A Profile of the Labor Force in Early Nineteenth-Century Istanbul

2001 ◽  
Vol 60 ◽  
pp. 125-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cengiz K[icy ]rl[icy ]

This article attempts to offer a detailed profile of the labor force in early nineteenth-century Istanbul. The primary source upon which this study is based is the register of an original Ottoman survey, conducted in the Istanbul districts of the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn, where some 2,000 shops along with their work force of 6,000 people as well as 1,500 peddlers (working as, among other things, boatmen, fishermen, and water carriers) were listed in a comprehensive fashion. Through an examination of the register, this article seeks to illuminate the general characteristics of employment and shop sizes, the ethno-religious profile of the labor force, occupational patterns in connection with religious allegiances and migration networks, and the degree to which the military corps were involved in commercial activities. It also questions the supposed existence of an “ethnic division of labor” in labor market and commercial activities, and demonstrates the centrality of regional allegiances in occupational specializations.

2019 ◽  
pp. 29-46
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Smith

The first of two companion chapters, this essay focuses especially on the historical meeting of European and African American movement vocabularies in English-speaking early-nineteenth-century contexts. It focuses particularly upon public music and dance in two creolized cities: Kingston, Jamaica, and New York City. Primary source evidence includes period illustrations (most notably, a ca. 1802 watercolor entitled A Grand Jamaica Ball) and period accounts of entertainments at lower Manhattan’s African Grove Theater; both are analyzed for the evidence they provide regarding the synthesis of creolized movement vocabularies and, by extension, cultural experiences. Methodology is drawn especially from iconography and kinesics.


Author(s):  
Nick Mansfield

This chapter reviews the involvement of soldiers in conventional politics in the early nineteenth century. In contrast to the leeway which allowed officers to be involved in politics (both as voters and MPs), the rank and file were discouraged from taking part. It outlines military policies of Whigs and Tories in the early nineteenth century and profiles key individual officers. It discusses the emergent influence of political radicalism on both parties, with some Whig officers embracing the concept, in contrast to Tory anathema.


2019 ◽  
pp. 47-64
Author(s):  
Karl Raitz

Early-nineteenth-century farmers and millers were often craft distillers, mashing and fermenting grain meal in wooden barrels before distilling the liquid in small copper pot stills. Waterwheels powered the first-generation creek-side mills and distilleries. Wood fueled early steam engines; the use of coal required access to better transportation. Second-generation distilleries, operating from the 1830s to the 1880s, used traditional pot stills,although some adopted new column stills, perfected in Scotland, when they began to mechanize. Old still buildings were often modified to accommodate new machinery. Distillers stored whiskey-filled wooden barrels in stack warehouses to age. Industrialization required a larger labor force. By 1880, businesses in Louisville and other river cities were producing steam engines, boilers, and related equipment. Third-generation distilleries operated from the 1880s to 1920; their high-capacity output required more grain and fuel, mandating locations near railroad tracks or navigable rivers. Complementary industries such as cooperages, metal fabricators, slaughterhouses, and tanneries were attracted to urban, rail-side distilleries.


1989 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-225 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger B. Beck

Trade across the Cape frontier in the first three decades of the nineteenth century, and government attempts to regulate that trade, cannot be understood without first considering the role of Protestant missionaries as traders and bearers of European manufactured goods in the South African interior. From their arrival in 1799, missionaries of the London Missionary Society carried on a daily trade beyond the northern and eastern boundaries of the Cape Colony that was forbidden by law to the colonists. When missionaries of the Methodist Missionary Society arrived in the mid-1810s they too carried beads as well as Bibles to their mission stations outside the colony. Most missionaries were initially troubled by having to mix commercial activities with their religious duties. They were forced, however, to rely on trade in order to support themselves and their families because of the meagre material and monetary assistance they received from their societies. They introduced European goods among African societies beyond the Cape frontiers earlier and in greater quantities than any other enterprise until the commencement of the Fort Willshire fairs in 1824. Most importantly, they helped to bring about a transition from trade in beads, buttons and other traditional exchange items to a desire among many of the peoples with whom they came into contact for blankets, European clothing and metal tools and utensils, thus creating a growing dependency on European material goods that would eventually bring about a total transformation of these African societies.


