S. R. Welch and His History of the Portuguese in Africa, 1495–1806

1960 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. R. Boxer

The lack of an adequate work in English—or indeed in any other language—on the history of the Portuguese in Africa before the nineteenth century has long been felt by those interested in what is still, in many respects, the Dark Continent, in so far as its past is concerned. In Africa as in Asia, the Portuguese pioneered the expansion of Europe; and their accounts of the indigenous peoples whom they successively discovered will always be of value as showing the state of those peoples before they were affected by contact with white rule. The reactions of the Portuguese to the African environment, whether in Morocco, Guinea, the Congo, Zambesia, or in Abyssinia inevitably affected not only the inhabitants of those regions but set precedents which were followed to a greater or lesser degree by the other Europeans who came after them.

2021 ◽  
pp. 729-745
Author(s):  
Julio de la Cueva

The modern religious history of Spain and Portugal begins with the religious unity between the state and society forged around Catholicism, and ends with the present era epitomized by ongoing secularization and incipient religious pluralism. With some difficulty, the Catholic Church adapted to the trials posed by nineteenth-century liberalism, reaching an accommodation with the constitutional monarchies in both Iberian countries. The first serious challenge came with the arrival of the republics in Portugal in 1910 and in Spain in 1931. The republics did not last long, however; two Catholic dictatorships governed the fate of the Peninsula until the 1970s, though separation of church and state was formally maintained in Portugal. The dictatorships ended in 1974 and 1975, respectively, giving way to the establishment of new democracies, accompanied on the one hand by secularization in both the state and society, and on the other by growing religious pluralism.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 180-190
Author(s):  
Rajkumar Bind

This paper examines the development of modern vaccination programme of Cooch Behar state, a district of West Bengal of India during the nineteenth century. The study has critically analysed the modern vaccination system, which was the only preventive method against various diseases like small pox, cholera but due to neglect, superstation and religious obstacles the people of Cooch Behar state were not interested about modern vaccination. It also examines the sex wise and castes wise vaccinators of the state during the study period. The study will help us to growing conciseness about modern vaccination among the peoples of Cooch Behar district.   


2018 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 79-98
Author(s):  
Allison K. Shutt

Abstract:This article reviews the history of defamation cases involving Africans in Southern Rhodesia. Two precedent-setting cases, one in 1938 and the other in 1946, provided a legal rationale for finding defamation that rested on the ability of litigants to prove they had been shamed. The testimony and evidence of these cases, both of which involved government employees, tracks how colonial rule was altering hierarchy and changing definitions of honor, often to the bewilderment of the litigants themselves. Importantly, both cases concluded that African employees of the state deserved special protection from defamation. The article then traces how the rules and ambiguities resulting from the legal logic of the 1938 and 1946 cases gave a wider group of litigants such as clerks, police, clergy, and teachers room to maneuver in the courtroom where they also claimed their professional honor. Such litigants perfectly understood the expectations of the court and performed accordingly by recounting embarrassing, even painful, experiences, all to validate their personal and professional honor in court. Such performances raise the question of how we might use court records to write a history of the emotional costs to people who used astute strategies that rested on dishonorable revelations to win their cases.


2014 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 755-771 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard A. Kaye

Much of the critical writingon Queer Theory and Sexuality Studies in a Victorian context over the last decade or so has been absorbing, exploring, complicating, and working under the burden of the influence of Michel Foucault's theoretical writings on erotic relations and identity. The first volume of Foucault'sThe History of Sexuality(1978), in fact, had begun with a gauntlet thrown down before Victorian Studies, a chapter-long critique of Steven Marcus'sThe Other Victorians(1966), a work that had offered an entirely new and at the time, quite bold avenue of exploring nineteenth-century culture – namely, through the pornographic imagination that Marcus taxonomized with precise, clinical flair as a “pornotopia” in which “all men . . . are always infinitely potent; all women fecundate with lust and flow inexhaustibly with sap or both. Everyone is always ready for everything” (276). In Foucault's telling, however, Marcus demonstrated a theoretically impoverished faith in Freudian models of “repression” in Marcus's examination of “underground” Victorian sexualities. It was Marcus's reliance on the “repressive fallacy,” his conviction that there existed a demarcated spatial and psychic Victorian counter-world thatThe History of Sexualityhad so forcefully undermined.


Clerk Maxwell’s investigation into the constitution and stability of Saturn’s Ring was based upon the fundamental supposition that the rings were composed of particles arranged in concentric circles. Although the particles could perform small oscillations about their mean positions, it is evident that the outline of the ring would be to all appearances circular. A line in Clerke’s ‘Popular History of Astronomy in the Nineteenth Century’ (page 299) suggests that some observers have regarded the outline of the ring as elliptical. It is therefore of interest to enquire under what conditions an elliptical ring could exist. The ellipse is a more general form than a circle. If, therefore, it can be shown that an elliptic ring is possible, any explanation of the origin of the rings must take account of this fact. In this paper a single ring of particles is examined. The actual Ring of Saturn probably consists of numerous rings, one within the other. By their gravitational attraction, each will affect the motions of the others. As a first approximation, however, it is sufficient to consider the case of a single ring.


