TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS

2000 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 1-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
P.J. Marshall

AbstractTHESE addresses have been trying to explore the obvious paradox in eighteenth-century Britain's fortunes overseas: a North American empire, as I suggested last year, deeply rooted in the rich soil of a close-knit transatlantic community, was to come crashing down in the gale unleashed by the new imperial anxieties and ambitions of Britain's rulers. A British empire was, however, to be successfully planted in the unpromising terrain of alien Asian peoples. It is to the creation of this new Indian empire that I wish now to turn.

Author(s):  
Justin du Rivage

This introductory chapter briefly considers why the British American colonists had broken away from an empire that they had long revered. Americans like to think of themselves as fundamentally different from Europeans—both more democratic and more libertarian. But during the eighteenth century, Britain and its North American colonies were actually becoming more alike. However, the United States followed a different path from the dramatic transformation that painted the globe French blue and British red. That path reflected the fact that the American Revolution was a revolution not for or against monarchy, but against the authoritarian transformation of the British Empire.


2004 ◽  
Vol 113 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-54
Author(s):  
Susanne Davies

The ‘tyranny of distance’ that once marked Australia's standing as an outpost of the British Empire may have dissipated, yet there is much to suggest that the insecurities that characterised its colonial status now find renewed expression in Australia's alignment with American political, cultural and military interests and policies. Assisting in fostering public allegiance to a new American Empire, are some segments of the media that, far from reporting the news, now engage in propagandist style campaigning that collapses time, space, and difference. The ‘Shine On’ Memorial initiated by Melbourne's Herald Sun newspaper to mark the first anniversary of the 9/11 bombings exemplifies this approach. Imploring citizens to join in ‘a community memorial’ as ‘a mark of respect to the victims’ and ‘a symbol of hope’, this campaign dug deep into Australian insecurities to manufacture an appearance of consent, and thus operated to mask and delegitimate difference and dissent.


Author(s):  
Stefan Winter

This concluding chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. The book has shown that the multiplicity of lived ʻAlawi experiences cannot be reduced to the sole question of religion or framed within a monolithic narrative of persecution; that the very attempt to outline a single coherent history of “the ʻAlawis” may indeed be misguided. The sources on which this study has drawn are considerably more accessible, and the social and administrative realities they reflect consistently more mundane and disjointed, than the discourse of the ʻAlawis' supposed exceptionalism would lead one to believe. Therefore, the challenge for historians of ʻAlawi society in Syria and elsewhere is not to use the specific events and structures these sources detail to merely add to the already existing metanarratives of religious oppression, Ottoman misrule, and national resistance but rather to come to a newer and more intricate understanding of that community, and its place in wider Middle Eastern society, by investigating the lives of individual ʻAlawi (and other) actors within the rich diversity of local contexts these sources reveal.


2011 ◽  
pp. 15-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Galley ◽  
Eilidh Garrett ◽  
Ros Davies ◽  
Alice Reid

This article examines the extent to which living siblings were given identical first names. Whilst the practice of sibling name-sharing appeared to have died out in England during the eighteenth century, in northern Scotland it persisted at least until the end of the nineteenth century. Previously it has not been possible to provide quantitative evidence of this phenomenon, but an analysis of the rich census and vital registration data for the Isle of Skye reveals that this practice was widespread, with over a third of eligible families recording same-name siblings. Our results suggest that further research should focus on regional variations in sibling name-sharing and the extent to which this northern pattern occurred in other parts of Britain.


Author(s):  
Jonathan Hopkin

Recent elections in the advanced Western democracies have undermined the basic foundations of political systems that had previously beaten back all challenges—from both the Left and the Right. The election of Donald Trump to the US presidency, only months after the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, signaled a dramatic shift in the politics of the rich democracies. This book traces the evolution of this shift and argues that it is a long-term result of abandoning the postwar model of egalitarian capitalism in the 1970s. That shift entailed weakening the democratic process in favor of an opaque, technocratic form of governance that allows voters little opportunity to influence policy. With the financial crisis of the late 2000s, these arrangements became unsustainable, as incumbent politicians were unable to provide solutions to economic hardship. Electorates demanded change, and it had to come from outside the system. Using a comparative approach, the text explains why different kinds of anti-system politics emerge in different countries and how political and economic factors impact the degree of electoral instability that emerges. Finally, it discusses the implications of these changes, arguing that the only way for mainstream political forces to survive is for them to embrace a more activist role for government in protecting societies from economic turbulence.


