A Bureaucracy of Rejection: Petitioning and the impoverished paternalism of the British-Indian Raj

2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 177-202
Author(s):  
JULIA STEPHENS
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Steady Flow ◽  
Traditional Authority ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Face ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Colonial Resistance ◽  
Imperial Governance

AbstractBombay, the hub of Britain's Indian Ocean empire, hosted a ceaseless flow of humanity: sailors and lawyers, street performers and royal refugees. When fate set obstacles in their way, the residents of this teeming metropolis petitioned colonial officials, looking on them as patriarchal providers of last resort. These petitions, which this article terms ‘personal pleas’, adeptly braided different, often contradictory, idioms of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century imperial governance, from stylized imitations of traditional authority to bureaucratic proceduralism. Their functional contribution to Raj governance, however, remains a puzzle since the vast majority of petitions were rejected. For the British, the steady flow of rejections threatened to unmask the disjuncture between the expectations and realities of Raj paternalism. As a result, colonial officials viewed personal pleas with a mixture of ridicule and concern. Yet, while unsettling for officials, personal pleas rarely spurred the collective politics associated with anti-colonial resistance. Thus, where other articles in this special issue focus on petitioning's functional contributions to the consolidation of state bureaucracies and the formation of new publics, this article traces the genre's more emotive dimensions. Even as they failed to consolidate colonial discipline or resistance, personal pleas provided a vehicle for the airing of the lived contradictions and tensions of empire. They allowed rulers and subjects alike to fantasize about the possibility of a more benevolent order, and to vent their frustration when those fantasies crumbled in the face of imperial indifference.

Interdecadal Variations in ENSO Teleconnection to the Indo–Western Pacific for 1870–2007

2012 ◽  
Vol 25 (5) ◽  
pp. 1722-1744 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. S. Chowdary ◽  
Shang-Ping Xie ◽  
Hiroki Tokinaga ◽  
Yuko M. Okumura ◽  
Hisayuki Kubota ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
El Niño ◽  
General Circulation ◽  
El Nino ◽  
Southern Oscillation ◽  
Western Pacific ◽  
Northwest Pacific ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Slow modulation of interannual variability and its relationship to El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is investigated for the period of 1870–2007 using shipboard surface meteorological observations along a frequently traveled track across the north Indian Ocean (NIO; from the Gulf of Aden through Malacca Strait) and the South China Sea (to Luzon Strait). During the decades in the late nineteenth–early twentieth century and in the late twentieth century, the El Niño–induced NIO warming persists longer than during the 1910s–mid-1970s, well into the summer following the peak of El Niño. During the epochs of the prolonged NIO warming, rainfall drops and sea level pressure rises over the tropical northwest Pacific in summer following El Niño. Conversely, during the period when the NIO warming dissipates earlier, these atmospheric anomalies are not well developed. This supports the Indian Ocean capacitor concept as a mechanism prolonging El Niño influence into summer through the persistent Indian Ocean warming after El Niño itself has dissipated. The above centennial modulation of ENSO teleconnection to the Indo–northwest Pacific region is reproduced in an atmospheric general circulation model forced by observed SST. The modulation is correlated not with the Pacific decadal oscillation but rather with the ENSO variance itself. When ENSO is strong, its effect in the Indo–northwest Pacific strengthens and vice versa. The fact that enhanced ENSO teleconnections occurred 100 years ago during the late nineteenth–early twentieth century indicates that the recent strengthening of the ENSO correlation over the Indo–western Pacific may not entirely be due to global warming but reflect natural variability.

scholarly journals “Foreigners in Town”: Leisure, Consumption, and Cosmopolitanism in Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Century Tillsonburg, Ontario1

2013 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 215-247
Author(s):  
Rebecca Beausaert
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Small Town ◽  
Leisure Activities ◽  
Small Towns ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Ethnic Food ◽  
The Face ◽  
Late Nineteenth

