The Slaves of Timor: Life and Death on the Fringes of Early Colonial Society

Itinerario ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 19-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans Hägerdal
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social History ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Academic Literature ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Colonial Society ◽  
Centre Of Gravity ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
History Of

The history of slavery is by no means untouched, and there are now even ambitious global histories of the phenomenon in print. On the other hand, it is clear that much of the literature on this sombre side of human society has concentrated on the Transatlantic slave trade and non-free labour in the Americas. The relative wealth of documents in Western languages has presumably contributed to give the historiography of slavery a Western centre of gravity, coupled with the fact that the early modern Americas were restructured into settlement colonies. This made slavery a motor of socio-economic change in a more pronounced way than in Asian societies. Consequently, it comes as no surprise that the handling of slaves in an Asiatic context has been less thoroughly treated in the extant academic literature. It seems that aspects of Asian slavery have not fit well into the preconceptions of Asianists, or have at least been relegated to the margins of social history.

Renaissance Mass Murder

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen D. Bowd
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social History ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Mass Murder ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
Italian Wars ◽  
Human Tragedy

Renaissance Mass Murder explores the devastating impact of war on the men and women of the Renaissance. In contrast to the picture of balance and harmony usually associated with the Renaissance, it uncovers in forensic detail a world in which sacks of Italian cities and massacres of civilians at the hands of French, German, Spanish, Swiss, and Italian troops were regular occurrences. The arguments presented are based on a wealth of evidence—histories and chronicles, poetry and paintings, sculpture and other objects—which together provide a new and startling history of sixteenth-century Italy and a social history of the Italian Wars. It outlines how massacres happened, how princes, soldiers, lawyers, and writers, justified and explained such events, and how they were represented in contemporary culture. On this basis the book reconstructs the terrifying individual experiences of civilians in the face of war and in doing so offers a story of human tragedy which redresses the balance of the history of the Italian Wars, and of Renaissance warfare, in favour of the civilian and away from the din of the battlefield. This book also places mass murder in a broader historical context and challenges claims that such violence was unusual or in decline in early modern Europe. Finally, it shows that women often suffered disproportionately from this violence and that immunity for them, as for their children, was often partially developed or poorly respected.

Sons and Fathers in the Major Declamations Ascribed to Quintilian

1995 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lewis A. Sussman
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Private Schools ◽  
History Of Rhetoric ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Court Cases ◽  
Major Focus ◽  
Absolute Power ◽  
Male Adolescents ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
History Of

Abstract: A major focus of the school themes in the collections of Roman declamations knowrn as controversiae (practice court cases) is the period of a young man's adolescence, and especially his relationship with his father during this period. In part this can be explained because teachers in the private schools of rhetoric selected themes that naturally appealed to their students——male adolescents in their mid and late teens. This focus is especially notable in the Major Declamations, and since they are the only full examples of controversiae,the phenomenon can most easily be explored in reference to this werk. In its nineteen declamations youths are generally portrayed sympathetically, in contrast to their fathers who are often cruel and harsh. Relations between the two are generally very strained. The themes were popular because they reflected the reality of growing up in a paternally dominated society where fathers had absolute power(even of life and death) over their sons. These declamations therefore had a cathartic effect and escapist value fer Roman teenaged boys,who could vent or explore in legitimate and acceptable ways their repressed, pent-up, and often hostile feelings toward their fathers. The declamations therefore provide an important resource, when used judiciously, for associating social history with the history of rhetoric.

The Social History of Skepticism: Experience and Doubt in Early Modern Culture

2001 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 533
Author(s):  
Christopher S. Celenza ◽  
Brendan Dooley
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social History ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

Doctoring the Body and Exciting the Soul: Drugs and consumer culture in medieval and early modern Iran

2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 554-617
Author(s):  
RANIN KAZEMI
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social History ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The Body ◽  
Mass Consumption ◽  
History Of ◽  
Urban And Rural Areas

AbstractThis article focuses on the development of early modern consumerism in a part of the Middle East that historians of consumer culture are yet to fully explore. Making use of a wide variety of unexplored and underexplored original sources, the article contends that early modern consumer culture in Iran was grounded deeply in the ever-widening patterns of exchange and use that had developed slowly over the course of the previous centuries. The discussion below takes the growing popular interest in a few key psychoactive substances as a useful barometer of the dynamics of mass consumption, and chronicles how the slow and ever-expanding use of alcohol, opium, and cannabis (or a cannabis-like product) in the medieval period led to the popularity of coffee, tobacco, older drugs, and still other commodities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The aim here is to use the history of drug culture as an entry point to scrutinize the emergence of early modern consumerism among the elites and the non-elites in both urban and rural areas of the Middle East. In doing so, this article reconstructs the cultural and social history of recreational drugs prior to and during the early modern period, and elucidates the socio-economic context that helped bring about a ‘psychoactive revolution’ in the Safavid state (1501–1736).

The Roots of Rough Justice

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Pfeifer
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mob Violence ◽  
Antebellum America ◽  
Global Context ◽  
Class Hierarchies ◽  
History Of ◽  
Civil War Era ◽  
American Society

This deeply researched prequel to the author's 2006 study Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874–1947, analyzes the foundations of lynching in American social history. Scrutinizing the vigilante movements and lynching violence that occurred in the middle decades of the nineteenth century on the Southern, Midwestern, and far Western frontiers, this book offers new insights into collective violence in the pre-Civil War era. The book examines the antecedents of American lynching in an early modern Anglo-European folk and legal heritage. This is the first book to consider the crucial emergence of the practice of lynching slaves in antebellum America, and it also leads the way in analyzing the history of American lynching in a global context. Arguing that the origins of lynching cannot be restricted to any particular region, the book shows how the national and transatlantic context is essential for understanding how whites used mob violence to enforce the racial and class hierarchies across the United States.

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