Ensemblance ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 112-139
Author(s):  
Luis de Miranda

After 1800, esprit de corps was often nationally manufactured, and Napoleon was its first engineer. French society became a reflection of the military. This chapter shows how the Bonapartists succeeded in building a national system of rewards and interdependent privileged corps in which ‘esprit de corps’ was encouraged according to a military model of general agonism. The transformation of the organisation of labour, of the army, and of education after the French Revolution is narrated. This chapter is essential to understand not only today’s France, but also most nation-states, functioning more or less under a similar model. The author also analyses the decline of labour communities and their form of belonging since the eighteenth century. The Revolutiondiscredited the esprit de corporation, and capitalist merchants were often thankful for the republican defence of more competitive and less-regulated entrepreneurship.


2021 ◽  
Vol 155 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-54
Author(s):  
SJ Zhang

Spanning a long literary history, from 1742 to 1934, this essay argues for the military epaulette as an important material signifier through which the arbitrary nature of rank and colonial authority was revealed and challenged. This essay connects the anxieties attending the introduction of epaulettes in newly nationalized European armies to the historical and rhetorical impact of such uniforms on depictions of so-called Black chiefs, including Toussaint Louverture, Lamour Derance, and Nat Turner. In the context of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century slave revolts and imperial and colonial war fronts, this otherwise semiotic feature of the military uniform was a catalyst for a particular kind of confrontation over authority of signification in the tug-of-war between rank and race. This essay tracks a consistent rhetoric of violence and ridicule in these confrontations as they appear in histories, novels, and plays. In the work of Walter Scott, Victor Hugo, William Wells Brown, and Martin Delany, attempts to read epaulettes produce a violent form of colonial desire that is only permitted when couched in the rhetoric of ridicule and the ridiculous. The essay’s final pages turn to the first half of the twentieth century, when the still violent stakes of subverting the uniform persist through an ambivalence stemming from the literal and figural “costuming” of the Black chief.


1983 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 311-320 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey P. Koplan

The early nineteenth-century decrease in several West Indian slave populations has been a subject of intense interest among historians of the region, of slavery, and of population dynamics (Higman, 1973; Curtin, 1969). Further data on birth rates, death rates, causes of deaths, and quantity and quality of slave importation and migration will help explain the phenomenon of “natural decrease. “The slave registration records of the island of Grenada provide useful information on this piece of demographic history. The records enumerate slave births and deaths and list causes of death, signed by a physician. There are few published reports on death rates and causes of death in West Indian slave populations (Higman, 1973; Handler and Lange, 1978; Roberts, 1952). The purpose of this study is to describe the causes of death, estimate specific death rates, and construct a life-table for slaves in Grenada in 1818.


1975 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Law

Following an earlier article in this Journal, by Humphrey Fisher, dealing with the role of the horse in the Central Sudan, this article considers the role of cavalry in the kingdom of Oyo. It is suggested that the use of cavalry may have been adopted by Oyo during the sixteenth century. Oyo never became self-sufficient in horses, but remained dependent for its horses upon importation from the Central Sudan, while local mortality from trypanosomiasis was considerable. Evidence relating to the operations of Oyo armies supports the view that cavalry was of substantial military value, while at the same time illustrating the limitations of the military efficacy of cavalry. The acquisition and maintenance of large numbers of horses represented a considerable economic burden for Oyo, and the high cost of maintaining a large cavalry force may have inhibited the establishment of a royal autocracy in Oyo. The decline of the cavalry strength of Oyo in the early nineteenth century was due, it is suggested, to economic difficulties.


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