Vietnam. By showing how three different local struggles were linked to the socio-political realities in Vietnam, the three can be seen as representatives of a way of thinking global and local in political struggles under the principle of anti-colonial resistance and universal self-determination. In this way, it is argued that looking through the lens of dissident intellectuals and political activists provides a methodological groundwork through which we can experience global intellectual connectedness that counterbalances existing Westerncentric perspectives on Vietnamese history. However, global intellectual connectedness has to be taken with a pinch of salt, because thoughts and ideas have always been defined by and modified under different socio-political circumstances, in this case: for the purpose of strengthening the national cause. KEYWORDS Global intellectual history; Vietnam; Martin Luther King; Ernesto Guevara; Rabindranath Tagore; Westerncentrism 'create a more inclusive intellectual history that respects the diversity of intellectual traditions and broadens the parameters of thought beyond the narrow limits defined by the traditions institutionalized in the Western or Eurocentric academy', regardless of the geographical spread of the concept or thematic. 2 For it is all a question of perspective and who exerts the power to interpret history, this article wants to pay attention to hitherto undervalued contributions of the intellectual connectedness between global-southern subjects and their relations to Vietnam. 3 In this spirit,

Although B.R. Ambedkar, the chief architect of the Indian Constitution, is well known for his struggle against caste and the practice of untouchability, his ideas have seldom been linked to concepts such as nationalism or space. In an attempt to shed some light upon this under-explored subject, I analyse the relationship between the village, the city, the practice of untouchability and the emergence of nationalism in Ambedkar’s thought. Focusing primarily on his writings, post 1935 concerning
untouchability, I will argue that for Ambedkar, space played a critical role in both the perpetuation and evanescence of untouchability and similarly in the neglect and emergence of nationalism. More specifically, a small locus with tightly knit social and commercial associations, such as the Indian village, facilitated the ongoing differentiation of the population into two distinct groups, touchables and Untouchables. This social and spatial segregation perpetuated the practice of untouchability while preventing the growth of nationalism. However, a bigger and
more crowded setting, such as the city, not only complicated the observance of social norms such as untouchability, but also benefited the creation of a corporate feeling of ‘oneness’ among individuals, which according to Ambedkar, was a condition for the
emergence of nationalism.

The revolutionary thinker and later yogi of Pondicherry, Aurobindo Ghose (1872-1950), played a critical role during the Swadeshi movement in Bengal, articulating a radical vision that determined the limits and possibilities of the Indian political. Reading his polemical journalism in Bande Mataram alongside his prison memoir, Karakahini, reveals the importance of the jail for his staging of politics. This paper refutes the usual dichotomy of politics and spirituality in readings of Aurobindo and instead explores their underlying interconnectedness in relation to his scripting of an insurrectionary and universalist Hindu metaphysics in which divinity intervened in human history on the side of the oppressed. Aurobindo's central symbol—of Krishna being born in a prison cell—inscribed enduring theo-political significance into the colonial jail, which was successfully re-imagined as a revolutionary ashram, a transformative and sovereign space where political prisoners could be reborn.

This article will argue that during the 1950s and 1960s a battle over the meanings of socialism took place in India. Exploring the ways in which the contending conceptions of socialism defended by Rammanohar Lohia and Jayaprakash Narayan intersected and drifted apart during these decades, and the ways in which these were shaped in response to the gradual adoption of socialism by the Nehruvian state, it will be shown that during these years socialism emerged at the same time as a central part of the roadmap for socioeconomic development of the national state as well as a central category for doctrines and practices of protest and contestation. For this, it will focus on Narayan's insistence on a politics of the people, or lok niti, and his equating of socialism and Sarvodaya, as well as on Lohia's doctrine of equal equidistance and his critique of Third Worldism and the Nehruvian state. Moreover, it will be argued that this battle over meanings crated a space for the emergence of original conceptions of socialism wholly unrelated to anything known elsewhere by that name, and inaugurated a set of political trajectories central to the contemporary political horizon in India.

