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Historical Threads: Silk Roads and East – West Conflict
Dr T P Wilkinson, Center for Africa Studies, University of Porto
Foreword
Every argument requires some simplification as well as selection in order to make a point. The following review and critique is no exception. The basic concepts underlying this analysis are convergence and conversion. (Peckham, 1979) While it is always possible to find data that can be applied to refute or qualify any argument, this paper proposes an orientation, both literal and figurative, for considering contemporary issues. This orientation should serve to compose questions about current international relations by highlighting cultural-historical phenomena rather than those strictly defined by Western international relations theories. (Sederberg, 1984) This is important because the predominance of the Western centres of scholarship and education have given those theories the colour of universal scientific validity. It is this presumption that the following reflection aims to critique.
I.
The ancient Silk Road was an expression of interest in trade and communication that extended from China to the northern reaches of the European isthmus. Essentially it comprised two routes across the Eurasian landmass to the Baltic and Black Sea basins. From there products and ideas were transported as far away as Champagne (France) and Bruges (Belgium). Until the 13th century CE, these routes were served or linked by cities that performed the function of way stations and hubs. (Abu-Lughod, 1989) Long before telegraphs or today’s computer-driven cellular telephony grids, the Silk Road was a communication network spanning much, if not all, of the known world. In fact it was the principal artery of a nascent world system, long before economists began to talk and write about globalization.
Products moving through regional capillaries into the stream of continental commerce nourished this circulatory system. However it was clearly not a system of world domination. Traffic along the Silk Road did not force Chinese views onto the peoples whose territories were crossed by raw or finished goods. Multiple languages, religions, and cultures coexisted and communicated without infringement, if not without occasional friction. Certainly there was knowledge transfer since every product processed embodies the skills and methods required to make it. The tools by which these journeys were accomplished were necessarily shared. Long before the Treaties of Westphalia parties in dispute respected the integrity of the Road’s travellers engaged in legitimate trade. In other words, that which is heralded today as an emergent “multi-polar world” already existed before the 13th century.
What changed those conditions? How did the western isthmus known today as Europe, with its relatively small population and more primitive economic and political culture, now coterminous with the Atlantic basin, become not merely the centre of political and social power (not to mention economic pre-eminence)? What is the significance of the cumulative events of the 20th century for the current foci of global conflict?
In April 1904, The Geographical Journal published “The Geographical Pivot in History”, a paper read to the Royal Geographical Society in January of that year. In 2016, Kurt M Campbell published The Pivot: the Future of American statecraft in Asia. However, Campbell’s arguments were not new. Already in 2011, Foreign Affairs published “America’s Pacific Century” penned under the name of then US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. Secretary Clinton concluded her article with the words, “This kind of pivot is not easy, but we have paved the way for it over the past two-and-a-half years, and we are committed to seeing it through as among the most important diplomatic efforts of our time.” (Clinton, November 2011). Mackinder concluded his 1904 lecture:
“… It may be well expressly to point out that the substitution of some new control of the inland area for that of Russia wound not tend to reduce the geographical significance of the pivot position. Were the Chinese, for instance, organized by the Japanese to overthrow the Russian Empire and conquer its territory, they might constitute the yellow peril to the world’s freedom just because they would add an oceanic frontage to the resources of the great continent, an advantage as yet denied to the Russian tenant of the pivot region.” (Mackinder, 1904)
We ought not to ignore here the convergence between British imperial strategic thought and that promulgated in the house publication of the Council on Foreign Relations, a sister to the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) when observing continuity in perspective and policy over the past century. However to understand the roots of this Weltanschauung it is necessary to look back a thousand years to the beginnings of Western hegemony.
