Economic Processes, Ruralisation, and Ethnic Mutation. A Study on the Changing Meanings of Lusitanian Space in India, 1780-1840

Itinerario ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 45-62
Author(s):  
Pius Malekandathil

The period between 1780 and 1840, which is often called the age of revolutions in the West, witnessed significant change in the Lusitanian space in India, due to radical alterations in the politico-economic activities and socio-ecclesiastical institutions. On the one hand, the commercial ventures that the Portuguese had officially maintained as their major economic activity for more than two centuries were relegated to the background or handed over to the Saraswat Brahmins of Goa and some private entrepreneurs. On the other hand, the Portuguese state in India began to focus more on agriculture as a means of sustaining itself against the backdrop of intensified threats from the British encroaching on their peripheral commerce. The agrarian policy of the Portuguese Prime Minister Marques de Pombal to acquire new cultivable territories and expand agriculture had already brought several neighbouring areas of Goa, under the Portuguese control during the period between 1763 and 1783, which were named New Conquests. This was followed by the establishment of a Department of Agriculture in 1776 to supervise cultivation and to introduce new crops, such as pepper, cotton and areca-nuts in Goa and in the newly conquered territories. At the same time that the king of Portugal fled from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro and began to rule the metropolis and its colonies from Brazil, following severe threats from Napoleonic wars, the Portuguese possessions in India—particularly in Goa—were moving towards increasing ruralisation. The Department of Agriculture even clamoured for the closure of the municipal councils of Goa, and also for the liquidation of the gaonkar system (communal ownership of land) that would facilitate distribution of land to enterprising individuals to increase production and to make Goa self-sustaining.

2014 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 7-15
Author(s):  
Santa Bahadur Pun

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Nepal in August 2014 was instrumental in reinvigorating the stalled 6,480 MW Pancheshwar Multipurpose Project. In particular, the one billion US Dollar soft loan for infrastructures that Modi offered to Nepal has generated much enthusiasm. As the Mahakali Treaty was ratified in September 1996, and as public memory is short, this article reverts back 18 years ago into the heady days when the Water Resources Minister, Pashupati SJB Rana, publicly claimed that the sun would now begin to ‘rise from the west’! At that time, even the leaders in the opposing camp (the CPN-UML), started to count their chickens in billions and billions of rupees accruing from the sale of electricity to India. Today, that ‘Som Sharma euphoria’ has again started to percolate among our political leaders. The article, hence, poses six vital issues that need to be ‘fixed’ before the Pancheshwar Multipurpose Project can begin to taxi along the runway: i) validity of Rashtriya Sankalpas/national strictures; ii) re-constituting the all-party Parliamentary Monitoring Joint Committee; iii) export of energy and its pricing principle; iv) formation of Mahakali River Commission; v) equal sharing of Mahakali waters after the completion of the Pancheshwar Project; and vi) determining the origin of Mahakali River. The author believes that until these vital issues are fixed in an amicable and good faith manner, the viability of the Pancheshwar Multipurpose Project will again be in doubt !DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/hn.v15i0.11284HYDRO Nepal JournalJournal of Water Energy and EnvironmentVolume: 15, 2014, JulyPage: 7-15


1954 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-37
Author(s):  
Alexander Eckstein

THE Communist conquest of mainland China may be legitimately viewed as the culmination of a century-long interregnum during which the traditional equilibrium of Chinese society was profoundly disturbed by the Western impact, at a time of dynastic decline. The initial impact of the West was in the nature of a shock treatment administered by the Opium War, the subsequent military defeats, the unequal treaties, and the rise of the whole Treaty Ports system. Thus China's first massive contact with the West was associated with humiliation, bewilderment, frustration, and a sense of inequality. In these terms, then, a constant and continuing struggle for equality has been a hallmark of China's development since 1840.The military and diplomatic defeats suffered by the Chinese made them conscious of the West's technological and industrial superiority. In fact, one of the essential ingredients in China's striving toward equality was economic—expressedin a deep-seated aspiration to catch up, to narrow the gap, and to industrialize. In other words, the Western impact generated “tension between the actual state of economic activities in the country and the existing obstacles to industrial development, on the one hand, and the great promise inherent in such a development, on the other.”


1997 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 356-365 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fouad A-L.H. Abou-Hatab

This paper presents the case of psychology from a perspective not widely recognized by the West, namely, the Egyptian, Arab, and Islamic perspective. It discusses the introduction and development of psychology in this part of the world. Whenever such efforts are evaluated, six problems become apparent: (1) the one-way interaction with Western psychology; (2) the intellectual dependency; (3) the remote relationship with national heritage; (4) its irrelevance to cultural and social realities; (5) the inhibition of creativity; and (6) the loss of professional identity. Nevertheless, some major achievements are emphasized, and a four-facet look into the 21st century is proposed.


2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-271
Author(s):  
Claudia Lintner

This article analyses the relationship between migrant entrepreneurship, marginalisation and social innovation. It does so, by looking how their ‘otherness’ is used on the one hand to reproduce their marginalised situation in society and on the other to develop new living and working arrangements promoting social innovation in society. The paper is based on a qualitative study, which was carried out from March 2014- 2016. In this period, twenty semi-structured interviews were conducted with migrant entrepreneurs and experts. As the results show, migrant entrepreneurs are characterised by a false dichotomy of “native weakness” in economic self-organisation against the “classical strength” of majority entrepreneurs. It is shown that new possibilities of acting in the context of migrant entrepreneurship are mostly organised in close relation to the lifeworlds and specific needs deriving from this sphere. Social innovation processes initiated by migrant entrepreneurs through their economic activities thus develop on a micro level and are hence less apparent. Supportive networks are missing on a structural level, so it becomes difficult for single innovative initiatives to be long-lasting.


