Jonathan Parry – författare

A major history of the British Empire’s early involvement in the Middle EastNapoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 showed how vulnerable India was to attack by France and Russia. It forced the British Empire to try to secure the two routes that a European might use to reach the subcontinent—through Egypt and the Red Sea, and through Baghdad and the Persian Gulf. Promised Lands is a panoramic history of this vibrant and explosive age.Charting the development of Britain’s political interest in the Middle East from the Napoleonic Wars to the Crimean War in the 1850s, Jonathan Parry examines the various strategies employed by British and Indian officials, describing how they sought influence with local Arabs, Mamluks, Kurds, Christians, and Jews. He tells a story of commercial and naval power—boosted by the arrival of steamships in the 1830s—and discusses how classical and biblical history fed into British visions of what these lands might become. The region was subject to the Ottoman Empire, yet the sultan’s grip on it appeared weak. Should Ottoman claims to sovereignty be recognised and exploited, or ignored and opposed? Could the Sultan’s government be made to support British objectives, or would it always favour France or Russia?Promised Lands shows how what started as a geopolitical contest became a drama about diplomatic competition, religion, race, and the unforeseen consequences of history.

Classes of Labour: Work and Life in a Central Indian Steel Town is a classic in the social sciences. The rigour and richness of the ethnographic data of this book and its analysis is matched only by its literary style. This magnum opus of 732 pages, an outcome of fieldwork covering twenty-one years, complete with diagrams and photographs, reads like an epic novel, difficult to put down. Professor Jonathan Parry looks at a context in which the manual workforce is divided into distinct social classes, which have a clear sense of themselves as separate and interests that are sometimes opposed. The relationship between them may even be one of exploitation; and they are associated with different lifestyles and outlooks, kinship and marriage practices, and suicide patterns. A central concern is with the intersection between class, caste, gender and regional ethnicity, with how class trumps caste in most contexts and with how classes have become increasingly structured as the ‘structuration’ of castes has declined. The wider theoretical ambition is to specify the general conditions under which the so-called ‘working class’ has any realistic prospect of unity.

Classes of Labour: Work and Life in a Central Indian Steel Town is a classic in the social sciences. The rigour and richness of the ethnographic data of this book and its analysis is matched only by its literary style. This magnum opus of 732 pages, an outcome of fieldwork covering twenty-one years, complete with diagrams and photographs, reads like an epic novel, difficult to put down. Professor Jonathan Parry looks at a context in which the manual workforce is divided into distinct social classes, which have a clear sense of themselves as separate and interests that are sometimes opposed. The relationship between them may even be one of exploitation; and they are associated with different lifestyles and outlooks, kinship and marriage practices, and suicide patterns. A central concern is with the intersection between class, caste, gender and regional ethnicity, with how class trumps caste in most contexts and with how classes have become increasingly structured as the ‘structuration’ of castes has declined. The wider theoretical ambition is to specify the general conditions under which the so-called ‘working class’ has any realistic prospect of unity.

Few topics generate as much controversy and debate as armed humanitarian intervention. Military force involves death and destruction, as well as interfering in other countries’ domestic affairs. But, crucially, non-intervention is also controversial. When confronted with humanitarian crises abroad, many feel that outsiders are not only justified in using force to halt the abuses, but that they must do so. The Ethics of Humanitarian Intervention: An Introduction offers a guide to these ethical debates.

In clear and informative style Jonathan Parry explores the following topics:

Examples of intervention – including the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Liberia, and Libya – are used to illustrate the ethical dilemmas in question. The arguments of important theorists of intervention, such as John Stuart Mill, Michael Walzer and Jeff McMahan, are also explained clearly and critically. Each chapter concludes with questions for discussion and reflection. The Ethics of Humanitarian Intervention: An Introduction is ideal reading for students and researchers in philosophy, applied ethics, politics and international relations.

Chapter 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.

Few topics generate as much controversy and debate as armed humanitarian intervention. Military force involves death and destruction, as well as interfering in other countries’ domestic affairs. But, crucially, non-intervention is also controversial. When confronted with humanitarian crises abroad, many feel that outsiders are not only justified in using force to halt the abuses, but that they must do so. The Ethics of Humanitarian Intervention: An Introduction offers a guide to these ethical debates.

In clear and informative style Jonathan Parry explores the following topics:

Examples of intervention – including the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Liberia, and Libya – are used to illustrate the ethical dilemmas in question. The arguments of important theorists of intervention, such as John Stuart Mill, Michael Walzer and Jeff McMahan, are also explained clearly and critically. Each chapter concludes with questions for discussion and reflection. The Ethics of Humanitarian Intervention: An Introduction is ideal reading for students and researchers in philosophy, applied ethics, politics and international relations.

Chapter 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.

Jonathan Parry presents a history of Liberalism that is organized around themes in British Liberal politics since the early nineteenth century. In the first half of the book, he shows how the Liberal Party shaped national politics between 1830 and 1914 by conducting a series of campaigns against what it saw as over-dominant interest groups in British and Irish political, economic and religious life. Some of these campaigns succeeded, some failed, but they gave the party a strong identity as a political movement hostile to concentrations of power. The last two chapters chart its response to its political marginalization by Labour and Conservatives since the 1920s. They show how Liberals have continued to organize against over-centralized institutional power. They have defended civil liberties, urged devolution, criticized the rigidity of the electoral system, and attacked exaggerations of Britain’s capacity to act independently in the world. British Liberalism’s focus has never been the defence of laissez-faire economic principles, as many claim; it has always been political.