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"Buchan, Bruce"
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Piracy in World History
In a modern global historical context, scholars have often regarded piracy as an essentially European concept which was inappropriately applied by the expanding European powers to the rest of the world, mainly for the purpose of furthering colonial forms of domination in the economic, political, military, legal and cultural spheres. By contrast, this edited volume highlights the relevance of both European and non-European understandings of piracy to the development of global maritime security and freedom of navigation. It explores the significance of 'legal posturing' on the part of those accused of piracy, as well as the existence of non-European laws and regulations regarding piracy and related forms of maritime violence in the early modern era. The authors in this volume highlight cases from various parts of the early-modern world, thereby explaining piracy as a global phenomenon.
eBook
Sight unseen: Neoliberal visions of (in) security
Is security seen? Is security seen in images of peace and safety, or is it perceived in the troubled images of the horrors of violence and suffering? Vision has played a crucial role in shaping the modern Western preoccupation with, and prioritisation of security. Historically, security has been visually represented in a variety of ways, typically involving the depiction of its absence. In Medieval and Early Modern Europe especially, security and insecurity were presented as coterminous insofar as each represented separate conditions - their shared boundary envisioned in representations of the temporal threshold separating human mortality from divine salvation. This ocular demonstration of thresholds has been heightened by the 'war on terror' conducted by neo-liberal states since 2001. Neoliberalism operates as a discourse of constant global circulations (of money, goods and people) premised on a perpetual anticipation and pre-emption of insecurity. In the neoliberal scheme, security and insecurity are no longer coterminous, but mutually sustaining in perpetuity. In that sense, neoliberal security is 'sight unseen' - an uncanny presence that is not there. In the reiterated troubled images of horror amplified by the seemingly endless 'war on terror', neoliberal security operates as a terrifying visual reflex: we cannot see it but in new horrors.
Journal Article
Piracy in World History
In a modern global historical context, scholars have often regarded piracy as an essentially European concept which was inappropriately applied by the expanding European powers to the rest of the world, mainly for the purpose of furthering colonial forms of domination in the economic, political, military, legal and cultural spheres. By contrast, this edited volume highlights the relevance of both European and non-European understandings of piracy to the development of global maritime security and freedom of navigation. It explores the significance of ‘legal posturing’ on the part of those accused of piracy, as well as the existence of non-European laws and regulations regarding piracy and related forms of maritime violence in the early modern era. The authors in Piracy in World History highlight cases from various parts of the early-modern world, thereby explaining piracy as a global phenomenon.
eBook
SCOTTISH MEDICAL ETHNOGRAPHY: COLONIAL TRAVEL, STADIAL THEORY AND THE NATURAL HISTORY OF RACE, c.1770–1805
This paper will present a comparative analysis of the ethnographic writings of three colonial travellers trained in medicine at the University of Edinburgh: William Anderson (1750–78), Archibald Menzies (1754–1842) and Robert Brown (1773–1858). Each travelled widely beyond Scotland, enabling them to make a series of observations of non-European peoples in a wide variety of colonial contexts. William Anderson, Archibald Menzies and Robert Brown in particular travelled extensively in the Pacific with (respectively) James Cook on his second and third voyages (1771–8), with George Vancouver (1791–5) and with Matthew Flinders (1801–3). Together, their surviving writings from these momentous expeditions illustrate a growing interest in natural-historical explanations for diversity among human populations. Race emerged as a key concept in this quest, but it remained entangled with assumptions about the stadial historical progress or “civilization” of humanity. A comparative examination of their ethnographic writings thus presents a unique opportunity to study the complex interplay between concepts of race, savagery and civilization in the varied colonial contexts of the Scottish Enlightenment.
Journal Article
Listening for noise in political thought
The association of sound and political philosophy is venerable, but usually only silently invoked in metaphor or analogy, as in Cicero's likening 'concord' among the citizens of the republic to 'harmony in song', or John of Salisbury's image of rulership as 'producing the sweetest consonance of dissonances' by 'stretching or relaxing' the variety of 'strings' in the commonwealth. These musical metaphors have at least two important implications for our understanding of how political ideas are communicated in the Western tradition of political thought. First, their antiquity implies that political ideas have frequently been communicated, even in written texts, by means of specific reference to the noise of ideas resonating in music, in speech, or in dialogue. Second, they also imply that the communication of political ideas takes place by means of purposive and meaningful 'sound' (of the orchestrated harmony of music in this analogy) rather than invasive and irritating 'noise' (to stretch the same analogy, in discordant strumming or tuneless chanting). These two implications deserve further investigation if only because political theorists have often been deaf to the ways in which the invocation of noise has been used in written texts to underscore the meaning of political ideas.
Journal Article
SCOTTISH MEDICAL ETHNOGRAPHY: COLONIAL TRAVEL, STADIAL THEORY AND THE NATURAL HISTORY OF RACE, c. 1770–1805
This paper will present a comparative analysis of the ethnographic writings of three colonial travellers trained in medicine at the University of Edinburgh: William Anderson (1750–78), Archibald Menzies (1754–1842) and Robert Brown (1773–1858). Each travelled widely beyond Scotland, enabling them to make a series of observations of non-European peoples in a wide variety of colonial contexts. William Anderson, Archibald Menzies and Robert Brown in particular travelled extensively in the Pacific with (respectively) James Cook on his second and third voyages (1771–8), with George Vancouver (1791–5) and with Matthew Flinders (1801–3). Together, their surviving writings from these momentous expeditions illustrate a growing interest in natural-historical explanations for diversity among human populations. Race emerged as a key concept in this quest, but it remained entangled with assumptions about the stadial historical progress or “civilization” of humanity. A comparative examination of their ethnographic writings thus presents a unique opportunity to study the complex interplay between concepts of race, savagery and civilization in the varied colonial contexts of the Scottish Enlightenment.
Journal Article
The ethics of troubled images
When a former drone pilot for the United States Airforce was asked to describe his experience of directing lethal strikes on selected targets over distances of many thousands of kilometres, he said:
Ever step on ants and never give it another thought? That's what you are made to think of the targets - as just black blobs on a screen. You start to do these psychological gymnastics to make it easier to do what you have to do... You had to kill part of your conscience to keep doing your job every day...
Journal Article
\No distinction of Black or Fair\
Recent scholarship on the Scottish Enlightenment has emphasized the increasing importance, in the last decades of the eighteenth century, of the concept of race. Yet race was a conceptual, moral, and taxonomic puzzle for Scots intellectuals such as Adam Ferguson (1723–1816). While the influence of Ferguson's published works has received wide scholarly attention, the content of his teaching has not. His surviving moral philosophy lecture notes offer us a window into the development of thought on race at the disciplinary intersections of moral philosophy and natural history, and the crossroads of Edinburgh's curricula and Britain's Empire.
Journal Article
Dying for security
On 4 December 2008 Australia's then prime minister, Kevin Rudd, proclaimed the First National Security Statement to the Australian Parliament The statement begins with a crucial claim: 'The first priority of government is the nation's security.' A repeated definite article in this sentence reveals that this claim is not primarily about the Rudd government's priorities, nor is it simply about Australia's security. This is a universal claim; a political philosophical proposition that the 'first priority' of any and all governments is the security of 'the nation' it governs. This is not a claim unheard of in the history of political thought nor is its obvious pre-eminence here unique. Security is obviously a 'highly divisive and isolationist concept' in the sense that those 'secured' and those still 'insecure' are to be isolated one from the other. I will argue here, however, that the divisiveness of the concept originates in an ontology of the subject of security that is well established in Western political thought.
Journal Article