Small States, History of
Small states have been the subject of historical enquiry since the writings of Herodotus and Thucydides. Intertwined with the history of empire, the survival or demise of small states has regularly inspired patriotic encomium or tragic lament. Small states threatened by large empires or ambitious neighbors developed numerous survival strategies including alliance, the balance of power, economic specialization, and reliance upon military manliness. All of these were failing by the mid-eighteenth century, leading to a crisis of the small states and the development of new strategies to maintain them in a world increasingly dominated by large commercial empires.
Barbarism and religion
This sixth and final volume in John Pocock's acclaimed sequence of works on Barbarism and Religion examines Volumes II and III of Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, carrying Gibbon's narrative to the end of empire in the west. It makes two general assertions: first, that this is in reality a mosaic of narratives, written on diverse premises and never fully synthesized with one another; and second, that these chapters assert a progress of both barbarism and religion from east to west, leaving much history behind as they do so. The magnitude of Barbarism and Religion is already apparent. Barbarism: Triumph in the West represents the culmination of a remarkable attempt to discover and present what Gibbon was saying, what he meant by it, and why he said it in the ways that he did, as well as an unparalleled contribution to the historiography of Enlightened Europe.
Capturing Crime in the Antipodes: Colonist Cultural Representation of Indigeneity
This chapter adopts a Southern criminological lens, which allows the authors to explore how colonialism has been constructed and depicted in museums within both regional and urban Australia. By studying spatial and historical silences in Australian museums, this chapter offers a consistent frame to chronologically chart Anglo-Australian depictions of Indigeneity, imperialism and violence wielded by the state. As this chapter will argue, museums can often reflect Westernized (white) conceptualizations about Indigeneity and the state violence involved in colonization, which actively re-enforces popular views and influences sociopolitical visions of identity, the state and justice.