Water and Agriculture in Nineteenth-century Tamilnad

2017 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 485-510 ◽  
Author(s):  
PRASANNAN PARTHASARATHI
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Agricultural Production ◽  
South India ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Agricultural Activity ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Agricultural Enterprise ◽  
Diverse Environment ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries

AbstractWith a focus by scholars on states and classes, the environment of India and its impact on agriculture has been neglected, except to provide a context—which was largely unchanging—in which states extracted and classes struggled. One example of environment as the backdrop is the distinction between ‘wet’ and ‘dry’ areas in Tamilnad and South India more widely. This distinction is based on the availability of water and on the local categorization of agricultural activity (nanjai versus punjai). There are two problems with this approach, however. First, it is a narrow treatment of the environment as it neglects other features of the land such as forests, grasslands, scrublands, and other so-called wasteland. Second, it sees the environment as a fixed entity, but the landscape has changed dramatically in the past, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If changes in the environment are included in the mix, the development of agriculture in nineteenth-century Tamilnad may be seen in some new ways. Agricultural production existed in symbiosis with the complex and varied environment of the region. In the early nineteenth century Tamilnad contained extensive tracts of forests, widespread wastelands, and abundant surface water. This diverse environment made it possible to maintain high levels of agricultural productivity as it provided the resources to maintain the fertility of the soil and the supplies of water that were critical for agricultural enterprise, as well as the well-being of the rural population. The consequences of changing regimes of water is the focus of this article.

Other-Worldly and This-Worldly Islam and the Islamic Revival

2004 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francis Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Important Change ◽  
Great Power ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Islamic Revival ◽  
The Past ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Islamic Society

In his Islam in Modern History, published in 1957, yet still a work remarkable for its insights, Wilfred Cantwell Smith refers to the extraordinary energy which had surged through the Muslim world with increasing force in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He talks of:dynamism, the appreciation of activity for its own sake, and at the level of feeling a stirring of intense, even violent, emotionalism…The transmutation of Muslim society from its early nineteenth-century stolidity to its twentieth-century ebullience is no mean achievement. The change has been everywhere in evidence.This surge of energy is closely associated with a shift in the balance of Muslim piety from an other-worldly towards a this-worldly focus. By this I mean a devaluing of a faith of contemplation of God's mysteries and of belief in His will to shape human life, and a valuing instead of a faith in which Muslims were increasingly aware that it was they, and only they, who could act to fashion an Islamic society on earth. This shift of emphasis has been closely associated with a new idea of great power, the caliphate of man. In the absence of Muslim power, in the absence, for the Sunnis at least, of a caliph, however symbolic, to guide, shape and protect the community, this awesome task now fell to each individual Muslim. I hazard to suggest that this shift towards a this-worldly piety, and the new responsibilities for Muslims that came with it, is the most important change that Muslims have wrought in the practice of their faith over the past one thousand years. It is a change full of possibilities for the future.

The Crimea between East and West according to Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century British Travelogues

2020 ◽  
pp. 81-97
Author(s):  
Nikita I. Khrapunov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The West ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Negative Stereotypes ◽  
Grand Tour ◽  
Archaeological Heritage ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Crimea

Following its annexation by Russia in 1783, the Crimea became a stage on the Western grand tour. Foreign travelogues informed their readers about the country, previously almost unknown in Europe. This paper addresses the British travelogues that played an important role in shaping notions of the Crimea and Russia's role in its history, many of which still exist today. The travellers created works of different kinds: unedited letters and journals, encyclopaedic descriptions, imagined journeys, and pseudo-correspondences. Their authors had varied levels of intelligence, motivations, and passions, intricately entwining empirical observations with stereotypes. Geographically located in Europe, the Crimea was understood as a country featuring distinctive features of the East. Its image possessed traits of paradisiacal nature, inhabited by naïve and lazy persons resembling Rousseau's utopia, with an extraordinarily rich archaeological heritage, the romantic culture of Islam, and various ethnic and religious types. The British offered plans for the establishment of Western colonists in the Crimea, as well as the development of communications, trade, agriculture, and industry. William Eton and Matthew Guthrie considered the Russian occupation of the Crimea historically progres-sive, which would bring prosperity and well-being to the country and its residents. However, Edward Clarke interpreted the Russians as the avatar of barbarism and developed a plan to return the peninsula to the Ottomans. Some negative stereotypes originating from his book continue nowadays and are restated in periods of aggravated relations between Russia and the West.

WOMEN, MARGINALITY AND THE ZULU STATE: WOMEN'S INSTITUTIONS AND POWER IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY

1998 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 389-415 ◽  
Author(s):  
SEAN HANRETTA
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
State Government ◽  
Gender Relations ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
Internal Conflict ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Definition Of

For a number of years the historiography of Southern Africa has been dominated by a materialist framework that has focused upon modes of production and forms of socio-political organization as the determining factors in historical change. Those historians concerned with the history of women in pre-colonial societies – even those who have privileged gender relations in their analyses – have largely been content to construct women's history by applying the insights of socio-economic and political analyses of the past to gender dynamics, and by projecting the insights of anthropological analyses of present gender relations into the past. Some of these historians have concluded that until the arrival of capitalism no substantial changes in the situations, power or status of women took place within Zulu society, even during the period of systemic transformation known as the mfecane in the early nineteenth century.More recently, Zulu gender history has become part of a larger debate connected to the changing political and academic milieu in South Africa. Representatives of a revived Africanist tradition have criticized materialist historians for writing Zulu history from an outsider's perspective and of focusing overly on conflict and power imbalances within the nineteenth-century kingdom in an effort to discredit contemporary Zulu nationalism. To counter this, historian Simon Maphalala has stressed the harmony of nineteenth-century Zulu society, the power advisors exercised in state government, and the lack of internal conflict. Maphalala also claims that women's subordinate role in society ‘did not cause any dissatisfaction among them’, and argues that ‘[women] accepted their position and were contented’. In recent constitutional debates many South African intellectuals including members of the Congress of Traditional Leaders of South Africa (CONTRALESA), invoked this ‘benign patriarchy’ model of pre-colonial gender relations to oppose the adoption of gender-equality provisions in the new constitution. As Cherryl Walker has noted, the hegemonic definition of traditional gender relations to which such figures have made rhetorical appeals often masks not only the historicity of these relations but also hides dissenting opinions (often demarcated along gender lines) as to what those relations are and have been.

