LANGUAGE AND POLITICS AT THE WESTMINSTER ELECTION OF 1796

2001 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 419-439 ◽  
Author(s):  
TIMOTHY JENKS

This article looks at one of the less frequently examined contests in the parliamentary borough of Westminster – the election of 1796, in which Charles James Fox, Admiral Allan Gardner, and John Horne Tooke vied for the borough's two seats. This election offers an opportunity to investigate the patriotic discourses, representational strategies, and styles of political leadership available to loyalism and popular radicalism in the early years of the war with Revolutionary France. The period of the election spanned the second anniversary of Admiral Richard Howe's victory of 1 June 1794, creating significant opportunities for links to be made between Gardner's naval position and the necessity of electing a loyalist candidate. The article investigates electoral politics with an eye towards reconstructing some important features of Westminster political culture in the 1790s. While Gardner's electoral posture is revealed to depend on a series of stereotypes operating around the image of the ‘political’ admiral, Tooke's is shown to have been heavily informed by his philological studies. Given the long history of admirals serving as MPs for Westminster and the persistent presence of naval officers as members of parliament between 1790 and 1820, the article concludes by suggesting that political admiralship played a role in the development of nineteenth-century styles of political candidacy and leadership.

2016 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 550-576 ◽  
Author(s):  
Assef Ashraf

AbstractThis article uses gift-giving practices in early nineteenth-century Iran as a window onto statecraft, governance, and center-periphery relations in the early Qajar state (1785–1925). It first demonstrates that gifts have a long history in the administrative and political history of Iran, the Persianate world, and broader Eurasia, before highlighting specific features found in Iran. The article argues that the pīshkish, a tributary gift-giving ceremony, constituted a central role in the political culture and economy of Qajar Iran, and was part of the process of presenting Qajar rule as a continuation of previous Iranian royal dynasties. Nevertheless, pīshkish ceremonies also illustrated the challenges Qajar rulers faced in exerting power in the provinces and winning the loyalty of provincial elites. Qajar statesmen viewed gifts and bribes, at least at a discursive level, in different terms, with the former clearly understood as an acceptable practice. Gifts and honors, like the khil‘at, presented to society were part of Qajar rulers' strategy of presenting themselves as just and legitimate. Finally, the article considers the use of gifts to influence diplomacy and ease relations between Iranians and foreign envoys, as well as the ways in which an inadequate gift could cause offense.


Author(s):  
Nurit Yaari

This chapter examines the lack of continuous tradition of the art of the theatre in the history of Jewish culture. Theatre as art and institution was forbidden for Jews during most of their history, and although there were plays written in different times and places during the past centuries, no tradition of theatre evolved in Jewish culture until the middle of the nineteenth century. In view of this absence, the author discusses the genesis of Jewish theatre in Eastern Europe and in Eretz-Yisrael (The Land of Israel) since the late nineteenth century, encouraged by the Jewish Enlightenment movement, the emergence of Jewish nationalism, and the rebirth of Hebrew as a language of everyday life. Finally, the chapter traces the development of parallel strands of theatre that preceded the Israeli theatre and shadowed the emergence of the political infrastructure of the future State of Israel.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dmitriy Kazancev

The monograph is devoted to the history of medieval Russian and Byzantine teachings about the power of the sovereign and the reflection of these doctrinal ideas in the practice of public administration of the two peoples. The phenomena of the power of the sovereigns of the Byzantine Empire, Ancient Russia and the Moscow state are investigated and compared, and an attempt is made to answer the question of what is common and different in the foundations of the organization of power of these three states. The Byzantine influence on the political culture of Russia is still a subject of controversy, and therefore it is especially important to analyze the achievements of historical and legal science in this area for a reasoned discussion. For students and teachers, as well as anyone interested in national and world history.


1986 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 363-382
Author(s):  
Larry W. Yarak

