Terrestrial Lessons: The Conquest of the World as Globe
... T. Ruddiman Johnston's proposed 84-foot hollow globe (1 inch = ~8 miles), c.1896[38],[39]. b Asian Circle: unenhanced snapshot taken by the author in a lecture hall at the 27th International Geological Congress, Moscow, August 1984. Parts of the Himalayan Circle are also visible. ...
Bombardment of the Earth at an early date established initial conditions that have affected all later regional geology. No part of the Earth's crust escaped. Activity at the brittle-ductile boundary has caused large-diameter scars to be sporadically regenerated upward throughout the four-billion years of our planet's history. Although these three-dimensional 'craterform' scars have evolved in many different manners, and many are covered over at any given time, many retain observable two-dimensional map-outlines with circular curvature. These inherited scar-features have been regenerated 'cold' from below and are fundamentally different from 'astroblemes', as presently defined, whose constituent rocks had been directly subjected to the high temperatures and pressures that accompany extra-terrestrial impacts. The varied present-day manifestations of these scars need to be described and categorized as has been done for faults, folds, rocks, and minerals by earlier workers in the earth sciences.
... 11. On the adaptation of modern globalism in first the Mughal Empire and then the Republic of India state, see Ramaswamy (2007Ramaswamy ( , 2017. 12. ...
Africa has more often been the object rather than the subject of globalization, a region on which the globe has impressed itself with disastrous results. But Africa is a rarely considered but significant example of the global circulation of modernity. The dramatic beginning of the cultural movement of modernity and consequently of the globalization of Africa occurred in the black diaspora: people scattered across the world in that immense aporia of the Enlightenment—slavery. Violently captured and transported, dispersed throughout the New World, placed in plantations with speakers of different languages, deprived not only of a common tongue, but a common history and birthplace, they eventually succeeded in articulating their own postcolonial modernity. Africa had been the source of all kinds of diasporas for millions of years until the industrial level slavery of the Atlantic Middle Passage. The global dimension of Africa can be seen in African writing, in its transnational reach through music, in pan-Africanism, and in the emergence of modernism itself. A revealing sign of the image of Africa in the European consciousness is its invisibility. But the Africa conceived in the imaginations of its writers, artists, and creative thinkers is a global Africa that has already changed and continues to change the world.
What happens when we take the big picture to its spatial zenith and examine histories of science from the vantage point of outer space? The answer is somewhat messy. The satellite era launched alongside Sputnik 1 in 1957 facilitated the extension of scientific order and control through technologies of planetary surveillance. Yet regimes of disorder and fragmentation that emerged through entanglements of anthropogenic and more-than-human natural forces at the planetary periphery prompt a reconsideration of the limits of that control. Enrolling the methodologies of envirotech and discard studies scholarship invites a generatively messy, vertical and extra-planetary view of scientific practices and politics from the ground up and back again, and a glimpse at the historiographical possibilities that emerge from an embrace of systemic disorder.
Despite three decades of rapid expansion and public success, global history's theoretical and methodological foundations remain under-conceptualised, even to those using them. In this collection of essays, leading historians provide a reassessment of global history's most common analytical instruments, metaphors and conceptual foundations. Rethinking Global History prompts historians to pause and think about the methodology and premises underpinning their work. The volume reflects on the structure and direction of history, its relation to our present and the ways in which historians should best explain, contextualise and represent events and circumstances in the past. In chapters on fundamental concepts such as scale, comparison, temporality and teleology, this collection will guide readers to assess the extant literature critically and write theoretically informed global histories. Taken together, these essays provide a unique and much-needed assessment of the implications of history going global. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
Despite three decades of rapid expansion and public success, global history's theoretical and methodological foundations remain under-conceptualised, even to those using them. In this collection of essays, leading historians provide a reassessment of global history's most common analytical instruments, metaphors and conceptual foundations. Rethinking Global History prompts historians to pause and think about the methodology and premises underpinning their work. The volume reflects on the structure and direction of history, its relation to our present and the ways in which historians should best explain, contextualise and represent events and circumstances in the past. In chapters on fundamental concepts such as scale, comparison, temporality and teleology, this collection will guide readers to assess the extant literature critically and write theoretically informed global histories. Taken together, these essays provide a unique and much-needed assessment of the implications of history going global. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
Drawing from media analysis and supplemental ethnographic work in Tamil Nadu, India, between 2016 and 2020, this chapter analyzes the school uniform and its discursive functions in cleanliness-oriented campaigns in the region. As a site of everyday performance and visualization of modernity, the school uniform is a signifier of different childhood ideals within the region’s cleanliness discourses. Contrasting the figuration of the child in school uniform within public health campaigns and a product advertisement campaign, I argue that they mark domestic and embodied cleanliness to project differentiation of class and aspirational futures onto their child protagonists. The differentiation further surfaces in the gendered reproductive labor and domestic affordances surrounding the child. I observe that, alternatively, environmental cleanliness campaigns, which predominantly critique middle-class practices, seek to portray generalized children-in-school as demanding their right to a safe future and hence embed class-differentiated schooling within a symbolic realm of generational divide.
