Vernacular Capitalism and Intellectual History in a Gujarati Account of China, 1860–68

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Michael O'Sullivan
Keyword(s):  
South China Sea ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Southern China ◽  
Western Indian Ocean ◽  
Port Cities ◽  
Late Qing ◽  
Modern Capitalism ◽  
Late Qing China ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many

This article examines one of the earliest Gujarati travelogues concerning China, written by Damodar Ishwardas—a Hindu resident of Bombay and a clerk for a Sunni Khoja commercial firm—and published in Bombay in 1868. Based on a three-year trip to the port cities of southern China, Ishwardas's text runs close to 400 pages and was patronized by a prominent stratum of Bombay's Gujarati-speaking commercial and bureaucratic elite. The primary intervention in this article is to analyze Ishwardas's account as a neglected relic of vernacular capitalism and vernacular intellectual history. Furthermore, the text presents an opportunity to reexamine the history of the Indian intellectual and mercantile engagement with late Qing China, especially before anticolonial nationalism and pan-Asianism supplied new paradigms for Indian writing on East Asia beginning around 1900. It further points to the many unstudied Indian materials that have yet to be integrated into the study of modern capitalism in the regions from the South China Sea to the western Indian Ocean.

Philosophy before the Greeks

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Van De Mieroop
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
First Century ◽  
Alternative Methods ◽  
Coherent System ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
History Of ◽  
First Millennium ◽  
Written Word ◽  
The Many ◽  
Eastern Traditions

There is a growing recognition that philosophy isn’t unique to the West, that it didn’t begin only with the classical Greeks, and that Greek philosophy was influenced by Near Eastern traditions. Yet even today there is a widespread assumption that what came before the Greeks was “before philosophy.” This book presents a groundbreaking argument that, for three millennia before the Greeks, one Near Eastern people had a rich and sophisticated tradition of philosophy fully worthy of the name. In the first century BC, the Greek historian Diodorus of Sicily praised the Babylonians for their devotion to philosophy. Showing the justice of Diodorus’s comment, this is the first book to argue that there were Babylonian philosophers and that they studied knowledge systematically using a coherent system of logic rooted in the practices of cuneiform script. The book uncovers Babylonian approaches to knowledge in three areas: the study of language, which in its analysis of the written word formed the basis of all logic; the art of divination, which interpreted communications between gods and humans; and the rules of law, which confirmed that royal justice was founded on truth. The result is an innovative intellectual history of the ancient Near Eastern world during the many centuries in which Babylonian philosophers inspired scholars throughout the region—until the first millennium BC, when the breakdown of this cosmopolitan system enabled others, including the Greeks, to develop alternative methods of philosophical reasoning.

Liang Fa: Pioneer Chinese Protestant Evangelist

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 253-279
Author(s):  
P. Richard Bohr
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Late Qing ◽  
Chinese Christianity ◽  
Late Qing China ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Christian Message

Through a meticulous study of the life and times of Liang Fa, this article explores the ways in which the Anglo-Chinese College prepared him to become a pioneer Chinese Protestant evangelist. While not overlooking his struggle with deep-rooted Chinese cultural precepts, on the one hand, and his responses to changing circumstances in late Qing China while presenting the Christian message, on the other, this study examines both the questions of the relationship between Liang and his missionary mentors and of Liang's proselytisng strategies that involved both direct and indirect evangelism, including his major Chinese publication, Quanshi Liangyan (commonly known as Good Words to Admonish the Age). Special attention is paid to the question of how Hong Xiuquan misinterpreted Liang's book, thereby creating the Taiping heresy and its tragic consequences. The study concludes with an overall assessment of Liang's place in the history of Chinese Christianity.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Lindsay Kaplan
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Racial Identities ◽  
Modern Racism ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Many ◽  
History Of Race

This intellectual history focuses on racism: discriminatory concepts and practices that produce, accompany, or follow the (fictive) idea of race. The author identifies inferiority as a primary category of analysis, arguing that the creation of a hierarchy in which one group represents itself as superior to another constitutes a necessary element of racism. Attending to the tropes of subordinating differentiation helps trace racism’s history in drawing a line from medieval forms to contemporary white supremacism. The figural concept of cursed Jewish slavery developed in medieval Christian theology serves to construct racial inferiority. The introduction stresses the importance of theology in the history of race: the many studies of medieval discourses that articulate racial identities for Jews and Muslims do not focus on the theological texts from which these constructions emerge. Medieval Christian theology creates a status of hereditary inferiority, a concept that continues to shape modern racism.

Breaking the Ice: The establishment of overland winter postal routes in the late Qing China

2013 ◽  
Vol 47 (6) ◽  
pp. 1749-1781 ◽  
Author(s):  
WEIPIN TSAI
Keyword(s):  
Yangtze River ◽  
Post Office ◽  
Inspector General ◽  
Chinese Context ◽  
Late Qing ◽  
Treaty Port ◽  
Late Qing China ◽  
History Of ◽  
Crucial Information ◽  
Lower Yangtze

AbstractThis paper looks at the establishment of experimental winter overland postal routes in the late 1870s and 1880s, which eventually led to the creation of the Great Qing Imperial Post Office in 1896. The history of this experiment sheds much light on important issues in the establishment of what was to become the country's most crucial information-bearing network, in particular those related to collaboration and negotiation between foreign and Chinese officials, and those between local interests and the central authorities. It also explores how foreign processes and management had to be adapted in order to function in a Chinese context.In March 1878, Robert Hart, inspector general of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, instructed Gustav Detring, commissioner of Tianjin Port, to investigate the possibility of introducing overland public postal routes in China, beginning with Beijing to Tianijn, Niuzhuang, Yantai, and then to Zhenjiang, a treaty port on the lower Yangtze River.The three main challenges involved were: to establish a reliable workforce, to design appropriate routes, and to win the cooperation of local governing officials. Although the winter service was initiated on time, problems repeatedly arose from each one of these challenges.

