Empires, Modernisation and Modernities

Islamic Reform and Modernities in South Asia

From the beginning of the Islamic era, Muslim societies have experienced periods of renewal (tajdid). Since the eighteenth century, Muslim societies across the world have been subject to a prolonged and increasingly deeply felt process of renewal. This has been expressed in different ways in different contexts. Amongst political elites with immediate concerns to answer the challenges of the Wes...

Alternative Modernities for Colonial Korea

States Systems and Universal Empires

"Civilizations" and "world systems" are alternative labels for the largest macropolitical entities that have existed in human history. These historical civilizations/world systems may be seen as having two polar types of power structure, the "states system" and the "universal empire." Each form has certain characteristic accompaniments, which may promote it, be promoted by it, or both. For stat...

Two empires or three?

In the last 100 years, several spectacular discoveries were made in the world of biodiversity, discoveries such as the Okapi in the Congo forest, the only living relative of the giraffes, or Latimeria in the Indian Ocean, a living coelacanth fish, believed to have been extinct for 60 million years. But these were merely small white spots on the world map of biodiversity. By contrast, Carl Woese...

Bulletin comment: Ever-expanding empires†

the highest level ought to be based on sound information, research or expert advice. Further, once change has been implemented and new practices set up there needs to be ongoing assessment, monitoring and reflection on the relative merits of the situation. Depending on the findings it might be necessary to make further changes: sometimes these alterations may even result in a complete reversal ...