Author: Lucette Valensi Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 9780801424809 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 140
Book Description
In her graceful account of the transformation of European attitudes toward the Ottoman empire during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Lucette Valensi follows the genealogy of the concept of Oriental despotism. The Birth of the Despot examines a crucial moment in the long and ambiguous encounter between the Christian and Islamic worlds: the period after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks, when Venice's pursuit of its commercial and maritime interests brought two powerful protagonists--Venice and the Sublime Porte--face-to-face.Vivaldi's oratorio Juditha Triumphans, in which Judith liberates her besieged town by killing the Turk Holofernes, serves as the organizing metaphor in Valensi's study of how Venice's perceptions of its rival changed. Valensi shows how Venice's initial admiration for the sultan and his orderly empire metamorphosed into revulsion at a monstrous tyrant.
Author: Brian Klaas Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1510735933 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 284
Book Description
”[A] primer on the threat to democracy posed by—and I can’t believe I’m saying this—the current president of the United States.” —David Litt, New York Times bestselling author Donald Trump isn’t a despot. But he is increasingly acting like The Despot’s Apprentice, an understudy in authoritarian tactics that threaten to erode American democracy, including: Attacking the press Threatening rule of law by firing those who investigate his alleged wrongdoings Using nepotism to staff the White House and countless other techniques Donald Trump is borrowing tactics from the world’s dictators and despots. Trump’s fascination with the military, his obsession with his own cult of personality, and his deliberate campaign to blur the line between fact and falsehood are nothing new to the world of despots. But they are new to the United States. With each authoritarian tactic or tweet, Trump poses a unique threat to democratic government in the world’s most powerful democracy. At the same time, Trump’s apprenticeship has serious consequences beyond the United States. His bizarre adoration and idolization of despotic strongmen—from Russia’s Putin, to Turkey’s Erdogan, or to the Philippines’ Duterte—has transformed American foreign policy into a powerful cheerleader for some of the world’s worst regimes. In The Despot’s Apprentice, an ex-US campaign advisor who has sat with the world’s dictators explains Donald Trump’s increasingly authoritarian tactics and how Trump uniquely threatens American democracy... and how to save it from him.
Author: Joseph A. Massad Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 022620622X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 405
Book Description
Joseph Massad s "Desiring Arabs" (UCP, 2007) was an intellectual/literary history that sought out links between Orientalism and representations of sex and desire, rebutting in the meantime Western efforts to impose categories of heterosexual/homosexual where (in Islam) no such subjectivities exist. His new book broadens the purview to show us what Islam has become in today s world, attending fully to the multiplication of meanings of Islam. Islam in Liberalism is an intellectual/political history, enabling us to understand that history in terms of how Islam operated as a category within western liberalism; another way to phrase this is to say that Massad underscores how the anxieties about what Europe constituteddespotism, intolerance, misogyny, homophobiahave gotten projected onto Islam. It is, he avers, only through this projection that Europe could emerge as democratic, tolerant, gynophilic, and hemophilicin short, Islam-free. But in fact Islam has been there since the birth of Europe. Liberalism has been the weapon of choice since the late 18th century against the internal and external others of Europe. Massad s brilliant critique of anti-Muslim sexual politics in Desiring Arabs is now broadened provocatively to include NGOs, international organizations, and therapeutic programs. He moves from consideration of the meanings of democracy (and the ideological assumption that Islam is not compatible with democracy) through chapters on women in Islam, sexuality and/in Islam, psychoanalytic interpretations of Islamic themes, and the more recent development of the idea of Abrahamic religions among those valorizing an inter-faith agenda. Overall, Massad sets this book up as a biting critique of the sort of liberalism Euro-American propagated and brought as good news to an unenlightened Islam."
Author: Guido Abbattista Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 1000423255 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 332
Book Description
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.
Author: Ali Rahnema Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 086154143X Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 528
Book Description
How did the Shah of Iran become a modern despot? In 1953, Iranian monarch Mohammad-Reza Shah Pahlavi emerged victorious from a power struggle with his prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddeq, thanks to a coup masterminded by Britain and the United States. Mosaddeq believed the Shah should reign not rule, but the Shah was determined that no one would make him a mere symbol. In this meticulous political history, Ali Rahnema details Iran’s slow transition from constitutional to despotic monarchy. He examines the tug of war between the Shah, his political opposition, a nation in search of greater liberty, and successive US administrations with their changing priorities. He shows how the Shah gradually assumed control over the legislature, the judiciary, the executive, and the media, and clamped down on his opponents’ activities. By 1968, the Shah’s turn to despotism was complete. The consequences would be far-reaching.
Author: Susan Mokhberi Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0190884800 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 224
Book Description
The Persian Mirror explores France's preoccupation with Persia in the seventeenth century. Long before Montesquieu's Persian Letters, French intellectuals, diplomats and even ordinary Parisians were fascinated by Persia and eagerly consumed travel accounts, fairy tales, and the spectacle of the Persian ambassador's visit to Paris and Versailles in 1715. Using diplomatic sources, fiction and printed and painted images, The Persian Mirror describes how the French came to see themselves in Safavid Persia. In doing so, it revises our notions of orientalism and the exotic and suggests that early modern Europeans had more nuanced responses to Asia than previously imagined.
Author: Tracey A. Sowerby Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1000391914 Category : Architecture Languages : en Pages : 285
Book Description
In the sixteenth century, the Ottoman court in Constantinople emerged as the axial centre of early modern diplomacy in Eurasia. Diplomatic Cultures at the Ottoman Court, c.1500-1630 takes a unique approach to diplomatic relations by focusing on how diplomacy was conducted and diplomatic cultures forged at a single court: the Sublime Porte. It unites studies from the perspectives of European and non-European diplomats with analyses from the perspective of Ottoman officials involved in diplomatic practices. It focuses on a formative period for diplomatic procedure and Ottoman imperial culture by examining the introduction of resident embassies on the one hand, and on the other, changes in Ottoman policy and protocol that resulted from the territorial expansion and cultural transformations of the empire in the sixteenth century. The chapters in this volume approach the practices and processes of diplomacy at the Ottoman court with special attention to ceremonial protocol, diplomatic sociability, gift-giving, cultural exchange, information gathering, and the role of para-diplomatic actors.
Author: Anders Ingram Publisher: Springer ISBN: 1137401532 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 200
Book Description
Histories of the Turks were a central means through which English authors engaged in intellectual and cultural terms with the Ottoman Empire, its advance into Europe following the capture of Constantinople (1454), and its continuing central European power up to the treaty of Karlowitz (1699). Writing the Ottomans examines historical writing on the Turks in England from 1480-1700. It explores the evolution of this discourse from its continental roots, and its development in response to moments of military crisis such as the Long War of 1593-1606 and the War of the Holy League 1683-1699, as well as Anglo-Ottoman trade and diplomacy throughout the seventeenth century. From the writing of central authors such as Richard Knolles and Paul Rycaut, to lesser known names, it reads English histories of the Turks in their intellectual, religious, political, economic and print contexts, and analyses their influence on English perceptions of the Ottoman world.
Author: Lucette Valensi
Author: Brian Klaas
Author: Joseph A. Massad
Author: Southern
Author: John Addington Symonds
Author: Guido Abbattista
Author: Ali Rahnema
Author: Susan Mokhberi
Author: Tracey A. Sowerby
Author: Anders Ingram