Frontier Disputes and Problems of Legitimation: Sokoto–Masina Relations 1817–1837

1976 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 497-514 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. C. Stewart

The nature of relations between the neighbouring West African caliphates of Sokoto and Hamdullahi in the early nineteenth century has been the subject of speculation by students of the western and central Sudan from the time of Barth's visit to the area in the mid-nineteenth century. Now, working from several new manuscript finds and the evidence built up by scholars who have studied the two caliphates in detail, a tentative reconstruction of relations between the states in the crucial period 1817–37 is possible. What emerges is evidence of an intricate balance between the two caliphates and their mutually acknowledged spiritual advisers from the Kunta confederation in the Azaouad in which economic and strategic priorities as well as internal politics and theological matters all seem to play a role in determining the nature of relations between Hamdullahi and Sokoto.

1975 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Law

Following an earlier article in this Journal, by Humphrey Fisher, dealing with the role of the horse in the Central Sudan, this article considers the role of cavalry in the kingdom of Oyo. It is suggested that the use of cavalry may have been adopted by Oyo during the sixteenth century. Oyo never became self-sufficient in horses, but remained dependent for its horses upon importation from the Central Sudan, while local mortality from trypanosomiasis was considerable. Evidence relating to the operations of Oyo armies supports the view that cavalry was of substantial military value, while at the same time illustrating the limitations of the military efficacy of cavalry. The acquisition and maintenance of large numbers of horses represented a considerable economic burden for Oyo, and the high cost of maintaining a large cavalry force may have inhibited the establishment of a royal autocracy in Oyo. The decline of the cavalry strength of Oyo in the early nineteenth century was due, it is suggested, to economic difficulties.


1997 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 91-93
Author(s):  
Ahmed Sheikh Bangura

Islam in West Africa is a collection of nineteen essays written by NehemiaLevtzion between 1963 and 1993. The book is divided into five sections. dealingwith different facets of the history and sociology of Islam in West Africa.The first section focuses on the patterns, characteristics, and agents of thespread of Islam. The author offers an approach to the study of the process of thatIslamization in West Africa that compares pattems of Islamizacion in medievalMali and Songhay to patterns in the Volta basin from the seventeenth to thenineteenth centuries. He also assesses the complex roles played by Africanchiefs and kings and slavery in the spread of Islam.Section two focuses on the subject of lslam and West African politics fromthe medieval period to the early nineteenth century. Levtzion identifies twotrend in African Islam: accommodation and militancy. Islam's early acceptancein West African societies was aided by the fact that Islam was initially seen asa supplement, and not as a substitute, to existing religious systems. Levtzionanalyzes the dynamics of Islam in African states as accommodation gave wayin time to tensions between the ruling authorities and Islamic scholars, callingfor a radical restructuring of the stare according to Islamic ideals. The tensionsbetween the Muslim clerics of Timbuktu and the medieval Songhay rulers. andthe ultimately adversarial relationship between Uthman dan Fodio and the Gobirleadership in eighteenth-century Hausaland, are singled out for sustained analysis ...


2006 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 621-628
Author(s):  
Mary Ann Smart

Giacomo Leopardi was convinced that the willingness of Italians to wallow passively in operatic spectacle was an important reason for Italy's lack of a civil society based on debate and the exchange of opinions. Despite recent proposals that opera and opera going constituted signiªcant means of social engagement and contributed to regional and/or national identity, the preoccupations of early nineteenth-century music journalism suggest that opera existed outside the mainstream of both political and aesthetic debate, and was not yet the subject of a truly vibrant national discourse.


While the twenty-first century has brought a wealth of new digital resources for researching late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century serials, the subfield of Romantic periodical studies has remained largely inchoate. This collection sets out to begin tackling this problem, offering a basic groundwork for a branch of periodical studies that is distinctive to the concerns, contexts and media of Britain’s Romantic age. Featuring eleven chapters by leading experts on the subject, it showcases the range of methodological, conceptual and literary-historical insights to be drawn from just one of the era’s landmark literary periodicals, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Drawing in particular on the trove of newly digitised content, specific essays model how careful analyses of the incisive and often inflammatory commentary, criticism and original literature from Blackwood’s first two decades (1817–37) might inform and expand many of the most vibrant contemporary discussions surrounding British Romanticism.


