A New Pablik: Abdul Halim Sharar, volunteerism, and the Anjuman-e Dar-us-Salam in late nineteenth-century India

2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 1049-1090 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. RYAN PERKINS

AbstractIn the second half of the nineteenth century an increasing number of Indians entered the world of volunteerism and public activism. One such individual was the prolific Urdu writer Abdul Halim Sharar (1860–1926), who served as the secretary for a short-lived voluntary association, the Anjuman-e Dar-us-Salam, during the late 1880s in Lucknow, India. Using readers’ letters as printed in Sharar's widely circulating monthly periodical, Dil Gudāz, this article seeks to understand the reasons behind the increasing role of volunteerism as part and parcel of a modern sharīf Muslim identity in the post-1857 period. Having adopted the role of a community activist, Sharar began using his periodical, soon after its inception, to mobilize and recruit his readers to participate in what he described as a passionate movement sweeping through the ‘Islami pablik’. Both rhetorical and descriptive, such an idea provided hope for a divided and struggling community to overcome the divisions that were central to their many challenges in a post-1857 world. Through the study of the vicissitudes and challenges faced by Sharar and his fellow activists, this article underscores the ways in which public activism and volunteerism simultaneously represented the possibility for Muslims to use their own resources to bring about real social and political change, and also reminded them of their shortcomings and the limits of an informal activism. This article seeks to show that ultimately, even such ‘failed’ and ephemeral attempts were foundational for more effective mass mobilization efforts in the following decades and into the twentieth century.

2019 ◽  
pp. 38-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Bell

This chapter will explore the similarities and differences between late nineteenth-century debates on the British settler Empire and more recent visions of the Anglosphere. It suggests that the idea of the Anglosphere has deep roots in British political thought. In particular, it traces the debates over both imperial federation and Anglo-American union from the late nineteenth century onwards into the post-Brexit world. I examine three recurrent issues that have shaped arguments about the unity and potential of the ‘English-speaking peoples’: the ideal constitutional structure of the community; the economic model that it should adopt; and the role of the United States within it. I conclude by arguing that the legacy of settler colonialism, and an idealised vision of the ‘English-speaking peoples’, played a pivotal role in shaping Tory Euroscepticism from the late 1990s onwards, furnishing an influential group of politicians and public intellectuals, from Thatcher and Robert Conquest to Boris Johnson and Andrew Roberts, with an alternative non-European vision of Britain’s place in the world.


Veiled Power ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Doreen Lustig

Corporations have limited responsibilities in international law but enjoy far-reaching rights and privileges. International legal debates often conceive of this issue as a problem of business accountability for human rights violations. Conceptually, the issue of corporations in international law has focused on whether or not they are, or ought to be, recognized as ‘subjects’ of responsibility in international law and on the adequate conceptual analogy to the corporation. The introduction presents an alternative way of thinking about the role of international law and its relevance to the private business corporation. It traces the emergence of the contemporary legal architecture for corporations in international law and shows how modern international law constitutes a framework within which businesses and governments allocate resources and responsibilities—a framework that began to operate as early as the late-nineteenth century and continued throughout the twentieth century.


Urban History ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-237 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roy Hartnell

This paper looks at Joseph Chamberlain's Birmingham and claims that George Dawson's famous ‘civic gospel’ which laid the ground for the municipal reforms was permeated by a consensus view of the moral and civic role of art. It suggests that it was this combination of philosophy in action through art which created the special Birmingham context for a vibrant civic culture which led to the political and artistic achievements of the 1870s and 1880s. For a few brief years, this combination enabled Birmingham to stand above other British cities and lay claim to the titles of ‘the best-governed city in the world’ and ‘perhaps the most artistic town in England’.


Author(s):  
Nile Green

Global Islam: A Very Short Introduction looks at the methods used by individuals, organizations, and states to spread multiple versions of Islam around the world. Since the late nineteenth century, publications, missions, congresses, and pilgrimages have contributed to the communication and evolution of Islam. At the start of the twentieth century, the infrastructure of European empire allowed for the widespread communication of Islamic beliefs. During a period of secularism in the mid-twentieth century, global Islam became more accessible and, in some cases, more political. How have today’s broadcasting and smartphone technologies changed the face of global Islam? Will communication technologies reconcile the contradictions between variations of the faith, or will they create new ones?


Author(s):  
Bradley Shope

This chapter discusses blackface minstrel troupes, British regimental bands and jazz orchestras performing in India from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. It details their challenges and strategies for success, and suggests that their capacity to facilitate cosmopolitan encounters in the wider world contributed to their popularity and value. It first introduces problems and practicalities in maintaining bands performing British military music in India in the mid- and late-nineteenth century. It then briefly introduces the character and scope of ballroom dance music and blackface minstrelsy in urban centres. To end, it examines the character of jazz orchestras between the 1920s and 1940s, detailing the role of the gramophone industry, entertainment venues such as hotel and cinema hall ballrooms, and the Allied military in Calcutta on their growth and profitability. In each example, it articulates thoughts on the role and usefulness of orchestras and notes issues confronting their musicians.


