Nation-State Science: Lappology and Sweden's Ethnoracial Purity

2014 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 320-350 ◽  
Author(s):  
Greggor Mattson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Scientific Work ◽  
State Building ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Empirical Knowledge ◽  
Paradigm Shifts ◽  
Scientific Thought ◽  
Scientific Labor ◽  
And Control ◽  
The Ideal

AbstractThis paper introduces the concept of “nation-state science” to describe the scientific work of ethnoracial classification that made possible the ideal of the homogenous nation-state. Swedish scientists implicitly defined their nation for Continental Europeans when they explicitly created knowledge about the “Lapps” (today's Sámi/Saami). Nation was coupled to state through such ethnoracial categories, the content of which were redefined as Sweden's geopolitical power rose and fell. These shifts sparked methodological innovations to redefine the Lapp, making it a durable category whose content was plastic enough to survive paradigm shifts in political and scientific thought. Idiosyncratic Swedish concerns thus became universalized through the scientific diffusion of empirical knowledge about Lapps and generalizable anthropometric techniques to distinguish among populations. What Sweden lost during the nineteenth century in terms of geopolitical power, it gained in terms of biopower: the knowledge and control of internal populations made possible by its widely adopted anthropometric innovations. Nation-state science helps unpack the interrelationships between state-building, nation-making, and scientific labor.

Contested Citizenship

2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 15-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ingrid Brühwiler
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Education ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Ideal

This article examines public education and the establishment of the nation-state in the first half of the nineteenth century in Switzerland. Textbooks, governmental decisions, and reports are analyzed in order to better understand how citizenship is depicted in school textbooks and whether (federal) political changes affected the image of the “imagined citizen” portrayed in such texts. The “ideal citizen” was, first and foremost, a communal and cantonal member of a twofold society run by the church and the secular government, in which nationality was depicted as a third realm.

America’s Blackbeard

2018 ◽  
pp. 25-48
Author(s):  
Sharada Balachandran Orihuela
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
State Building ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Central Character ◽  
Historical Novels ◽  
Property Ownership ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Novela Historica ◽  
State Growth ◽  
American Nation

This chapter examines the ways early nineteenth century authors framed piracy as an instrument of state growth, anti-colonial resistance, as well as a rationale for imperial expansion and intervention in the Americas in William Gilmore Simms’s The Yemassee (1835), John Brougham’s 1857 play Columbus, El Filibustero!, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Red Rover: A Tale (1829) and The Water Witch; or, The Skimmer of the Seas (1830), as well as El Filibustero: Novela Historica (1864), written by Yucatec author Eligio Ancona. In a climate of rapid national expansion, nineteenth century authors used the pirate as a central character to plot national(ist) narratives. Given piracy’s relationship to both state-building and anti-colonial enterprises, as well as piracy’s capacity to both facilitate and threaten property ownership, piracy helps us understand the radical and repressive regimes of American power. The historical novels examined in this chapter are interested in the shadowy origins of the American nation-state, as much as they are with the potentially conflicted present and future of these nation-states.

An Imperial Nation-State

2021 ◽  
pp. 941-963
Author(s):  
David Todd
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Continuous Process ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Nation State ◽  
French Empire ◽  
French Experience ◽  
Informal Empire ◽  
Imperial Power ◽  
Imperial Expansion ◽  
The Ideal

Rather than as a continuous process, French imperial expansion is better understood as a succession of four distinct empires: a Bourbon mercantilist empire until 1789, a messianic European empire in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic era, a global informal empire in the nineteenth century, and a republican territorial empire after 1880. In each of these empires, the ideal of assimilation, in its Catholic, Napoleonic, or republican variants, was much trumpeted by French empire-builders. But historical research has shown that, in practice, French imperial power chiefly relied on pragmatic collaboration with imperial subjects and auxiliaries. Successive waves of imperial expansion rarely resulted in extensive “Frenchification,” although universalist rhetoric often inadvertently contributed to the outbreak of violent and successful rebellions against imperial rule as in Haiti, Napoleonic Europe, or Algeria. Despite such moments of dislocation, the French experience illustrates well the potential and resilience of the nation-state as a powerbase for imperial expansion.

scholarly journals The Nation and Its Deserters: Conscription in Mehmed Ali's Egypt

1998 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 421-436 ◽  
Author(s):  
Khaled Fahmy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
State Building ◽  
European History ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The Past ◽  
War Effort ◽  
Public Lecture ◽  
Modern Nation State

“Could a Nation, in any true sense of the word, really be born without war?” Such was the question raised by Michael Howard, the eminent Oxford military historian in a public lecture delivered on the topic of “War and the Nation State”. Looking generally at European history in the past two centuries he argued that war was indeed central for the appearance of the modern nation-state and that modern armies are somehow intimately linked to the rise of nationalism. During the first half of the nineteenth century this argument could very well be applied to Egypt. Having been incorporated in the Ottoman Empire for more than two and a half centuries, Egypt, by the beginning the nineteenth century and mostly through an unprecedented war effort that was concurrent and often synonymous with state-building, had come to play an increasingly independent role on the international plane.

