The “Criminal Tribe” in India before the British

2015 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 323-354 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anastasia Piliavsky
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Categories ◽  
Legal Texts ◽  
History Of ◽  
Imperial Politics ◽  
History Of Violence ◽  
Broad Consensus ◽  
Selection Of ◽  
Travel Accounts

AbstractThis paper challenges the broad consensus in current historiography that holds the Indian stereotype of criminal tribe to be a myth of colonial making. Drawing on a selection of precolonial descriptions of robber castes—ancient legal texts and folktales; Jain, Buddhist and Brahmanic narratives; Mughal sources; and Early Modern European travel accounts—I show that the idea of castes of congenital robbers was not a British import, but instead a label of much older vintage on the subcontinent. Enjoying pride of place in the postcolonial critics' pageant of “colonial stereotypes,” the case of criminal tribes is representative and it bears on broader questions about colonial knowledge and its relation to power. The study contributes to the literature that challenges the still widespread tendency to view colonial social categories, and indeed the bulk of colonial knowledge, as the imaginative residue of imperial politics. I argue that while colonialusesof the idea of a criminal tribe comprises a lurid history of violence against communities branded as born criminals in British law, the stereotype itself has indigenous roots. The case is representative and it bears on larger problems of method and analysis in “post-Orientalist” historiography.

Violence and Masculinity

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joachim Eibach
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Interpersonal Violence ◽  
Violent Crimes ◽  
Grand Theory ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Violence ◽  
Shed Light

A consistent overrepresentation of men in recorded violent crimes and thus a certain disposition of male aggressiveness has been evident from the late Middle Ages to today. However, we can also detect several major shifts in the history of interpersonal male violence from the eighteenth century onward. From a cultural historical perspective, violent actions by men or women cannot be interpreted as contingent, individual acts, but rather must be seen as practices embedded in sociocultural contexts and accompanied by informal norms. Because one grand theory cannot account convincingly for the history of violence and masculinity, an array of approaches is more likely to shed light on the issue. Interestingly, shifts in the history of violence have often corresponded with changes to prevailing notions of masculinity. This essay delineates the relevant historical shifts from the early modern “culture of dispute” to the different paths of interpersonal violence over the twentieth century.

The Conquest of Death

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Lockwood
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
State Formation ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Original Intent ◽  
History Of ◽  
Legislative Policy ◽  
History Of Violence ◽  
The Creation ◽  
State Growth ◽  
The Relationship

The Conquest of Death considers the concepts of violence and state power far more broadly and holistically than previous accounts of state growth by intertwining the national and the local, the formal and the informal to illustrate how the management of incidental acts of violence and justice was as important to the monopolization of violence as the creation of the machinery of warfare. It reveals how the creation and operation of everyday bureaucracy built systems of power far exceeding its original intent and allowed a greater centralized surveillance of daily life than ever before. In sum, this book forces us to think about state formation not in terms of the broad strokes of legislative policy and international competition, but rather as a process built by multiple tiny actions, interactions and encroachments which fundamentally redefined the nature of the state and the relationship between government and governed. The Conquest of Death thus provides a new approach to the history of state formation, the history of criminal justice and the history of violence in early modern England. By locating the creation of an effective, permanent monopoly of violence in England in the second-half of the sixteenth century, this book also provides a new chronology of the divide between medieval and modern while divorcing the history of state growth from a linear history of centralization.

The Actual and the Possible

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Bertrand Russell ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
Baruch Spinoza ◽  
Christian Wolff ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Range ◽  
Selection Of

This volume offers a selection of essays by leading specialists on modality and the metaphysics of modality in the history of modern philosophy, from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. It revisits key moments in the history of modern modal doctrines, and illuminates lesser-known moments of that history. With this historical approach, the book aims to contextualize and even to offer alternatives to dominant positions within the contemporary philosophy of modality. Hence the volume contains not only new scholarship on the early-modern doctrines of Baruch Spinoza, G. W. Leibniz, Christian Wolff, and Immanuel Kant, but also work relating to less familiar nineteenth-century thinkers such as Alexius Meinong and Jan Łukasiewicz, together with essays on celebrated nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers such as G. W. F. Hegel, Martin Heidegger, and Bertrand Russell, whose modal doctrines have not previously garnered the attention they deserve. The volume thus covers a variety of traditions, and its historical range extends to the end of the twentieth century, since it addresses the legacy of Willard Van Orman Quine’s critique of modality within recent analytic philosophy.

Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy, Volume X

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Early Modern Philosophy ◽  
Annual Series ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Modern Thought ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Selection Of

Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy is an annual series, presenting a selection of the best current work in the history of early modern philosophy. It focuses on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—the extraordinary period of intellectual flourishing that begins, roughly, with Descartes and his contemporaries and ends with Kant. It also publishes work on thinkers or movements outside of that framework, provided they are important in illuminating early modern thought. The core of the subject matter is philosophy and its history. But the volume’s chapters reflect the fact that philosophy in the early modern period was much broader in its scope than it is currently taken to be and included a great deal of what now belongs to the natural sciences. Furthermore, philosophy in the period was closely connected with other disciplines, such as theology, law and medicine, and with larger questions of social, political, and religious history. Volume 10 includes chapters dedicated to a wide set of topics in the philosophies of Thomas White, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, and Hume.

A diachronic speech act analysis of sworn testimonies in Polish criminal trials

2006 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 293-314 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wojciech Kwarciński
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Criminal Trials ◽  
Complete Collection ◽  
Legal Context ◽  
Legal Texts ◽  
History Of ◽  
Speech Act Analysis ◽  
Proper Analysis ◽  
Selection Of

In this paper I employ a diachronic model of analyzing speech acts to trace the development of sworn testimonies through the history of the Polish criminal trial. The research is based on the complete collection of medieval testimonies in Old Polish that have survived to the present day and on a selection of legal texts recorded in modern criminal trials. My preliminary assumption is that a proper analysis of institutional acts such as testimonies can only be achieved when their socio-historical context is taken into account. This is due to the fact that the very existence of legal speech acts depends on a set of constitutive rules that are socially and historically variable. The study corroborates my hypothesis and offers evidence in favor of the view that the changing legal context in which testimonies occur affects not only the ways in which they are realized over time but also their performative function.

scholarly journals Water Management, Purification and Testing Techniques in Indo-Pak Landscapes in the Early Modern Period

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-28
Author(s):  
Suryyia Manzoor ◽  
Taniya Iqbal
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Historical Texts ◽  
Water Testing ◽  
Religious Rituals ◽  
Water Transportation ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
Selection Of

Abstract This article reviews water transportation, testing and purification techniques in a regional context - the Indo-Pak subcontinent, a southern region of Asia - during the early modern period. A brief history of comparative methodologies based on surveys and historical texts has been explored as evidence of the evolving types of water testing parameters between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries. This analysis also took under consideration the role of culture, beliefs as well as religious rituals in the selection of drinking water and how it has influenced the population living conditions, dominating the process of decision-making within a specific community.

scholarly journals Commerce, finance and statecraft

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Dew
Keyword(s):  
Economic Policy ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
British History ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Political Conflicts ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Selection Of

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, historians of England pioneered a series of new approaches to the history of economic policy. Commerce, Finances and Statecraft charts the development of these forms of writing and explores the role they played in the period's economic, political and historiographical thought. Through doing so, the book makes a significant intervention in the study of historiography, and provides an original account of early-modern and Enlightenment history. A broad selection of historical writing is discussed, ranging from the work of Francis Bacon and William Camden in the Jacobean-era, through a series of accounts shaped by the English Civil War and the party-political conflicts that followed it, to the eighteenth-century's major account of British history: David Hume's History of England. Particular attention is paid to the historiographical context in which historians worked and the various ways they copied, adapted and contested one another's narratives. Such an approach enables the study to demonstrate that historical writing was the site of a wide-ranging, politically-charged debate concerning the relationship which existed – and should have existed – between government and commerce at various moments in England’s past.

scholarly journals Beauplan’s Ukraine: open access georeferenced databases for studies of early modern history of Central and Eastern Europe