scholarly journals DEVELOPMENTALISM IN LATE QING CHINA, 1874–1911

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
JONATHAN CHAPPELL
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Han Chinese ◽  
Late Qing ◽  
Late Qing China ◽  
Chinese Perceptions ◽  
History Of ◽  
European Colonialism ◽  
Evolutionary Fate

Abstract This article explores the changing historical referents that Qing officials used in arguing for the extension of direct governance to the empire's frontier regions from the 1870s to the 1900s. In the 1870s, Shen Baozhen and Zuo Zongtang made the case for a change of governance on Taiwan and in Xinjiang respectively by reference to past Chinese frontier management. However, in the first decade of the twentieth century Cen Chunxuan and Yao Xiguang both referred to the European past, and specifically the history of European colonialism, to argue for reform of frontier policy in Mongolia. I argue that this shift was a result of both the empire's altered political circumstances and a growing belief in the inevitability of an evolutionary fate which awaited nomadic peoples, who were destined to be colonized. Yet this was not a case of Chinese thinkers simply adopting European ideas and perspectives wholesale. The adoption of European historical referents was entangled with Han Chinese perceptions of Mongolian populations which had been carefully cultivated by the Manchu Qing state.

WHAT WAS THE HISTORY OF THE BOOK? A RESPONSE

2007 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 537-544 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID D. HALL
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Book History ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Many ◽  
History Of Journalism

The history of the book is everywhere, so widely diffused that it merits comparison with the famously elusive Scarlet Pimpernel, whose pursuers sought him without success. Like that figure, book history passes among us in disguise, reluctant to reveal its presence even as it gains ever-greater recognition. In some quarters, it lurks within the domain of bibliography, a field of scholarship dedicated to describing the histories of printed texts and, in the service of this enterprise, concerned with the details of book-making. Elsewhere, book history installs itself within descriptions of libraries and education, sharing, with the first of these, a concern for how old books were accumulated and classified and, with the second, for the many ramifications of literacy and the fashioning of schoolbooks. Together with the history of journalism it studies how news was disseminated and ponders the significance of periodicals, be these newspapers or magazines. Political history has been another convenient site of disguise in the wake of efforts to connect the public sphere and concepts of nation with the emergence of print culture. And, of course, book history has enjoyed a long and fruitful kinship with literary history, a relationship freshly energized in recent decades as literary historians turned to describing the rise and remaking of a canon and to emphasizing the mediations that all texts undergo—the “sociology of texts,” to borrow a phrase made famous by D. F. McKenzie. To this list we can add the version of intellectual history that reconstructs the reading of a person or group and employs this data to generalize about the coming of the Enlightenment and similar formations.

A 200-Year History of the Study of Childhood Language Disorders of Unknown Origin: Changes in Terminology

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence B. Leonard
Keyword(s):  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Scientific Literature ◽  
Language Disorder ◽  
Language Disorders ◽  
Unknown Origin ◽  
Developmental Language Disorder ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many

Purpose The current “specific language impairment” and “developmental language disorder” discussion might lead to important changes in how we refer to children with language disorders of unknown origin. The field has seen other changes in terminology. This article reviews many of these changes. Method A literature review of previous clinical labels was conducted, and possible reasons for the changes in labels were identified. Results References to children with significant yet unexplained deficits in language ability have been part of the scientific literature since, at least, the early 1800s. Terms have changed from those with a neurological emphasis to those that do not imply a cause for the language disorder. Diagnostic criteria have become more explicit but have become, at certain points, too narrow to represent the wider range of children with language disorders of unknown origin. Conclusions The field was not well served by the many changes in terminology that have transpired in the past. A new label at this point must be accompanied by strong efforts to recruit its adoption by clinical speech-language pathologists and the general public.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Randall
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
James Madison ◽  
Modern Conception ◽  
Political World ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Constitutional Thought

The changed conception of conversation that emerged by c.1700 was about to expand its scope enormously – to the broad culture of Enlightenment Europe, to the fine arts, to philosophy and into the broad political world, both via the conception of public opinion and via the constitutional thought of James Madison (1751–1836). In the Enlightenment, the early modern conception of conversation would expand into a whole wing of Enlightenment thought. The intellectual history of the heirs of Cicero and Petrarch would become the practice of millions and the constitutional architecture of a great republic....

Indian Sex Life

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Durba Mitra
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Social Thought ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Global History ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Indentured Servitude ◽  
History Of

During the colonial period in India, European scholars, British officials, and elite Indian intellectuals—philologists, administrators, doctors, ethnologists, sociologists, and social critics—deployed ideas about sexuality to understand modern Indian society. This book shows how deviant female sexuality, particularly the concept of the prostitute, became foundational to this knowledge project and became the primary way to think and write about Indian society. The book reveals that deviant female sexuality was critical to debates about social progress and exclusion, caste domination, marriage, widowhood and inheritance, women's performance, the trafficking of girls, abortion and infanticide, industrial and domestic labor, indentured servitude, and ideologies about the dangers of Muslim sexuality. British authorities and Indian intellectuals used the concept of the prostitute to argue for the dramatic reorganization of modern Indian society around Hindu monogamy. The book demonstrates how the intellectual history of modern social thought is based in a dangerous civilizational logic built on the control and erasure of women's sexuality. This logic continues to hold sway in present-day South Asia and the postcolonial world. Reframing the prostitute as a concept, the book overturns long-established notions of how to write the history of modern social thought in colonial India, and opens up new approaches for the global history of sexuality.

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