Rural History ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (02) ◽  
pp. 215-240 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Matless

AbstractThis article examines coastal defence in East Norfolk between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries. From 1802 until 1932 sea defence between Happisburgh and Winterton was the responsibility of the Commissioners of Sewers for the Eastern Hundreds of Norfolk, more commonly known as the Sea Breach Commission (SBC). This article explores the geographies of authority shaping sea defence, with the SBC a body whose relationship to the local and national state could be uneasy. The article outlines the SBC’s nineteenth-century roles and routines, and examines its relationship to outside expertise, including its early hiring of geologist William Smith. The article reviews challenges to the SBC’s authority following late nineteenth-century flood events, details its early twentieth-century routines, and examines disputes over development on the sandhills. The article details the SBC’s dealings with an emerging national ‘nature state’, around issues such as coastal erosion and land drainage, matters which led to the SBC’s demise following the 1930 Land Drainage Act. The article concludes by considering the SBC’s contemporary resonance in a time of challenges to the role of the nature state, and anxieties over coastal defence.


Author(s):  
Elif S. Armbruster

This chapter examines the role of houses and interiors in American realist fiction and argues that realist authors were preoccupied with settings and houses in a way unique to their period, the late nineteenth century, when numerous technological and aesthetic developments coincided with the reproduction of “real life” in writing. Offering the lives and literature of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Edith Wharton as useful brackets around the realist genre, the chapter illustrates the degree to which these two authors made the motif of the home central to their fiction and nonfiction. It provides detailed readings of Stowe’s Pink and White Tyranny (1871), Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905), and Wharton’s rural novel, Summer (1917) in order to showcase how houses personify and encapsulate their characters. In realist fiction, the chapter argues, houses can be read in order to understand the characters who move within them, just as characters can be read by their homes. Finally, the chapter reveals the degree to which Gilded Age excess was replaced by early twentieth-century simplicity, which, in turn, became the linchpin for the era of modernism that evolved in literature and architecture at this time.


Author(s):  
Eve E. Buckley

This chapter emphasizes the intersection of natural (environmental) and social factors that made droughts calamitous for the poorest sertanejos. It traces the construction of the northeast (nordeste) as an identifiable region within modern Brazil, perceived as a challenge to modernization efforts due to its environment and its citizens’ mixed racial heritage. The chapter introduces central aspects of the sertão’s geography and economy, briefly outlining changes from the colonial period to the twentieth century. The role of the Great Drought (1877-1879) in shaping landholding patterns is emphasized, along with the impact that the Canudos rebellion had on other Brazilians’ views of sertanejos. Brazilian racial ideologies of the late nineteenth century are analysed in relation to the marginalization of sertanejos. The dynamics of political patronage by Brazil’s rural coronéis are introduced to explain how drought aid was often funnelled to wealthy landowners rather than to the poor. Finally, popular views of twentieth century drought works are accessed through reference to folk poems known as cordéis.


2020 ◽  
pp. 026010792090719
Author(s):  
Prabir Bhattacharya

This article discusses the role of the British control of India in the rise of Britain and Europe as well as in the convergence in incomes within the Atlantic economy in the late nineteenth century. Britain was at the apex of the world economy throughout most of the nineteenth century. The article argues that the emergence of Britain as the apex economic and political power depended on her control over India. This control of India then enabled Britain to pursue a set of policies that were of critical importance, both for the convergence in incomes within the Atlantic economy and the rise of Europe. The thesis advanced here can be viewed, depending on one’s prior position, as being either complementary to or alternative to the views of many of the protagonists of the divergence debate in the literature. JEL: N10, N13, N15, N70, O4


1993 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
Holly Rothermel

By the early years of the twentieth century, astronomers regarded photography as one of the most valuable tools at their disposal, a technique which not only provided an accurate and reliable representation of astronomical phenomena, but also radically changed the role of the astronomical observer. Herbert Hall Turner, professor of astronomy at Oxford, wrote in 1905: ‘The wonderful exactness of the photographic record may perhaps best be characterised by saying that it has revealed the deficiencies of all our other astronomical apparatus – object-glasses and prisms, clocks, even the observer himself.’ H. C. Russell, government astronomer in Sydney, suggested that photography might in the future make the observer redundant: ‘In many cases the observer must stand aside while the sensitive photographic plate takes his place and works with the power of which he is not capable… I feel sure that in a very few years the observer will be displaced altogether.’ Such visions were not uncommon at the time, emanating from the trust invested in the photographic process after the spectacular achievements of the late nineteenth century.


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