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 185-193
Author(s):  
Michael Polczynski ◽  
Mark Polczynski
Keyword(s):  
Open Access ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Early Modern History ◽  
History Of ◽  
South Eastern Europe ◽  
The Rich ◽  
River Rapids ◽  
Early Modern Times ◽  
Selection Of

Abstract In 1630, Guillaume Le Vasseur, sieur de Beauplan, travelled to the lands of Poland-Lithuania to begin a seventeen-year military career in the Crown army. The purpose of the Beauplan’s Ukraine (BU) project is to provide a set of open access, georeferenced databases for the populated places, rivers, river fords, river rapids, islands, forests, mountains, valleys, and travel paths that are shown on a selection of maps created by Beauplan. The purpose of this document is to describe how these databases and related materials can be accessed and applied by scholars, with the ultimate goal of this work being to convert the rich source of information provided by Beauplan’s maps into a viable instrument for the laboratory of the historian of south-eastern Europe in Early Modern times.

Configurations and Prefigurations of Conversion in the History of World Christianity

2017 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Lienemann-Perrin
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
Broad Variety ◽  
World Christianity ◽  
Historical Periods ◽  
Selection Of

Many contemporary understandings and implementations of conversion are prefigured in historical periods of world Christianity. In this paper, I consider a selection of historical moments, which together illustrate the broad variety of understandings and practices of conversion. I begin with conversion’s role in the formation of Christianity, followed by conversion in oriental Christianity under the influence of Islam from the seventh century. I then explore conversion in occidental Christianity during the early modern period. Exported to China in the seventeenth century, this conception ultimately failed to translate into the Chinese context. After briefly considering this development, I turn to an understanding of conversion that emerged in African societies, which responded in their own ways to Western missions during late colonialism. Finally, I consider the nature of conversion, de-conversion and re-conversion in secularized societies.很多当代对转化的认知及实施都是在世界基督教的历史阶段中被预示了的。在这篇文章中，我择选了部分历史片段，用以说明对转化的理解及实践的多样性。我以基督教成形中转化的角色为开始，进入到七世纪在伊斯兰教影响下的东方基督教的转化，然后探讨近现代欧美基督教的转化。当这概念在十七世纪进口到中国时，并未成功地转入中国社会。这之后，我会考查在非洲社会呈现的对转化的理解，他们怎样在后殖民主义时期以自己的方式回应西方宣教。最后，我会探讨在世俗化社会里转化，非转化及再转化的本质。Muchas interpretaciones y prácticas contemporáneas de la conversión fueron anticipadas en los períodos históricos del cristianismo. En este artículo, la autora considera una selección de momentos históricos que en conjunto ilustran la amplia variedad de entendimientos y prácticas de conversión. Comienza con el papel de la conversión en la formación del cristianismo, seguido, desde el siglovii, por la conversión en el cristianismo oriental bajo la influencia del Islam. A continuación, explora la conversión en el cristianismo occidental durante la Edad Moderna. Esta concepción fue exportada a la China en el sigloxviipero no pudo trasladarse al contexto chino. Luego de considerar brevemente este desarrollo, analiza el tipo de conversión que surgió en las sociedades africanas, que respondieron a su manera a las misiones occidentales durante la época del colonialismo tardío. Por último, considera la naturaleza de la conversión, la des-conversión y la re-conversión en las sociedades secularizadas.This article is in English.

A Cultural History of Memory in the Early Modern Age

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Cultural Artifacts ◽  
Cultural Encounters ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
Selection Of

The early modern age, conceived in this volume as a period spanning from 1450 to 1700, was an epoch of dramatic cultural and social developments. It witnessed major cultural encounters that produced what is currently labeled the first globalization, and intensified the worldwide circulation of a variety of cultural artifacts—as well as of people, knowledge, and ideas. Taking all these developments into account, it seems inevitable that many human groups in a variety of changing historical circumstances should have produced and practiced, over that period, distinctive forms of memory which it would not be fruitful to amalgamate into one unifying category. Rather than attempting that, the essays in this volume aim to explore a stimulating selection of a wide range of experiences of remembering and forgetting in early modern Europe.

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