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Topic: Oriental despotism

	Hydraulic despotism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Hydraulic despotism is a term for despotic rule supported by control of a single, necessary resource.
		Frank Herbert's Dune establishes a universe centered on a hydraulic despotism: The spice, Melange, is essential for, among other things, space travel; it is said that "He who controls the spice controls the universe".
		In the film Total Recall, the air on Mars is controlled by a central authority, which acts as a hydraulic despotism.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Hydraulic_despotism (230 words)

	AllRefer.com - despotism (Political Science: Terms And Concepts) - Encyclopedia
		In Greek usage, a despot was ruler of a household and master of its slaves.
		In the Byzantine Empire, despot was a title of honor of the emperors and their relatives and of vassal princes of the tributary states and dignitaries of the Eastern Church.
		The 18th-century doctrine of the Enlightenment influenced such absolutist rulers as Frederick the Great of Prussia, Catherine II of Russia, and Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II toward a rule of beneficent intent known as benevolent despotism.
	reference.allrefer.com /encyclopedia/D/despotis.html (284 words)

	Hydraulic empire - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		A hydraulic empire, also known as a hydraulic despotism or water monopoly empire, arises through the need for flood control and irrigation, which requires central coordination and a specialized bureaucracy.
		The term was coined by the German American historian Karl A. Wittfogel (1896 - 1988), in Oriental Despotism (1957).
		Needham argued that the Chinese government was not despotic, that was not dominated by a priesthood, and that Wittfogel fails to realize the necessity and presence of bureaucracy in modern Western civilization.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Hydraulic_empire (433 words)

	inq: Journal
		Despotism has been a classification employed, not only with argumentative energies, but also with the rationale to categorize and demean political cultures presumed to be contrary to the notion of freedom and is often directly linked to a particular understanding of liberty (Richter, 1973, p.
		The conception of despotism originated with the Greeks with their use of the model of the master-slave relationship in describing what they considered oriental rule, which was for the most part mysterious to the Greek city-states that were threatened by the prospect of the Persian Achaemenid Empire (559-330 B.C.).
		Despotism was deeply repulsive to the Greeks who considered themselves as possessors of reason, which for them followed in recognizing their own capability and the practice of governing themselves.
	www.inq.pdx.edu /journal/article7.html (3099 words)

	Knox, The Spirit of Despotism (1824 ed.) ToC: The Online Library of Liberty (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-11)
		Under a despotic government, to steal through life unobserved, to creep, with timid caution, through the vale of obscurity, is the first wisdom; and to be suffered to die in old age, in the course of nature, without the prison, the chain, the halter, or the axe, the highest pitch of human felicity.
		Despotism is indeed an Asiatic plant; but brought over by those who have long lived in Asia, and nursed in a hot house with indefatigable care, it is found to vegetate, bloom, and bear fruit, even in our cold, ungenial climate.
		In times when the jacobitical, tory, selfish, and despotic principles rear their heads, and think opportunities favour their efforts for revival, the press is bought up as a powerful engine of oppression.
	oll.libertyfund.org /Home3/HTML.php?recordID=0239 (17304 words)

	Commentary Magazine - Oriental Despotism, by Karl Wittfogel (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-11)
		...He uses this theory to elicit the origins of Soviet Communism: "hydraulic bureaucratic despotism" was brought to Russia by the Tartars, set its stamp on Russian society, and the tradition of centralized despotism persisted through Czarist days to Communism, which he defines as generalized industrial state slavery...
		...the Orient, which had appeared as familiar to S massive, despotic, and permanent, seemed to be on the point of crumbling away, and it was PnoFEssoR generally assumed that Asia would have to mented acco adopt European modes of existence in order to low-traveling survive...
		...The Oriental despot stood at the apex of a despotic society, whose members were "crouching and abject before a victor and Lord.
	www.commentarymagazine.com /Summaries/V27I1P88-1.htm (2349 words)

	ACL - Peterapril272003 (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-11)
		Students of government, such as Montesquieu, were primarily concerned with the distressing personal effects of Oriental despotism, students of economy vith its managerial and proprietary range The classical economists particularly were impressed by the large water works maintained for purposes of irrigation and communication.
		Its ever-critical children could combat the fragmented despotism of privilege and power, because they did not live under a system of "general slavery." {footnote a} Indeed they were so far removed from the image of absolutist power that they felt no urge to study its substance.
		The Soviet ideologists, who in 1931 declared the concept of Oriental society and a "functional" ruling bureaucracy politically impermissible, no matter what the "pure truth" might be, cynically admitted that their objections were inspired by political interests and not by scientific considerations.
	nord.twu.net /acl/peter4-27-03.html (9858 words)

	Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2004.11.32 (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-11)
		This is the subject of the second chapter (17-26), in which M. discusses the evidence for an unwritten Macedonian nomos and the notion of oriental despotism in Greek political thinking.
		As regards the latter, M. concludes that condemnation of oriental despotism was the opposition's main justification for their resistance to Alexander's autocracy.
		Chapter 3 (27-54) is concerned with factions at the court of Philip II and the bloodshed accompanying Alexander's accession to the throne.
	ccat.sas.upenn.edu /bmcr/2004/2004-11-32.html (1782 words)

	The Constant Feud
		The same condition probably held at the northern tier too, although there are signs that the percentage of free peasantry in Iran and in the early states of Asia Minor was greater than in Egypt, Mesopotamia and the valley of the Indus.
		With the Urban Civilization and the despotism that came with it, the situation of the craftsmen and the priesthood changed.
		As the Oriental Despotisms became ossified societies, the only way for a ruler to enrich the ruling elite, whose support kept him on the throne, was by paying them with the spoils of conquests.
	www.eg-ban.com /constant-feud11.html (12587 words)

	Orientalism revisited by Keith Windschuttle (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-11)
		Oriental Studies is a composite area of scholarship comprising philology, linguistics, ethnography, and the interpretation of culture through the discovery, recovery, compilation, and translation of Oriental texts.
		Where Orientalism goes even further astray, he claims, is its anachronistic assumption that Islam has possessed a unity since the seventh century, which can be read, via the Koran, into every facet of, say, modern Egyptian or Algerian society.
		The only plausible connection he establishes between Oriental scholarship and imperialism is the example of the Comte de Volney, who wrote two travel books on Syria and Egypt in the 1780s suggesting that the decaying rule of the Ottoman Empire in those countries made them ripe for political change.
	www.newcriterion.com /archive/17/jan99/said.htm (4274 words)

	Al-Ahram Weekly \| Books Supplement \| Greeks of the World: Victor Hugo looks East
		Franck Laurent's Victor Hugo face à la conquête de l'Algerie and Claude Millet's Le Despote oriental are available separately from the other 11 essays, the series as a whole being supplied in a smart presentation case, which includes the inevitable CD-ROM.
		Millet traces Hugo's views on "Oriental despotism" in detail, noting that many nineteenth- century Europeans tended to superimpose Aristotle's division of "Asian despotism" from "Greek democracy" onto contemporary geography, drawing on a venerable European literature that imagined "Asian and African nations to be subject...
		However, he did not think that this condition was innate, instead considering that French-led reform could put an end to Oriental despotism in the region while staving off the greater threat of "Asian despotism" represented by Russia.
	weekly.ahram.org.eg /2002/585/bo4.htm (1299 words)

	despotism on Encyclopedia.com
		DESPOTISM [despotism] government by an absolute ruler unchecked by effective constitutional limits to his power.
		Bibliography: See L. Krieger, ed., An Essay on the Theory of Enlightened Despotism (1975); K. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (1981); F. Maitland, The Theory of Despotism in Germany (1988).
		Time to end judicial tyranny: the judicial despotism the Founders warned against is happening today.
	www.encyclopedia.com /html/d1/despotis.asp (480 words)

	Article (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-11)
		Asians were therefore unprogressive because ‘oriental despots’ ruled their societies.
		We are told that, ‘oriental’ religions and despots ‘blocked’ the development of free enterprise system in Asia while Christianity encouraged it in Europe. Therefore, it was but natural for capitalism to evolve in Europe and not in Asia.
		Oriental empires and despotic rulers stifled economic development of cities as commercial centres.
	www.epw.org.in /showArticles.php?root=2005&leaf=05&filename=8653&filetype=html (4350 words)