Author(s):  
Alison Games

This book explains how a conspiracy trial featuring English, Japanese, and Indo-Portuguese co-conspirators who allegedly plotted against the Dutch East India Company in the Indian Ocean in 1623 produced a diplomatic crisis in Europe and became known for four centuries in British culture as the Amboyna Massacre. The story of the transformation of this conspiracy into a massacre is a story of Anglo-Dutch relations in the seventeenth century and of a new word in the English language, massacre. The English East India Company drew on this new word to craft an enduring story of cruelty, violence, and ingratitude. Printed works—both pamphlets and images—were central to the East India Company’s creation of the massacre and to the story’s tenacity over four centuries as the texts and images were reproduced during conflicts with the Dutch and internal political disputes in England. By the eighteenth century, the story emerged as a familiar and shared cultural touchstone. By the nineteenth century, the Amboyna Massacre became the linchpin of the British Empire, an event that historians argued well into the twentieth century had changed the course of history and explained why the British had a stronghold in India. The broad familiarity with the incident and the Amboyna Massacre’s position as an early and formative violent event turned the episode into the first English massacre. It shaped the meaning of subsequent acts of violence, and placed intimacy, treachery, and cruelty at the center of massacres in ways that endure to the present day.


Author(s):  
Lucia Dacome

Chapter 7 furthers the analysis of the role of anatomical models as cultural currencies capable of transferring value. It does so by expanding the investigation of the early stages of anatomical modelling to include a new setting. In particular, it follows the journey of the Palermitan anatomist and modeller Giuseppe Salerno and his anatomical ‘skeleton’—a specimen that represented the body’s complex web of blood vessels and was presented as the result of anatomical injections. Although Salerno was headed towards Bologna, a major centre of anatomical modelling, he ended his journey in Naples after the nobleman Raimondo di Sangro purchased the skeleton for his own cabinet of curiosities. This chapter considers the creation and viewing of an anatomical display in di Sangro’s Neapolitan Palace from a comparative perspective that highlights how geography and locality played an important part in shaping the culture of mid-eighteenth-century anatomical modelling.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-31
Author(s):  
Troy Bickham

Abstract In examining how children engaged with the British Empire, broadly defined, during the long eighteenth century, this article considers a range of materials, including museums, printed juvenile literature, and board games, that specifically attempted to attract children and their parents. Subjects that engaged with the wider world, and with it the British Empire, were typically not a significant part of formal education curricula, and so an informal marketplace of materials and experiences emerged both to satisfy and drive parental demand for supplementary education at home. Such engagements were no accident. Rather, they were a conscious effort to provide middling and elite children with what was considered useful information about the wider world and empire they would inherit, as well as opportunities to consider the moral implications and obligations of imperial rule, particularly with regard to African slavery.


Literator ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Viljoen

This article is an attempt to outline the difference between Breytenbach's poetic method and that of the Symbolists. Although it touches on aspects of the symbolist poetic method like the rich suggestiveness, the creation o f a meaningful alternative world (and the effort of doing this), it focuses mainly on Breytenbach’s use of metaphor to create an impossible alternative world in a poem, only to relativize and destroy it again in the end. This process is illustrated in an analysis of poem 8.1 from Lotus. This analysis also shows up five well-known cardinal traits of Breytenbach’s poetry, viz. its carnality, the universal analogy between body, cosmos and poetry and the great emphasis on journeys, discoveries and transformations by means of language. It is also claimed that the Zen-Buddhisi Void plays an analogous role in Breytenbach's poetry to the theory of correspondances in the Symbolists: it is a rich source of metaphor. Breytenbach's poetry shows a strong duality between the present world and a meaningful alternative sphere. Being in and of this alternative sphere only aggravates the poet’s isolation (a typically symbolist trait), making him literally and figuratively an exile, as exile poems like "tot siens, kaapstad" (see you again, cape town) and "Walvis in die berg" (Whale on the mountain) and, of course, his prison poetry, clearly show.


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