Benjamin D. Hopkins

George Washington University

Author Statistics

Papers

Citation

H-Index

i-10 index

Research Trends

Author Order

Document Type

Co-Authors

ММ

Магнус Марсден

University of Sussex

George Lee

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

Dragomir N. Neshev

Australian National University

Yuri S. Kivshar

Australian National University

Sergey Kruk

Australian Research Council

Urs Geiser

Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, Zentrale

William H. Mills

University of Toronto

Ivan I. Kravchenko

Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Arthur Brown

Riau University

Andrey E. Miroshnichenko

UNSW Sydney

Cooperative Institutions

Australian National University

Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Australian Research Council

University of Canberra

UNSW Sydney

Canberra (United Kingdom)

University of Technology Sydney

Indian Institute of Technology Delhi

Nonlinear Control Strategies (United States)

Cornell University

Author Statistics

Papers

Citation

H-Index

i-10 index

Research Field

The longue durée of the Human Terrain: Politics, cultural knowledge and the technical fix

Anthropology Today (2016)

Benjamin D. Hopkins

The recent end of the Human Terrain System run by the US Army has brought to a close one of the most recent insidious challenges to the field of anthropology. But while the anthropological elements of the programme have been well documented, and contested, its historical roots have not. The HTS and cultural knowledge apparatus of the American defence establishment draw deeply upon the wells of British scholar administrators of the nineteenth century. Of particular importance, especially in regard to Afghanistan, is Mountstuart Elphinstone who published the foundational text about the country, An account of the Kingdom of Kabul , 200 years ago. But unlike the HTS and similar programmes run by other Western governments which treat culture as a kind of technical aspect of governance, Elphinstone appreciated the importance ‐ and legitimacy ‐ of local politics.

10.1111/1467-8322.12253

Cite

Citations (4)

Producing civil society, ignoring Rivaj: International donors, the state and development interventions in Swat

Columbia University Press eBooks (2013)

Urs Geiser Магнус Марсден Benjamin D. Hopkins

Civil Society

Source

Cite

Citations (1)

The political pianist : protest, commissions, and programming for the twenty-first century

Benjamin D. Hopkins

10.14288/1.0395353

Cite

Citations (0)

3. The Imperial Life of the Frontier Crimes Regulation

Harvard University Press eBooks (2020)

Benjamin D. Hopkins

Frontier

10.4159/9780674246164-004

Cite

Citations (0)

Afghan Trading Networks

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History (2019)

Магнус Марсден Benjamin D. Hopkins

Afghanistan has long been conventionally regarded as a remote space peripheral to the wider world. Yet scholarship produced in the 2nd decade of the 21st century suggests its multiple connections to a wide array of regions and settings. Such connections are especially visible when viewed through the lens of the trade networks originating from the territories of modern Afghanistan. Scholars have come to recognize that Afghan traders have long been active players in many contexts across Asia and beyond. Such traders and the networks they form play a critically important role in connecting different parts of Asia with one another, including South Asia and Eurasia, as well as East and West Asia. The connective role performed by Afghan caravanners and religious minorities in the trade between India and Central Asia are especially well documented by historians. Increasingly so too are the activities of Afghan merchants in Ottoman territories. The trading networks Afghan traders have participated in are historically dynamic. Their orientating values shift across time and space between various forms of religious, ethno-linguistic, and political identity. The capacity to adapt to changing circumstances is helpful in understanding the continuing relevance of Afghan traders to 21st-century forms of globalized capitalism, in contexts as varied as the former Soviet Union, China, and the Arabian Peninsula.

Afghan

Peninsula

Relevance

10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.013.119

Cite

Citations (5)

4. The Colonial Specter of “Savagery”

Harvard University Press eBooks (2020)

Benjamin D. Hopkins

10.4159/9780674246164-005

Cite

Citations (0)

Afghanistan and the Defence of Empire: Diplomacy and Strategy During the Great Game (review)

The Middle East Journal (2012)

