scholarly journals British Workers and Ottoman Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Istanbul

2021 ◽  
Vol 99 ◽  
pp. 147-166
Author(s):  
Akın Sefer

AbstractIn the mid-nineteenth century, when the Ottoman state launched an industrialization campaign within the context of increasing contacts between the Ottoman and British governments, hundreds of British industrial workers migrated to Istanbul to work in Ottoman military factories, along with technology transfer from Britain. This article narrates the history of these workers and of the community they established in Istanbul in a period spanning four decades, from the beginning of the mechanization efforts in the 1830s until the economic crisis in the mid-1870s. Drawing on archival evidence from Ottoman and British sources, it analyzes the larger context of British workers’ migration from Britain, their relations with the Ottoman state officials and local workers, and their experiences and struggles in the workplace and the city. Although both British and Ottoman historians have largely ignored their experiences due to their marginal numbers and distinct statuses, these workers actively took part in the Ottoman industrialization process, in the development of capitalist class relations, and in the social, cultural, and spatial transformation of the capital city in the Ottoman age of reforms. By means of this analysis, the article aims to highlight the significance of immigrant workers as actors of the history of large-scale transformations in the late Ottoman Empire as well as underlining the role of trans-imperial labor migration in the history of modernity.

2019 ◽  
pp. 167-190
Author(s):  
Mary Wills

This chapter examines officers’ contributions to the metropolitan discourses about slavery and abolition taking place in Britain in the early to mid-nineteenth century. Furthering the theme of naval officers playing an important part in the social and cultural history of the West African campaign, it uncovers connections between the Royal Navy and domestic anti-slavery networks, and the extent to which abolitionist societies and interest groups operating in Britain during the first half of the nineteenth century forged relationships with naval officers in the field. Officers contributed to this ever-evolving anti-slavery culture: through support of societies and by providing key testimonies and evidence about the unrelenting transatlantic slave trade. Their representations of the slave trade were used to champion the abolitionist cause, as well as the role of the Royal Navy, in parliament, the press and other public arenas.


Author(s):  
Michelle McCann

This chapter examines the function, status and qualifications of the men that served in the role of county coroner in Ireland in the first half of the nineteenth century. This remains an under-researched area when compared to other local government figures of authority. The history of the office exposes tensions within a politically polarised society and the need for changes in legislation. A combination of factors initially undermined the social standing and reputation of coroners. An examination of the legislation on coroners that the administration subsequently introduced suggests that the authority of the office in early-nineteenth-century Ireland was not strictly jurisprudential, but political and confessional by nature. By analysing the personal background, work experience, social standing, political alliances and religious patronage of coroner William Charles Waddell (1798-1878), the paper charts the wider social and political narrative that allowed this eminently respectable Presbyterian figure to secure the role of coroner of County Monaghan.


2013 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 395-428 ◽  
Author(s):  
Akın Sefer

AbstractThis article introduces a bottom-up perspective to the history of the Revolution of 1908 in the Ottoman Empire by focusing on the experiences of workers in the Imperial Naval Arsenal (Tersâne-i Âmire) in Istanbul. Drawing mainly on primary documents, the article explores, from a class-formation perspective, the struggles and relations of Arsenal workers from the second half of the nineteenth century until the revolution. The Arsenal workers’ involvement in the revolution was rooted in their class solidarity, which was revealed in a number of ways throughout this period. The workers’ immediate embrace of the revolution was spurred by their radicalization against the state; such radicalization stemmed from the state's failure to solve the workers’ persistent economic problems, and its attempts to discharge them and replace them with military labor. The case of the Arsenal workers thus points to the role of working-class discontent in the history of the revolution, a dimension that has thus far been only minimally addressed in Ottoman historiography.


2015 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 41-51
Author(s):  
Elżbieta Koniusz

Co-existence of languages in the area of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the light of the works of Jan KarłowiczThe article discusses the issues of the co-existence of languages in the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the consequences of the phenomenon as documented in the works of Jan Karłowicz – the outstanding scholar of the second half of the nineteenth century, an expert and researcher of the “Lithuanian” version of Polish language. The article emphasizes the fact that the research on languages in the area of The Grand Duchy of Lithuania and results of their co-existence goes back to the second half of the nineteenth century and Jan Karłowicz was the pioneer of this research. He was the first to observe the following phenomena of their co-existence: interference; bilingualism and multilingualism; prioritization of co-existing languages with the unique role of the Polish language in focusing various functions in the history of The Grand Duchy of Lithuania; the diversity of Polish with sociolinguistic classification of its provincia­lisms and their division in the view of their origin; and the dangers to the Polish language in the period of Russification. Karłowicz struggled with the lack of terminology to describe the linguistic phenomena characteristic for the area. The article focuses on the classification of provincial qualities of the “Lithuanian” Polish language executed by Karłowicz in the social and ethnolinguistic area; and on the presentation of the phenomenon of linguistic interference visible in the provincial vocabulary in The Grand Duchy of Lithuania collected in “Dictionary of Polish dialects” by Karłowicz. Сосуществование языков на территории бывшего Великого княжества Литовского в свете произведений Яна КарловичаЦель данной статьи – показать сосуществование языков на землях бывшего Великого княжества Литовского (ВКЛ) и последствий этого явления, засвидетельствованных в работах Яна Карловича, видного ученого второй половины девятнадцатого века, знатока и исследователя „литовского” польского языка. Автор статьи указывает на то, что изучение языков в Великом княжестве Литовском, последствиям их сосуществования относятся ко второй половине девятнадцатого века, а их первым исследователем был Карлович. Им впервые были отмечены такие проявления этого сосуществования, как языковая интерференция, билингвизм и многоязычие, иерархия сосуществующих языков и диалектов. Выделена особая роль польского языка, объединившего целый ряд функций в истории ВКЛ, дифференциация внутри польского языка, социолингвистическая классификация его диалектизмов и их деление по происхождению, угрозы для польского языка в период сильной русификации. Особое внимание автор статьи сосредоточил на классификации провинциальных особенностей „литовского” польского языка, осуществлённой Карловичем в социальном и этнолингвистическом плане, а также на проявлениях интерференции в провинциальной лексике, ведущей своё происхождение из Великого княжества Литовского, собранной в „Словаре польских диалектов” Карловича.


