Ethnohistory and Political Change

1970 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-122
Author(s):  
Kenneth C. Wylie
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Political Change ◽  
Theoretical Models ◽  
West African ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Social Anthropology ◽  
Narrow Scope

There is a reluctance on the part of many historians to use theoretical models for research, especially for ethnohistorical work, which is both unfortunate and unjustified. Much of the recent work in social anthropology and political science has been of great historical value precisely because the use of theory has rendered studies with an otherwise narrow scope more general in application. It is the intention of this article to examine some techniques for historical research into the process of political change among certain West African kingdoms and chiefdoms in the nineteenth century. While examining some of these techniques and the problems associated with them, it is also my intention to suggest ways in which they might be combined for use in the field.

Bunyan and the Historians

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamsin Spargo
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
English Literature ◽  
First Century ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
John Bunyan ◽  
Theoretical Assumptions ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Research Analysis

This chapter offers a chronological account of varying historical and historicist approaches to the life and writings of John Bunyan from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century. The theoretical assumptions of major scholars in the field are highlighted, from a Whig such as Macaulay in the nineteenth century to a Marxist such as Christopher Hill in the twentieth, to more recent work by contemporary historians such as Richard L. Greaves and N. H. Keeble. It explores changing conceptions of the relationship between text and context, and past, present, and future, as they have informed research, analysis, historiography, and interpretation within the developing disciplines of History and of English Literature. This exploration is coupled with a consideration of the often unacknowledged relationship between teleological conceptions of history and the practice of historical research and historiography.

Drake's Fake: A Curiosity Concerning a Spurious Visit to Asante in 1839

1984 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 223-236
Author(s):  
T. C. McCaskie
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Present Note ◽  
West African ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
African Slave ◽  
Slave Traders ◽  
Intellectual Interest ◽  
Unusual Occurrence

A wholly fraudulent source is an unusual occurrence in historical research. What is much more common and of much more intellectual interest is the discovery of a source that skilfully combines spurious invention with some regard for accuracy and convincing detail. This second kind of source is of course very familiar to historians of Africa, and the present note deals with a document of this type that, among other things, purports to offer a brief first-hand account of life in Kumase in 1839. I am chiefly concerned hare with the accuracy or inaccuracy of this piece of reportage; and--unusually for precolonial Africa--the document presently under review can be directly compared with a number of other precisely contemporary written accounts of life in Kumase.In his pioneering work published over thirty years ago on the suppression of the illicit nineteenth-century slave trade from Africa, Christopher Lloyd remarked on the paucity of first-hand accounts authored by slave traders. He also offered a number of judicious observations respecting the veracity or reliability of such accounts of this type as did exist. In his treatment of the workings of the illegal West African slave trade, Lloyd relied very heavily on one of the annotated editions of the memoirs of Théodore Canot (alias Théophile Conneau). Canot or Conneau is justly famous, and in the intervening years since the appearance of Lloyd's book this important source has become something of an exegetical industry among historians of West Africa.

William Rathbone Greg, Scientific Liberalism, and the Second Empire

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Alex Middleton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
European Politics ◽  
Second Empire ◽  
Liberal Thought

William Rathbone Greg's name is well known to historians of nineteenth-century Britain, but the content of his political thought is not. This article, based on a comprehensive reading of Greg's prolific published output, has two aims. The first is to pin down his politics. The article positions Greg as a leading spokesman for the rationalistic, antidemocratic strand of mid-Victorian Liberalism. It argues that his thought centered on the idea that politics was a science, and that scientific statesmanship might solve many of the problems of the age. The article's second aim is to show that Greg was a sophisticated thinker on politics overseas. He developed distinctive arguments about the structures of European politics, and especially about France under the Second Empire (1852–70). Greg's writings cast important light on the connections between abstract, domestic, and European issues in less familiar reaches of Liberal thought, and on how Victorian political science grappled with Continental despotism.

Sub-National Perspectives on West African Political Change

1977 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 165
Author(s):  
Barbara C. Lewis ◽  
Howard Wolpe ◽  
Patrick Cole ◽  
John Dunn ◽  
A. F. Robertson ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Political Change ◽  
West African

scholarly journals A new perspective on the shielding property of positive polarity

2017 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 266
Author(s):  
Andreea Cristina Nicolae
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Universal Quantifier ◽  
Positive Polarity ◽  
Narrow Scope ◽  
Clausal Negation ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Scope Interpretation

In certain languages, disjunctions exhibit positive polarity behavior, which Szabolcsi (2002) argues can be diagnosed via the following four properties: (i) anti-licensing: no narrow scope interpretation under a clausemate negation, (ii) rescuing: acceptable in the scope of an even number of negative operators, (iii) shielding: acceptable under a clausemate negation if a universal quantifier intervenes, and (iv) locality of anti-licensing: acceptable in the scope of an extra-clausal negation. In recent work, Nicolae (2016, 2017), building on Spector 2014, argues that what distinguishes PPI disjunctions from polarity insensitive disjunctions is the fact that PPI-disjunctions obligatorily trigger epistemic inferences. That analysis, however, only accounts for the first two PPI properties. This paper extends that analysis to account for the second two properties, concluding that they should be seen as instantiations of the same phenomena, namely shielding by a universal quantifier.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document