Charles Maier offers a new narrative of the long twentieth century, focused on institutions that shaped politics and societies: project-states, driven by democratic or authoritarian ideologies; capital; and advocates of apolitical values, such as health, human rights, and international law. In this we discern the unfolding of our own troubled time.
Contemporary America, with its unparalleled armaments and ambition, seems to many commentators a new empire. Others angrily reject the designation. What stakes would being an empire have for our identity at home and our role abroad? A preeminent American historian addresses these issues in light of the history of empires since antiquity. This elegantly written book examines the structure and impact of these mega-states and asks whether the United States shares their traits and behavior. Eschewing the standard focus on current U.S. foreign policy and the recent spate of pro- and anti-empire polemics, Charles S. Maier uses comparative history to test the relevance of a concept often invoked but not always understood. Marshaling a remarkable array of evidence—from Roman, Ottoman, Moghul, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, and British experience—Maier outlines the essentials of empire throughout history. He then explores the exercise of U.S. power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, carefully analyzing its economic and strategic sources and the nation’s relationship to predecessors and rivals. To inquire about empire is to ask what the United States has become as a result of its wealth, inventiveness, and ambitions. It is to confront lofty national aspirations with the realities of the violence that often attends imperial politics and thus to question both the costs and the opportunities of the current U.S. global ascendancy. With learning, dispassion, and clarity, Among Empires offers bold comparisons and an original account of American power. It confirms that the issue of empire must be a concern of every citizen.
Thomas Hobbes laid the theoretical groundwork of the nation-state in Leviathan, his tough-minded treatise of 1651. Leviathan 2.0 updates this classic account to explain how modern statehood took shape between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, before it unraveled into the political uncertainty that persists today. Modern states were far from immune to the modernizing forces of war, technology, and ideology. From 1845 to 1880, the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Argentina were all reconstituted through territorial violence. Europe witnessed the unification of Germany and Italy, while Asian nations such as Japan tried to mitigate foreign incursions through state-building reforms. A global wave of revolution at the turn of the century pushed the modernization process further in China, Russia, Iran, and Ottoman Turkey. By the late 1930s, with the rise of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, the momentum of history seemed to shift toward war-glorifying totalitarian states. But several variants of the modern state survived World War II: the welfare states of Western democracies; single-party socialist governments; and governments dominated by the military, especially prevalent in Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East. Toward the end of the twentieth century, all of these forms stood in growing tension with the transformative influences of globalized capitalism. Modern statehood recreated itself in many ways, Charles S. Maier concludes, but finally had to adopt a precarious equilibrium with ever more powerful economic forces.
Against the backdrop of the sudden and unexpected fall of communism, Harvard history teacher Charles Maier traces the demise of East Germany". . . . an historian whose writing talks both to political scientists and to lay readers . . . combines probing historical examination with disciplined and informed political analysis".Richard H. Ullman, Princeton Universtiy.
Bringing his book up to date with reflections since its first publication a decade ago, Charles Maier writes that the historians' controversy gave Germany a chance to air the issues immediately before unification and, in effect, the controversy substituted for the constitutional debate that a united Germany never got around to holding. The premises of national community, whether formulated in terms of legal culture, inherited collective responsibilities, or patriotic habits of the heart, had already been subjects for vigorous discussion.
Charles Maier, one of the most prominent contemporary scholars of European history, published Recasting Bourgeois Europe as his first book in 1975. Based on extensive archival research, the book examines how European societies progressed from a moment of social vulnerability to one of political and economic stabilization. Arguing that a common trajectory calls for a multi country analysis, Maier provides a comparative history of three European nations and argues that they did not simply return to a prewar status quo, but achieved a new balance of state authority and interest group representation. While most previous accounts presented the decade as a prelude to the Depression and dictatorships, Maier suggests that the stabilization of the 1920s, vulnerable as it was, foreshadowed the more enduring political stability achieved after World War II. The immense and ambitious scope of this book, its ability to follow diverse histories in detail, and its effort to explain stabilization—and not just revolution or breakdown—have made it a classic of European history.
Bringing his book up to date with reflections since its first publication a decade ago, Charles S. Maier writes that the historians’ controversy gave Germany a chance to air the issues immediately before unification and, in effect, the controversy substituted for the constitutional debate that a united Germany never got around to holding. The premises of national community, whether formulated in terms of legal culture, inherited collective responsibilities, or patriotic habits of the heart, had already been subjects for vigorous discussion.