	The Case Against Wittfogel
		That he changed it to "Oriental Despotism," with all that that implies, may be considered by later ages as one of the most unfortunate intellectual casualties in the "cold war".
		Whereas seventeenth-century theorists of despotic rule had conceived of it as a regime natural to the Ottoman empire, Safavid Persia and Moghul India, Montesquieu believed it to be typical of China as well.
		Wittfogel's reading of China as a hydraulic despotism, which was aimed inter alia at undermining John Fairbank's Grand Alliance distinction between 'fascist-conservative and communist-progressive forms of totalitarianism', was soon adopted widely in Western comparative social science literature.
	users.cyberone.com.au /myers/wittfogel2.html (6797 words)

	The Asia Model - Civilization or Despotism?
		In some cases the rise of hydraulic despotism was probably contested by the heads of poverful clans or by religious groups eager to preserve their traditional autonomy.
		Tatar rule alone among the three major Oriental influences affecting Russia was decisive both in destroying the non-Oriental Kievan society and in laying the foundations for the despotic state of Muscovite and post-Muscovite Russia.
		Marx commented on the despot's position as the actual and apparent coordinator of the population's labor for hydraulic ancl other communal works; and he considered the individual land-possessing peasant "au fond the property, the slave" of the head of the Oriental community.
	users.cyberone.com.au /myers/wittfogel.html (20512 words)

	Tributary empire and state segmentation: (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-11)
		Either the empire has been perceived as benevolent civiliser, a harbinger of peace, law and order; or, on the contrary, it has been portrayed as a ruthless leviathan, an abusive Oriental despotism and insatiable plundering machine, destroying the civil society it was supposed to govern.
		The late empire, on the other hand, suffers from the image of an Oriental despotism.
		On the other hand, students of the so-called Oriental despotisms proper, the Ottoman, Mughal and Ming/Ch’ing empires have now seriously undermined the old conception of these states.
	www.classics.unc.edu /wgems/abstract18.html (645 words)

	Kingship in the Early Modern World
		One saw oriental regimes as tyrannical and despotic; the other one idealised oriental political systems as possessing the qualities that Europeans were struggling for.
		All of these people were thinking in terms of theoretical positions and practical advice for European rulers, in which the oriental examples were often used as an alternative vision of politics, to be admired or denigrated.
		Europeans came to define more sharply than ever the importance of political liberty by contemplating this "monstrosity": a system in which there was no political and civil liberty, in which law could be changed arbitrarily, in which there was no distinction between religious and secular law.
	www.fathom.com /course/21701738/session4.html (1842 words)

	t20
		And one of the first things that happened, you see, is the attempt to destroy these old clichÈs, and for people to write their own history for the first time, instead of their history and their actuality being written, as it were, by European scholars.
		Removes from the Oriental any trace perhaps of history or development, that there's an idea that, well, no matter, they may acquire cars, they may look like us, they may even use the same forks and knives that we do, but in reality they're really Oriental.
		And for me, the most important aspect of this historical situation of a ?text is also its geographical location, that is to say, try to understand where in a society your ?text comes from and where in a society the ?text is pointed to.
	www.well.com /user/mp/t20.html (2761 words)

	Chapter Foundation Of Constantinople. of History of The Decline And Fall of The Roman Empire by Gibbon (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-11)
		The acquiescence of the provincials encouraged their governors to acquire, or perhaps to usurp, a discretionary power of employing the rack, to extort from vagrants or plebeian criminals the confession of their guilt, till they insensibly proceeded to confound the distinction of rank, and to disregard the privileges of Roman citizens.
		But this reflection, which would tend to alleviate the miseries of despotism, is contradicted at least by the history of the Roman empire; which accuses the same princes of despoiling the senate of its authority, and the provinces of their wealth.
		Without abolishing all the various customs and duties on merchandises, which are imperceptibly discharged by the apparent choice of the purchaser, the policy of Constantine and his successors preferred a simple and direct mode of taxation, more congenial to the spirit of an arbitrary government.
	www.bibliomania.com /2/1/62/109/25659/18.html (644 words)

	Dictionary of East European History Since 1945 by Joseph Held [ISBN: 0313265194] - Find Cheap Textbook Prices & Save BIG
		Ceausescu ruled by relying on the Securitate, as the secret police was called, and he succeeded in intimidating almost everyone in society.
		He eventually resembled an oriental despot, and nepotism, the hallmark of oriental despotism, became a means through which he conducted his everyday business."
		The term oriental despot is patently absurd and disgustingly racist.
	www.gettextbooks.com /isbn_0313265194.html (464 words)

	CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Byzantine Literature
		In Byzantine literature, therefore, four different cultural elements are to be reckoned with: the Greek, the Christian, the Roman, and the Oriental.
		As previously stated, the chief kinds of poetry during the period of the decline (eleventh to thirteenth century) were satire and parody, didactic and hortatory poetry, the begging-poem, and the erotic romance.
		The love-romance of the Greek Middle Ages is the result of the fusion of the sophistical Alexandro-Byzantine romance and the medieval French popular romance, on the basis of an Hellenistic view of life and nature.
	www.newadvent.org /cathen/03113a.htm (11040 words)

	\| Book Review \| Journal of World History, 14.2 \| The History Cooperative
		Instead, Europe's hereditary monarchs, first as defenders of confessional orthodoxy, and later as symbols of national identity, presided over the rise of the West, encouraging the dynamism of the commercial middle class and adjusting their claims to rule to fit the new secular and utilitarian rhetoric of authority.
		Furthermore, the capriciousness and unpredictability of personal rule and a tendency to devote inordinate resources to embellish the ruler diverted precious energy, once again, from the development of manufacturing and the infrastructural improvements necessary to compete, in the long run, with the West.
		Undoubtedly, Spellman's static image of Chinese and Islamic despotism could also benefit from a similarly nuanced recognition of informal patterns of negotiation and resistance, which served as well to limit the reach of kingship outside Europe.
	www.historycooperative.org /journals/jwh/14.2/br_5.html (1117 words)

	INDONESIA: Golkar and the legacy of `oriental despotism'
		A central aspect of this political role was to back the despotic rule of local bureaucrats, who acted and still try to act as virtual petty lords in the provinces, districts and villages.
		During the 1950s and 1960s, the despotism of this state machine was constrained to a certain extent by the growth of the Communist and other left parties and the explosion of popular struggles against the imperialist exploitation of the Indonesian masses.
		The huge social layer of local despotic officials is very conscious that reformasi total, as demanded by the students and sections of the urban masses, threatens their very existence.
	www.greenleft.org.au /back/2001/439/439p22.htm (1704 words)

	History News Network
		Taylor and Wittfogel were back in the fold; out in the cold were the many scholars of Asia who had their careers ruined or their character assassinated in the 1950s (Lattimore taught at the University of Leeds for decades).
		Furthermore, lo and behold, one set of Orientals has kept it alive: journalists use the term time and again to describe North Korea, without any hint of qualifying or questioning their position.
		The idea that the DPRK is a pure form of “Stalinism in the East” goes back to the 1940s, and was constantly reinforced by Berkeley’s Robert Scalapino, a Cold War scholar who came along in the late 1950s and benefited as much as anyone from the Fairbank-Taylor accommodation.
	hnn.us /roundup/entries/19249.html (6841 words)

	The Last Challenge - The Beginning
		Let's assume that the increase of 480 million people between the years 1000 Ad and 1750 AD was in the same proportion as the populations of the total.
		In the East, where the ruling political system was Oriental Despotism, then, before and after, including today, the additional people only increased the number of slaves.
		The feudal system of the Middle Ages assigned the land to the vassals of the king, which was subdivided again to the vassals of the vassals and to the knights.
	www.eg-ban.com /challenge05.html (2787 words)

	ARHT1001 header
		Orientalism was a diverse and complex process by which the authority of the western Orientalist was established and in which the West defined itself through a subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Islamic cultures.
		In the first half of this lecture we will focus on a range of stereotypes of the Oriental and the western Orientalist.
		In particular looking at Napoleonic imagery, religious scenes, stereotypes of Oriental despotism and the fantasy of the harem.
	teaching.arts.usyd.edu.au /ArtHistory/ARHT1001/pages/orientalism.shtml (319 words)

	RevolutionaryLeft.com -> Marxism Without the Crap! - The Materialist Interpretation o
		Feudalism: the replacement of a single despot by a small number of mini-despots who owned huge tracts of agricultural holdings, with laborors being the property of the estate rather than the "lord" (serfs).
		The specific social construct of despotism and feudalism that was Russia by the beginning of the 20th century was cracking up; beginning in the 1890s, there were localized famines and peasant rebellions every year.
		It's interesting to note, however, that back in the 1400s, China was poised on the edge of a transition from despotism to at least proto-capitalism...the nobility and aristocracy managed to stop it, but it was a near thing.
	www.revolutionaryleft.com /index.php?showtopic=6371 (2530 words)

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