Benjamin D. Hopkins

AFGHANISTAN Afghanistan and the Defence of Empire: Diplomacy and Strategy During the by Christopher M. Wyatt. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2011. 336 pages. $99. There is perhaps no more defining legend of Afghanistan's past than that of the Great Game, the Anglo-Russian rivalry marking the latter half of the 19th century. Christopher Wyatt's new book, Afghanistan and the Defence of Empire, offers a serious examination of the Game and its peaceful ending. Though Wyatt's title leads one to suppose Afghanistan will occupy a central role in the book, the story he tells is a profoundly British one. The work focuses on the high politics of empire as practiced by ambassadors, viceroys, and foreign secretaries. The characters inhabiting its pages are familiar to anyone who has studied the Edwardian epoch of the British Empire - Curzon, Balfour, Morley, and Minto. Examining the middle years of the first decade of the 20th century, the book documents how British calculations about the defense of empire, and more specifically Afghanistan's role in those calculations, changed during this time. Within this short four-year period, the British imperial establishment moved from an attitude of marked antagonism towards the Tsarist Empire to a negotiated understanding which would serve as the basis of their 1907 entente. Wyatt's thesis is that during this crucial period, the British abandoned a defense of their Indian empire based on military calculation for one based on diplomatic nuance. Following a brief introduction with some basic background on Afghanistan and Russian expansion into Central Asia in the late 19th century, the book traces the evolution of British strategic thinking during this period by examining six different episodes in Anglo- Russian-Afghan relations. The chapters move chronologically, beginning with the Dobbs mission to Herat in 1903-1904 and finishing with the Anglo-Russian accord of 1907. The intervening chapters focus on internal British deliberations, including the Morley sub-committee regarding imperial defense. Throughout, Wyatt's critical gaze is solely fixed on the British and their own internal imperial concerns. Consequently, the reader is given a highly detailed rendering of the policy back and forth between London and Calcutta which marked the evolving strategies of imperial defense. Wyatt's volume is a valuable work which offers a well-researched telling of a relatively over-looked, but important chapter of the Game. …

Rivalry

Source

Cite

Citations (0)

Makers of Modern Asia, edited by Ramachandra Guha

Journal of History (2016)

Benjamin D. Hopkins

Makers of Modern Asia, edited by Ramachandra Guha. Cambridge, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014. 385 pp. $29.95 US (cloth). In his volume Makers of Modern Asia, Ramachandra Guha has brought together an impressive assembly of scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals tasked with authoring a series of biographical essays about Asia's major leading political figures of the twentieth century. The list of figures, while in many ways predictable, is notable for its inclusivity. In it, the reader finds three Indian (Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Indira Gandhi) and four Chinese (Chiang Kai-shek, Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and Deng Xiaoping) leaders, as well as one each from Vietnam (Ho Chi Minh), Indonesia (Sukarno), Singapore (Lee Kuan Yew), and Pakistan (Zulfikar Ali Bhutto). The list reads like a roster of the veritable heavyweights of Asian statesmen (and a token woman) of the recent past. In keeping with the volume's theme of makers, nearly all the selected individuals were key movers in the nationalist movements that gained independence (de jure and de facto) throughout Asia during the middle decades of the century. Makers of Modern Asia begins with a short introductory essay authored by Guha himself, where he lays out the structure and logic of the book. The book's aim is to bring to the fore the now somewhat obscured history of agitation and consolidation that created unified, stable (or more or less stable) nation-states out of fragmented territories and fractious social groups (4). The work, then, is most decidedly that of political biography. As such, it returns to a version of history rather long passe within the profession, namely that of big-man history. Yet the authors use this form to reflect on wider social and political issues that their subjects both shaped and were beholden to. Taken individually, the eleven essays offer contributions of somewhat uneven character. Some, such as James R. Rush's chapter on Sukarno and Odd Arne Westad's on Deng Xiaoping, provide a chronological biography of their subject from birth to death. Others, such as Sophie Quinn-Judge's contribution on Ho-Chi Mirth, more tightly focus on particular episodes of the individual's life, in this case the years between the end of WWII and the outbreak of the Second Indo-China War. Consequently, the essays fail to set a collective tone for the volume, as each reflects the individual voice of its author. Some take a relatively light tack vis-a-vis the details of the historical narrative, while others provide what is at times an overwhelming wealth of information. …

Independence

Theme (computing)

10.3138/cjh.ach.51.2.rev45

Cite

Citations (0)

Banishment of the People of Colour from Cincinnati

The Journal of Negro History (1923)

William H. Mills Benjamin D. Hopkins George Lee

George (robot)

American History

10.2307/2713563

Cite