This article examines often ignored 'minority entanglements' forged between European Jewish and South Asian Muslim intellectuals in Germany and traces their evolution in colonial India. The article focuses on three individual life histories and situates them within the more extensive Jewish-Muslim intellectual dialogue that resonated in the inter-war period. It brings to light the lives and writings of Josef Horovitz (1874-1931), professor of Arabic at the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College, Aligarh, and a prolific contributor to the journal Islamic Culture published in Hyderabad; Leopold Weiss alias Muhammad Asad (1900-1992) in Islamia College, Lahore, who also served as the editor of Islamic Culture, Hyderabad; and educationist and reform pedagogue Gerda Philipsborn (1895-1943) at the Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi. The intellectual dialogue between minority communities, together with the contribution it made both to modern Islamic studies as a discipline and the forging of a new reform pedagogy, allow us to rethink the Jewish and Muslim question as well as the minority response to it through a comparative perspective. The minor history of European Jewish and South Asian Muslim entanglements makes for a rich testimony to the problems and possibilities of studying minorities as the makers of minor cosmopolitan knowledge.

This paper aims to show that two eminent Marxists in the 1930s, the Italian Antonio Gramsci and the Japanese Tosaka Jun, shared three important characteristics of so-called Western Marxism: the methodological development of Marxism, the focus on the superstructure, and the pessimism about the impossibility of immediate revolution. Showing that Gramsci and Tosaka shared these characteristics enables us to revisit the framework of " Western Marxism, " which confusingly consists of both theoretical characteristics and geographical criteria. Looking at Gramsci and Tosaka on the same plane allows us to revisit Marxist thought different from the orthodox Marxism in Soviet Russia, and not strictly as a Western, but as a part of potentially global movement of thought.

This article analyzes the historical and political thinking of the eighteenth-century German historian August Ludwig Schlözer, in the context of the American War of Independence and the French Revolution. The article argues that Schlözer's disillusionment with these transformative events led him to identify the German settlers in medieval Transylvania as agents of a better Enlightenment. In doing so, Schlözer constructed the history of the Transylvanian German colony as an antithesis to American colonial endeavors, while redefining the frameworks and history of enlightened progress in both time and space. In this way, Schlözer translated the history of a marginal East–Central European region into a world-historical narrative.

Scenes of avarna castes (slave and intermediate castes) pondering their reflections recur throughout the history of anti-caste struggle in the princely state of Travancore in colonial-era south India. These scenes represent what I will call performative egalitarianisms, which are repetitive enactments in the performance of everyday lives that embody claims to equality against the dehumanizing caste codes of colonial Travancore. In this paper, I will describe three scenes that represent distinct yet intertwined routes for the flows of egalitarian discourses in colonial Kerala. The concept of equality emerged in Travancore, first, via Enlightenment values of the British Protestant missionaries, or soulful Enlightenment; second, as non-dualistic equality of Narayana Guru, or repurposed Advaita; and third, through the discourses and practices of a Tamil religious cult called Ayya Vazhi, or radical Siddha Saiva. In viewing the flows of egalitarian discourse through the lens of performance, I demonstrate the method of intellectual histories in the repertoire which allows us to investigate how particular conceptual frameworks and discursive modes are transmitted, transformed, and embodied by people for whom these ideas are, quite literally, a matter of life and death. The intentional, productive, and empowering relationship between universals such as equality or humanity and the particular claims of anti-caste struggle in Kerala leads to a politics of practice that I describe as repurposing universals. The centrality of the notion of the human in the anti-caste politics of colonial-era Travancore leads me to refer to these flows of egalitarian discourses and the political struggles that they empowered as genealogies of the human. In sum, I analyze the genealogies of the human in colonial-era Travancore by focussing on three scenes exemplifying performative egalitarianisms: soulful Enlightenment, repurposed Advaita, and radical Siddha Saiva.

