All Ages

How were state formation and early modern politics shaped by the state’s proclaimed obligation to domestic welfare? Drawing on a wide range of historical scholarship and primary sources, this book demonstrates that a public interest-based discourse of state legitimation was common to early modern England, Japan, and China. This normative platform served as a shared basis on which state and society could negotiate and collaborate over how to attain good governance through providing public goods such as famine relief and infrastructural facilities. The terms of state legitimacy opened a limited yet significant political space for the ruled. Through petitioning and protests, subordinates could demand that the state fulfil its publicly proclaimed duty and redress welfare grievances. Conflicts among diverse dimensions of public interest mobilized cross-regional and cross-sectoral collective petitions; justified by the same norms of state legitimacy, these petitions called for fundamental political reforms and transformed the nature of politics.

Wenkai He (Ph.D., MIT, 2007), is associate professor of Social Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Before joining the Division of Social Science of HKUST, he was An Wang postdoctoral fellow at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. His research interests include comparative historical analysis in social science, political economy of state formation, and the political and economic history of China. His manuscript, The Paths toward the Modern Fiscal State: Early Modern England, Meiji Japan, and Qing China, is published by the Harvard University Press in 2013. His current research project, funded by Hong Kong’s Research Grants Council (RGC), is a comparative study about legitimation of state power through social policies such as plague prevention, famine relief and river works in early modern England and 18-19th century Japan and China.

One of the most underreported human catastrophes of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is the ongoing cultural and existential erasure of the country’s Nadazov Greek population, which, prior to the war, constituted the third-largest ethnic group (after Ukrainians and Russians) in the bitterly contested Donetsk region. Most of these Greeks were concentrated in and around the city of Mariupol, which they founded after Catherine the Great had resettled them from their ancient homeland of Crimea in 1778. This imperial precedent—and the cultural prejudice used to justify its expedience—would persist. The Soviet policy of mass persecution of Greeks, which included deportations, executions, and bans on their language and culture, started with the NKVD’s so-called “Greek Operation” under Stalin in 1937 and continued for many years thereafter. For today’s Nadazov Greeks, who come from a region of Ukraine that has been militarized since 2014 and much of which was effectively destroyed in some of the heaviest fighting of 2022, Russia’s war and occupation now pose a question of both cultural preservation and immediate survival.

–

Tetiana (Tatiana) Liubchenko is an associate professor of Greek Linguistics at Kyiv National Linguistic University (Ukraine). She obtained her undergraduate degree in Philology (English language and literature, Modern Greek) from Mariupol State University in 2000 and received her PhD in Greek Philology from the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv in 2009. She has published over 50 articles in various subfields of linguistics. Tetiana was head of the Modern Greek and Translation Studies section at Kyiv National Linguistic University. She also served as an expert at the Hennadi Udovenko Diplomatic Academy of Ukraine through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine; an expert at the Institute of Education Content Modernization through the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine, which supervised the publication of school textbooks under state order; and she was head of the All-Ukrainian School Olympiad in Greek Language and Literature. As a representative of the Greek population of Ukraine, she has been participating in the organization of numerous international events at the diplomatic level for more than 25 years. With the outbreak of full-scale war in Ukraine, she moved to Greece, where she works as a translator and interpreter and serves as a representative of the Union of the Greeks of Ukraine in Greece, a non-profit organization. Her most recent projects include translating and participating in a 2023 documentary about the Ukrainians and Greeks of Ukraine who now live in Greece as a result of the war (part of the “Thessaloniki The Human Histories” TV series). She is also working on launching a website dedicated to the preservation of the legacy of Ukraine’s Nadazov Greeks.

Ayse Zarakol is Professor of International Relations at the University of Cambridge and a Politics Fellow at Emmanuel College. Her research is at the intersection of IR and historical sociology, focusing on East-West relations in the international system, history and future of world order(s), conceptualizations of modernity and sovereignty, rising and declining powers, and Turkish politics in a comparative perspective.

Cosponsored by the Fox International Fellowship

Yiorgo Topalidis is a historical sociologist whose research explores the social construction, contestation, memory and forgetting of Whiteness and its decoupling from White supremacy. He engages with these concepts through historical case studies that feature the experiences of Ottoman Greek migrants in a US context.

With Alona Verbytska, human rights advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Ms. Verbytska’s portfolio covers the “Human Rights of the Defender.” She assesses and monitors the adherence to the laws of war in the conflict. She will speak about issues such as the commission of and accountability for war crimes, the use of mercenary soldiers, and the treatment of prisoners of war.