Legal Exceptionalism in Egypt’s Borderlands

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew H. Ellis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Geography ◽  
Historical Geography ◽  
State Building ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Territorial Sovereignty ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter opens with a brief overview of the historical geography of the Egyptian West, highlighting the diversity within the region’s human and physical landscapes. It then moves on to illustrate the uneven political geography of the Egyptian nation-state in the late nineteenth century by highlighting two salient themes: the persistence of legal exceptionalism in the western oases and other desert territories, even after Egypt’s state-wide judicial reforms starting in the 1870s; and the state’s fraught efforts to standardize its policy vis-à-vis Egypt’s bedouin population around the country. Both these themes illustrate the emergence of Egypt’s borderlands as enclaves of exceptionalism within the emergent Egyptian nation-state. Accordingly, the chapter questions prevailing notions of territorial sovereignty in the nineteenth century and argues against normative Euro-centric top-down frameworks for understanding the process of state-building in the period.

Exile Ingathering: An Exposition

2019 ◽  
pp. 53-80
Author(s):  
Alan Gamlen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Phase 1 ◽  
State Building ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Soviet Empire ◽  
Political Membership

Chapter 3 examines Phase 1 of the process in which post-colonial states sought to gather their ethnic constituents into the process of independent nation-state building. It began during the turbulent disintegration of the nineteenth-century European empires, and culminated in the wake of the collapsed Soviet empire of the 1990s. To explain these exile ingathering strategies, the chapter introduces the notion of ‘regime shock’: a new concept denoting moments disruption to prevailing configurations of territoriality, sovereignty, and/or citizenship that define a specific place, and which lead to the questioning and redrawing of the lines of social and political membership, along with changes in the structure of authority.

scholarly journals La mujer “enchichada” y la “herencia herida”. La biopolítica y la condenación fisiológica de la mujer en los umbrales del siglo XX

2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan Carlos Alegría Montaño
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political History ◽  
The Body ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Control Education ◽  
And Control ◽  
Siglo Xx

Resumen: Hacia los umbrales decimonónicos, sedesplegaron diversos discursos en Colombia y Latinoamérica,relacionados con la raza y la anormalidad, lacivilización y el progreso, la cultura y el control, la educacióny el adiestramiento. Discursos que si bien proveníande diversos sectores, estaban en general enmarcadosdentro de las magnas utopías republicanas. Se tratódel gran proyecto del Estado-Nacional, que demandó esereciente descubrimiento (la población), como fuente dela riqueza. Bajo estos lineamientos, la familia perdió sututela, la medicina y la enfermedad han sido nacionalizadas,que la escuela, el cuartel o la hacienda de plantaciónhan sido reformados y servido como nuevos espaciosde disciplinamiento; y principalmente, que la mujery su sexualidad, el uso biopolítico de su cuerpo, de sufisiología, como máquina de reproducción de las nuevasgeneraciones, como progenitora del “nuevo ciudadano”,moral y físicamente sano, ha sido requerida. Se trataentonces de saber, entre otras cosas, ¿cuáles discursosantecedieron y rodearon la condenación del cuerpo dela mujer, qué saberes le legitimaron? Para este análisis,se ha requerido, más que plantear una historia global ypolítica, realizar una arqueología al estilo de Foucaultsobre aquellos discursos y prácticas dadas.Palabras claves: Herencia, mujer, estado-nación, biopolítica,raza.Woman “Enchichada” and the “Hurt Heredity .”Biopolitics and Physiological Condemnationof Women at the Threshold of the XXth CenturyAbstract: Towards the end of the nineteenth-century,diverse discourses appeared in Colombia and LatinAmerica, related to race and abnormality, civilizationand progress, culture and control, education and training.These discourses came from diverse sectors, yetwere framed in general within the great republican utopiasrelated to the great project of the nation-state, whichdemanded this recent discovery of the population as asource of wealth. It was under these lineaments, that thefamily lost his tutelage, that medicine and illness werenationalized, that the school, the barracks or the plantationwere reformed and served as new spaces of discipline.One important consequence was changes in thecontrol over women and their sexuality. This meant thebiopolitical use of their body, of their physiology, as machinesof reproduction of the new generations, necessaryfor producing the “new citizen,” morally and physicallyhealthy. It is a question then of knowing among otherthings: which discourses preceded and surrounded theinterdiction of the body of women, what knowledge wasused to legitimize this? For this analysis, it was necessary,more than appealing to global and political history,to carry out an archaeology in the style of Foucault onthose discourses and given practices.Key words: Heredity, woman, nation-state, ancestral, degeneratetares, interracial crossing.

‘Here in India’: Nineteenth-Century British Women Navigating their Position in the Empire through Children's Literature

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-185
Author(s):  
Jesse Aberbach
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Infants And Children ◽  
Children's Books ◽  
Children’S Books ◽  
Maternal Roles ◽  
Female Writers ◽  
And Control ◽  
Botanical Study

This article considers how the children's books written by two nineteenth-century female writers, Eliza Tabor and Mary Martha Sherwood, when they accompanied their husbands to India, enabled them to navigate this new environment and their position as respectable middle-class women while revealing how India was deemed a place where British childhood was impossible. Just as many women took up botanical study to legitimise their ‘otherwise transgressive presence in imperial spaces’ (McEwan 219), writing for children enabled others to engage with the masculine world of travelling and earning money without compromising their femininity. Addressing their work to children also seems to have helped both writers to deal with the absence of their own children: the Indian climate made it impossibly challenging for most British infants and children. In this way their writing gives expression to what might be termed a crisis of imperial motherhood. Underlying the texts is an anxiety relating to British settlement and an attempt to comprehend and control a place that threatened their maternal roles.

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