Orientalism and the geoculture of the World System: Discursive othering, political economy and the cameralist division of labor in Habsburg Central Europe (1713-1815)

Autor: Klemens Kaps
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2016
Předmět:
Zdroj: Journal of World-Systems Research, Vol 22, Iss 2, Pp 315-348 (2016)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 1076-156X
DOI: 10.5195/jwsr.2016.619
Popis: This article addresses the question of to what degree the concept of geoculture can be brought in line with research on Orientalist stereotypes and imaginary. Following Said’s original definition of orientalism discourses of the 18th-century political economy are reassessed by focusing on their perception of spatial hierarchies in Eastern Europe. This article reconsiders these discourses as an active factor in the struggle for power and a tool in the hands of the geopolitical interests of absolutist monarchs in Prussia, the Habsburg Monarchy, and Russia in the age of mercantilism, as demonstrated by the Partitions of Poland-Lithuania. By focusing on the Habsburg Monarchy between the Spanish War of Succession and the Congress of Vienna, it is demonstrated here that, territorial landlocked empires within Europe used a similar language as colonial maritime empires in order to justify their geopolitical expansion and territorial domination of Eastern Europe. In a second step, it is shown that this discourse was part of the geopolitical culture of the World System and was instrumental in setting ideological conditions for cameralist-driven institutional transformations in favor of the core regions within the Habsburg dominions in Central Europe.
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