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Professor Roger Owen Has Passed Away

Edward Roger John Owen (27 May 1935 – 22 December 2018) was a British historian who wrote several classic works on the history of the modern Middle East. His research interests included the economic, social and political history of the Middle East, especially Egypt, from 1800 to the present, as well as the theories of imperialism, including military occupations.
He read Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Magdalen College, Oxford, from 1956 to 1959, followed by a D Phil in Economic History at St. Antony's College, from 1960 to 1964. One of his close advisers was the renowned Middle East historian Albert Hourani. His thesis which was on the cotton production and the development of the economy in nineteenth-century Egypt was later published into a book.
When in the 1960s new postgraduate course in modern Middle Eastern studies were introduced at St Antony's College and a raft of new posts created with British government funding, Owen was appointed in Economic and Social History in 1964. He served as Director of St. Antony's College Middle East Centre, from 1971-4, 1980-2, 1986-8, and 1991-3.
Subsequently he became the A.J. Meyer Professor of Middle East History at Harvard University and was the director of Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES).
In addition to his teaching and scholarship, Owen frequently wrote columns for the English-language versions of the Arabic newspapers Al-Hayat and Al-Ahram.
He was a member of the Middle East Studies Association of North America, also known as MESA.
He died on 22 December 2018

https://history.fas.harvard.edu/people/edward-roger-owen
https://cmes.fas.harvard.edu/news/professor-roger-owen-has-passed-away

Strategy, Evolution, and War: From Apes to Artificial Intelligence by Kenneth Payne

Georgetown University Press, 2018


Decisions about war have always been made by humans, but now intelligent machines are on the cusp of changing things - with dramatic consequences for international affairs. This book explores the evolutionary origins of human strategy, and makes a provocative argument that Artificial Intelligence will radically transform the nature of war by changing the psychological basis of decision-making about violence.
Strategy, Evolution, and War is a cautionary preview of how Artificial Intelligence (AI) will revolutionize strategy more than any development in the last three thousand years of military history. Kenneth Payne describes strategy as an evolved package of conscious and unconscious behaviors with roots in our primate ancestry. Our minds were shaped by the need to think about warfare—a constant threat for early humans. As a result, we developed a sophisticated and strategic intelligence.
The implications of AI are profound because they depart radically from the biological basis of human intelligence. Rather than being just another tool of war, AI will dramatically speed up decision making and use very different cognitive processes, including when deciding to launch an attack, or escalate violence. AI will change the essence of strategy, the organization of armed forces, and the international order.
This book is a fascinating examination of the psychology of strategy-making from prehistoric times, through the ancient world, and into the modern age.

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Kenneth Payne is a senior lecturer in the School of Security Studies at King's College, London. He is also a senior member of St Antony's College, Oxford University, having earlier been a visiting fellow in the Department of International Relations there. Payne's research is broadly in the field of political psychology and strategic studies. He is the author of two previous books, The Psychology of Strategy: Exploring Rationality in the Vietnam War and The Psychology of Modern Conflict.

Table of Contents
Introduction
Part 1: The Evolution of Strategists
1. Defining Strategy as Psychology
2. Evolutionary Strategy
3. Strategic Heuristics and Biases
Part 2: Culture Meets Evolved Strategy
4. The Pen and the Sword in Ancient Greece
5. Clausewitz Explores the Psychology of Strategy
6. Nuclear Weapons Are Not Psychologically Revolutionary
Part 3: Artificial Intelligence and Strategy
7. Tactical Artificial Intelligence Arrives
8. Artificial General Intelligence Does Strategy
Conclusion: Strategy Evolves beyond AI 

The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America E. Digby Baltzell

The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America 

E. Digby Baltzell

Yale University Press
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300038187/protestant-establishment

This classic account of the traditional upper class in America traces its origins, lifestyles, and political and social attitudes from the time of Theodore Roosevelt to that of John F. Kennedy. Sociologist E. Digby Baltzell describes the problems of exclusion and prejudice within the community of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants (or WASPs, an acronym he coined) and predicts with amazing accuracy what will happen when this inbred group is forced to share privilege and power with talented members of minority groups.

“The book may actually hold more interest today than when it was first published. New generations of readers can resonate all the more to this masterly and beautifully written work that provides sociological understanding of its engrossing subject.”—Robert K. Merton, Columbia University

“The documentation and illustration in the book make it valuable as social history, quite apart from any theoretical hypothesis. As such, it sketches the rise of the WASP penchant for country clubs, patriotic societies and genealogy. It traces the history of anti-Semitism in America. It describes the intellectual conflict between Social Darwinism and the environmental social science founded half a century ago by men like John Dewey, Charles A. Beard, Thorstein Veblen, Franz Boas and Frederick Jackson Turner. In short, The Protestant Establishment is a wide-ranging, intelligent and provocative book.”—Alvin Toffler, New York Times Book Review

“The Protestant Establishment has many virtues that lift it above the level we have come to expect in works of contemporary social and cultural analysis. It is clearly and convincingly written.”—H. Stuart Hughes, New York Review of Books

“What makes Baltzell’s analysis of the evolution of the American elite superior to the accounts of earlier writers . . . is that he exposes the connections between high social status and political and economic power.”—Dennis H. Wrong, Commentary