Contemporary America, with its unparalleled armaments and ambition, seems to many commentators a new empire. Others angrily reject the designation. What stakes would being an empire have for our identity at home and our role abroad? A preeminent American historian addresses these issues in light of the history of empires since antiquity. This elegantly written book examines the structure and impact of these mega-states and asks whether the United States shares their traits and behavior. Eschewing the standard focus on current U.S. foreign policy and the recent spate of pro- and anti-empire polemics, Charles S. Maier uses comparative history to test the relevance of a concept often invoked but not always understood. Marshaling a remarkable array of evidence—from Roman, Ottoman, Moghul, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, and British experience—Maier outlines the essentials of empire throughout history. He then explores the exercise of U.S. power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, carefully analyzing its economic and strategic sources and the nation’s relationship to predecessors and rivals. To inquire about empire is to ask what the United States has become as a result of its wealth, inventiveness, and ambitions. It is to confront lofty national aspirations with the realities of the violence that often attends imperial politics and thus to question both the costs and the opportunities of the current U.S. global ascendancy. With learning, dispassion, and clarity, Among Empires offers bold comparisons and an original account of American power. It confirms that the issue of empire must be a concern of every citizen.
Charles Maier offers a new narrative of the long twentieth century, focused on institutions that shaped politics and societies: project-states, driven by democratic or authoritarian ideologies; capital; and advocates of apolitical values, such as health, human rights, and international law. In this we discern the unfolding of our own troubled time.
Originally published in 1987 to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Marshall Plan, this fascinating collection of essays, from an eminent ‘insider’ to the Marshall Plan, combines economics, politics and history to provide authoritative and personal insights into the creation of one of the greatest foreign aid programmes of the twentieth century. Any reader interested in the Marshall Plan itself, the inner workings of a major act of US foreign policy, and its many economic, political and historical facets will welcome the reissue of this valuable book from one of America’s most distinguished economists.
Superconductivity, Third Edition is an encyclopedic treatment of all aspects of the subject, from classic materials to fullerenes. Emphasis is on balanced coverage, with a comprehensive reference list and significant graphics from all areas of the published literature. Widely used theoretical approaches are explained in detail. Topics of special interest include high temperature superconductors, spectroscopy, critical states, transport properties, and tunneling. This book covers the whole field of superconductivity from both the theoretical and the experimental point of view. This third edition features extensive revisions throughout, and new chapters on second critical field and iron based superconductors. Comprehensive coverage of the field of superconductivity New content on magnetic properties, fluxons, anisotropies, and more Over 2500 references to the literature Enhanced data tables
Against the backdrop of one of the great transformations of our century, the sudden and unexpected fall of communism as a ruling system, Charles Maier recounts the history and demise of East Germany. Dissolution is his poignant, analytically provocative account of the decline and fall of the late German Democratic Republic. This book explains the powerful causes for the disintegration of German communism as it constructs the complex history of the GDR. Maier looks at the turning points in East Germany's forty-year history and at the mix of coercion and consent by which the regime functioned. He analyzes the GDR as it evolved from the purges of the 1950s to the peace movements and emerging youth culture of the 1980s, and then turns his attention to charges of Stasi collaboration that surfaced after 1989. In the context of describing the larger collapse of communism, Maier analyzes German elements that had counterparts throughout the Soviet bloc, including its systemic and eventually terminal economic crisis, corruption and privilege in the SED, the influence of the Stasi and the plight of intellectuals and writers, and the slow loss of confidence on the part of the ruling elite. He then discusses the mass protests and proliferation of dissident groups in 1989, the collapse of the ruling party, and the troubled aftermath of unification. Dissolution is the first book that spans the communist collapse and the ensuing process of unification, and that draws on newly available archival documents from the last phases of the GDR, including Stasi reports, transcripts of Politburo and Central Committee debates, and papers from the Economic Planning Commission, the Council of Ministers, and the office files of key party officials. This book is further bolstered by Maier's extensive knowledge of European history and the Cold War, his personal observations and conversations with East Germans during the country's dramatic transition, and memoirs and other eyewitness accounts published during the four-decade history of the GDR.
Bringing his book up to date with reflections since its first publication a decade ago, Charles S. Maier writes that the historians’ controversy gave Germany a chance to air the issues immediately before unification and, in effect, the controversy substituted for the constitutional debate that a united Germany never got around to holding. The premises of national community, whether formulated in terms of legal culture, inherited collective responsibilities, or patriotic habits of the heart, had already been subjects for vigorous discussion.
