Interests, Institutions, and Identity: Strategic Adaptation and the Ethno-evolution of Minh Hương (Central Vietnam), 16th–19th Centuries

Itinerario ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Wheeler
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Interest Group ◽  
World History ◽  
Overseas Chinese ◽  
Adaptive Responses ◽  
Strategic Adaptation ◽  
Political Interests ◽  
Central Vietnam ◽  
Powerful Interest

Minh Hương—often translated as ‘Ming Refugees’, became a powerful interest group in Vietnamese commerce, colonization, and politics between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Curiously, they remain understudied and misunderstood by both Vietnamese and Overseas Chinese specialists. This results from confusion about Minh Hương identity and origins, which this article addresses by analyzing the evolution of the group’s identity and the interests and institutions that shaped it. Far from static, Minh Hương identity formed, metamorphosed, and all but disappeared due to the interplay between changing circumstances and adaptive responses that continually reshaped the content of Minh Hương identity whenever “outside” circumstances challenged them. In this way, the Minh Hương evolved from its merchant diaspora origins into a powerful merchant-bureaucratic class that exploited the institutions that Vietnamese matrilineage and Chinese patrilineage afforded them in order to advance its commercial and political interests. When their status eroded in the nineteenth century, the Minh Hương redefined their group as a minority ethnicity in defense of diminishing rights. Far from the powerless refugee minority image their name implies, their behaviour so reminiscent of merchant cultures from the Sogdians to the Swahili, the Minh Hương deserves greater consideration in the literature on merchant cultures in world history.

Periodization in Global History: The Productive Power of Comparing

2020 ◽  
pp. 43-62
Author(s):  
Angelika Epple
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
World History ◽  
Global History ◽  
Drivers Of Change ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Postcolonial Criticism ◽  
Fundamental Challenge ◽  
Time Concepts ◽  
New Perspective

This chapter develops a new perspective on fundamental problems of periodization and goes beyond postcolonial criticism. It argues that Eurocentrism is a symptom of a fundamental challenge in periodization as it relies on comparisons. It also elaborates that comparisons, even if they reject a 'telos' of history, depend on narrative objectives to distinguish important from less important historical movements and to identify directions, velocities, and standstills in these movements. The chapter demonstrates how history is cut up into epochs that show the heyday of Eurocentrism in nineteenth-century historicism up to the current global and world history writing based on comparing different velocities and drivers of change that vary in narrative objectives. It points out that Eurocentrism is caused not only by universalized time concepts, but also by justifications of periodization.

A Jesus of White Marble or a Jesus in the Flesh?

2021 ◽  
pp. 131-146
Author(s):  
Guy G. Stroumsa
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
World History ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
White Marble ◽  
Early Loss ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of Religions ◽  
History Of ◽  
Jewish Historian ◽  
Multiple Translations

Despite the early loss of his Christian faith, Renan held onto a lifelong belief in the incommensurability of Christianity with Judaism and Islam. This entailed his perception of an unbridgeable chasm between Christianity and the two “Semitic religions.” Such insistence originated in his understanding of Jesus as a unique figure, one who stood at the very core of the world history of religions. It is in his Life of Jesus that he expressed most clearly his views on the founder of Christianity. First published in 1863, Renan’s Vie de Jésus would swiftly become, in the original as well as in its multiple translations, a nineteenth-century international best seller. The chapter reassess the roots of Renan’s project, as well as its impact. Finally, we compare Renan and the Jewish historian Joseph Salvador on the figure of Jesus.

History and Progress

2019 ◽  
pp. 234-255
Author(s):  
Paul Stock
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
World History ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ideal Society ◽  
Historical Processes ◽  
Late Eighteenth

Chapter 10 discusses how ideas about historical change influence conceptions of Europe. Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century geography books typically regard history as a progression through various ‘stages’, an account which often conflates European and world history. But they also often regard the continent as an extant ideal society. This exposes uncertainty about whether to define Europe in terms of unchanging characteristics or mutable historical processes. Some geography books combine these perspectives and interpret historical change in terms of established patterns, a method which allows them to account for Europe’s malleability and its stable qualities.

