scholarly journals Becoming a Correspondent: The Foundations of New Merchant Relationships in Early Modern French Trade (1730–1820)

2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 533-574
Author(s):  
ARNAUD BARTOLOMEI ◽  
CLAIRE LEMERCIER ◽  
VIERA REBOLLEDO-DHUIN ◽  
NADÈGE SOUGY

This article discusses the relational and rhetorical foundations of more than 300 first letters sent in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by merchant or banking houses based in Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Americas to two prominent French firms: Roux Brothers and Greffulhe Montz & Cie. We used a quantitative analysis of qualitative aspects of first letters to go beyond the standard opposition between premodern personal exchanges and modern impersonal transactions. The expansion of commercial networks during the period under analysis is often believed to have relied on families and ethnic networks and on explicit recommendations worded in the formulas prescribed in merchant manuals. However, most first letters did not use such resources. In many cases, commercial operations began thanks to a mutual acquaintance but without a formal recommendation. This was in fact the norm in the eighteenth century—and an underestimated foundation of the expansion of European commercial networks. In the early nineteenth century, this norm became less prevalent: it was replaced by diverse relational and rhetorical strategies, from recommendations to prospective letters dispensing with any mention of relationships. Whether before or after 1800, the relational and rhetorical resources displayed in letters did not systematically influence the sender’s chances of becoming a correspondent; instead, they depended on the receiving firm’s commercial strategy.

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Kelly

Infanticide reached record levels in Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century. Although the rising population and increasing poverty provided the essential precondition for this, the sharp rise in the practice identified by contemporaries in the 1820s and 1830s might not have taken place had the Dublin and Cork Foundling Hospitals continued to assume responsibility for the care of foundling children. But once they were no longer available to receive them, the women who give birth to the children that society identified as illegitimate chose to terminate their lives in record numbers in an attempt to avoid the severe stigma that this brought and the practical difficulties of taking care of a child alone. Using the cases that came before the coroners court and the crime figures assembled by the Royal Irish Constabulary from the 1830s, this article combines the quantitative analysis of the practice that this permits with a reliance on the qualitative approach that informed a previous investigation of the phenomenon in the eighteenth century to track its evolving trajectory, to identify its main features and to explain how it had arrived at a point by the 1840s when it exceeded homicide as the primary cause of violent death.


Costume ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 240-265
Author(s):  
Tyler Rudd Putman ◽  
Matthew Brenckle

This article examines the historical and material context of a rare sailor's jacket, c. 1804, probably produced in England and worn by a Japanese castaway named Tajuro (among the first Japanese men to circumnavigate the globe) during a Russian expedition to Japan. We place Tajuro's jacket in the longer history of garments worn by sailors and labourers. Because it is the only surviving example definitively used at sea by an identified seaman on a particular voyage, from the long eighteenth century, Tajuro's jacket provides a glimpse into what European, Russian, and American sailors wore in this era. It is an invaluable addition to the scanty material archive of common sailors’ clothing with a story that shows the global possibilities of early modern travel.


2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 421-439 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diederik F Janssen

A conceptual evolution is traceable from early modern classifications of libido nefanda (execrable lust) to early nineteenth-century allusions to ‘perversion of the sexual instinct’, via pluralizing notions of coitus nefandus/sodomiticus in Martin Schurig’s work, and of sodomia impropria in seventeenth- through late eighteenth-century legal medicine. Johann Valentin Müller’s early breakdown of various unnatural penchants seemingly inspired similar lists in works by Johann Christoph Fahner and Johann Josef Bernt, and ultimately Heinrich Kaan. This allows an ante-dating of the ‘specification of the perverted’ (Foucault) often located in the late nineteenth century, and appreciation of pygmalionism and necrophilia as instances of ‘perverted sexual instinct’. In this light, Kaan’s early psychopathia sexualis was less innovative and more ambivalent than previously thought.