Before considering that history a further digression can be useful. In 1993, the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington published—in that same mouthpiece of Anglo-American thought—an article that has been called one of the most famous (or most superficial) statements of Western strategy—“The Clash of Civilizations?” Two points in that article are particularly interesting. The first is Huntington’s attempt to outline the core types of modern conflict. In his chronology he writes:
“For a century and a half after the emergence of the modern international system with the Peace of Westphalia, the conflicts of the Western world were largely among princes—emperors, absolute monarchs and constitutional monarchs attempting to expand their bureaucracies, their armies, their mercantilist economic strength and, most important, the territory they ruled. In the process they created nation states, and beginning with the French Revolution the principal lines of conflict were between nations rather than princes. In 1793, as R R Palmer out it, ‘The wars of kings were over; the wars of peoples had begun.’ This nineteenth-century pattern lasted until the end of World War I. Then, as a result of the Russian Revolution and the reaction against it, the conflict of nations yielded to conflict of ideologies, first among communism, fascism-Nazism and liberal democracy, and then between communism and liberal democracy. During the Cold War, this latter conflict became embodied in the struggle between the two superpowers, neither of which was a nation state in the classical European sense and each of which defined its identity in terms of its ideology.” (Huntington, 1993)
From this chronology he concludes that the Cold War ended and gave birth to “interaction between the West and non-Western civilizations and among non-Western civilizations.” In fact the focus of his attention was the claim that the “secular West” (with its Christian foundations) would now be exposed to conflict with those countries where Islam prevails. From this perspective international conflict was within the West (as the dominant world civilization) until the collapse of the Soviet Union resolved those contradictions. The end of the age of ideology (a secular term) would now expose the West to all those religious and cultural contradictions that had essentially been suppressed or subsumed by the world order established after the atomic demolition of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By 2001 any doubt as to the location of the fault line was removed by the demolition of the World Trade Center towers attributed to the civilizational enemies of the West. Thus Huntington’s forecast despite its apparently naïve simplicity anticipated the subsequent Global War on Terror, a euphemism for the expansion of military operations beyond the Hindu Kush. Years later, another unapologetic icon of Anglo-American foreign policy, President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Bzrezinski, would repeatedly excuse the flippant arming of Afghani militias subscribing to radical Islamic doctrines as an insignificant side effect for which the destruction of the Soviet Union was a worthy reward. Secretary Clinton too would admit that this had been a price the US Congress and executive had agreed to pay for expelling the Soviet Union from Central Asia. One has to wonder at the insincerity or mendacity of a highly positioned Harvard academic attributing the “clash” with Islam to natural causes while his close associates in the US government were actively promoting the conditions that composed such a clash.
The other peculiar detail in Huntington’s essay is a map reproduced in the article. It is taken from W. Wallace, The Transformation of Western Europe (1990). Huntington wrote:
“The most significant dividing line in Europe… may well be the eastern boundary of Western Christianity in the year 1500. This line runs along what are now the boundaries between Finland and Russia and between the Baltic states and Russia, cuts through Belarus and Ukraine separating the more Catholic western Ukraine from Orthodox eastern Ukraine, swings westward separating Transylvania from the rest of Romania, and then goes through Yugoslavia almost exactly along the line now separating Croatia and Slovenia from the rest of Yugoslavia. In the Balkans this line, of course, coincides with the historic boundary between the Habsburg and Ottoman empires.” (Huntington, 1997)
While Huntington pays lip service to the conflict between Islam and Christianity going back to the Crusades, he omits both the prehistory of the Crusades and the substance of the crusade he reduced to the conflict of ideologies in the 20th century. In his determination to preserve Western supremacy, he has to engage in several distortions. However he can rely on the “common knowledge” in the West to nurture acceptance, even among his critics, of those omissions.
The line that marked on the Wallace map Huntington cites corresponds roughly to the termini of the two Silk Roads. Moreover, it corresponds to the frontier beyond which crusaders commissioned by the Roman pontiff had been unable to go in their mission to destroy any centres of Christianity that did not recognize papal supremacy. More recently it is the line to which the German Wehrmacht pressed with its Western Ukrainian Waffen-SS divisions in the war to destroy the Soviet Union. The southern reaches formed the theatre of operations for fascists in Croatia—with papal blessing—to wage war against Orthodoxy in the Balkans. (Deschner, 2013) That war was renewed in 1991 when overt and covert NATO action forced the disintegration of the Yugoslav Federation (with the aid of the same kind of “Islamic radicals” that were deployed in Afghanistan).
If the line were extended it would have to cut through the Adriatic, turn toward Cyprus and through Transjordan reach the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. The line of contact thus described would correspond almost entirely to that found today where Orthodox Eastern Ukraine, Serbia, Syria, Palestine and Yemen have been under attack by forces of Western civilization for the past several decades.