Nationalism and Freedom

Worldview ◽  
1964 ◽  
Vol 7 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 7-12
Author(s):  
George Shepherd
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
John Locke ◽  
World History ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
The Right

The flower of human freedom blooms seldom and precariously in world history. One such occasion was the period of the Enlightenment when philosophers from Rousseau to John Locke and Jefferson proclaimed new conceptions of natural rights. Inspired by these new ideas of freedom, revolutions spread from America, France and England through Europe. New nations arose throughout Europe of the nineteenth century as a wave of new nationalism spilled across the Continent. The right of nationhood and self-determination was one of the new doctrines of freedom.

The Duke of Newcastle, The Earl of Halifax, and the American Origins of the Seven Years' War

1981 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 571-603 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. R. Clayton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
World History ◽  
Appalachian Mountains ◽  
First World War ◽  
Ohio Valley ◽  
World War ◽  
George Washington ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World

On the fourth of July 1754 a garrison of Virginians, under the command of the young George Washington, marched its British colours out of a small log fort in an isolated valley of the Appalachian mountains, where it had capitulated to a French detachment the previous evening. Washington's defeat had an impact upon world history no less significant than did his more famous victories subsequent to a more dramatic removal of British colours, on another fourth of July twenty-two years later. The French expulsion of British colonials from the Ohio valley led to nine years of war in America and quickly escalated into seven years of general war, so wide in its geographical extent that Churchill called it the first world war. At the end of hostilities in 1763 the acquisition from France of Canada and a number of West Indian islands laid the foundations of the nineteenth-century British empire.

The Invention of Tradition as Public Image in the Late Ottoman Empire, 1808 to 1908

1993 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Selim Deringil
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
World History ◽  
Public Image ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
National Foundation ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Ottoman Empire ◽  
Late Ottoman

The nineteenth century, a time when world history seemed to accelerate, was the epoch of the Risorgimento and the Unification of Germany. It was also an epoch which saw the last efforts of dynastic ancien régime empires (Habsburg, Romanov, Ottoman) to shore up their political systems with methods often borrowed from their adversaries, the nationalist liberals. Eric Hobsbawm's inspiring recent study has pointed out that, in the world after the French Revolution, it was no longer enough for monarchies to claim divine right; additional ideological reinforcement was required: “The need to provide a new, or at least a supplementary, ‘national’ foundation for this institution was felt in states as secure from revolution as George III's Britain and Nicholas I's Russia.”

Objectivity and the Scientist: Heisenberg Rethinks

2002 ◽  
Vol 16 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 243-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cathryn Carson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Quantum Mechanics ◽  
Federal Republic ◽  
Interest Group ◽  
Federal Republic Of Germany ◽  
Werner Heisenberg ◽  
Interest Group Politics ◽  
Group Politics

ArgumentObjectivity has been constitutive of the modern scientific persona. Its significance has depended on its excision of standpoint, which has legitimated the scientist epistemically and sociopolitically at once. But if the nineteenth century reinforced those paired effects, the twentieth century brought questioning of both. The figure of Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976) puts the latter process on display. From the Kaiserreich to the Federal Republic of Germany, between quantum mechanics and interest group politics, his evolution shows an increasing openness to perspectival pluralism, together with an attempt to save some form of objectivity as discursive coherence. Heisenberg’s self-understanding and the reactions of his publics display the transmutation of the persona as objectivity was rethought. By the end of the day, speaking “as a scientist” would mean something different from what it had at the start.

Jury Service and Women's Citizenship before and after the Nineteenth Amendment

2002 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 479-515 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gretchen Ritter
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Constitutional Order ◽  
Nineteenth Amendment ◽  
Political Interests ◽  
Jury Service ◽  
Before And After ◽  
The Right ◽  
Equal Citizenship

The Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution had surprisingly little impact on women's citizenship or the American constitutional order. For seventy-two years, from 1848 until the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, suffrage was the central demand of the woman rights movement in the United States. Women demanded the right to vote in the nineteenth century because they believed it would make them first class citizens with all the rights and privileges of other first class citizens. Both normatively and instrumentally, the suffragists believed that voting would secure equal citizenship for women by raising their civic status and allowing them to assert their political interests. Yet in many ways women were more politically efficacious in the years just prior to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment than they were afterward. Further, their ability to claim rights from the courts and legislatures, on the basis of their new status as voting citizens, was limited.

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