Western Republicanism and the Oriental Prince is a thoroughly revisionist book, challenging both the West's comfortable view of its own political evolu­tion and its negative stereotypes of non-Western systems. Not only did these stereotypes serve to legitimate early modern European nation-states struggling for an identity, but they also served to justify slavery and other forms of domination over subject peoples. Drawing upon  archaeo!ogical  and  epigraphic  evi­dence, Springborg  discusses  the Mesopotamian and ancient Egyptian contribution of political  forms and cultic  institutions  to  classical  Greco-Roman  civiliza­tion,  an  Eastern  legacy  to  the  West  that  has  long been  obscured  for  political  reasons.  A  different reading  of  the  foundation  myths  of  Athens  and Rome and of certain  texts of Plato and Aristotle, as well as the writings of Herodotus, Isocrates, Plutarch , and  Diodorus Siculus, permits us to restore possible lines  of  affiliation.  Springborg  demonstrates that  Renaissance thought, long believed to have ushered in the Western  classical  republican  tradition,  demonstrates  a  curious  ambivalence  toward  powerful Eastern  systems, which  it viewed with
fascination  as much  as  fear. The  great  divide  between  Western democracy  and Oriental  despotism,  which post-­Reformation thought  has  set  in  stone, was  not  yet sedimented in the Renaissance. This major study wiII be of interest to stu­dents of political history and theory, Middle Eastern studies, and East-West relations.

Nineteenth-century colonial jurists, sociologists, and Indian nationalists revived the ancient Indian legal concept of rakshasa marriage by bride capture after vanquishing her kinsmen, which the Hindu “lawgiver” Manu condemned but permitted to the warrior caste alone. Only the Kshatriyas, India's designated sovereigns, could break patriarchal and brahmanical authority in this way. But rakshasa marriage was also identified with the demon Ravana, who abducted Sita in the epic Ramayana, and with Hindu nationalism's Muslim enemy. Preoccupied with the loss of kshatriyahood, Hindu nationalism uniquely premised sovereignty on the power to dispossess enemy Fathers of their women: from Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay's celebration of epic hero Arjuna and Krishna's own rakshasa marriages, to the appropriation of this supposedly Muslim method by the architect of Hindutva, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883–1967). Transcending the “sexual contract” in the Indian case, rakshasa marriage...

By conceiving two emergent nation-states as a single region linked by conjoining roads, shared technologies and circulating researchers, this essay traces the emergence of a common “intellectual infrastructure” that during the interwar decades enabled European, American, Iranian, Afghan and Indian scholars to promote archeological and architectural interpretations of the Iranian and Afghan past. Taking Robert Byron’s Road to Oxiana as a fixed point of reference, the following pages survey the motor-linked sites where these new disciplinary approaches were developed and disseminated. By positioning Byron amid a larger cadre of investigators publishing in Farsi, Dari and Urdu no less than English, French and German, the essay shows how shifts in Iranian perceptions of the ancient and medieval past were part of a larger regional development, unfolding not only in familiar dialogue with Europe, but also in conversation and to some degree competition with nationalist scholarship in Afghanistan and India. Together with the journals, museums, learned societies and congresses which were launched in the 1920s and 1930s, cars and cameras—those key tools of the “age of speed”—were central to these learned ventures. Far from generating uniformity, this shared intellectual infrastructure enabled multiple interpretations of the archaeological and architectural past that were nonetheless mutually intelligible and methodologically consistent.

¿Hasta qué punto participa el pensamiento latinoamericano
del diálogo global sobre la crisis civilizatoria? En la actualidad, esa participación parece ser limitada. Pero hace exactamente un siglo, en otro contexto de trastornos mayúsculos, tres de los más importantes intelectuales latinoamericanos se inmiscuyeron en los debates que la situación suscitaba. En este ensayo, se reconstruye esa dimensión poco atendida del itinerario de José Ingenieros, José Vasconcelos y José Carlos Mariátegui, en la idea de que ese espejo puede resultar inspirador para las reflexiones que puedan desarrollarse desde América Latina sobre la crisis global en curso.

