Scottish Orientalism: From Robertson to James Mill

1982 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Rendall
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
British India ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Close Interrelationship

It is by now accepted that James Mill’s History of British India, which exercised such influence over the British image of India and Indians throughout the nineteenth century, was cast in the mould of‘philosophical history’, the kind of historical writing typical of the Scottish Enlightenment By the 1790s such an approach was faught at Edinburgh by Dugald Stewart, and in Glasgow by John Millar; and their teachings and writings did much to form Mill’s approach, overlaid though it later was by the Benthamite political message. The characteristics of ‘ philosophical history’ can be identified. Writers of the Scottish Enlightenment were concerned to apply to the study of man and society methods of enquiry comparable to those of the natural sciences, and this, for them, involved the formulation of general laws on the basis of observation, and the available evidence about the history, economy, culture, and political institutions of different societies. Certain guidelines were evolved. The starting point was the close interrelationship between all aspects of men's life within society, between the economy, government, culture, and social life of a people. Secondly, a civilisation, by which was implied all these aspects of a society, could be located on an evolutionary scale, a ladder of civilizations running from ‘rudeness’ to ‘refinement’.

The Modernities of H. Lawrence Freeman

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 719-779
Author(s):  
David Gutkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
White Press ◽  
Grand Opera

H. Lawrence Freeman's “Negro Jazz Grand Opera,” Voodoo, was premiered in 1928 in Manhattan's Broadway district. Its reception bespoke competing, racially charged values that underpinned the idea of the “modern” in the 1920s. The white press critiqued the opera for its allegedly anxiety-ridden indebtedness to nineteenth-century European conventions, while the black press hailed it as the pathbreaking work of a “pioneer composer.” Taking the reception history of Voodoo as a starting point, this article shows how Freeman's lifelong project, the creation of what he would call “Negro Grand Opera,” mediated between disparate and sometimes apparently irreconcilable figurations of the modern that spanned the late nineteenth century through the interwar years: Wagnerism, uplift ideology, primitivism, and popular music (including, but not limited to, jazz). I focus on Freeman's inheritance of a worldview that could be called progressivist, evolutionist, or, to borrow a term from Wilson Moses, civilizationist. I then trace the complex relationship between this mode of imagining modernity and subsequent versions of modernism that Freeman engaged with during the first decades of the twentieth century. Through readings of Freeman's aesthetic manifestos and his stylistically syncretic musical corpus I show how ideas about race inflected the process by which the qualitatively modern slips out of joint with temporal modernity. The most substantial musical analysis examines leitmotivic transformations that play out across Freeman's jazz opera American Romance (1924–29): lions become subways; Mississippi becomes New York; and jazz, like modernity itself, keeps metamorphosing. A concluding section considers a broader set of questions concerning the historiography of modernism and modernity.

Victorian Pain

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Ablow
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Harriet Martineau ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Natural Philosophers ◽  
First Time

The nineteenth century introduced developments in science and medicine that made the eradication of pain conceivable for the first time. This new understanding of pain brought with it a complex set of moral and philosophical dilemmas. If pain serves no obvious purpose, how do we reconcile its existence with a well-ordered universe? Examining how writers of the day engaged with such questions, this book offers a compelling new literary and philosophical history of modern pain. The book provides close readings of novelists Charlotte Brontë and Thomas Hardy and political and natural philosophers John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau, and Charles Darwin, as well as a variety of medical, scientific, and popular writers of the Victorian age. The book explores how discussions of pain served as investigations into the status of persons and the nature and parameters of social life. No longer conceivable as divine trial or punishment, pain in the nineteenth century came to seem instead like a historical accident suggesting little or nothing about the individual who suffers. A landmark study of Victorian literature and the history of pain, the book shows how these writers came to see pain as a social as well as a personal problem. Rather than simply self-evident to the sufferer and unknowable to anyone else, pain was also understood to be produced between persons—and even, perhaps, by the fictions they read.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. B. Patterson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Robert Southey ◽  
History Of ◽  
Charles Lamb

Fuller’s books about England’s religious past helped to stimulate an outpouring of historical writing. Peter Heylyn wrote about some of the same subjects as Fuller, and so did Gilbert Burnet, Edward Stillingfleet, John Strype, and Jeremy Collier. Burnet, who looked for models for his history of the English Reformation, was sarcastic about Fuller, partly because of the latter’s “odd way of writing.” Fuller’s work was not highly regarded in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the nineteenth century Charles Lamb, Robert Southey, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge deeply admired him for his insights and praised him for his writing. Several nineteenth-century historians defended his work. His reputation has remained uncertain, despite fresh assessments in recent years. Coleridge was remarkably apt in his viewpoint. Fuller saw the broader significance of the events he described and was one of the most sensible scholars and writers of his time.

scholarly journals The historical writing of the Monography in contemporary Morocco: a contribution to the study of backgrounds, subject and methodology: الكتابة التاريخية المونوغرافية بالمغرب المعاصر: إسهام في دراسة الخلفيات والموضوع والمنهج

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (10) ◽  
Author(s):  
Elbachir Abarzak
Keyword(s):  
Historical Research ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Historical Material ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Regional History ◽  
The Rich

Form of requirement to rewrite the history of Morocco, end and destined for historical writing since the dawn of contemporary Moroccan independence to today. To achieve this endeavor went searching at first with the pioneers of traditional historical writing about writing encyclopedic local dates for various parts of the country, leaving archival sources and the rich historical material, formed an indispensable starting point for subsequent generations of researchers. Has contributed to those pioneers in founding the transformation of historical research in Morocco beginning in the 1970s, crystallized modern path generated in regional history, formed in some respects a continuation of historical writing traditional regional hand and open to Thematic issues and new methodology.

