
The Art of Not Being Governed
An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Yale Agrarian Studies Series)
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Narrated by:
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Alex Boyles
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By:
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James C. Scott
About this listen
From the acclaimed author and scholar James C. Scott comes the compelling account of Asian peoples who until recently have stemmed the vast tide of state-making to live at arm’s length from any organized state society.
For two thousand years, the disparate groups that now reside in Zomia—a mountainous region the size of Europe that consists of portions of seven Asian countries—have fled the projects of the organized state societies that surround them: slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare. This book, essentially an “anarchist history,” is the first-ever examination of the huge literature on state-making whose author evaluates why people would deliberately and reactively remain stateless.
Among the strategies employed by the people of Zomia to remain stateless are physical dispersion in rugged terrain, agricultural practices that enhance mobility, pliable ethnic identities, devotion to prophetic millenarian leaders, and maintenance of a largely oral culture that allows them to reinvent their histories and genealogies as they move between and around states.
James Scott, recognized worldwide as an eminent authority in Southeast Asian, peasant, and agrarian studies, tells in accessible language the story of the peoples of Zomia and their unlikely odyssey in search of self-determination. He redefines our views on Asian politics, history, demographics, and even our fundamental ideas about what constitutes civilization, and he challenges us with a radically different approach to history that presents events from the perspective of stateless peoples and redefines state-making as a form of “internal colonialism.”
This new perspective requires a radical reevaluation of the civilizational narratives of the lowland states.
Scott’s work on Zomia represents a new way to think of area studies that will be applicable to other runaway, fugitive, and marooned communities, be they Gypsies, Cossacks, tribes fleeing slave raiders, Marsh Arabs, or San-Bushmen.
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History of the Russian Revolution
- By: Leon Trotsky
- Narrated by: Jonathan Booth
- Length: 53 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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The Russian Revolution of 1917 was one of the most cataclysmic events in world history, profoundly shaping politics, international relations, social patterns, economics and science in the century that followed. It created long-lasting aftershocks which travelled far beyond its geographical borders. How did it happen? What were the sequence of events that led, following the shocking upheaval of the old Romanov order, to a fierce and violent rivalry between a variety of revolutionary factions and the ultimate victory of the Bolsheviks?
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One of the Greatest Works of History Ever Written
- By Sophie on 12-01-22
By: Leon Trotsky
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Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia
- By: David Graeber
- Narrated by: Roger Davis
- Length: 5 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Pirates have long lived in the realm of romance and fantasy, symbolizing risk, lawlessness, and radical visions of freedom. But at the root of this mythology is a rich history of pirate societies—vibrant, imaginative experiments in self-governance and alternative social formations at the edges of the European empire.
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A fun historical analysis of Pirate political systems
- By Ian Turner on 01-30-23
By: David Graeber
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Streams of Gold, Rivers of Blood
- The Rise and Fall of Byzantium, 955 A.D. to the First Crusade
- By: Anthony Kaldellis
- Narrated by: Nigel Patterson
- Length: 15 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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In the second half of the tenth century, Byzantium embarked on a series of spectacular conquests. By the early eleventh century, the empire was the most powerful state in the Mediterranean. Yet this imperial project came to a crashing collapse fifty years later, when political disunity, fiscal mismanagement, and defeat at the hands of the Seljuks and the Normans brought an end to Byzantine hegemony. By 1081, Byzantium's very existence was threatened.
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Very Detailed but Tedious
- By Amazon Customer on 09-06-24
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The Age of Choice
- A History of Freedom in Modern Life
- By: Sophia Rosenfeld
- Narrated by: Greg D. Barnett
- Length: 13 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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The Age of Choice tells the long history of the invention of choice as the defining feature of modern freedom. Taking listeners from the seventeenth century to today, Sophia Rosenfeld describes how the early modern world witnessed the simultaneous rise of shopping as an activity and religious freedom as a matter of being able to pick one's convictions. Similarly, she traces the history of choice in romantic life, politics, and the ideals of human rights. Throughout, she pays particular attention to the lives of women, who have frequently been the drivers of this change.
By: Sophia Rosenfeld
Brilliant
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