scholarly journals Evidence for Thailand's Missing Social History: Thai Women in Old Mural Paintings

2002 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-275 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alec Gordon ◽  
Napat Sirisambhand
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
Capital City ◽  
Gender History ◽  
Thai Women ◽  
The North ◽  
Mural Paintings

With the burning of central Thailand's capital city, Ayudhya, in 1767 and the destruction of virtually all the records kept there by the centralized bureaucracy of that kingdom, and with the Burmese occupation of the north and the devastating years of fighting around 1800 to drive them out, there is virtually no written record left at all for Thailand prior to the nineteenth century. There is a little material on rulers and some of their activities, but for social history the record is nearly blank. Is there then no way to write a social history or a gender history for Thailand?

Mpongwe Origins: Historiographical Perspectives

1975 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 59-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry H. Bucher
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Capital City ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Lingua Franca ◽  
Previous Period ◽  
The North ◽  
Bantu Language ◽  
Linguistic Classification

The Mpongwe people of the Gabon estuary live today in the immediate area of Libreville, the capital city of the Gabon Republic. Libreville is built on Mpongwe ancestral lands, and its history is only a small and comparatively recent chapter in the longer story of the Mpongwe and their neighbors. In the nineteenth century the expression “les Gabonais” or “the Gaboon people” had only one meaning—the Mpongwe of the estuary who were the coastal trading aristocracy.The Mpongwe are only one of the six peoples belonging to the Myèné-speaking group of Gabon. The other five are the Orungu, Nkomi, Galoa, Adyumba, and Enenga. Only the Mpongwe are patrilineal. Myèné is purely a linguistic classification, a subdivision of the Bantu language. All six of these societies fit into a circle whose circumference includes the three largest cities in Gabon today—Libreville, Port Gentil (formerly Cape Lopez), and Lambaréné (Map 1). From the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, Myèné was the coastal lingua franca between the southern Cameroun and Cabinda. The Myèné societies in general, and the Mpongwe in particular, have played a key role in Gabon's past, and continue to be an influential minority in modern Gabon. In the early nineteenth century, and for an unknown previous period, the closest non-Myèné neighbors of the Mpongwe were the Benga and the related societies to the north, and the Shekiani and Bakélé to the east. The Shekiani were the couriers in the Mpongwe trade with the Bakélé and other interior societies.

From Caesarea to Athens: Greek Revival Edinburgh and the Question of Scottish Identity within the Unionist State

2001 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 136-157 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Lowrey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sir Walter Scott ◽  
Capital City ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Town ◽  
The North ◽  
Greek Revival ◽  
Greek Architecture ◽  
The City

In the early nineteenth century, the city of Edinburgh cultivated a reputation as "the Athens of the North." The paper explores the architectural aspects of this in relation to the city's sense of its own identity. It traces the idea of Edinburgh as a "modern Athens" back to the eighteenth century, when the connotations were cultural, intellectual, and topographical rather than architectural. With the emergence of the Greek revival, however, Edinburgh began actively to construct an image of classical Greece on the hilltops and in the streets of the expanding city. It is argued that the Athenian identity of Edinburgh should be viewed as the culmination of a series of developments dating back to the Act of Union between the Scottish and English Parliaments in 1707. As a result, Edinburgh lost its status as a capital city and struggled to reassert itself against the stronger economy of the south. Almost inevitably, the northern capital had to redefine itself in relation to London, the English and British capital. The major developments of Edinburgh in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including the New Town and the urban proposals of Robert Adam, are interpreted in this light. As the eighteenth century progressed, the city grew more confident and by the early nineteenth century had settled upon its role within the Union and within the empire, which was that of cultural capital as a counterbalance to London, the political capital. The architectural culmination of the process of the redefinition of Edinburgh, however, coincided with the emergence of another mythology of Scottish identity, as seen through the Romantic vision of Sir Walter Scott. It implied a quite different, indigenous architecture that later found its expression in the Scots Baronial style. It is argued here, however, that duality does not contradict the idea of Edinburgh as Athens, nor, more generally, does it sit uneasily with the Scottish predilection for Greek architecture, but rather that it encapsulates the very essence of Scottish national identity: both proudly Scots and British.

The Itsekiri in the nineteenth century; an outline social history

1963 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. C. Lloyd
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
Palm Oil ◽  
Niger Delta ◽  
Political Structure ◽  
The North ◽  
North Western

In 1800 the Itsekiri kingdom of Warri in the north-western corner of the Niger delta had a highly centralized government. In 1848, the king died, followed shortly by his two principal heirs, and a state of anarchy developed in which order was maintained largely through the balance held between the two largest descent groups or ‘Houses’. The latter part of the century saw the rise, and defeat by the British of Nana Olomu, possibly the greatest of the delta traders, whose power over the Itsekiri derived from his trading monopoly. One cannot divorce these striking changes in Itsekiri social and political structure from the trade in slaves and later in palm oil, for the Itsekiri were by profession the middlemen between the interior peoples—the Urhobo and Isoko and to some extent the Benin—and the European traders.

