A Rule of Proprietary Right for British India: From revenue settlement to tenant right in the age of classical legal thought

2015 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 345-384 ◽  
Author(s):  
FAISAL CHAUDHRY

AbstractScholars have long debated the impact of the British ‘rule of property’ on India. In our own day it has become common for historians to hold that the Raj's would-be regime of free capitalist property was frustrated by a pervasive divide between rhetoric and reality which derived from a fundamental lack of fit between English ideas and Indian land control practices. While seemingly novel, the contemporary emphasis on the theory-practice divide is rooted in an earlier ‘revisionist’ perspective among late-nineteenth-century colonial thinkers who argued that land control in the subcontinent derived from a uniquely Indian species of ‘proprietary’ (rather than genuinely propertied) right-holding. In this article, I critically examine the revisionist discourse of ‘proprietary right’ by situating it in a broader comparative perspective, both relative to earlier ideas about rendering property ‘absolute’ during the East India Company's rule and relative to the changing conception of the property right among legal thinkers in the central domains of the Anglo-common law world. In so doing, the article significantly revises our understanding of the relationship between property, law, and political economy in the subcontinent from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century.

2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Duckett

Sarah Bernhardt is one of the most globally celebrated actress-managers of the late nineteenth century. Bernhardt’s fame, however, is rarely associated with silent film. This article explores the coincidence between Sarah Bernhardt’s role as a theatrical manager in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and her pioneering work in the nascent film industry. I argue that Bernhardt was not only a performer and manager in the theatre, but a creative agent in modern media industries. Questions about the relationship between Bernhardt and early film allow us to discuss the formation of female business experience in the theatre and its subsequent movement into a cinematographic culture that would dominate and define twentieth-century culture and commerce. Even if Bernhardt is regarded as a ‘lone entrepreneur’ and therefore extraneous to broader national discussions of theatrical industrialisation, it is important to understand the impact she has as a media celebrity who used film in order to expand her own twentieth-century global marketability.


2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-135
Author(s):  
Giles Whiteley

Walter Pater's late-nineteenth-century literary genre of the imaginary portrait has received relatively little critical attention. Conceived of as something of a continuum between his role as an art critic and his fictional pursuits, this essay probes the liminal space of the imaginary portraits, focusing on the role of the parergon, or frame, in his portraits. Guided by Pater's reading of Kant, who distinguishes between the work (ergon) and that which lies outside of the work (the parergon), between inside and outside, and contextualised alongside the analysis of Derrida, who shows how such distinctions have always already deconstructed themselves, I demonstrate a similar operation at work in the portraits. By closely analysing the parerga of two of Pater's portraits, ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’ (1887) and ‘Apollo in Picardy’ (1893), focusing on his partial quotation of Goethe in the former, and his playful autocitation and impersonation of Heine in the latter, I argue that Pater's parerga seek to destabilise the relationship between text and context so that the parerga do not lie outside the text but are implicated throughout in their reading, changing the portraits constitutively. As such, the formal structure of the parergon in Pater's portraits is also a theoretical fulcrum in his aesthetic criticism and marks that space where the limits of, and distinctions between, art and life become blurred.


Author(s):  
Cristina Vatulescu

This chapter approaches police records as a genre that gains from being considered in its relationships with other genres of writing. In particular, we will follow its long-standing relationship to detective fiction, the novel, and biography. Going further, the chapter emphasizes the intermedia character of police records not just in our time but also throughout their existence, indeed from their very origins. This approach opens to a more inclusive media history of police files. We will start with an analysis of the seminal late nineteenth-century French manuals prescribing the writing of a police file, the famous Bertillon-method manuals. We will then track their influence following their adoption nationally and internationally, with particular attention to the politics of their adoption in the colonies. We will also touch briefly on the relationship of early policing to other disciplines, such as anthropology and statistics, before moving to a closer look at its intersections with photography and literature.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-41
Author(s):  
W. Walker Hanlon ◽  
Casper Worm Hansen ◽  
Jake Kantor

Using novel weekly mortality data for London spanning 1866-1965, we analyze the changing relationship between temperature and mortality as the city developed. Our main results show that warm weeks led to elevated mortality in the late nineteenth century, mainly due to infant deaths from digestive diseases. However, this pattern largely disappeared after WWI as infant digestive diseases became less prevalent. The resulting change in the temperature-mortality relationship meant that thousands of heat-related deaths—equal to 0.9-1.4 percent of all deaths— were averted. These findings show that improving the disease environment can dramatically alter the impact of high temperature on mortality.


Author(s):  
Shaul Stampfer

This chapter investigates the phenomenon of remarriage in nineteenth-century eastern Europe, demonstrating its significance in Jewish marital behaviour. Patterns of remarriage deserve attention for a number of reasons: they influenced fertility levels, affected family structure, played a role in networking, and served as an indicator of the importance of marriage in a given society. Remarriage is highly revealing of group characteristics and behaviour, but remarriage in late nineteenth-century eastern Europe merits attention for an additional reason. Patterns of remarriage and their changes over time significantly diverged among various population groups. Eastern Europe is thus an excellent context for examining the impact of significant variables on remarriage by means of a comparative approach. The chapter then evaluates modes of remarriage among four major religious-national groups: Russian Orthodox, Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. It also considers important differences between Jews and Christians in specific patterns of remarriage.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 20190130 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura E. Ludtke

This article addresses the charge that the introduction of the electric light in the late nineteenth century increased disruptions to the human body's biological processes and interfered with the oscillating sleeping–waking cycle. By considering the nineteenth century research into the factors that motivate and disrupt sleep in concert with contemporary discussions of the physiology of street lighting, this article exposes how social and political forces shaped the impact of artificial light on sleep and, more perniciously, on bodily autonomy. As a close reading of artificial light in three influential dystopian novels building on these historical contexts demonstrates, dystopian fiction challenges the commonplace assumption that the advent of the electric light, or of widespread street lighting in public urban spaces, posed an immediate or inherent threat to sleep. Beginning with H. G. Wells's The Sleeper Awakes (1899), in which the eponymous sleeper emerges from a cataleptic trance into a future in which electric light and power are used to control the populace, representations of artificial light in early dystopian fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries depict a nightmare of total illumination in which the state exerted its control over the individual. In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), constant artificial illumination plays a vital role in the chemical and behavioural conditioning undergone by individuals in a post-Fordian world. George Orwell intensifies this relationship between light and individual autonomy in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), where access to electric current (and thus light) is limited at certain times of the day, brownouts and electrical rationing occur intermittently, and total illumination is used to torture and reprogram individuals believed to have betrayed Big Brother.


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