Author: Emily Berquist Soule File Type: pdf In December 1788, in the northern Peruvian city of Trujillo, fifty-one-year-old Spanish Bishop Baltasar Jaime Martinez Companon stood surrounded by twenty-four large wooden crates, each numbered and marked with its final destination of Madrid. The crates contained carefully preserved zoological, botanical, and mineral specimens collected from Trujillos steamy rainforests, agricultural valleys, rocky sierra, and coastal desert. To accompany this collection, the Bishop had also commissioned from Indian artisans nine volumes of hand-painted images portraying the people, plants, and animals of Trujillo. He imagined that the collection and the watercolors not only would contribute to his quest to study the native cultures of Northern Peru but also would supply valuable information for his plans to transform Trujillo into an orderly, profitable slice of the Spanish Empire. Based on intensive archival research in Peru, Spain, and Colombia and the unique visual data of more than a thousand extraordinary watercolors, The Bishops Utopia recreates the intellectual, cultural, and political universe of the Spanish Atlantic world in the late eighteenth century. Emily Berquist Soule recounts the reform agenda of Martinez Companonincluding the construction of new towns, improvement of the mining industry, and promotion of indigenous educationand positions it within broader imperial debates unlike many of his Enlightenment contemporaries, who elevated fellow Europeans above native peoples, Martinez Companon saw Peruvian Indians as intelligent, productive subjects of the Spanish Crown. The Bishops Utopia seamlessly weaves cultural history, natural history, colonial politics, and art into a cinematic retelling of the Bishops life and work. **Review Emily Berquists work on Baltasar Jaime Martinez Companon is worthy of its determined, dynamic, enlightened subject. This is no small feat...Any historian of this bishop must be as much of a polymath as he was, and Berquist Soule more than rises to the occasion. The book is equal parts biography, history of science, and visual, intellectual, and social history. Each of its seven chapters is written in language as vibrant as the color plates that adorn the interior. ul lBianca Premo, The Americasl ul Soule invokes a remarkable intellectual eighteenth-century transatlantic Spanish world. By contextualizing and piecing together the disparate archives of Martinez Companon, her book has done a notable service of illuminating a transcendent utopia rooted in the northern Peruvian region of Trujillo. ul lRachel Sarah OToole, The American Historical Reviewl ul Astonishingly original and highly readable. With this ground-breaking study of the monumental work of Bishop Martinez Companon, Emily Berquist Soule opens up a whole new world of research on the eighteenth century in Peruvian history. This is cultural, intellectual, and art historical writing at the very highest level.Gary Urton, Harvard University A deeply researched, beautifully written account of a fascinating man. Bishop Martinez Companon was a brilliant iconoclast who saw the need for change and did everything he possibly could to promote it. Emily Berquist Soules impressive archival work and fine pen brought him to life.Charles Walker, University of California, Davis A superb study of a neglected figure of the Spanish-American Catholic Enlightenment whose capacious mind and broad cultural, political, and social reforming agenda here expertly come alive. Berquist Soule casts her net widely, utilizing documentation from over a dozen archives, to reconstruct the bishops agenda and struggles. Her work marvelously reminds readers that his utopia was disciplined by reality competing and conflicting agendas of the locals taught the eager bishop the limits of his vision.Jorge Canizares-Esguerra, University of Texas About the Author Emily Berquist Soule teaches history at California State University at Long Beach.

Author: Andrew Gamble File Type: pdf Has Marxism ceased to be part of our political present and future? Crises are not new to Marxism, but many believe that the current crisis is terminal. For much of the twentieth century, a critical engagement with Marx and Marxism has been an essential part of social science, with even anti-Marxists reliant on Marxist thought for the formulation of their ideas. Yet for many engaging for the first time with social science in a post-cold war world, Marxist ideas, concerns, and methods seem to belong to a past era. Marxism and Social Science argues that Marxism continues as a living tradition, a system of thought that remains relevant and instructive to other theoretical positions and contemporary world changes. Contributors address Marxisms engagement with other perspectives in social science, including feminism, the New Right, and postmodernism, as well as the utility of Marxist approaches to a wide range of substantive issues the state, welfare, democracy, culture, class, globalization, ecology, nationalism, and communism. What emerges is the extraordinary richness and diversity of the Marxist intellectual tradition and its enduring importance for understanding the twenty-first century world.ReviewThis is a challenging volume, an important intervention at the level of ideological and political struggles, useful for research and teaching -- a welcome addition to Marxist scholarship. -- Martha E. Gimenez, Qualitative Sociology About the AuthorANDREW GAMBLE is Professor of Politics, University of Sheffield. DAVID MARSH is Professor of Politics, University of Birmingham. TONY TANT is Senior Lecturer in Applied Social Studies, University of Plymouth.