In Search of Stability: Explorations in Historical Political Economy ponders the issue of how Western industrial societies overcame major challenges to political and economic stability in the twentieth century. Successive essays ask: what ideological messages did American influence transmit to Europe after World War I, then again after World War II? Did Nazis and Italian fascists share an economic ideology or impose a unique economic system in the interwar period and during World War II? How do their accomplishments stack up comparatively against those of the liberal democracies? After 1945, what was the relationship between concepts of productivity and class division? How have the major experiences of twentieth-century inflation arisen out of class and interest-group rivalry? Most generally, what has been the representation of interests in capitalist political economies?
Throughout history, human societies have been organized preeminently as territories—politically bounded regions whose borders define the jurisdiction of laws and the movement of peoples. At a time when the technologies of globalization are eroding barriers to communication, transportation, and trade, Once Within Borders explores the fitful evolution of territorial organization as a worldwide practice of human societies. Master historian Charles S. Maier tracks the epochal changes that have defined territories over five centuries and draws attention to ideas and technologies that contribute to territoriality’s remarkable resilience. Territorial boundaries transform geography into history by providing a framework for organizing political and economic life. But properties of territory—their meanings and applications—have changed considerably across space and time. In the West, modern territoriality developed in tandem with ideas of sovereignty in the seventeenth century. Sovereign rulers took steps to fortify their borders, map and privatize the land, and centralize their sway over the populations and resources within their domain. The arrival of railroads and the telegraph enabled territorial expansion at home and abroad as well as the extension of control over large spaces. By the late nineteenth century, the extent of a nation’s territory had become an index of its power, with overseas colonial possessions augmenting prestige and wealth and redefining territoriality. Turning to the geopolitical crises of the twentieth century, Maier pays close attention to our present moment, asking in what ways modern nations and economies still live within borders and to what degree our societies have moved toward a post-territiorial world.
Charles Maier, one of the most prominent contemporary scholars of European history, published Recasting Bourgeois Europe as his first book in 1975. Based on extensive archival research, the book examines how European societies progressed from a moment of social vulnerability to one of political and economic stabilization. Arguing that a common trajectory calls for a multi country analysis, Maier provides a comparative history of three European nations and argues that they did not simply return to a prewar status quo, but achieved a new balance of state authority and interest group representation. While most previous accounts presented the decade as a prelude to the Depression and dictatorships, Maier suggests that the stabilization of the 1920s, vulnerable as it was, foreshadowed the more enduring political stability achieved after World War II. The immense and ambitious scope of this book, its ability to follow diverse histories in detail, and its effort to explain stabilization—and not just revolution or breakdown—have made it a classic of European history.
Thomas Hobbes laid the theoretical groundwork of the nation-state in Leviathan, his tough-minded treatise of 1651. Leviathan 2.0 updates this classic account to explain how modern statehood took shape between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, before it unraveled into the political uncertainty that persists today. Modern states were far from immune to the modernizing forces of war, technology, and ideology. From 1845 to 1880, the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Argentina were all reconstituted through territorial violence. Europe witnessed the unification of Germany and Italy, while Asian nations such as Japan tried to mitigate foreign incursions through state-building reforms. A global wave of revolution at the turn of the century pushed the modernization process further in China, Russia, Iran, and Ottoman Turkey. By the late 1930s, with the rise of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, the momentum of history seemed to shift toward war-glorifying totalitarian states. But several variants of the modern state survived World War II: the welfare states of Western democracies; single-party socialist governments; and governments dominated by the military, especially prevalent in Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East. Toward the end of the twentieth century, all of these forms stood in growing tension with the transformative influences of globalized capitalism. Modern statehood recreated itself in many ways, Charles S. Maier concludes, but finally had to adopt a precarious equilibrium with ever more powerful economic forces.
The common images of Korea view the peninsula as a long-standing battleground for outside powers and the Cold War's last divided state. But, Korea's location at the very center of Northeast Asia gives it a pivotal role in the economic integration of the region and the dynamic development of its more powerful neighbors. A great wave of economic expansion, driven first by the Japanese miracle and then by the ascent of China, has made South Korea - an economic powerhouse in its own right - the hub of the region once again, a natural corridor for railroads and energy pipelines linking Asiatic Russia to China and Japan. And, over the horizon, an opening of North Korea, with multilateral support, would add another major push toward regional integration. Illuminating the role of the Korean peninsula in three modern historical periods, the eminent international contributors to this volume offer a fresh and stimulating appraisal of Korea as the key to the coalescence of a broad, open Northeast Asian regionalism in the twenty-fifth century.
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