1989 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. A. Jaffe

The role of evangelical religion in the social history of the English working class has been an area of both bewildering theories and un-founded generalizations. The problem, of course, was given a degree of notoriety by Elie Halévy who, according to the received interpretation, claimed that the revolutionary fervor characteristic of the Continental working class in the first half of the nineteenth century was drained from its British counterpart because of the latter's acceptance of Evangelicalism, namely, Methodism.It was revived most notably by E. P. Thompson, who accepted the counterrevolutionary effect of Methodism but claimed that the evangelical message was really an agent of capitalist domination acting to subordinate the industrial working class to the dominion of factory time and work discipline. Furthermore, Thompson argued, the English working class only accepted Methodism reluctantly and in the aftermath of actual political defeats that marked their social and economic subordination to capital. This view has gained a wide acceptance among many of the most prominent labor historians, including E. J. Hobsbawm and George Rudé who believe that Evangelicalism was the working-class's “chiliasm of despair” that “offered the one-time labour militant … compensation for temporal defeats.”There could hardly be a starker contrast between the interpretation of these labor historians and the views of those who have examined the social and political history of religion in early industrial Britain. Among the most important of these, W. R. Ward has claimed that Methodism was popular among the laboring classes of the early nineteenth century precisely because it complemented political radicalism.


Author(s):  
S.H. Apaeva

The article analyzes the history of the Chinese translation development from Ancient China to the present. Translation is the key to communication between two or more peoples, the key to connect the cultural, historical, political and social aspects of two or more countries. The interpreters recognized in China as an ancient profession, and later a translation science arose, which spread in many areas of the social sphere. The texts of the Buddhist sutras were the very first large-scale translations into Chinese, while Chinese interpreters, in the process, developed criteria and principles for translation from different points of view.


1975 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elissa S. Itzkin

He “saw England with fresh eyes”, and for more than fifty years Elie Halévy's provocative interpretation of the effect of religion on the Victorian out look has continued to engender lively debate and controversy. After his History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century, few historians would contest the practical role of evangelicalism and nonconformity in molding Victorian society. What continues to be challenged is Halévy's claim that the moral influence of the evangelical movement is the parameter within which the social history of nineteenth-century England unfolded.


Author(s):  
Shmuel Feiner ◽  
David Sorkin

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment. The Haskalah provides an interesting example of one of the Enlightenments of eighteenth- to nineteenth-century Europe which also constituted a unique chapter in the social history of European Jewry. It encompasses over 120 years (from around the 1770s to the 1890s), and a large number of Jewish communities, from London in the west, to Copenhagen in the north, to Vilna and St Petersburg in the east. Much scholarship in the past concentrated on the Haskalah's intimate relationship to Jewish modernization: scholars examined the role of the Haskalah in the processes of political emancipation and the integration of Jews into the larger society. A different approach became possible once the modernization of European Jewry came to be viewed as a series of processes that awaited adequate analysis and explanation, the Haskalah being one of the foremost among them.


2013 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
pp. 800-833 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristina Wirtz

AbstractIn tracing a discourse history for the emergence and enregisterment of Bozal, a Cuban speech style that robustly indexes the historical persona of the African slave, this paper proposes that such discourse “genealogies” are more accurately reconstructed not through a linear, teleological metaphor of “speech chains” but through a more reticulated, multiply stranded web of interdiscursive connections. Bozal, in contemporary Cuba, characterizes the voices of African deities and spirits of the dead who possess their devotees to speak during folk religious ceremonies. I consider a deeper history of theatrical “blackface” influences on religious performances of spirit possession, a discourse history that destabilizes facile notions of “authentic, African” cultural sources in Cuba. I argue that rather than reflecting direct memories ofactualspeech by African-born slaves, once upon a time, Bozal's enregisterment began with, and always involved, double-voiced representations of imagined social types—what recent scholarship has described as “mock” forms disparaging the speech of racialized Others. The “Bozal slave” was a figure caricatured for comedic effect, proliferating into a whole set of stock theatrical characters, some of which became focal points for building nationalist sentiment in mid-nineteenth-century Cuba. The lesson for understanding the role of Bozal or any “Africanizing” voice in performance today is clear: we must always consider the mediating effects of metacultural practices in shaping our understanding of the social meaning of speech styles.


1997 ◽  
pp. 3-8
Author(s):  
Borys Lobovyk

An important problem of religious studies, the history of religion as a branch of knowledge is the periodization process of the development of religious phenomenon. It is precisely here, as in focus, that the question of the essence and meaning of the religious development of the human being of the world, the origin of beliefs and cult, the reasons for the changes in them, the place and role of religion in the social and spiritual process, etc., are converging.


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