This essay seeks to show that military strategists have not only been acute philosophers of space but also philosophers of world history. The works of Albert Speer, Friedrich Ratzel, A. T. Mahan, Halford Mackinder, Carl Schmitt, Guilio Duohet, and Harlan K. Ullman are considered in terms of the ways in which space has been militarized, or rather how war spatializes world history. The geography of world history has been the topos of war.

This article reflects on the convergence of revolutionary anti-capitalism and moral fundamentalism in the contemporary Islamic revival. It is concerned more generally with the recurrent appeal to fundamental value — of a sexual, genealogical or economic kind — in the history of anti-imperial and anti-capitalist movements. Exploring the tradition of Islamist philosophies of finance, the article suggests that Islamic political theology is unique in its ability to separate absolute law from territory ( pace Schmitt). Transgressing the boundaries of nation-state postcolonialism, (...) it thereby relocates absolute value, and hence absolute prohibition, in the realm of the sexual and the divine. (shrink)