At the turn of the twentieth century, the small town of Tillsonburg, Ontario contained a population that was over eighty-six percent Anglo-Celtic in origin. Increasingly, however, local leisure activities began to incorporate “ethnic” food, dress, and mannerisms so that citizens could momentarily become “foreigners” and “consume” knowledge of other nations and peoples. Two of the more notable venues where participants acted out racialized identities—the “Garden Party of the Nations” and the Ladies’ Travel Club—showcase desires to consume markers of foreignness while concurrently displaying an acceptance of these cultures. Using Tillsonburg as a case study, this article examines how engaging with the “foreign” in patterns of leisure and consumption was a way for citizens (and women in particular) to convey an air of cosmopolitanism and cultural refinement in the face of critiques that small towns were insular and unsophisticated. Their cultural appropriations, however, represent grossly distorted understandings of races, ethnicities, and cultures that existed outside their Euro-Canadian one. Though efforts by Tillsonburg’s populace to appear more cosmopolitan were grounded in a desire to expand understandings of “the foreign,” this occurred only on their own terms and in controlled spaces.

Faeries, Aliens, and Leviathans: Science and Fantasy in Ian McDonald's King of Morning, Queen of Day

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 290-303
Author(s):  
Richard Howard
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Irish Studies ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Politics And Religion ◽  
Unexplored Area ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Cultural Movement

Irish science fiction is a relatively unexplored area for Irish Studies, a situation partially rectified by the publication of Jack Fennell's Irish Science Fiction in 2014. This article aims to continue the conversation begun by Fennell's intervention by analysing the work of Belfast science fiction author Ian McDonald, in particular King of Morning, Queen of Day (1991), the first novel in what McDonald calls his Irish trilogy. The article explores how McDonald's text interrogates the intersection between science, politics, and religion, as well as the cultural movement that was informing a growing sense of a continuous Irish national identity. It draws from the discipline of Science Studies, in particular the work of Nicholas Whyte, who writes of the ways in which science and colonialism interacted in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Ireland.

A Historiographical Interlude

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan D. Teubner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth

The ‘Historiographical Interlude’ presents a brief overview of the cultural, social, and political changes that occur between Augustine’s death in 430 CE and Boethius’ earliest theological writings (c.501 CE). When Augustine, Boethius, and Benedict are treated together in one unified analysis, several historiographical challenges emerge. This Interlude addresses several of these challenges and argues that trends within late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholarship established some unfounded interpretive biases. In particular, this section will discuss the contributions of Adolf von Harnack and Henri Irénée Marrou, focusing on how they contributed, in diverse ways, to the neglect of sixth-century Italy as a significant geographical site in the development of the Augustinian tradition.

Extractivist Geographies: Mining and Development in Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth-Century Peru

2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 27-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Himley
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
National Level ◽  
National Development ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Long Run ◽  
Contemporary Politics ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Siglo Xix ◽  
Extractive Economies

In Peru, development dreams have not infrequently been hitched to the expansion of mining and other extractive activities. While the Peruvian state pursued strategies to stimulate mining expansion during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the geography of capitalist mining that emerged mapped poorly onto the national development imaginaries of the country’s elites. State-led efforts to mobilize subsurface resources in the service of national-level development conflicted with the tendency for extractive economies to exhibit uneven and discontinuous spatialities. Attention to the long-run unevenness of extractive investment in global resource frontiers such as Peru promises to deepen understandings of both world environmental history and the contemporary politics of resource extractivism. En el Perú, los sueños de desarrollo han sido enganchados con frecuencia a la expansión de la minería y otras actividades extractivas. Mientras que el estado peruano siguió estrategias para estimular la expansión minera a fines del siglo XIX y principios del XX, la geografía de la minería capitalista que surgió no se proyectó bien en los imaginarios de desarrollo nacional de las élites del país. Los esfuerzos dirigidos por el estado para movilizar los recursos del subsuelo al servicio del desarrollo a nivel nacional contradijeron la tendencia de las economías extractivas a mostrar espacialidades desparejas y discontinuas. La atención al carácter desparejo a largo plazo de la inversión extractiva en las fronteras de recursos globales, como Perú, promete profundizar el entendimiento tanto de la historia ambiental mundial como de la política contemporánea del extractivismo de recursos.

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