The edible tide: How estuaries and migrants transformed the Straits of Melaka, 1870–1940

2020 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 579-596
Author(s):  
Anthony D. Medrano

The Straits of Melaka have long played a central role in the history of Southeast Asia, from facilitating the movement of people, ideas, and commodities to marking the salty edge of states, empires, and sultanates. Networks, circulations, and mobilities have shaped our vision and understanding of this waterway. This article charts a different kind of story, one that explores the Straits not as a space of passage but rather as a place of production. It shows how and why these waters became an industrial fishing zone — an industrial estuary, as it were — in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through the case of Bagan Si Api Api, a Hokkien-built town at the mouth of Sumatra's Rokan River, it explains why estuaries and migrants were central to Southeast Asia's urban rise from 1870 to 1940. By looking at the Straits during this pivotal moment, the article reveals the ways in which ecologies, beliefs, technologies, and cultures all combined to shape not only the economic life of Southeast Asia's estuaries, but also, and more importantly, the place of these estuaries in the region's economic life.

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 35
Author(s):  
Peter Worsley

Western historical scholarship has taught us much about Southeast Asia in the period between 1800 and 1940. This was a time when the insistent, intensifying and transforming influence of Dutch colonial society and its culture became widespread in Bali and more broadly in the archipelago. Much too has been written about the analytical framework of European histories of these times. In this essay I discuss Balinese paintings from this same period which shed light on how painters and their works spoke to their viewers both about how the Balinese knew, imagined, thought and felt about the world in which they lived and about the visual representation and communication of these ideas, imaginings and feelings through the medium of narrative paintings. In this paper I hope to draw attention to a number of historiographical issues concerning the reception of the ideas, imaginings and feelings conveyed in paintings. In particular I shall have some remarks to make about the role of philology in this regard.


2021 ◽  
pp. 141-159
Author(s):  
Vitalii Telvak ◽  
Bohdan Yanyshyn

Summary. The purpose of the study is to reconstruct the socio-economic life of Drohobych and Drohobych district in the late nineteenth century as represented by the newspaper "Gazeta Naddniestrzańska". The work’s methodological basis is an interdisciplinary approach with an emphasis placed on the structural and functional system analysis of historiographical facts and the method of critical analysis of documentary material. The article’s scientific novelty is an attempt to comprehensively analyse the materials of the journal "Gazeta Naddniestrzańska" as a source for studying socio-economic processes in Drohobych and Drohobych district in the late nineteenth century. Conclusions. The newspaper materials allow us to get acquainted with a range of cultural and socio-economic problems experienced by Drohobych district citizens in the late nineteenth century. The newspaper delivers an extremely dynamic image of the city’s daily life, and its articles are emotional and engaged in the interests of its ordinary residents. In addition, the broad public orientation of the newspaper’s editorial policy also allows getting acquainted with significant events in the socio-economic history of Galicia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Europe and the world. The "perspective from the province" attaches exceptional value to newspaper reports, as it sheds light on the specifics of their perception on the periphery of cultural and political life. The materials of "Gazeta Naddniestrzańska" allow reconstructing only certain aspects of the history of Drohobych and its district in 1884‒1889. However, taken together with official documents and periodicals published by the city’s Jewish community in the late 19th century, they provide a reliable source base for reconstructing Drohobych’s past in its socio-economic, political and cultural dimensions.


1961 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 73-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
John R. W. Small

It is generally accepted that history is an element of culture and the historian a member of society, thus, in Croce's aphorism, that the only true history is contemporary history. It follows from this that when there occur great changes in the contemporary scene, there must also be great changes in historiography, that the vision not merely of the present but also of the past must change.


2002 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-336
Author(s):  
PIOTR DASZKIEWICZ ◽  
MICHEL JEGU

ABSTRACT: This paper discusses some correspondence between Robert Schomburgk (1804–1865) and Adolphe Brongniart (1801–1876). Four letters survive, containing information about the history of Schomburgk's collection of fishes and plants from British Guiana, and his herbarium specimens from Dominican Republic and southeast Asia. A study of these letters has enabled us to confirm that Schomburgk supplied the collection of fishes from Guiana now in the Laboratoire d'Ichtyologie, Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris. The letters of the German naturalist are an interesting source of information concerning the practice of sale and exchange of natural history collections in the nineteenth century in return for honours.