1936 ◽  
Vol 5 (14) ◽  
pp. 121-122
Author(s):  
D. A. Macnaughton

This epitaph is on a tombstone in the churchyard of Kenmore, Perthshire, a little village on the shores of Loch Tay, close to the point at which the river leaves the parent lake. In the early nineteenth century Kenmore had some importance as the market of a wide rural area and as containing the parish church and parish school. The epitaph is the work of the son, William Armstrong, who succeeded to his father's post and died in 1879. Purists might perhaps take exception to the post-classical authority of puritate, but it will be generally allowed that as the composition of the Headmaster of a rural parish school its Latinity is as remarkable as its pietas. It is to be regretted that the author left no pupil to pay him a fitting tribute in the same tongue. But among his alumni there were many who remembered his teaching with admiring gratitude. Of these was one of the principal farmers of the district who told me years ago that he held Latin in high esteem as the subject which, as he put it, ‘opened his head’. His precise meaning eluded me until in later years I reflected that Highland farmers have a gift of imagination and a command of terse and figurative expression. Clearly what he implied was that, just as, when Hephaestus split the skull of Zeus, Athene sprung out in full panoply, so the impact of the lene tormentum of Latin on his own brain let wisdom loose.


Many leading nineteenth-century physicians recognized the need to reduce the empirical element in medicine and to base both diagnosis and treatment more firmly upon scientific principles. In an age when chemistry was a rapidly developing science it seemed that animal chemistry, dealing with the materials and functions of living organisms, might well offer the best solution to the problem. Thus the development of the subject for medical purposes became one of the main objectives of animal chemists, although from hindsight it is clear that neither the techniques nor the chemical knowledge available were at all adequate for solving the complex problems involved. Yet chemists like Fourcroy and Berzelius tried to understand the chemistry of life and their results seemed to support the widely held view that a knowledge of the composition of animal tissues, together with an understanding of the natural functions in health, would aid medical diagnosis and treatment by exposing the faults present in disease. In early nineteenth-century England there was a lively interest in this subject (I) and some physicians became very successful in applying chemical principles to medicine, but despite the evident value of animal chemistry the novelty of the subject caused medical schools to be reluctant to introduce it into their curricula. Medical students continued to receive instruction in the classics but the physical sciences were frequently neglected.


1990 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 521-540 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Eltis

Analysis indicates that the Yoruba were taller than other West African peoples in the early nineteenth century. Disease, workloads, and environmental or genetic factors explain little of this differential. Rather, it appears due to a superior nutritional status made possible by Yoruba social structures, in particular, Yoruba towns. Yoruba stature declined both absolutely and relatively over the forty years corresponding to the collapse of the Oyo Empire. Regression analysis suggests a systematic relationship between these two events.


Author(s):  
Diana R. Hallman

Historical settings—especially those from the medieval and early modern periods—were central to the aesthetic of grand operas of the 1830s and 1840s. This historical aesthetic is clearly evident in the four works that are the subject of this chapter: La Reine de Chypre, Charles VI, La Juive and Les Huguenots. The enormous popularity of these historical settings reflected a more general fascination with the distant past among early nineteenth-century Europeans, a fascination that was also manifest in genres such as the historical novel. But the music and drama of grand opera also mirrored contemporary events, reflecting the tensions that were shaping the rapidly changing social and political dynamics of the present.


2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 40-57
Author(s):  
Kathleen Stuart

Abstract This article considers how a viewer identifies spiritual meaning in landscape images of the Romantic era as well as the role of artists’ statements about their work in a viewer’s interpretive process. It examines landscapes by Samuel Palmer and John Martin, two early nineteenth-century British artists known for the spiritual content of their work, and the connection between the work and their published statements about it. The article also considers the “secular” landscapes by their contemporary John Sell Cotman for the work’s possible spiritual meaning despite the absence of published comments by the artist on the subject.


2004 ◽  
Vol 76 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-46
Author(s):  
Ian J. Shaw

The development of important models for urban mission took place in early nineteenth-century Glasgow. Thomas Chalmers’ work is widely known, but that of David Nasmith has been the subject of less study. This article explores the ideas shared by Chalmers and Nasmith, and their influence on the development of the city mission movement. Areas of common ground included the need for extensive domestic visitation, the mobilisation of the laity including a middle- class lay leadership, efficient organisation, emphasis on education, and discerning provision of charity. In the long term Chalmers struggled to recruit and retain sufficient volunteers to sustain his parochial urban mission scheme. However, Nasmith’s pan-evangelical scheme succeeded in attracting a steady stream of lay recruits to work as city missioners, as well as mission directors. Through their agency a significant attempt was made to reach those amongst the urban masses who had little or no church connection.


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