New Future

Trump’s second term has begun with a whirlwind of iconoclastic pronouncements and an opening to Moscow that has sent European rulers into ideological crisis. An American-policy aide-mémoire offers baseline metrics for the ruptures—and continuities—ahead.

A discussion of Robin Blackburn’s quintet on slavery in the Atlantic world: origins, rise, overthrow, legacy.

Drawing inspiration from Edward Thompson’s classic study, a comparative analysis of the forces that have shaped and re-shaped China’s labouring masses, as wave upon wave of ‘new enclosures’ complete the proletarianization of the peasantry.

What weight should be given to the role of ideas in moments of radical change, as opposed to that of material interests and forces? From the Reformation to the Enlightenment, rise of Marxism and hegemony of neoliberalism, lessons for a system-changing left.

Opening a symposium on Robin Blackburn’s The Reckoning, a probing examination of political agents and structuring conditions behind the late overthrow of slavery in the American South, Cuba and Brazil.

A political panorama of the Middle East, surveying the fortunes of rulers and ruled in Riyadh, Cairo, Tripoli, Damascus, Tehran, Gaza and Tel Aviv, under the stifling blanket of a heavily militarized Israeli-American hegemony.

How should Blackburn’s slavery quintet be situated in relation to shifting historiographical paradigms of the Atlantic World, from the voyages of discovery to the age of Anglo-American predominance?

What questions for critical social theory are posed by the capitalist slave regimes of the Americas? An inquiry into the political, economic and social-reproductive dimensions of enslaved and ‘doubly free’ labour.

Responding to his interlocutors in NLR’s symposium, Blackburn foregrounds the contradictions of capital and political rule in the Atlantic slave systems that opened space for class struggle.

If, since Duchamp, anything can be art, regardless of skill or vision, why isn’t more of it produced? Drawing on Frank Knight’s work on financial risk to probe the institutional theory of art, Malcolm Bull finds curious links with the worlds of cryptocurrency and NFTs.

The classicist Joseph Bryant explains the importance of Elvin’s newly discovered 2007 Preface to the PRC edition of Pattern of the Chinese Past, setting out the social-historical ontology that informs its interpretative framework.

Man of the people, how you kept me laughing, Hemp-cloth in your arms, come to barter for silk. But skeins of silk were not what you were after, You were there with schemes to make me come with you. And so—I . . .

Hobsbawm’s contradictory relations with liberalism—and with liberals—from his rescue of the legacy of the French Revolution in Echoes of the Marseillaise to the impasses of Age of Extremes.

A personal prologue, this was Elvin’s message to a new generation of mainland readers of his classic economic and social history, The Pattern of the Chinese Past.