This article sketches a theoretical framework and research agenda for what is labeled as “Comparative Democratic Theory.” It is intro- duced as an approach to democratic theory which is informed by conceptual and methodological debates from “Comparative Political Theory” (CPT) as well as from insights from a global history of democratic thought. The in- clusion of CPT perspectives into democratic theory is motivated by what is diagnosed as a conceptual blindness in Western democratic theory. When following this approach, however, the two extremes of unjustified univer- salism and normatively problematic relativism both must be avoided. To do so, a mode of sound abstraction is proposed, using the term “constellation,” and a discussion of aims and benefits of Comparative Democratic Theory is presented.

Amongst the many narrative strategies in the recent " global turn " in the history of science, one commonly finds attempts to complement the single European story by multiplying histories of knowledge-making in as many different regional and cultural contexts as possible. Other strategies include attempts to generalize the " Needham Question " of why the Scientific Revolution occurred only in early-modern Europe to the exclusion of other parts of the world, or to challenge the diffusionist vision of the spread of modern science from Europe by attempting to show that non-European scientific traditions already had an understanding of recent European discoveries. These latter strategies seek simply to pluralize the Scientific Revolution without actually unpacking the latter concept itself. This article seeks firstly to show that the " Scientific Revolution " was in fact a Cold War invention intended to bring the freshly decolonized world into the ambit of the West by limiting the conception of modern science to Europe-specific activities and thus delegitimizing other knowledge domains and using the term as a spatially circumscribed chronological marker. Using a broader understanding of scientific activity in the early modern period, and mobilizing relational methodologies, such as circulatory and connected historiographies, the paper then reexamines a well-known history of the Hortus Malabaricus, one of the most celebrated seventeenth-century botanical works, to show the short-and long-range knowledge circulations, intercultural interactions and connections involved in its making to bring out the global nature of scientific activity of the period and illustrate relational approaches to global history.

This paper explores, briefly, the circulation in the River Plate (and Chile) of the discourses and concepts elaborated by Giuseppe Mazzini in the context of his Giovine Italia movement, with an emphasis on the concept of "nation", and its reconfiguration by publicists of the Romantic generations of the Argentinian Confederation, Uruguay and Chile. Emphasized are the prisms -conceptual, discursive and contextual- through which notions encountered in Mazzini (and his followers) were given new inflections -original nuances- by his South American readers. The period covered is 1830 to the middle of the 1860s. This was published in a beautiful British Academy edition, but it is highly expensive and by now somewhat rare. The editors of the volume were C.A. Bayly and Eugenio Biagini.

The chapter analyzed the debates on parliamentarism in the late Russian Empire and revolutionary Russia and explored how the idea of parliament helped intellectuals locate Russia globally. The establishment of the legislative State Duma and the adoption of the Fundamental Laws of the Russian Empire during the Revolution of 1905–1907 seemed to make Russia a constitutional state. Few intellectuals, however, viewed the Duma as a parliament equal to its Western counterparts. Despite their criticism of the Duma, numerous liberal and moderate socialist and nationalist thinkers generally supported parliamentarism, seeing Russian transformations as part of the perceived parliamentary universalism. Right and left radicals, by contrast, questioned the very necessity of a parliament. The right argued that Russia was self-sufficient and did not need Western democracy; the left rejected parliaments, claiming them a part of class exploitation and oppressive state machinery, and called for direct rule of the toilers to represent an alternative democratic modernity. The Bolshevik–Left Socialist Revolutionary coup in October 1917 and the dissolution of the All-Russian Constituent Assembly in January 1918 marked a halt in Russia’s participation in global parliamentary developments, which institutionally encompassed, inter alia, Persia, the Ottoman Empire, and the Qing Empire (and the Republic of China) in the 1900s/1910s. Conceptually, it marked an end of the global parliamentary moment, as the Bolshevik–Left Socialist Revolutionary regime became the first practical take on non-parliamentary modernity.

