The Nazis, Japanese, & Soviets all pursued centralized programs of industrialization in a bid to break free from the US-British world-system. American military keynesian industrialization responded to the threat of these "late industrializers" & took inspo from the Nazi & Soviet examples.

Mamdani does. Ro Khanna does not.

One of the main insights from my fieldwork for my (almost finished!) second monograph is the extent to which the ethnographic gaze of the colonial state and its inheritor shapes the lives of ordinary Indians. For any non-upper caste Hindus, the correct performance is a matter of community survival.

The students who were the most intolerant of perspectives different to their own in my American classrooms in Oklahoma were the ultra conservative Christians, and the far right students. Who curiously rarely get the endlessly critical treatment that the "woke" students get in mainstream US media.

Does anyone have any recommendations on right-wing environmental/health politics? Want to learn more about the history behind the RFK Jr.-style politics of fascist "clean eating."

Mirza Fath-ʿAli Akhundzadeh and Mirza Aqa Khan Kermani, writing in the second half of C19, produced what Zia-Ebrahimi terms “dislocative nationalism,” a discourse that severs Iran from its Islamicate present and relocates it imaginatively in a pre-Islamic Aryan past racially continuous with Europe.

Great stuff on how Japanese immigrants to the US, disappointed by racism & taking inspo from US policies, promoted Japan's settler colonialism in Asia. Torajiro Sato, a settler leader in Korea who studied in the US, called for a Japanese "Monroe Doctrine" & "manifest destiny."

I went to the Bourgeois Pig Cafe and everyone knew you

I may have issues. . . lol

me talking to @2024shawn.bsky.social trying to explain why Althusser, Foucault, and Bourdieu are all correct simultaneously.

Reminder to Americans that many knowledgeable about both point to Modi's India as the model Trump's America could follow more than some of the other comparisons thrown around

If Hobsbawm was writing Age of Revolution today, I think he would mention the Olivia Rodrigo music video in Versailles to highlight the French Revolution's world-historical capitalist break with the feudal order.

A synthesis between Roediger and Thompson will tell you how the label of "working class" has historically presumed whiteness and the privileged status of white workers as a default condition.

Sometimes you see leftist writing that's so bad it makes you want to become an Analytic Marxist

This sounds awesome — I need to attend a history conference

I think this critique applies to some aspects of subaltern studies (cough cough Provincializing Europe) & should be made. At the same time, it doesn't encompass all of subaltern studies & even works that exalt investment in traditional practices can be read to provide insight into Indian fascism. /1

Indian constitution 1 Hindutva cheating bastards 0. Best news from the motherland in a while.

Does anyone happen to have a pdf of this?

Mike Davis, writing in the New Left Review in 2020, referred to it as a core 40% and noted that it has two components: 1) Small, unscrupulous rural capitalists or "lumpen-billionaires" and the towns they dominate 2) Wealthy, middle class whites who have fled suburbs for more rural exurban areas

The central government of India, controlled by the Hindu supremacist BJP, has barred 9 million residents, disproportionately Muslims, from voting in West Bengal, India's 4th most populous state. Such a country can no longer be considered a democracy.

4 books I've been reading on US Empire in (South)East Asia that have been exceptionally insightful. Interesting themes are: US military suppliers & local authoritarian elites forming a transregional "Pacific ruling class" + the continuity of violent settler colonial practices from the frontier.

Just remembered to check out the new issue of my favorite humanities journal. . .

Just got a flurry of messages from my cousin that came through now. When Trump was threatening to destroy Iranian civilization, he wrote me, “I love you cousin. If I am not here tomorrow, I love you and I am proud of you. Please pray for us.” I am devastated and wrecked. He is okay, thank God.

My friend @2024shawn.bsky.social asked me how I’d think through a global history survey course. It would start (i.e., my theorizing, not what the undergrads would read) with this essay, which - along with Mbembe’s work - has led me to an attention to planetary consciousness.

I swear I spend half of my time trying to figure out what exactly happened in the 1970s.

Declaring a fatwa against so-called “Dubai chocolate” for so many reasons, many of which should be self-evident. It also tastes terrible, but this isn’t the most important reason why you shouldn’t buy it.