In other words, while Samuel Huntington was a pure Cold Warrior with all the deficiencies of that species of academic, his polemic is consistent with that of his ecclesiastical predecessors who preached the Crusades a millennium ago.
A discussion of the West’s contemporary duplicity or deception in the creation of the clash is beyond the scope of this essay. However, the actions of the North Atlantic alliance are consistent with their policies when viewed from that very limited historical perspective Huntington disingenuously applies to announce the deluge.
II.
To this day, the language of international relations is shaped by the Western—actually Anglo-American—worldview. The academic points of reference have admitted some considerations of “civilizational” differences. Thus a debate arose whether there was or ought to be a specifically Chinese theory of international relations or for that matter whether Russia’s international relations are culturally specific. The Non-Aligned Movement, formally constituted in the defunct Yugoslav Federation in 1961, had its roots in the League Against Imperialism League founded in Brussels in 1927. Before the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, attempts to change the character of international relations were based on an end to the colonialism still enshrined in the League of Nations. (Prashad, 2007) By 1955, when numerous leaders of new nation states convened the conference in Bandung, the concept of Cold War had so contaminated international relations that much of the original critique of imperialism had been distorted or diluted beyond recognition.
The term “Cold War” was an American invention. Bernard Baruch formalized the concept and arch-propagandist Walter Lippmann made it common speech. Officially the Cold War denoted what political scientists in the West called the standoff between US freedom and USSR expansion, enforced by the regrettable success of Soviet atomic weapons tests. The Manhattan Project, code name for the US atomic bomb development, was the largest single scientific research project of its time. By virtue of its compartmentalization, innumerable researchers and their institutions were engaged in a massive project shrouded in secrecy. The sums expended, like those later applied to the US space program, were so enormous that virtually every academic institution in the country received some of the largesse. One price paid for that was the parallel creation of an internal security system made funding and careers dependent upon compliance with official secrecy and official doctrine. Thus before US officials began their routine condemnation of state-run science and scholarship in the Soviet Union under the patronage of institutes of Marxism-Leninism, the US government had developed a more sophisticated and concealed mechanism for ideological conformity. This American “scholasticism” guided the teaching and research in the private cadre schools, like the ones that employed Huntington, Kissinger, and Brzezinski.
What did the “Cold War” actually describe? George Kennan made two poignant observations in papers he wrote in the immediate aftermath of World War II. The first was that the Soviet Union had been so decimated by the German onslaught that it would take at least 20 years for it to recover the economic conditions it had achieved prior to the war. The second was that the US would be unable to continue to consume some 60% of the world’s resources by some 13% of the world’s population without the maintenance of a permanent military establishment. These conclusions were enshrined in NSC 68 (1950), written mainly by Paul Nitze and classified top secret until the 1975. The aggressive posture outlined in the study provides a far more plausible explanation for the US occupation of Korea in 1945 and its subsequent war on the peninsula than any still used to defend the continued occupation of Korea. (Cumings, 1981) The record of US military and diplomatic actions since 1945 when viewed through the internal documents ought to discredit the very term “Cold War”. In fact, the US and its NATO partners waged a continuous war against the Soviet Union and a counter-insurgency against virtually all the peoples who sought nation state status, independence and self-determination. The approximately ten million dead in Indonesia, Korea, and Indochina (not to mention the enormous death toll in Latin America and Africa) were not casualties of “cold war” but one of extremely intense heat. These were not victims of Soviet or Chinese invasions but of repeated military aggression with the most modern weaponry available directed at mainly civilian populations. However, the guiding maxim of this “Cold War” in all its phases was “better dead than red”.
If the Non-Aligned Movement had no choice but to avoid alliances, the evidence shows that only a small segment of the populations concerned actually benefitted from these efforts at neutrality or balance. The concept served its purpose as a propaganda device by blurring the observation and response to real international relations phenomena. Like the secrecy regime of atomic weaponry, the fiction of the Cold War, stifled serious debate about what other kinds of international relations were possible. When in 1989 the Cold War was declared ended, there was talk about a “peace dividend”. In other words, 44 years of investment in unlimited war against mainly unarmed populations was to pay off. The dissolution of the Soviet Union was the profit earned by steadfast slaughter and perennial assassinations throughout the non-Western world. Forgotten was the fact that Lenin’s communism was simply “soviet power plus electrification of the entire country…” Forgotten was the fact that the October Revolution had brought industrial development to Russia in some twenty years before much of it was destroyed by the German invasion. Forgotten was the fact that under Stalin the Soviet Union replaced all that capacity in the course of a decade from its own resources. In short, the self-determination and economic development of the Soviet Union was achieved in less than 50 years without the genocide, global chattel slavery and colonization with which England, France and the US had industrialized but taken some two hundred years. Those lessons were concealed by the interminable Cold War rhetoric at every level of communications and policy.