This article examines the import of Western pedagogic knowledge, knowledge about the theory and principles of education and teaching, in India from its very first formulations in Bengal in the 1840s until its inclusion at the University of Madras in 1882. The article follows the early trajectory of British pedagogical knowledge in the colonial setting, its associated knowledge practices related to its institutionalization in teachers’ education institutions and the main contents related to it. The research is based on a wide range of documents about colonial educational policy, particularly related to lectures in education and teaching, and a sample of early manuals of education and teaching. This article shows that, although not fully accepted as a relevant form of knowledge in Britain at the time, colonial educators introduced pedagogic knowledge as a manner of transforming inherited educational practices in India. In this process, colonial officials, missionaries, and upper-caste native authors authored manuals and embodied this kind of knowledge, in what can be interpreted as a de-subalternization of the knowledge of education in the colonial setting.
Who owns the skies? Under British colonialism, the ownership of the skies of India was a contested matter. The onset of aviation presented a challenge to the territorial understanding between the British and semi-sovereign Indian princes, Paramountcy (1858–1947). Technology itself was a tricky area: roadways, railways, telegraphs, and the wireless were nibbling away at the sovereign spheres which Paramountcy had put in place. This paper looks at the history of aviation in princely India, from aviation enthusiasts such as the rulers of Kapurthala, Jodhpur and Bikaner to subversive princes like the Maharaja of Patiala who worked towards a military air force. The paper tracks the three stages of the journey of aviation in princely India, from individual consumption, to the historical context of World War One which aided its access and usage, and finally, the collective princely legal assertion over the vertical air above them in the position, ‘sovereignty of air’. The government’s civil aviation policy in India remained ambiguous about the princes’ rights over the air till 1931 when their sovereignty of the sky was finally recognised. The paper focuses on the Indian princes varied engagement with aviation, modernity and their space in the world.
Schoolchildren’s embodied subjectivity has often been understood as a bio-political tool to ‘clean up’ and modernize poor and marginalized communities. In many post-colonial contexts, school uniforms frequently appear as visual symbols of a child’s clean, schooled body and democratic access to education. Through ethnographic research with 10–14-year-old schoolchildren in urbanizing areas in northern Tamil Nadu, my paper asks how children inhabit and co-construct the school uniform code’s cleanliness discourse in their everyday lives. Studying plural school uniforms through a spatial lens, I explore schoolchildren’s embodied and relational work in negotiating with the equalizing school uniform codes within the schools and the circulation of multiple school uniforms in the community outside. Engaging with a shifting visual aesthetic of embodied cleanliness in a context of class segregated schooling. I argue that school uniforms are discursive sites where exclusions of class and gender, with undertones of caste and age, are simultaneously reinforced and negotiated.
World Literature is a vital part of twentieth-first century critical and comparative literary studies. As a field that engages seriously with function of literary studies in our global era, the study of World literature requires new approaches. The Cambridge History of World Literature is founded on the assumption that World Literature is not all literatures of the world nor a canonical set of globally successful literary works. It highlights scholarship on literary works that focus on the logics of circulation drawn from multiple literary cultures and technologies of the textual. While not rejecting the nation as a site of analysis, these volumes will offer insights into new cartographies – the hemispheric, the oceanic, the transregional, the archipelagic, the multilingual local – that better reflect the multi-scalar and spatially dispersed nature of literary production. It will interrogate existing historical, methodological and cartographic boundaries, and showcase humanistic and literary endeavors in the face of world scale environmental and humanitarian catastrophes.
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In this second volume, the earth’s magnetic field and aurora take centre stage. Geomagnetic reversals are rare occasions when the field dwindles, the north and south magnetic poles trade places, and minor poles come into play. This process remains incomplete in the much more frequent case of a geomagnetic excursion. Throughout human history, people have personified and mythologised the aurora. If a geomagnetic excursion had occurred within human memory, they could have observed spectacular transformations of the lights, even at low latitudes, and enshrined these in myths, monuments, images and rituals. Many elements of the primordial condition described worldwide may thus be explained – awe-inspiring luminous rings, arcs and columns, often dynamic and structured, that seemingly held up a gloomy, low-hanging sky.