2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 719-779
Author(s):  
David Gutkin

H. Lawrence Freeman's “Negro Jazz Grand Opera,” Voodoo, was premiered in 1928 in Manhattan's Broadway district. Its reception bespoke competing, racially charged values that underpinned the idea of the “modern” in the 1920s. The white press critiqued the opera for its allegedly anxiety-ridden indebtedness to nineteenth-century European conventions, while the black press hailed it as the pathbreaking work of a “pioneer composer.” Taking the reception history of Voodoo as a starting point, this article shows how Freeman's lifelong project, the creation of what he would call “Negro Grand Opera,” mediated between disparate and sometimes apparently irreconcilable figurations of the modern that spanned the late nineteenth century through the interwar years: Wagnerism, uplift ideology, primitivism, and popular music (including, but not limited to, jazz). I focus on Freeman's inheritance of a worldview that could be called progressivist, evolutionist, or, to borrow a term from Wilson Moses, civilizationist. I then trace the complex relationship between this mode of imagining modernity and subsequent versions of modernism that Freeman engaged with during the first decades of the twentieth century. Through readings of Freeman's aesthetic manifestos and his stylistically syncretic musical corpus I show how ideas about race inflected the process by which the qualitatively modern slips out of joint with temporal modernity. The most substantial musical analysis examines leitmotivic transformations that play out across Freeman's jazz opera American Romance (1924–29): lions become subways; Mississippi becomes New York; and jazz, like modernity itself, keeps metamorphosing. A concluding section considers a broader set of questions concerning the historiography of modernism and modernity.


2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 37-41
Author(s):  
Maftuna Sanoqulova ◽  

This article consists of the politics which connected with oil in Saudi Arabia after the World war II , the relations of economical cooperations on this matter and the place of oil in the history of world economics


This chapter reviews the book Stepmother Russia, Foster Mother America: Identity Transitions in the New Odessa Jewish Commune, Odessa, Oregon, New York, 1881–1891 (2014), by Theodore H. Friedgut, together with Israel Mandelkern, Recollections of a Communist (edited and annotated by Theodore H. Friedgut). Stepmother Russia, Foster Mother America is a two-in-one volume that explores an obscure episode in the history of the Jews in the late nineteenth century while at the same time connecting much of its content to the author’s own life experience as a son of western Canada’s Jewish farming colonies and, later, as an ideologically driven halutz on an Israeli kibbutz. Stepmother Russia, Foster Mother America retells one branch of the mostly forgotten history of the Am Olam agricultural movement and brings a new layer into the discussion of global Jewish agrarianism, while Recollections of a Communist offers an edited and annotated version of a memoir written by Mandelkern.


Author(s):  
Nurit Yaari

This chapter examines the lack of continuous tradition of the art of the theatre in the history of Jewish culture. Theatre as art and institution was forbidden for Jews during most of their history, and although there were plays written in different times and places during the past centuries, no tradition of theatre evolved in Jewish culture until the middle of the nineteenth century. In view of this absence, the author discusses the genesis of Jewish theatre in Eastern Europe and in Eretz-Yisrael (The Land of Israel) since the late nineteenth century, encouraged by the Jewish Enlightenment movement, the emergence of Jewish nationalism, and the rebirth of Hebrew as a language of everyday life. Finally, the chapter traces the development of parallel strands of theatre that preceded the Israeli theatre and shadowed the emergence of the political infrastructure of the future State of Israel.


Author(s):  
Ashwin Desai ◽  
Goolam Vahed

While small in number, the place of the Indian in South Africa has historically loomed large because of their strong commercial and professional middle class, international influence through India, the commitment of many Indians to the anti-apartheid struggle and the prominent role that they have played in political and economic life post-apartheid. A History of the Present is the first book-length overview of Indian South Africans in the quarter century following the end of apartheid. Based on oral interviews and archival research it threads a narrative of the lives of Indian South Africans that ranges from the working class men and women to the heady heights of the newly minted billionaires; the changes wrought in the fields of religion and gender; opportunities offered on the sporting fields; the search for roots both locally and in India that also witnesses the rise of transnational organizations. Indians in South Africa appear to be always caught in an infernal contradiction; too traditional, too insular, never fitting in, while also too modern, too mobile. While focusing on Indian South Africans, this study makes critical interventions into several charged political discussions in post-apartheid South Africa, especially the debate over race and identity, while also engaging in discussions of wider intellectual interest, including diaspora, nation, and citizenship.


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