III.
Clearly one of the intellectual accomplishments of the high officials, scholars and propagandists whose ideas were distilled in NSC 68 and subsequent planning and operational documents has been to instil a idea so deeply in the framework of international relations that even those attempts to reformulate the diplomatic and military-economic framework adopt the dogmatic position embodied in the “Cold War” as the frame of reference. The modern term “multi-polarity” remains merely a refurbished version of the non-alignment cliché. This is nowhere more evident than in the fractured vision applied to the series of conflicts along Mackinder’s land bridge from the Baltic to the Black Sea (and the Gulf of Aden).
Negotiations, if one can call them that, are described in Cold War terms. The great threat ostensibly to be avoided is a “new Cold War”. This hardly represents an innovation in modelling of the world system. On the contrary, it perpetuates the limitations of the order created by the merger of British and American imperial power anticipated by those who first theorized this power constellation in the Rhodes-Milner group before the Great War of 1914-1918. (Quigley, 1981) On one hand, the language of multi-polarity suggests that those nation states whose entry into international relations was conceded may expect their often-fragile sovereignty finally to be respected by all major powers. On the other hand, the consecutive extinction of independent nation states, e.g. Yugoslavia, Libya, Syria and the suffocation of nascent states like Palestine, belies such optimism.
Alternatively the multi-polar world is to be realized with the maturity of globalization. Yet the form this quasi-world system will take remains nebulous. The extinction of sovereign states or their stillbirth has liberated millions of people, not from local tyranny or war but from citizenship and homeland. The current trend appears not to favour any of the security of person and property the West has always claimed as the foundation of their particular form of civilization. Instead a kind of compulsory nomadism has entered international affairs yet without a corresponding legal, political or socio-economic regime by which these peoples can claim any of those rights and privileges or peace dividends supposed to accrue to them. In short, the present global system is creating a dichotomy between those absorbed by the system and those who are essentially system-less, extraterritorial by virtue of being denied any territory whatsoever. Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” has in fact promoted an end to civilization as condition of international relations.
Is this all accidental? Is it inevitable? Is the dissolution of the nation state the sine qua non of globalization? That has certainly been argued repeatedly at numerous sessions of the World Economic Forum. Since 1945, African nation states were granted independence subject to the condition that the borders drawn in Berlin in 1884 (perhaps George Orwell had this in mind when he titled his book 1984.) Since the end of the Cold War, those powers that divided the continental loot with King Leopold of the Belgians have not hesitated to change those boundaries at will, while frustrating any adjustments by the indigenous inhabitants. Africa was kept a continent of princes, albeit in vassalage to their former colonial masters. Among all the major powers the electricity-driven digital age is maturing. Meanwhile much of Africa has not even achieved Lenin’s minimalist development objective eighty years after the founding of the United Nations. Where is the international relations theory to explain that?
IV.
To return to one of the questions that the collapse of the nascent world system in the 13th century raises: what happened to bring the Atlantic basin to global dominance? If it was not the Italian Renaissance and the Enlightenment with its new scheme of modern scientific knowledge, then what was it?
While I was still a child my grandfather told me, although I no longer recall the question that provoked him, that “making money is easy, if that is all you want to do”. It took me many years before I grasped the significance of this casual aphorism. It was not my study of political economy or exposure to Business that provided the answer. Perhaps by genetic predisposition—my great-uncle was a member of a Roman Catholic teaching order—I have devoted an inordinate amount of my scholarly activity to studying the Latin Church. Twice I even applied unsuccessfully to join the priesthood. While my colleagues in the social sciences chuckled or even derided my attention to the Roman Catholic Church, I insisted against all argument that without an adequate understanding of the foundational institution of Christendom and hence of the West it was impossible to fully understand the politics or anything else in the West.