Central Asia: West and East

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN BOARDMAN
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
British India ◽  
Asian Studies ◽  
The West ◽  
Central Asian ◽  
History Of

This chapter discusses the interest of the west in the history of Central Asia. It explains that central Asia has been studied by many western scholars and explorers, including British archaeologist Aurel Stein and traveller Sir John de Maundeville. Central Asia figured prominently in the days of political concerns about the safety of British India in the nineteenth century and this generated the interest of scholars. Today, the boom in Central Asian studies is further encouraged by the presence in Britain of those who have worked in this field and the source of many new publications on both prehistoric and historic periods.

Society, Nature, Emancipation

Why History? ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 154-190
Author(s):  
Donald Bloxham
Keyword(s):  
Life History ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Vicarious Experience ◽  
Human History ◽  
Speculative Philosophy ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
National Differences ◽  
Intellectual Traditions ◽  
History Of

This chapter is predominantly concerned with the thought tendencies grouped under the heading ‘the Enlightenment’, with regulation caveats about variations in character, national and otherwise, of the intellectual traditions denoted by the term: the French, Scottish, and German cases are each given separate attention. The governing concern is with the most theoretically self-conscious attempts to establish the utility of History as a way of understanding the human experience in light of influential concepts like Volksgeist, circonstance, esprit général, represéntations, and even ‘relations of production’, that elucidated human diversity across time and place. When explaining the broad sweep of human history providential accounts were replaced by secular ones, though in some instances the latter were structurally similar to the former and so had some of the character of History as Speculative Philosophy. On the whole the scholarship under examination evinced a liberal spirit as regards confessional and national differences, though it was frequently marked by a partiality to occidental civilization. Overall, we see a shift away from the study of religious and political institutions and towards—or back towards, insofar as there was some crossover with the French ‘new History’ of the sixteenth century—civic morals, culture, and the structural conditions of social life. History expanded further from being an instruction in statecraft for public men to proffering more rounded edification in the form of vicarious experience of different spheres of life.

James Mill's ‘The History of British India’ and Utilitarianism as a Rhetoric of Reform

1990 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Majeed
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Cultural Identities ◽  
Jeremy Bentham ◽  
British India ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
The French Revolution

This paper is about the emergence of new political idioms in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Britain, and how this was closely involved with the complexities of British imperial experience in India. In particular, I shall concentrate on the radical rhetoric of Utilitarianism expressed by Jeremy Bentham, and especially by James Mill. This rhetoric was an attack on the revitalized conservatism of the early nineteenth century, which had emerged in response to the threat of the French revolution; but the arena for the struggle between this conservatism and Utilitarianism increasingly became defined in relation to a set of conflicting attitudes towards British involvement in India. These new political languages also involved the formulation of aesthetic attitudes, which were an important component of British views on India. I shall try to show how these attitudes, or what we might call the politics of the imagination, had a lot to do with the defining of cultural identities, with which both political languages were preoccupied.

scholarly journals Dueling, Conflicting Masculinities, and the Victorian Gentleman

2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 605-628 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margery Masterson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Interpersonal Violence ◽  
Multifaceted Approach ◽  
Multiple Modes ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Modern Britain ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractThis article takes an unexplored popular debate from the 1860s over the role of dueling in regulating gentlemanly conduct as the starting point to examine the relationship between elite Victorian masculinities and interpersonal violence. In the absence of a meaningful replacement for dueling and other ritualized acts meant to defend personal honor, multiple modes of often conflicting masculinities became available to genteel men in the middle of the nineteenth century. Considering the security fears of the period––European and imperial, real and imagined––the article illustrates how pacific and martial masculine identities coexisted in a shifting and uneasy balance. The professional character of the enlarging gentlemanly classes and the increased importance of men's domestic identities––trends often aligned with hegemonic masculinity––played an ambivalent role in popular attitudes to interpersonal violence. The cultural history of dueling can thus inform a multifaceted approach toward gender, class, and violence in modern Britain.

The Conditioned Reflex and Some Psychological Analogues

1930 ◽  
Vol 76 (315) ◽  
pp. 764-771
Author(s):  
A. Wohlgemuth
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
The Other ◽  
New Era ◽  
Anatomy And Physiology ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Wilhelm Wundt ◽  
Modern Psychology ◽  
History Of ◽  
Hunting Ground

Psychology was for centuries a part of philosophy, the happy, undisputed hunting-ground of the speculative metaphysician. With the beginning of the nineteenth century a new era dawned gradually for psychology. Anatomists, physiologists and physicists began to invade this reserve of the metaphysician. These early attempts of Gall and Spurzheim, Johannes Müller, E. H. Weber, Du Bois Reymond, Helmholtz, Lotze, Fechner, Thomas Young and many others are too well known to detain us. They lead up to the work of Wilhelm Wundt and the establishment of psychology as one of the natural sciences, from speculation without facts to speculation allied with experiment. However, as usually happens, the swing of the pendulum goes from one extreme to the other. For whilst the metaphysical psychologist would ignore physiology and neurology, maintaining that what is not itself a phase of consciousness cannot be used to explain consciousness, some of the physiological psychologists would overshoot the mark and attempt a psychology without consciousness. Thus we find the behaviourists (Watson) and the objective psychologists (Bechterew). Pavlov appears to belong to the latter school. But as Prof. Brett, in his History of Psychology, rightly says: “Modern psychology lies between two points: it emerges from anatomy and physiology, and terminates in a region where those sciences cease to guide.”

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