Introduction

2001 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Shmuel Feiner ◽  
David Sorkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
Intimate Relationship ◽  
The West ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
The North ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment. The Haskalah provides an interesting example of one of the Enlightenments of eighteenth- to nineteenth-century Europe which also constituted a unique chapter in the social history of European Jewry. It encompasses over 120 years (from around the 1770s to the 1890s), and a large number of Jewish communities, from London in the west, to Copenhagen in the north, to Vilna and St Petersburg in the east. Much scholarship in the past concentrated on the Haskalah's intimate relationship to Jewish modernization: scholars examined the role of the Haskalah in the processes of political emancipation and the integration of Jews into the larger society. A different approach became possible once the modernization of European Jewry came to be viewed as a series of processes that awaited adequate analysis and explanation, the Haskalah being one of the foremost among them.

scholarly journals The arbitration of nature: state, water, and civil engineering in Northern Ireland directly after partition

Water History ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Reinsborough
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil Engineering ◽  
Water Reservoir ◽  
Capital City ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Peace Treaty ◽  
The South ◽  
Engineering Project ◽  
The North ◽  
Late Nineteenth

AbstractBegun in the summer of 1923, the Silent Valley Reservoir was the first large scale civil engineering project after the division between the North and the South of Ireland. It was the continuation of a previous project. In the late Nineteenth Century a portion of the Kilkeel and Annalong Rivers in the Mourne Mountains had been diverted 35 miles to provide water for the growing industrial city of Belfast in the North of Ireland. A reservoir in the mountains was also planned at a later date but this was delayed by the Great War and then by Irish political instability and the high cost of construction in immediate post war period. Before being completed the project had to overcome several obstacles. Firstly, the Mourne Mountains were claimed by the South of Ireland and thus subject to the Boundary Commission of the Anglo-Irish peace treaty. The Water Commissioners had brought important British political leaders to tour the Silent Valley construction site in an attempt to demonstrate how implausible a situation (in their opinion) that the South should control the major water supply to the capital city of the North. Secondly, shortly after the Boundary Commission was shelved, the combination of fluid subsoil and the failure to locate bedrock at expected depth brought construction to a halt while an engineering, political, and legal solution was sought for the expensive and now publicly controversial project. This article traces the contingent relationship between state (sovereignty) and technology (water reservoir) using a socio legal and socio material description of the crucial arbitration process enabling further time and resources for resolution of the difficulty. Ultimately an air-shaft device for excavating under increased atmospheric pressure had to be designed taking in mind both technical and political difficulties. Today the 3000-million-gallon reservoir, first imagined in the late Nineteenth Century, continues to be a major water source for the city of Belfast.

Kampungs and Conflict in Colonial Semarang

1988 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 266-291 ◽  
Author(s):  
James L. Cobban
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
City Council ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
North Coast ◽  
The North ◽  
Central Java ◽  
The Government ◽  
The City

By the beginning of the twentieth century, Semarang was a major port city and administrative centre on Java. Attainment of this position was due partly to the expansion of its hinterland during the nineteenth century. This expansion was closely related to developments in the means of transportation and the consequent ability of plantation owners to bring the products of their plantations to the port for shipment to foreign markets. By the end of the century virtually the whole economic life of central Java focused upon Semarang. The city also exercised administrative functions in the Dutch colonial administration and generally had been responsible for Dutch interests in the middle and eastern parts of the island. The importance of Semarang as an administrative centre increased after 1906. In that year the government incorporated the city as an urban municipality (stadsgemeente). In 1914 it had consular representation from the United States, Belgium, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Italy, Norway, Germany, and Thailand. Subsequently, in 1926 it became the capital of the Province of Central Java under the terms of an administrative reform fostered by the colonial government at Batavia. Status as an urban municipality meant that local officials sitting on a city council would govern the domestic affairs of the city. The members of the city council at first were appointed from Batavia, subsequently some of them were elected by residents of the city. By the beginning of the twentieth century Semarang had enhanced its position as a major port on the north coast of the island of Java. It was one of the foremost cities of the Dutch East Indies, along with Batavia and Surabaya, a leading port and a centre of administration and trade. This article outlines the growth of the port of Semarang during the nineteenth century and discusses some of the conflict related to this growth over living conditions in parts of the city during the twentieth century, a conflict which smouldered for several decades among the government, members of the city council, and the non-European residents of the city, one which remained unresolved at the end of the colonial era.

scholarly journals FRONTIER, FORTIFICATION, AND FORESTATION: DEFENSIVE WOODLAND ON THE SONG–LIAO BORDER IN THE LONG ELEVENTH CENTURY

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 313-334
Author(s):  
Yuan Julian Chen
Keyword(s):  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Physical Distance ◽  
Capital City ◽  
The North ◽  
Northern Song ◽  
The Creation

ABSTRACTThis article examines the creation, preservation, and destruction of the defensive forest that the Northern Song built in Hebei along the Song–Liao border. Created as a landscape barrier against the Kitan attacks, this forest established the necessary strategic depth between the capital city and the northern frontline of the Song empire to compensate for Kaifeng's geographical vulnerability. While the Song government painstakingly maintained this forest throughout most of the dynasty, Liao troops, Hebei borderland residents, and many Song officials had nonetheless posed incessant challenges to this military forestation project. In 1122/23, at the onset of the war on the Liao to retrieve the Sixteen Prefectures, the Song army removed this borderland forest that blocked their northern expedition. The destruction of this defensive forest, which could have had thwarted attacks from the north, dismantled the strategic depth between Kaifeng and the Hebei borderland and henceforth presaged the fall of Kaifeng to the Jin, the Liao's successor, in a few years. I argue that this strategic depth was not only a physical distance, but also a diplomatic, sociopolitical, and military link that connected the ecology of the Song's northernmost periphery and the fate of the entire empire.

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