I am convinced even today that this is true and that the deficiencies in political theory as well as the theory of international relations are in large part due to a failure or even refusal to examine and understand the source of Western power in the organizational and psychological technology embedded in the Latin Church.
Here is not the place to elaborate all the relevant historical facets that should be assessed. However, there can be no doubt that the unique technology developed after Augustine of Hippo laid the groundwork in his Civitas Dei has been the single most powerful instrument for the creation of the West’s global system. Augustine was the mouthpiece of a small landed elite that shifted its power centre from Carthage (he was bishop of Hippo in today’s Algeria) to the capital on the River Tiber. (Deschner, 2010) There the Roman pontificate would claim—one is tempted to compare with the Chinese mandate from heaven—the absolute power over the entire world as the terrestrial Vicar of Christ, the anthropomorphic god, and the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This power was never claimed by any of the other patriarchs of the Christian faith. In fact the orthodoxy (claimed by Rome to be schismatic rather than orthodox) knew no such autocratic absolutism. The papal crusades were initially launched against Christians before Islam became a target. (Lea, 1905) (In fact the most Christian north of Africa was converted to Islam by masses revolting against the tyranny of Augustine’s sponsors. Hence they had been unable to challenge Islam before subduing those Christians who did not recognize Roman supremacy.)
The Roman ecclesiastical bureaucracy and its financial aggrandizement expanded throughout the European isthmus, from the British Isles to the Baltic along up to that line of contact depicted in the map Huntington borrowed to define the West. The unlimited ambitions of the Latin Church led it to harness the martial forces of princes to subdue peoples within a vast business enterprise remembered best by its financial derivative system of indulgences, i.e. promises of salvation or profit in heaven. (Lea, 1898) Failing to penetrate the barriers of Mackinder’s land bridge, the Church created the mission for propagation of the Gospel behind which the mariners of Venice and Genoa would sail under Portuguese and Spanish ensigns to plunder the Americas and permanently disrupt the international relations that prevailed in the Indian Ocean basin. Unlike the merchants and travellers on the Silk Roads or through the Malaccan Strait, the men of war were driven by single-minded greed for gold and souls. Souls of course were merely means to obtain more precious metals and other goods unavailable to the inhabitants of the Western isthmus.
The monasteries were proto-industrial sites. The trade in indulgences was the vehicle for monetizing souls. Whatever could not be conquered was penetrated by conversion. And all of this could be sanctified by Scripture. The missionary orders became the prototype for today’s business corporations. After the so-called secularization, these enterprises changed their rhetorical program to salvation through the profits from free trade. The modern business corporation grew from the chartered enterprises like the Dutch and British East India Companies. They had abandoned fealty to the pope but not to the economic model from which they were descended.
The Silk Roads comprised a nascent global system in which languages, cultures, religions comingled but did not exterminate each other. Differences nurtured trade and commerce expanded through the richness of the cultures of those whose activity fed the system. In contrast the British Empire expanded, following the Roman model, by exploiting difference to divide. Borrowing from the myth of the persecuted Christ, the recruits to the invading forces were encouraged to share in what became a system of global parasitism. Those who acquired privileged access to salvation were a minority who could then be used to leverage power against the majority in the target markets. Their rights had to be protected and the invaders saw their special mission in precisely that protection, divinely sanctioned. (Pagden, 1995)
Mackinder and Huntington were acolytes in this global church. For them salvation was the expansion of their church beyond the line of contact in the East. When Secretary Clinton pronounced again the pivot to Asia she was not talking about a hinge but a cavalry manoeuvre. Britain made infamous the motto of the “white man’s burden”—in fact another allusion to the Cross, with which the world’s darker peoples were identified. Less infamous is the crusading dogma of Manifest Destiny. The Anglo-Americans distinguished their particular form of Eden and their salvific mission not only with the extermination of the heathen on the continent they had occupied but the expansion from California to China. (Cumings, 2007) It was this mission that justified Douglas MacArthur’s “island hopping” campaign during WWII, the defeat of Japan and the occupation of Korea and Indochina. MacArthur’s father had been the military governor of the Philippines, after the defeat of Spain, the origin of American Pacific power. Only Chinese revolutionary vigour and the necessity of stabilizing the line of contact in Europe prevented all out war in Asia after 1951.
