Heterogeneous coalitions and social revolutions

We have explained the presence of heterogeneous winning coalitions in social revolutions. In an overcrowded agrarian society, two almost identical non-productive enforcers, the landed political elite, collude and bargain over transfers with one of the two peasants to contest over a piece of land, as property rights for land are not well defined. In any other scenario, neither the grand coalition nor the coalition of two peasants and one enforcer forms, thereby deposing the other enforcer with positive probability. So, social revolutions never occur. If foreign wars weaken an enforcer, such as in China (1911), France, and Russia, adding one unit of capital makes the coalition of the peasant, the now worker, and one of the enforcers (now an industrial political elite) attractive: The excess labor can work with it; the weaker enforcer retaliates less and the stronger one more, if excluded. However, if the weaker one (the still-landed political elite) proposes first, a grand coalition forms in which he or she gets less than the other members do (desertion). There is conflict among peasants and among landed elites; thus, the concept of a coalition is more appropriate than that of a class.

The Khmer Empire

Founded in 802 CE, until its demise in the fourteenth century CE, the Khmer Empire held sway over much of Southeast Asia. At the heart of the empire was the highly urbanized capital city Yashodarapura (Angkor), containing the royal palace, the state temple, and enormous artificial reservoirs or barays. The empire’s numerous provinces were connected to the central bureaucracy by a system of major and secondary roads. In a moneyless economy, taxes were levied in kind, principally rice, and market transactions were by barter. Over these roads traveled the imperial armies at times of foreign wars or invasion, or local revolt; army units consisted of foot soldiers, horse cavalry, and war elephants. Several factors led to the empire’s collapse, including agricultural failure and the silting of the barays; and outside attack, especially from the newly powerful Thai.

Introduction

The Introduction locates major islands in the seas around England and indicates how their relationships to the rest of the kingdom reflected legacies of history, jurisdictional peculiarities. constitutional arrangements, foreign wars, and commerce. It previews island involvement in the stresses and struggles of English history associated with state formation, Reformation, Revolution, Restoration, and modernity. The Channel Islands, the Isles of Scilly, the Isle of Wight, the Isle of Man and other offshore territories were difficult to administer and sometimes prone to neglect. Yet their strategic positions gave them value and importance that far outweighed their size. Though English governments saw the islands as appurtenances or dependencies of the state, the islanders more often regarded their homes as privileged places.

Islands in an Island Empire

This concluding chapter returns to the problem of anomalous and competing jurisdictions in a world of quickening economy, expanding global ambition, and extended foreign wars. Looking forward through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries towards the present, it considers the survival and mutation of distinctive offshore legal arrangements, amid the changing relationships of the archipelagic periphery, the metropolitan core, and the international order. Like other parts of the expanding British world, the islands gave allegiance to English authorities while maintaining their distinctive characters. Island communities prospered with naval, military, and commercial investment, and developed as desirable places to live or visit. From London’s point of view, the islands could appear as liabilities as much as assets, resources as well as responsibilities, costs as much as benefits. Though modernized and better connected, England’s islands remain, to varying degrees, as they always were, strange, separate, and perversely independent.

Carceral Shadows

The chapter stretches across two centuries, from the antebellum period to the dawn of the twenty-first century, to reveal the blueprint of immigration control that marked, regulated, controlled, and expelled migrant peoples from the nation. This immigration control regime racially targeted Asian and Latina/o noncitizens as “racial bookends” to the twentieth century that allowed the state to associate in the public mind migration with criminality while issuing a strict legal definition that catalogued the migration of these two racial peoples as “criminal aliens,” invoking “’perpetual foreignness.” In this long survey of immigration control, the chapter considers how particular moments of economic crisis and depression, public health fears, foreign wars, and national security anxieties fed racial fears over new migrant groups that were subsequently labeled as “enemy aliens” and criminalized within an immigration control regime that resorted to carceral practices. What made this detention regime distinct from criminal law was the practice of plenary power and administrative punishment where the state enacted criminal prosecutorial power over immigration but denied due process to noncitizens.

Secret Wars

This is the first book to systematically analyze the ways that powerful states covertly participate in foreign wars, showing a recurring pattern of such behavior stretching from World War I to U.S.-occupied Iraq. Investigating what governments keep secret during wars and why, the book argues that leaders maintain the secrecy of state involvement as a response to the persistent concern of limiting war. Keeping interventions “backstage” helps control escalation dynamics, insulating leaders from domestic pressures while communicating their interest in keeping a war contained. It shows that covert interventions can help control escalation, but they are almost always detected by other major powers. However, the shared value of limiting war can lead adversaries to keep secret the interventions they detect, as when American leaders concealed clashes with Soviet pilots during the Korean War. Escalation concerns can also cause leaders to ignore covert interventions that have become an open secret. From Nazi Germany's role in the Spanish Civil War to American covert operations during the Vietnam War, the book presents new insights about some of the most influential conflicts of the twentieth century. Parting the curtain on the secret side of modern war, the book provides important lessons about how rival state powers collude and compete, and the ways in which they avoid outright military confrontations.