Description
The state is central to social scientific and historical inquiry today, reflecting its importance in domestic and international affairs. States kill, coerce, fight, torture, and incarcerate, yet they also nurture, protect, educate, redistribute, and invest. It is precisely because of the complexity and wide-ranging impacts of states that research on them has proliferated and diversified. Yet, too many scholars inhabit separate academic silos, and theorizing of states has become dispersed and disjointed. This book aims to bridge some of the many gaps between scholarly endeavors, bringing together scholars from a diverse array of disciplines and perspectives who study states and empires. The book offers not only a sample of cutting-edge research that can serve as models and directions for future work, but an original conceptualization and theorization of states, their origins and evolution, and their effects.
Table of Contents
Introduction Kimberly J. Morgan and Ann Shola Orloff; Part I. Locating the State: The Problem of Boundaries: 1. Reconciling equal treatment with respect for individuality: associations in the symbiotic state Elisabeth Clemens; 2. Beyond the hidden American state: rethinking government visibility Damon Mayrl and Sarah Quinn; 3. States as a series of people exchanges Armando Lara-Millán; 4. State metrology: the rating of sovereigns and the judgment of nations Marion Fourcade; Part II. Stratification and the Transformation of States: 5. Gendered states made and remade: gendered labor policies in the US and Sweden, 1960–2010 Ann Shola Orloff; 6. States and gender justice Mala Htun and S. Laurel Weldon; 7. The civil rights states: how the American state develops itself Desmond King and Robert C. Lieberman; 8. Disaggregating the racial state: activists, diplomats and the partial shift toward racial equality in Brazil Tianna S. Paschel; Part III. Developing the Sinews of Power: 9. Democratic states of unexception: towards a new genealogy of the American political William J. Novak, Stephen W. Sawyer and James T. Sparrow; 10. Performing order: an examination of the seemingly impossible task of subjugating large numbers of people, everywhere, all the time Christian Davenport; 11. Fiscal forearms: taxation as the lifeblood of the modern liberal state Ajay K. Mehrotra; 12. Unexpected adversaries: the state and the revolution in war Meyer Kestnbaum; Part IV. States and Empires: The Transnational/Global Turn: 13. Imperial states and the age of discovery in transition(s) to modernity Julia Adams and Steve Pincus; 14. Making legibility between colony and empire: translation, conflation, and the making of the Muslim state Iza Hussin; 15. The octopus and the Hekatonkheire: on many-armed states and tentacular empires George Steinmentz.