The story of the fall of the Silk Road system was certainly facilitated by numerous factors that had weakened the sovereigns of East and South Asia. There is no evidence that scientific or technological backwardness was at fault. In many fields China was far more advanced than the West. (Needham/ Ronan, 1980-95) However the numerically and economically inferior sovereigns of the West could not have achieved their domination without the religious zeal and single-minded drive for salvation/ profit that propelled their clerical-commercial-military bureaucracies. It is this single-mindedness and the successful penetration of most of the world’s societies by corporations organized and managed according to those same Catholic principles that forms the greatest obstacle to any restoration or reinvention of the New Silk Road or the Belt and Road Initiative.
It is therefore no accident that the line of contact has again become inflamed by Western belligerence from the Baltic to the Red Sea. The recovery of China with its potential for cooperation with Russia and the opportunity to restore the trade with Africa under more modern and effective conditions that poses the greatest threat to Western corporate (financial) hegemony. Ukraine and the Middle East—narrowly defined—are not separate theatres of war. They are the historical battlegrounds for Western crusaders. As in the 13th century, the West is incapable of raising the manpower and munitions needed to conquer the “heartland” or China. Their strategy has changed very little however over a thousand years. It is one of global terrorism waged behind religious banners by mercenaries and other proxies. In a reverse application of the doctrine of people’s war as Chairman Mao Zedong explained it, the West aims to win by not losing. The deployment of armed propaganda units and so-called “astroturf” grassroots organizations by the West is a strategy developed from reverse engineering of the national liberation movements in East Asia. (Sharp, 1985) Unlike people’s war, however, those who would claim this victory are the corporate-ecclesiastical-financial bureaucracy, e.g. the hedge fund prelates.
V.
If a genuinely new and sufficient international relations theory is to emerge, one that can adequately imagine a multi-polar system where difference enriches rather than divides peoples, then account has to be taken of the underlying defect in the Western theories of international relations. This includes an appropriate concept of sovereign and citizen actors and a corresponding framework for territorial integrity. It ought to recognize that the reduction of all relations to arrangements of cash flow, exchange of goods and services (licit and illicit), population flows where home and hearth are merely virtual, will not only impoverish the vast majority of the world’s population but undermine the value of human beings themselves, whether individually or in collectivities.
International relations modelled on financial arbitrage is the very opposite of civilization. As Gandhi famously responded to the question what he thought of Western civilization, “it would be a good idea.” The current wars in the Middle East ought to be seen in their proper geographical and historical perspective, not as deals to be made, e.g. here a peace, there a ceasefire, there an evacuation of an entire people, but as one piece of very dear fabric, once held together by the threads of cocoons from mulberry consumption, woven by skilled artisans for wear by one’s friends and neighbours. Silk is also an astoundingly resilient and versatile fabric. Its appeal should not be squandered.
Works cited
Abu-Lughod, Janet L. Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350, 1989
Cumings, Bruce, Dominion from Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power, 2007
Cumings, Bruce, The Origins of the Korean War, Vol. 1 (1981), Vol. 2 (1990)
Clinton, Hillary, “America’s Pacific Century”, Foreign Policy (2011)
Deschner, Karlheinz, Die Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (2010)
Deschner, Karlheinz, Die Politik der Päpste, 2013
Frank, Andre Gunder, Re-Orient: Global Economy in the Asian Age, 1997
Huntington, Samuel, “Crash of Civilizations?” Foreign Policy (1993)
Lea, Henry C., A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, 1906
Lea, Henry C., A History of Auricular Confession and Indulgences in the Latin Church, 1896
Mackinder, H R, “The Geographical Pivot”, The Geographical Journal (1904)
Needham, Joseph (abridgement by Colin Ronan), Science and Civilization in China (The Shorter Science and Civilization in China), 1980-95
Pagden, Anthony, Lords of All the World, 1995
Peckham, Morse, Explanation and Power, 1979
Prashad, Vijay, The Darker Nations, 2007
Quigley, Carroll, The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden, 1981
Robins, Nick, The Corporation that Changed the World: How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational, 2006.
Sederberg, Peter, The Politics of Meaning, 1984
Sharp, Gene, National Security Through Civilian-based Defense, 1985.
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