Vive la différence? Intergenerational Mobility in France and the United States during the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

2009 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 523-557 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jérôme Bourdieu ◽  
Joseph P. Ferrie ◽  
Lionel Kesztenbaum
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Socioeconomic Status ◽  
Intergenerational Mobility ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Past ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Europe Today

Although rates of intergenerational mobility are the same in the United States and Europe today, attitudes toward redistribution, which should reflect those rates—at least in part—differ substantially. An examination of the differences in mobility between the United States and France since the middle of the nineteenth century, based on data for both countries that permit a comparison between the socioeconomic status of fathers and that of sons throughout a period of thirty years, demonstrates that the United States was a considerably more mobile economy in the past, though such differences are far from apparent today.

scholarly journals Politicking Ayurvedic Education

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 298-334 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Cerulli
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South India ◽  
Life Science ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Public Confidence ◽  
The Past ◽  
Indian Medical ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ethnographic Data

AbstractAs the Indian population’s interest in biomedicine increased at the end of the nineteenth century, public confidence in India’s indigenous medicines flagged. Physicians of Ayurveda and officials of Indian medical organizations responded with discussions about and plans for reconfiguring the āyurveda (“life science”) of the Sanskrit medical classics of Caraka, Suśruta, and Vāgbhaṭa to be compatible with the anatomical, physiological, and pharmacological frameworks of biomedicine. This article considers some of the negotiations that shaped Ayurveda in late colonial and postcolonial India, paying special attention to how these debates affected the history of ayurvedic education. Reflecting on how the presence of biomedicine in India prompted ayurvedic practitioners to reimagine the history of their profession, it examines the revitalization of Ayurveda through the reinvention of ayurvedic education. It probes the historical move away from the gurukula as the seat of education and the institutionalization and standardization of education in the ayurvedic college. The historical record is expanded periodically with ethnographic data collected at gurukulas in South India to offer contemporary views on changes in ayurvedic education over the past 130 years.1

The People’s Two Bodies

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheldon S. Wolin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Body ◽  
American History ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
Defense Spending ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Advanced Economy ◽  
The Past ◽  
Two Bodies ◽  
At Home

In the span of a few short years, as Americans have watched the visible deterioration of their nation's power at home and abroad, they have experienced something unknown to American history since the early nineteenth century: a sense of collective vulnerability. Perhaps the clearest proof of the widespread perception of powerlessness is in the eagerness with which virtually all segments of the American public have supported the extraordinary increases in defense spending over the past decade. This chapter asks, what does it mean for America to ground its collective existence upon the type of power embodied in a highly advanced economy whose destructive effects upon nature, society, and the human body and psyche are documented daily with depressing regularity? The question is about political identity, about who Americans are as a people.

scholarly journals The Liberal Soliloquy: The Elite Expression of Shared Loneliness in Modern European Nationalism and Supranationalism

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Hernan Tesler-Mabé
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries

Abstract Abstract: In this article, I explore the problem of identity at the national and European levels historically and sociologically, exposing the liberal thread that runs through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Looking to key historical and artistic figures, I argue for the continuity between early nationalist and European integrationist impulses, maintaining that-despite their seemingly contradictory essence-the two are bound together by a liberalism (viz. the pursuit of the natural rights of man) they hold in common. I contend that this connection illustrates that the initial efforts to construct the nation in the early nineteenth century and a supranational Europe more than a century later can be understood asidealistic liberal projects that have failed due to the populist turn upon which their success depends, leaving the cultural elites behind both projects in a shared loneliness.

Textual Incest: Nathaniel Isaacs and the Development of the Shaka Myth

1992 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 411-433 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan Wylie
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South African ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Harold Bloom ◽  
The Past ◽  
Anxiety Of Influence ◽  
Storm Center ◽  
Verbal Construction ◽  
The University

Literary practitioners have long been, often uncomfortably, aware of the ambivalently fruitful and constraining rhetorical influences of the past. Writers successively utilize or rebel against traditional tropes, poetic conventions, and narrative norms, balancing cultural depth against individualist innovation, acceptability against rejection, public intelligibility against the opacity of private connotation. By such gestures towards the traditions, literature challenges, upholds, or leaves unquestioned the moral, political, and cultural pre-suppositions of its day.South African historiography is less aware than it might be of its textuality, in this sense, of its immersion in a similar “anxiety of influence,” as Harold Bloom has termed it. Little attention has been paid to its rhetorical lineaments and heritage or to the ways historians have read, used, and departed from one another. This is dramatically illustrated by the case of the historiography of Shaka Zulu (assassinated in 1828). Nowhere else has such poverty of evidence and research spawned such a massively unquestioned, long-lived, and monolithic “history.” Only in the last decade has the legendary, verbal construction of the Shaka figure been seriously questioned; only in 1991, at an important colloquium at the University of the Witwatersrand, was something approaching an academic consensus reached that themfecane—the notion of Shaka's Zulus as the “storm-center” of a sub-continental explosion of autophagous, black-on-black violence—was no longer a credible vehicle for understanding the early nineteenth century in southern Africa.

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