Increasing sympathetic to Tooze's critiques of those who chart a standard structure of the rise and fall of hegemonic orders; has become increasingly clear to me that we need to think of empires as composed of multiple parts & understand the importance of contingent events.

Have a lot of similar critiques about the recent wave of "right-wing studies" in general. It exemplifies a desire to position the MAGA right as "exceptional" and thus fails to connect it to broader trends in US history like settler colonialism, American imperialism, and anti-Black racism.

“Pledge yourself with prayer and remain steady on it; offer prayer as much as possible and seek nearness (of Allah) through it, because it is, (imposed) upon the believers as (a) timed ordinance (Qur'an 4:103).” – Imam Ali (a.s.), Nahj al-balagha, Sermon 199

Interestingly enough, this Hadith also appears in Sunni books, but is narrated from the prophet instead of Jafar al Sadiq. Likely evidence of the permeability between Sunni and Shia traditions in the early medieval period.

Breeders - Future Amnesia [Champaign, IL, USA ; Punk] (1984) https://redd.it/17en60o https://youtu.be/lQJRwcWcxs8

This tradition embraced similar foreign traditions, laying the groundwork for the Taliban. Deobandism supplied a useful critique of worldly power as temptation. Salafism meshed w tribal values of egalitarianism & a long-standing a tradition of excommunicating those who defied communal norms. /2

Highly recc this book. Chronicles tendency in Pashtun history of nobles trying to gain power thru alliance w foreign powers or importation of foreign centralizing ideologies in defiance of egalitarian, decentralized norms. An ascetic tradition centering the marginalized developed in response. /1

@uwmadison.bsky.social is having their annual S Asia conference late Oct. Looking for fellow scholars to do a panel with. I do research on Periyar and caste in S India. Also intereste in gender and caste. Message me or email ([email protected]) if interested. #academia #History #SouthAsia

Cumings on the 2 class fractions of American Empire. Eastern capital capable of competing globally which favored respecting state sovereignty, international orgs & economic integration. & More precarious sunbelt capital hoping to maintain itself thru direct imperialism modeled after the Indian Wars.

Zotero is so goated

The September Massacres are the obvious counterexample: about 1,200 prisoners killed after summary “popular tribunal” procedures, with authorities unable or unwilling to stop it. The king’s flight to Varennes is widely treated as a turning point in popular attitudes toward monarchy.

Friend is telling me about “Against the Machine” by Paul Kingsnorth and I can’t imagine a more poorly argued conceit. Popular politics in Paris (and not only Paris) included both pressure for harsh exemplary punishment and episodes of collective killing framed as justice.

People routinely profess beliefs that have little bearing on how they actually live. Ambient ideas in society bear no transparent relationship to the practices they ostensibly inform. It falls to the historian to trace the specific mechanisms by which ideas and actions come to be linked.

@keanuheydari.bsky.social thought a picture of Champaign-Urbana (my hometown) was Tehran. Tbf, this is a picture that UIUC touched up for its promotional materials to make CU seems like a thriving metropolis.

A new post from me. Paniz Faryousefi conducted the Tehran Symphony Orchestra this week. A real moment of visibility for women in Iranian classical music, which leaves open the question of how far institutions and laws in Iran are actually shifting.

The settler visions developed in this "Brazilian laboratory" would go on to fuel the settler colonial projects enacted by both Japan and Germany during WWII. Those projects were part of broader efforts to establish an alternative economic order to the emerging US-led one.

An interesting historical theme is how both Japan and Germany saw Brazil as a "settler colonial laboratory." Japanese settlers in Brazil acted as part of the broader imperial project and promoted settler colonial visions in Southeast Asia in the 1930s and 1940s.

Straight man who gets into queer theory to explain the fall of the New Deal Order (me)

Easily top three out-of-context @keanuheydari.bsky.social moments:

Timothy Mellon, a descendant of Gilded Age dynastic capitalism, being a key Trump backer is very interesting. Gels well with Cooper's arg that Trumpism is backed by factions of capital that use family incorporation & the rhetoric of "family values" to shield themselves from regulation and taxation.

I was on C. Derick Varn’s podcast to talk about the Iranian diaspora and the left!