2017 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-26

This section comprises international, Arab, Israeli, and U.S. documents and source materials, as well as an annotated list of recommended reports. Significant developments this quarter: In the international diplomatic arena, the UN Security Council approved Resolution 2334, reaffirming the illegality of Israeli settlements and calling for a return to peace negotiations. Additionally, former U.S. secretary of state John Kerry delivered a final address on the Israel-Palestine conflict, outlining a groundwork for negotiations. Two weeks later, international diplomats met in Paris to establish incentives for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas to return to the negotiating table. Despite international discussions of peace talks and the impediment settlements pose to a two-state solution, the Israeli Knesset passed the controversial Regulation Law, enabling the government to retroactively legalize settlements and confiscate Palestinian land throughout the West Bank. Meanwhile, U.S. president Donald Trump took office on 20 January 2017, and he wasted no time before inviting Netanyahu to the White House for their first meeting, in February.


Author(s):  
Telmo Móia ◽  
Rui Marques

In this paper, we analyse two subtypes of related comparative constructions in Portuguese, with a focus on grammatical anomaly and change – whether expressed in translated text, as a result of calquing (from English), or in autochthonous text, evincing an area of grammatical instability and change in progress. These are: on the one hand, comparative clauses using multiplicative numbers or fractions, like the Portuguese counterparts of the president is twice as popular as the prime minister or women are four times less likely to develop coronary problems than men, and, on the other hand, nominal phrases resorting to the same quantifying operators, but in a non-clausal environment, like the counterparts of Spain has twice the level of unemployment of Portugal or this game console has four times the memory of the previous one. The observed anomalies – or disputed constructions – involve the non-canonical: (i) use of equative operators (tão/tanto, ‘as’) in comparative clauses with multiplicative numbers or fractions (likely, as a result of calquing from English); (ii) use of a connective (que/do que, ‘than’) in nominal phrases with quantifying operators similar to those of comparative clauses (likely, as a result of autochthonous hybridization); (iii) use of complex prepositional expressions like comparativamente com (‘in comparison with’) or em relação a (‘relatively to’) either instead of the connective (do) que in comparative clauses, or before modifiers inside nominal phrases with multiplicative numbers or fractions. Overall, an intriguing area of grammatical unrest is discussed, with a particular focus on its bearing on translating texts into standard Portuguese.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (10-2) ◽  
pp. 86-98
Author(s):  
Ivan Popov

The paper deals with the organization and decisions of the conference of the Minister-Presidents of German lands in Munich on June 6-7, 1947, which became the one and only meeting of the heads of the state governments of the western and eastern occupation zones before the division of Germany. The conference was the first experience of national positioning of the regional elite and clearly demonstrated that by the middle of 1947, not only between the allies, but also among German politicians, the incompatibility of perspectives of further constitutional development was existent and all the basic conditions for the division of Germany became ripe. Munich was the last significant demonstration of this disunity and the moment of the final turn towards the three-zone orientation of the West German elite.


2020 ◽  
Vol 145 (2) ◽  
pp. 495-505
Author(s):  
EIRINI DIAMANTOULI

Ideologically motivated attempts to elucidate Shostakovich’s political views and to determine whether and how they may be coded into his compositions have come to characterize the Western reception of the composer’s works since his death in 1975. Fuelled by the political oppositions of the cold war, Shostakovich’s posthumous reputation in the West has been largely shaped by two conflicting perspectives. These have positioned him on the one hand as a secret dissident, bent and broken under the unbearable strain of totalitarianism, made heroic through his veiled musical resistance to Communism; and on the other hand as a composer compromised by his capitulation to the regime – represented in an anachronistic musical style. Both perspectives surrender Shostakovich and his music to a crude oversimplification driven by vested political interests. Western listeners thus conditioned are primed to hear either the coded dissidence of a tragic victim of Communist brutality or the sinister submission of a ‘loyal son of the Communist Party’.1 For those prepared to accept Shostakovich as a ‘tragic victim’, the publication of his purported memoirs in 1979, ‘as related to and edited by’ the author Solomon Volkov, presents a tantalizing conclusion: bitterly yet discreetly scornful of the Stalinist regime, Shostakovich was indeed a secret dissident and this dissidence was made tangible in his music.


Matatu ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chantal Zabus

The essay shows how Ezenwa–Ohaeto's poetry in pidgin, particularly in his collection (1988), emblematizes a linguistic interface between, on the one hand, the pseudo-pidgin of Onitsha Market pamphleteers of the 1950s and 1960s (including in its gendered guise as in Cyprian Ekwensi) and, on the other, its quasicreolized form in contemporary news and television and radio dramas as well as a potential first language. While locating Nigerian Pidgin or EnPi in the wider context of the emergence of pidgins on the West African Coast, the essay also draws on examples from Joyce Cary, Frank Aig–Imoukhuede, Ogali A. Ogali, Ola Rotimi, Wole Soyinka, and Tunde Fatunde among others. It is not by default but out of choice and with their 'informed consent' that EnPi writers such as Ezenwa–Ohaeto contributed to the unfinished plot of the pidgin–creole continuum.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document