De Gruyter Brill on the Wire

To the average landlubber, the merchant ships that crossed the Atlantic Ocean in 1800 seem little different from their counterparts two centuries beforehand. By detailing how these ships were built and operated, though, Philip Reid shows in his book The Merchant Ship in the British Atlantic, 1600-1800 (Brill, 2020), how these vessels underwent considerable adaptation over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries in response to evolving technologies and the demands of their industry. As Reid explains, the first ships dispatched by the English across the Atlantic at the start of the period were sturdy galleons known for their versatility. These vessels, however, proved less profitable than their Dutch counterparts, which were less sturdy but far more capacious. Over time, British shipbuilders adapted to the Dutch example, with evolution occurring slowly though changes introduced at a variety of different points in the design and construction process. Nevertheless, continuities persisted, as shipbuilders and their operators often found themselves at the limits of what was possible given the intended purposes of the vessels and the boundaries of what was possible with the nautical technology of the era.

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In 1999, the Organization of African Unity cited dissatisfaction with the solely “global” approach that the UN had applied in their International Decade for Disabled Persons (1983–1992), and declared an African Decade of Persons with Disabilities (1999–2009) to explore “local” approaches.

Was the UN’s approach truly detached from the ground reality? In this podcast, Sam De Schutter discusses his award-winning paper “A Global Approach to Local Problems? How to Write a Longer, Deeper, and Wider History of the International Year of Disabled Persons in Kenya” published in Brill’s Diplomatica, where he argues that to get to the truth historians must go beyond the global-local dichotomy. Sam de Schutter won the Brill/Diplomatica Mattingly Prize 2019 for this paper.

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The current neoliberal era has seen a paradigm shift in terms of economic liberalization, such as policies on privatization, deregulation, and globalization. Although neoliberalization promises to lessen the burden on government entities to provide welfare, it has evidently caused a greater economic and political divide, especially in advanced capitalist states.

In part 2 of this podcast episode, Cory Blad, Professor and Chair at Department of Sociology, Manhattan College, uses the example of Sweden and Finland to explain how neoliberalization plays a role in mitigating socioeconomic and political hardships—and how they can be overcome. His discussion is an extension of the book chapter “Searching for Saviors: Economic Adversities and the Challenge of Political Legitimacy in the Neoliberal Era,” which is published in the Brill series Critical Global Studies.

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The current neoliberal era has seen a paradigm shift in terms of economic liberalization, such as policies on privatization, deregulation, and globalization. Although neoliberalization promises to lessen the burden on government entities to provide welfare, it has evidently caused a greater economic and political divide, especially in advanced capitalist states.

In part 1 of this podcast episode, Cory Blad, Professor and Chair at Department of Sociology, Manhattan College, uses the example of Sweden and Finland to explain how neoliberalization plays a role in mitigating socioeconomic and political hardships—and how they can be overcome. His discussion is an extension of the book chapter “Searching for Saviors: Economic Adversities and the Challenge of Political Legitimacy in the Neoliberal Era,” which is published in the Brill series Critical Global Studies.

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Modern science uses the “randomized controlled trial”—whereby people are randomly allocated either the drug or a placebo—as a gold standard to find out whether a newly discovered drug works.

In this podcast, Dr. Martin Edwards, a general practitioner and retired clinician affiliated to the University of London, discusses the British Medical Research Council’s exploitation of the term “controlled” to establish “controlled trials” as the gold standard for therapeutic evaluation. His discussion is an extension of his paper “Control and the Therapeutic Trial: Rhetoric and Experimentation in Britain, 1918-48,” which is published in Brill’s Clio Medica.

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What does it mean to be a political subject? This is one of the key questions asked by Massimo Modonesi in ​The Antagonistic Principle: Marxism and Political Action (2019)​, published as part of the Historical Materialism book series from Brill and Haymarket books. The book takes on the theories of Marx and Gramsci to develop a philosophical triad of subalternity-antagonism-autonomy as a way of studying political subjectification under oppressive conditions and the potential for resistance. The book then looks at political developments in South and Latin America, trying to understand the underlying dynamics of both where it’s coming from, and what its possibilities are for anticapitalist resistance.

Massimo Modonesi is professor and chair of the Political and Social Sciences Faculty at the Autonomous National University in Mexico, and is the author of numerous books on political theory and history in Latin America, his most recent in English being ​Subalternity, Antagonism, Autonomy: Constructing the Political Subject.​ He is a member of the coordinating committee of the International Gramsci Society.

Maria Vignau served as a research assistant under Modonesi, and now teaches while working on her PhD at the University of Washington in Seattle.

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The recent COVID-19 pandemic has received unprecedented media coverage in the past 3 months. A large part of this coverage includes comparisons of the ongoing crisis to some major crises of the past, including the SARS epidemic of 2002-2003. In a new study titled “When the Analogy Breaks: Historical References in Flemish News Media at the Onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic” published in Brill’s Journal of Applied History, Dr. Bram De Ridder from KU Leuven, Belgium, analyzes how three Flemish media outlets covered the crisis recently and how their misplaced historical analogies could affect public perception, causing a problem in dealing with the current pandemic.

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In German law, a person strongly suspected of having committed a crime can be placed in pretrial detention; but a certain percentage of such people are ultimately acquitted.

In this podcast, Dr. Jorg Kinzig, Director of the Institute of Criminology, University of Tubingen, discusses his explorations of why this is. What do acquittals entail? Does Germany need a system and policy change? Dr. Kinzig speaks based on his paper “The Acquittal (After Pretrial Detention)—a Rare but Fascinating Phenomenon of the Criminal Justice System”, published in Brill’s European Journal of Crime, Criminal Law, and Criminal Justice.

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Elizabeth A. Cecil's Mapping the Pāśupata Landscape: Narrative, Place, and the Śaiva Imaginary in Early Medieval North India (Brill, 2020) weaves together material from the Sanskrit text Skandapurāṇa, physical landscapes, inscriptions, monuments, and icons to provide groundbreaking insight into the earliest known community of Śiva devotees: the Pāśupatas. Through examining how the Pāśupatas were emplaced in regional Indian landscapes, this book explores issues of belonging, identity, community building and place-making in Early Medieval India.

For information on your host Raj Balkaran’s background, see rajbalkaran.com/scholarship.

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Selective breeding of dogs currently helps meet the high demand for purebred dogs, but there are concerns about the ethicality of this practice.

In this podcast, Dr. Candace C. Croney of Purdue University talks about commercial breeding practices in the United States, social opposition to the practice, and the potential consequences of its outright abolition on the beings central to the discussion: dogs themselves. Her discussion is an extension of her paper “Turning up the Volume on Man’s Best Friend: Ethical Issues Associated with Commercial Dog Breeding,” which is published in Brill’s Journal of Applied Animal Ethics Research.

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