El «Tercer Mundo» fue una de las más poderosas y visitadas referencias en el ciclo largo de las décadas de 1960 y 1970 globales. Una aproximación a la trayectoria del concepto permite ver que su notable éxito obedeció no solo a los marcos de la Guerra Fría en los que emerge, sino a una historia policéntrica anterior, que se inicia en la primera posguerra y que incluye ya entonces a América Latina. Asimismo, su declive debe entenderse a partir del desvanecimiento paulatino de su dimensión universal a expensas de sus componentes nacional-particularistas.

The London based Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge and its many foreign connections formed a widely dispersed useful knowledge network, through which print, woodcuts, and educational theories circulated. Based on archival research this article expands the geographical scope of SDUK scholarship. Scholars have almost exclusively focused on the British context, overlooking its international importance. The article argues that the SDUK version of useful knowledge served widely different purposes depending on the local contexts it was exported to. For example, while some deemed the SDUK as being too secular evangelical missionaries abroad found great usage in their cheap literature. Through a selection of local contexts including China, Scandinavia and the Americas, the article place the SDUK in its contemporary worldwide educational context and show the versatile character of useful knowledge periodicals.

‘The tragedy of the commons’ and ‘the common heritage of mankind’ are concepts that dominate the legal discourse on governing  global commons, including spaces beyond national jurisdictions, essential resources and concerns such as biodiversity conservation and climate change. This article offers a critical account of their origins. It associates each with a prominent speech act of the late 1960s: Garrett Hardin introduced the former to a group of scientists in 1968, while Arvid Pardo articulated the latter to the First Committee of the UN General Assembly in 1967. The article shows that Hardin’s and Pardo’s interventions responded to pressing issues of the time: decolonization, developed/developing state relations and pressures of population and resource security. Channelling this period’s fascination with integrative knowledge, these feats were an impressive, if error-laden, synthesis of economic, legal and scientific data and theories. At the same time, they had parochial, illiberal and even imperial dimensions, playing upon, and exacerbating, the mistrust that then typified international relations. These are all legacies we must contend with today in our legal engagements with global commons.

Table of Contents: https://www.routledge.com/Global-Perspectives-in-Modern-Italian-Culture-Knowledge-and-Representation/Abbattista/p/book/9780367467920

Global Perspectives in Modern Italian Culture presents a series of unexplored case studies from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, each demonstrating how travellers, scientists, Catholic missionaries, scholars and diplomats coming from the Italian peninsula contributed to understandings of various global issues during the age of early globalization. It also examines how these individuals represented different parts of the world to an Italian audience, and how deeply Italian culture drew inspiration from the increasing knowledge of world ‘Otherness’. The first part of the book focuses on the production of knowledge, drawing on texts written by philosophers, scientists, historians and numerous other first-hand eyewitnesses. The second part analyses the dissemination and popularization of knowledge by focussing on previously understudied published works and initiatives aimed at learned Italian readers and the general public. Written in a lively and engaging manner, this book will appeal to scholars and students of early modern and modern European history, as well as those interested in global history.

This article sets out to elucidate the role of Japanese Protestants in the education of Koreans during the early twentieth century. Scholarship has often assigned only marginal roles to Japanese Protestants within the history of Japanese imperialism, despite the remarkable success of western missionaries in Korea at the time. As imperial expansion progressed, Japanese Protestants intensified their efforts to take up a leading role in the education of Koreans in colonial Korea and in the metropole wishing to spearhead the assimilation of Koreans. By drawing on the colonial discourses of East Asian unity under Japanese leadership, Protestant churches strove to mediate and facilitate colonial policies in Korea. Yet there were also voices of dissent from prominent Japanese Protestants critical of the assimilation policies implemented by colonial authorities in Korea. This ambivalent stance of Protestantism towards Korea is further complicated by the fact that the Korean Young Men’s Christian Association in Tokyo served as an important venue of the Korean Independence Movement. Examining Christian magazines and journals of the time, this paper delves into the contentious debates among Japanese Protestants concerning the Korea Mission and the Japanese government’s strategy of assimilation through education.