2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 581-597 ◽  
Author(s):  
James A. Jaffe

With relatively few exceptions, personal petitions from individuals have received much less attention from historians than those from groups in the public political sphere. In one sense, personal petitions adopted many of the same rhetorical strategies as those delivered by a group. However, they also offer unique insights into the quotidian relationship between the people and their rulers. This article examines surviving personal petitions to various administrators at different levels of government in western India during the decades surrounding the East India Company’s conquests. The analysis of these petitions helps to refine our understanding of the place of the new judicial system in the social world of early-nineteenth-century India, especially by illuminating the discourse of justice that petitioners brought to the presentation of their cases to their new governors. The conclusion of this article seeks to place the rhetoric of personal petitioning within the larger context of mass political petitioning in India during the early nineteenth century.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Cynthia Roman

Abstract Focusing on A smoking club (1793/7) by James Gillray, this essay presents satiric representations of smoking clubs in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British prints, arguing that they reflect and mediate contemporary understandings of tobacco as an intoxicant in British associational life. The breadth of potential cultural connotations – from political and social parody to light-hearted humour – is traced through the content and imagery of selected prints. These prints rely on the familiarity of contemporary audiences with political and social knowledge, as well as a visual iconography iconically realized in William Hogarth's A midnight modern conversation (1732).


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-142
Author(s):  
Nicholas Pappas

In the era of the Napoleonic wars, the Ionian Islands off the western coasts of Greece and southern Albania became a base of operations and an area of conflict in the Mediterranean in the years 1797–1814. In that period, Republican French, Russian, Imperial French, and British forces successively occupied these Greek-populated islands, formerly Venetian possessions. Each of these powers attempted to establish a nominally independent "Septinsular Republic" under their protectorate. There were efforts by all of these powers to organize native armed forces, some raised from among refugees from the mainland-bandits (klephtes), former Ottoman irregulars (armatoloi), and clansmen from the autonomous regions of Himara, Souli, and Mani. Although these refugee warriors were skilled in the use of weapons-flintlock firearms, sabres and yataghans-they fought and were organized according to traditions and methods that were different and considered "obsolete" in early nineteenth century Europe. This study will look into the organization, training and command of these troops by Russian, French, and British officers. It will study the successes and failures of these officers in forming these native warriors into regular or semi-regular forces. It will also examine how the attitudes and activities of these officers helped to develop the armed forces of the Greek War of Independence, 1821–1830. Keywords: Napoleonic wars, Ionian Islands, armatoloi and klephtes, military forces


2021 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 255-269
Author(s):  
Waïl S. Hassan

Abstract According to a well-known narrative, the concept of Weltliteratur and its academic correlative, the discipline of comparative literature, originated in Germany and France in the early nineteenth century, influenced by the spread of scientism and nationalism. But there is another genesis story that begins in the late eighteenth century in Spain and Italy, countries with histories entangled with the Arab presence in Europe during the medieval period. Emphasizing the role of Arabic in the formation of European literatures, Juan Andrés wrote the first comparative history of “all literature,” before the concepts of Weltliteratur and comparative literature gained currency. The divergence of the two genesis stories is the result of competing geopolitical interests, which determine which literatures enter into the sphere of comparison, on what terms, within which paradigms, and under what ideological and discursive conditions.


Author(s):  
Marina P. Banchetti-Robino

Early modern efforts to reconceptualize atomicity as a chymical notion fell by the wayside during the chemical revolution, as Antoine Lavoisier’s desire to transform chemistry into a strictly empirical and quantitative science led him to reject all metaphysical speculation about the fundamental nature of matter. Instead, Lavoisier focused on identifying elementary substances, which he defined operationally as the final products of chemical analysis. Our current understanding of the relation between atoms and elements, however, owes a great deal to the work of nineteenth-century chemist John Dalton. Dalton’s chemical atomic theory reconciled the concepts of “atomicity” and “elementarity” and rendered both as empirical and chemical notions, amenable to measurement and quantitative analysis. One of the central goals of Dalton’s theory was understanding how relative weights of chemical atoms determine the properties of elements and how the chemical atoms of different elements combine to form compound substances. Thus, Dalton’s theory provided a way of studying and measuring the properties of atoms and elements in a way that allowed chemists to finally understand the chemical relations between them.


Author(s):  
Paul Stock

Chapter 2 explores how late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British geographical works structure and present geographical knowledge. The books may seem disorganized and haphazard to modern eyes, but their contents and procedures are framed by classical and early modern precedents. The influence of Bernhard Varenius is key, especially his specification of ‘celestial’, ‘terrestrial’, and ‘human’ geography. These different emphases provide variant ways to understand space, premised respectively on universal mathematical laws, observation of a tangible physical world, and the vicissitudes of human activity and perception. The chapter shows how the resulting questions about the nature and limits of knowledge affect geographical works’ comprehension of Europe.


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