Author(s):  
Herman Mark Schwartz

Theories that the state and market are in a conflictual and binary relationship read the history of the past 30 years as a triumph of the market and a withering of the state. The underlying alleged conflict between state and market misrepresents history and reality. States and markets are commingled forms of power; each cannot exist without the other. States and markets operate on different logics and constantly mutate in response to changes in their environment. States constantly face competitive threats and need markets to generate revenue in efficient ways; market actors face competitive threats and need states to stabilize production and exchange relationships. States and market actors both need each other as a place to externalize threats to their legitimacy.


Author(s):  
Theodore M. Porter

This chapter discusses statistics as social science. The systematic study of social numbers in the spirit of natural philosophy was pioneered during the 1660s, and was known for about a century and a half as political arithmetic. Its purpose, when not confined to the calculation of insurance or annuity rates, was the promotion of sound, well-informed state policy. Political arithmetic was, according to William Petty, the application of Baconian principles to the art of government. Implicit in the use by political arithmeticians of social numbers was the belief that the wealth and strength of the state depended strongly on the number and character of its subjects. Political arithmetic was supplanted by statistics in France and Great Britain around the beginning of the nineteenth century. The shift in terminology was accompanied by a subtle mutation of concepts that can be seen as one of the most important in the history of statistical thinking.


Author(s):  
Anders Lundgren

The reception of Mendeleev’s periodic system in Sweden was not a dramatic episode. The system was accepted almost without discussion, but at the same time with no exclamation marks or any other outbursts of enthusiasm. There are but a few weak short-lived critical remarks. That was all. I will argue that the acceptance of the system had no overwhelming effect on chemical practice in Sweden. At most, it strengthened its characteristics. It is actually possible to argue that chemistry in Sweden was more essential for the periodic system than the other way around. My results might therefore suggest that we perhaps have to reevaluate the role of Mendeleev’s system in the history of chemistry. Chemistry in Sweden at the end of the nineteenth century can be characterized as a classifying science, with chemists very skilled in analysis, and as mainly an atheoretical science, which treated theories at most only as hypothesis—the slogan of many chemists being “facts persist, theories vanish.” Thanks to these characteristics, by the end of the nineteenth century, chemistry in Sweden had developed into, it must be said, a rather boring chemistry. This is obviously not to say that it is boring to study such a chemistry. Rather, it gives us an example of how everyday science, a part of science too often neglected but a part that constitutes the bulk of all science done, is carried out. One purpose of this study is to see how a theory, considered to be important in the history of chemistry, influenced everyday science. One might ask what happened when a daring chemistry met a boring chemistry. What happened when a theory, which had been created by a chemist who has been described as “not a laboratory chemist,” met an atheoretical experimental science of hard laboratory work and, as was said, the establishment of facts? Furthermore, could we learn something about the role of the periodic system per se from the study of such a meeting? Mendeleev’s system has often been considered important for teaching, and his attempts to write a textbook are often taken as the initial step in the chain of thoughts that led to the periodic system.


Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (11) ◽  
pp. 569
Author(s):  
Arpita Mitra

There has been a long-standing academic debate on the religious orientation of Śrī Rāmakṛṣṇa Paramahaṁsa (1836–1886), one of the leading religious figures of modern India. In the light of his teachings, it is possible to accept that Rāmakṛṣṇa’s ideas were Vedāntic, albeit not in a sectarian or exclusive way. This article explores the question of where exactly to place him in the chequered history of Vedāntic ideas. It points out that Rāmakṛṣṇa repeatedly referred to different states of consciousness while explaining the difference in the attitudes towards the Divine. This is the basis of his harmonization of the different streams within Vedānta. Again, it is also the basis of his understanding of the place of śakti. He demonstrated that, as long as one has I-consciousness, one is operating within the jurisdiction of śakti, and has to accept śakti as real. On the other hand, in the state of samādhi, which is the only state in which the I-consciosuness disappears, there is neither One nor many. The article also shows that, while Rāmakṛṣṇa accepted all of the different views within Vedānta, he was probably not as distant from the Advaita Vedānta philosopher Ādi Śaṁkara as he has been made out to be.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-96
Author(s):  
Markus Messling

Abstract In the New Science (1744), Giambattista Vico defined filologia as “the doctrine of all the institutions that depend on human choice” of the mondo civile. When nineteenth-century European nationalism was on the rise, supported by narratives of cultural homogeneity and specificity, philological comparatism was the state-of-the-art and it, often, legitimated the obsessions with the purity of origins and genealogies. Italy, characterized by internal plurality and its Mediterranean entanglements, is a model case. Whereas many discourses of the Risorgimento aspired to shape a new Italian nation after the classical model, Michele Amari’s History of the Muslims of Sicily (1854–1872) marked an astonishing exception. For him, going back to Islamic-Sicilian history, its literary, rhetorical and linguistic culture, meant to resume, on a higher level of incivilmento (Vico), what had been obscured by cultural decline: the spirit of freedom and equality, which Ibn Khaldūn had attributed to the Bedouins and their dynamics in history.


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