NLR 77

interview
Richard DuncanA New Global Depression?

Interview with the author of The Dollar Crisis, one of the few analyses to predict the 2008 financial meltdown. Richard Duncan tracks its causes to the credit explosion unleashed by the fiat-dollar system, in toxic symbiosis with the global wage deflation caused by manufacturing’s shift to the East.

obituary
Donald SassoonEric Hobsbawm, 1917–2012

Appreciation of the historian as unrepentant Communist. Donald Sassoon recalls Hobsbawm’s relations with the global movement he joined in Berlin during the Popular Front era, and his contributions as scholar and panoramic comparativist.

articles
Rob LucasThe Critical Net Critic

Advances in information technology have generated both delirious boosterism and gloomy prognoses of computer-assisted decline. Rob Lucas engages with the sceptical current exemplified by Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows, tracing its conceptual underpinnings and identifying its lacunae—political, economic, historical.

Daniel FinnOrder Reigns in The Hague

Daniel Finn reports on September’s Dutch election, where the Liberal and Labour parties rallied to prevent Holland following the Greek example. Origins and orientations of the Socialist Party that briefly threatened the Pax Bruxelliana, and strategic lessons for the left from its campaign.

interview
Rafael CorreaEcuador’s Path

The Andean republic’s president discusses his formation and his government’s record in office, across a range of spheres: economy, environment, education, freedom of the press. How would he respond to critics, and what are the main challenges the country faces?

articles
Robin OsborneCultures of Empire: Greece and Rome

How was Roman imperial rule over Greece legitimated in the minds of conquerors and subjects alike? The mutual reverberations of an Augustan cultural revolution that brought Hellenism to the empire’s core and diverted Greeks to the glories of the past.

Julian StallabrassRadical Camouflage at Documenta 13

Dispatch from dOCUMENTA, the quinquennial art exhibition in Kassel, where a rhetoric of diversity and ‘anti-logocentrism’ serves as smokescreen for the contradictions and complicities of the art business.

reviews
Ghosts of Kamerun

Augusta Conchiglia on Thomas Deltombe, Manuel Domergue and Jacob Tatsitsa, Kamerun! The first full account of France’s hidden colonial war in West Africa.

The Gleaners

Clive Dilnot on Chris Killip, Seacoal. Scenes of industrial decay in 1980s Northumberland as images of a workless future.

The Black and the Red

Bryan Palmer on Steven Hirsch & Lucien van der Walt, Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World. Panorama of libertarian left rebels, from Latin America to Ukraine, Cairo to Korea.