One of the more perplexing issues in the history of Asante's relations with the Europeans on the nineteenth-century Gold Coast has been that of the origin and significance of the so-called “Elmina Note,” the pay document which authorized the Asantehene to collect two ounces of gold (or its equivalent in trade goods) per month from the Dutch authorities at Elmina. Not only have modern historians of Ghana evidenced no small amount of confusion on this matter, but during 1870/71 the Asantehene, the British, and the Dutch also disagreed strongly over the political significance of the note, as the Dutch negotiated to cede their “possessions” on the Gold Coast to the British. Failure to resolve these disagreements contributed significantly to the Asante decision to invade the British “protected” territories in 1873. This action in turn led to the British invasion of Asante in 1874, which most historians agree constitutes a critical watershed in Asante history. Clearly, the matter of the “Elmina Note” (or kostbrief as it was known to the Dutch) is one of some historical and historiographical importance. An examination of the relevant Dutch, Danish, and British documentation now makes possible a resolution of the major questions concerning its origin and meaning.The debates between the Asante, the British, and the Dutch show that in the later nineteenth century there was considerable agreement over certain issues: first, no one disputed that the Dutch had for some time past paid to the Asantehene (actually to an envoy dispatched by the king to Elmina) a stipend (or kostgeld, as the Dutch termed it) of two ounces of gold per month, or twentyfour ounces per year.


Author(s):  
Sean Hanretta

The concept of culture, in the Boasian sense of the learned, variable, and mutable “structures” underlying “the behavior of the individuals composing a social group collectively and individually,” has played an important role in the production of knowledge about many human societies. This chapter examines two moments in the history of the culture concept as applied to West Africa. First, a moment during the process of the concept's formation in the mid-nineteenth century; second, a moment in the 1950s that revealed the political limits of appeals to culture. Juxtaposing the lives of Edward Wilmot Blyden, the father of Pan-Africanism, and the Ghanaian doctor and poet Raphael Armattoe, one of the first Africans nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, the chapter illuminates the diverse networks and shifting political valences that shaped the rise, redemption, and circumscription of the culture concept in Africa from colonialism to neoliberalism.


2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-94
Author(s):  
Matt Cohen

Nineteenth-century struggles over mapping concepts and techniques yielded the forebears of digital humanistic data visualizations today, staging the political tensions of the deep map’s entry into the humanities. The careers of educational reformer Emma Hart Willard and Creek poet and critic Alexander Posey, who were both map-makers in their ways, exemplify the entanglements of the history of deep mapping. Willard was a feminist innovator in her work with historical visualization, but at the cost of solidifying a regime of indigenous vanishment. Posey fought for his people’s cultural survival, but he did so from within a bureaucratic engine made possible in part by Willard’s widespread pedagogy linking the American map with a vision of settler dominance. These two figures left us provocative maps, but also offer a way to reflect on the justness of map-making — on the difficulty of deepening the map wisely, or even ethically.   


2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (6) ◽  
pp. 1840-1874 ◽  
Author(s):  
TAHIR KAMRAN

AbstractDuring the late nineteenth-century colonial era in India, theKhatam-e-Nubuwwat(Finality of the Prophethood) assumed remarkable salience as a theme for religious debate among Muslim sects. The controversies around the establishment of the Ahmadiya sect in 1889 brought the issue ofKhatam-e-Nubuwwatto the centre stage of religious polemic ormunazara.Tense relations continued between Ahmadiya and Sunnis, in particular, though the tension remained confined to the domain of religious polemic. However, immediately after Pakistan's creation, theKhatam-e-Nubuwwatsqueezed itself out of the epistemic confines of the ‘theological’ and entered the realm of the ‘political’.Majlis-Tahafuz-i-Khatam-e-Nubuwwat(the Association for the Safety of the Finality of the Prophethood) grew out of the almost-defunctMajlis-i-Ahrar-i-Islamon 13 January 1949, with the principal objective of excluding the Ahmadiya sect from the Islamic fold.1This article seeks to reveal how theKhatam-e-Nubuwwathas impinged upon the course of Pakistani politics from 1949 onwards as an instrument of religious exclusion, peaking in 1953. The pre-history of religious exclusion, which had 1889 as a watershed—the year when the Ahmadiya sect took a definitive shape—thus forms the initial part of the article.


2021 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 118-150
Author(s):  
Matthew Leigh

This paper studies examples of how exponents of Roman declamation could insert into arguments on the trivial, even fantastic, cases known as controuersiae statements of striking relevance to the political culture of the triumviral and early imperial period. This is particularly apparent in the Controuersiae of Seneca the Elder but some traces remain in the Minor Declamations attributed to Quintilian. The boundaries separating Rome itself from the declamatory city referred to by modern scholars as Sophistopolis are significantly blurred even in those instances where the exercise does not turn on a specific event from Roman history, and there is much to be gained from how the declaimers deploy Roman historical examples. Some of the most sophisticated instances of mediated political comment exploit the employment of universalizing sententiae, which have considerable bite when they are related to contemporary Roman discourse and experience. The declamation schools are a forum for thinking through the implications of the transformation of the Roman state and deserve a place within any history of Roman political thought.


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