Evidence is cited for two excursions that could have informed age-old traditions in this way. Specialists dispute both and a way out of the controversy is proposed. The unique effects that a geomagnetic reversal or excursion must have on the aurora are further explored through possible contemporary parallels on other solar-system bodies and in experimental work on terrellae, of which a historical survey is given. A wealth of new information is provided throughout on the history of geomagnetic studies and auroral physics.
With a foreword by Dr. C. J. Ransom.
XXXIII + 516 pages, including 168 illustrations and index.
Manufactured by leading American globe-making companies, slated globes were adopted in the second half of the nineteenth century as educational aid materials, recommended for teaching world geography from the 4th grade on. Focusing on their production and use in the US context at the turn of the twentieth century, and following an examination of their role in teaching American children the fundaments of terrestrial geography, I probe these now forgotten, blank, black, educational table globes’ capacity in offering a timely “spatial fix” to the prosaic finality of an already overly and overtly known world that the globally rising US Empire was grappling with. Provoking, in equal measure, playfulness and patriotism, I argue, slated globes were washed of imperial colors and freed of the border lines imposed on them, drained of water and emptied of landmasses, only to be once more scathed, and tattooed with lines, colors, and names, watered and landed—in sum, to be “globed” in the hands of the generations of American youth, future stewards of the US Empire who were learning how to (re-)imagine the terra that was already made cognita by earlier colonial powers. Furthermore, I read slated globes as generative of terra incognita iterum (territory made unknown again)—a terra incognita of a different kind and for different purposes than the terra nondum cognita (territory yet unknown) of the previous centuries: a blank fraught with colonial urges of a young empire and charged with imperial pedagogics.
This paper argues that discourses of climate change in the Solomon Islands are being significantly shaped by legacies of Anglican conversion. To understand how climate change is made meaningful therefore means being attentive to the histories and geographies of conversion. Climate change in the Solomon Islands is not only a physical process but a negotiation between new material realities and a Christian cosmos. This paper demonstrates how climate change is made compatible with a Christian cosmos. It also shows how that cosmos is transformed in the process. In the Solomon Islands, this means being attentive to spaces such as shorelines, horizons, ships, names and churches.
Discussions on world literature often imagine literary presence, movement, and exchange in terms of location and prioritize those literary traditions that can be easily mapped. In many regards, classical ghazal poetry resists such interpretation. Nonetheless, a number of nineteenth-century writers working in Urdu and English reframed classical ghazal poetry according to notions of locale that were particularly underpinned by ideas of natural essence, or genius. This article puts two such receptions of the classical ghazal in conversation with one another: the naičral shāʿirī (natural poetry) movement in North India, and the portrayal of classical Persian poet Hafiz as a figure of national genius in the scholarship of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Both these examples highlight the role that discourses of nature and natural expression played in nineteenth-century literary criticism, particularly with regard to conceptions of national culture. They also demonstrate how Persianate literary material that had long circulated in cosmopolitan ways could be vernacularized by rereading conventionalized tropes of mystical longing in terms of more worldly belonging.
Modern cultures are permeated by representations of the earth as a measurable and malleable globe. To interrupt this dominant imagination of the global, this chapter reaches back to an early modern vision of the world depicted in Flemish painter Hieronymus Bosch’s so-called Garden of Earthly Delights. It analyses Garden’s exterior panels, which present the world as a horizontal landscape contained within a spherical globe, in conjunction with Tim Ingold’s account of how the global is perceived today. For Ingold, subjects are split between situated experiences of a flat surrounding horizon and prevailing visions of earth as a distanced globe. In combining horizontal and global perspectives, Garden encapsulates this account. However, whereas Ingold affirms situated existence against estranged global overviews, Bosch’s art blocks recourse to place-based dwelling. In his Christian worldview, all earthly existence—whether grasped through individual places or as the whole globe—is spiritually estranged from God.
This chapter introduces the emerging concept of political geology in the context both of the recent literature in geography and anthropology, and the historical studies of science that have in part inspired this collection. We trace the history of science and its encounters with the earth, with a focus on the political dimensions of these encounters. We explain the different sections of the book – political geologies of knowledge, a modern political geologies and political geologies of the future – with reference to the studies to which they seek to contribute. Political geology has perhaps emerged from the recent interest in the Anthropocene, but it is much more than that: it seeks to understand how Western geological science in particular has been implicated in and by politics, and how non-Western knowledges of the earth might infiltrate and shift this discussion. In doing so, we move through historical, epistemological and philosophical frameworks that influence the authors in the volume. Ultimately, we demonstrate how geological knowledge-making, representation and thought have inscribed and are inscribed by political activities.
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