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Frank Johnson, Alison

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Frank Johnson

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Alison

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Frank Johnson, Alison

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Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    The Air Cure Town: Commodifying Mountain Air in Alpine Central Europe
    (Cambridge University Press (CUP), 2012) Frank Johnson, Alison
    Does air have value? In the first volume of Capital, Marx suggested it did not: “A thing can be a use-value, without having value,” he explained. “This is the case whenever its utility to man is not due to labour. Such are air, virgin soil, natural meadows, &c.” Because it has no value, understood by Marx in this context to mean labor value, air cannot be a commodity: “Commodities come into the world in the shape of use-values, articles, or goods, such as iron, linen, corn, &c. This is their plain, homely, bodily form. They are, however, commodities, only because they are something two fold, both object of utility, and, at the same time, depositories of value.” Marx's materialist focus on human labor and industrial production made it hard for him to imagine air as a commodity—at least when he published the first volume of Capital in 1867.
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    Environmental, Economic, and Moral Dimensions of Sustainability in the Petroleum Industry in Austrian Galicia
    (Cambridge University Press (CUP), 2011) Frank Johnson, Alison
    Fears about the sustainability of oil-rich communities and hopes that petroleum would fuel financial, social, and moral renewal have accompanied the oil industry since its inception in the mid-nineteenth century. With each successive ecological disaster caused by oil spills, debates over the industry's ecological sustainability sharpen. Discussions about the geological sustainability of the petroleum industry intensify when oil supplies tighten, and dissipate when they increase. Although concerns about the moral viability of communities dependent on oil have become radically unfamiliar since the late nineteenth century, these, too, were once central to debates about the effects of oil on human society. In the nineteenth century, the progress that oil promised to bring was to be measured not only in material wealth, but in the attainment of social harmony and the attenuation of political strife.
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    Continental and Maritime Empires in an Age of Global Commerce
    (SAGE Publications, 2011) Frank Johnson, Alison
    This article calls for the incorporation of Central Europe into the European and even the global history of the late imperial period through the investigation of the Habsburg Monarchy’s participation in global commerce. From 1719 until the empire’s dissolution in 1918, the Habsburg Monarchy strove to build up an informal empire based on maritime trade and the information it both engendered and required. The linchpin in this geography of imperial commerce—the point of connection between the continental empire and the rest of the world—was the port city of Trieste, on the empire’s Adriatic coastline. Thanks to Trieste and the ambition of its mercantile elite, the Habsburg Monarchy became not only a continental power, but also a maritime power. A cluster of politically and commercially engaged Habsburg subjects—consuls, merchants, engineers, bureaucrats—shared a vision of securing for the Habsburg Monarchy a global position that matched its dynasty’s prestige. Austria-Hungary’s ultimate inability to establish coercive economic relationships with non-European polities did not represent a rejection of the economic advantages or cultural privileges of imperialism, but a failed struggle to take advantage of them. From this perspective, the Habsburg Monarchy was a land caught not “between past and future,” as Robert Musil described it, but between terrestrial and maritime understandings of empire. Austria-Hungary could avow its lack of interest in formal colonial activity, but it could not escape the complications of a globalizing and colonizing age.
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    The Pleasant and the Useful: Pilgrimage and Tourism in Habsburg Mariazell
    (Cambridge University Press, 2009) Frank Johnson, Alison
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    The Petroleum War of 1910: Standard Oil, Austria, and the Limits of the Multinational Corporation
    (American Historical Association and University of Chicago Press, 2009) Frank Johnson, Alison