Designing a New Fort on the Gold Coast: Johan Fredrik Trenks, the WIC, and the New Fort at Takoradi, 1774–1791

Itinerario ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 523-547
Author(s):  
Erik Odegard
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Design Evaluation ◽  
Decision Making Process ◽  
Original Design ◽  
The Third ◽  
West India Company ◽  
Complex Project ◽  
Made In

This article examines the decision-making process for a new fort which the Dutch West India Company proposed to build near Takoradi in present-day Ghana in the third quarter of the eighteenth century. By closely following the process of design, evaluation, and redesign of the fort, this article argues that the WIC was institutionally incapable of coordinating and carrying out such a complex project. The original design for the new fort was made in 1774 by Johan Frederik Trenks, a Silesian-born engineer who, as it turned out, was not current with modern design practices and used Dutch examples from the first half of the seventeenth century. The design was sent to the Netherlands for evaluation and returned with scathing criticism. The long, drawn-out process of design, evaluation, and redesign of what was after all a relatively small fort show the institutional paralysis of the WIC in the years leading up to the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War (1780–84). Though the fort would never be completed, construction did begin shortly before the war. The conflict, followed shortly thereafter by the dissolution of the WIC, meant the project would never be completed.

Cromwell Mortimer, F. R. S. ( c . 1698-1752) and the invention of the metalline thermometer for measuring high temperatures

1969 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-135 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
High Temperatures ◽  
Boiling Point ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Fourth Degree ◽  
The Third ◽  
Upper Limit

Although the liquid-in-glass thermometer came into use either in the last decade of the sixteenth or during the early years of the seventeenth century (1), it was not until the eighteenth century that reproducible scales of temperature were established, arising from the work of Fahrenheit (2), Reaumur (3) and Celsius (4). So far as eighteenth-century chemists were concerned, the upper limit of temperature to which the liquid-in-glass thermometer could be used was set by the boiling point of mercury, at that time assumed to be 600 °F (5). In the latter half of the seventeenth century any temperatures attained in chemical operations could be indicated only by reference to a scale comprising some seven ‘degrees of heat’. In the middle to upper ranges, for example, to quote from Glaser’s The Compleat Chymist , the third ‘degree’ was that of hot ashes; the fourth ‘degree’ was that of hot sand, and the fifth that of hot iron filings; the sixth ‘degree’ was attained in the closed reverberatory charcoal fire, and the seventh and highest ‘degree’ was the ‘Flaming-Fire or Fire of Fusion’, made with wood or charcoal (6).

The Hermeneutical Rehabilitation of Supposition Theory in Seventeenth-Century Protestant Logic

Vivarium ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 51 (1-4) ◽  
pp. 464-481 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephan Meier-Oeser
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Semantic Function ◽  
The Third ◽  
Textual Interpretation ◽  
Supposition Theory

Abstract The paper focuses on some aspects of the early modern aftermath of supposition theory within the framework of the protestant logical tradition. Due to the growing influence of Humanism, supposition theory from the third decade of the sixteenth century was the object of general neglect and contempt. While in the late sixteenth-century a number of standard textbooks of post-Tridentine scholastic logic reintegrated this doctrine, although in a bowdlerized version, it remained for a century out of the scope of Protestant logic. The situation changed when the Strasburg Lutheran theologian J.C. Dannhauer, who in 1630 developed and propagated the program of a new discipline which he called ‘general hermeneutics’ (hermeneutica generalis), accentuating the importance of supposition theory as an indispensable device for the purpose of textual interpretation. Due to Dannhauer’s influence on later developments of hermeneutics, which in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was regarded as a logical discipline, supposition theory is still present in several logical treatises of the eighteenth century. The explication of the underlying views on the notion of supposition and its logico-semantic function may give at least some clues as to how to answer the question of what supposition theory was all about.

The Irish Priest in North America

1989 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 311-352
Author(s):  
Owen Dudley Edwards
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Frederick Jackson Turner ◽  
Catholic Clergy ◽  
The Third ◽  
Major Significance

To assert at the outset of this study, as I do, that the task before me is both impossible and essential, may be justly proclaimed a proceeding both cowardly and obvious. We are principally concerned with the nineteenth century, but the twentieth century prolonged many of the features of Irish Roman Catholic clerical identity of the nineteenth, in North America as elsewhere. Vitally important patterns and castes (social and mental) were established in the eighteenth century, and the first Irish-American Roman Catholic priestof major significance in the United States, John Carroll (1735-1815), first Roman Catholic bishop in the U.SA and first archbishop of Baltimore, owed his American birth initially to migration of his father’s kinsmen in the late seventeenth century. Anglophone North America from 178 3 consisted of two political obediences, with similarities and contrasts both subtle and, at least superficially, forceful. The huge and consistently expanding area of white settlement in North America in which the Irish Catholic clergy participated, created other great divergences: when American historians at the end of the nineteenth century under the influence of figures as divergent as Frederick Jackson Turner of the ‘frontier thesis’, Ulrich Bonnell Phillips of slavery apologetics, and Alfred Thayer Mahan of sea-power celebration, looked to environmentalism as the chief explanation of the American past, they may have oversimplified—indeed, they did oversimplify—but their sheer preoccupation with the question gives its own warnings against a filio-pietism which chooses to see an Irish ethnic character resolutely asserting itself to the third, fourth, and even later generations.

Slaves

2021 ◽  
pp. 124-138
Author(s):  
John Parker
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Intimate Relationship ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Intermediary Role

This chapter analyzes the entanglement of slavery and death on the Gold Coast. It focuses on the two eighteenth-century texts which reflect on life, death and anticipation of the afterlife in the Ga towns on the eastern reaches of the coast. The Ga (or Accra) had a long and intimate relationship with the Akan peoples to their north and west. The chapter outlines the succession of Akan overlords after the powerful kingdom in the mid-seventeenth century fell. Despite the situation, Ga merchants carved out a lucrative intermediary role and three prosperous towns grew up in association with the European forts in their midst: Kinka (or Dutch Accra), James Town (English Accra) and Osu (Danish Accra). The chapter explores how townsfolk earned their livelihood from trade, in particular the exchange of slaves for a range of imported commodities: cloth, liquor, metal goods, firearms, tobacco — all of which we have already seen come to feature in local funerary cultures. It investigates how slaves died, where and how were their corpses disposed of, and what were their prospects in the afterlife.

If Democracy Is Such a Smart Regime, Why Are Democracies Doing So Poorly at the Moment and How Can We Fix Them?

2021 ◽  
pp. 211-238
Author(s):  
Jason Brennan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Selection Mechanism ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Original Design ◽  
The Core ◽  
Laws And Policies ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Made In

This chapter returns to the ideal of people’s power and argues that democracies as we know them are dubiously democratic. Most ordinary citizens, in the United States certainly but in other advanced democracies as well, have little deliberative input into the laws and policies that rule their lives. The chapter traces the problem to fundamental design mistakes made in the eighteenth century when elections, an oligarchic selection mechanism, rather than the traditional lot of Classical Athens, were privileged as the method for choosing representatives. This original design mistake explains in part why contemporary democracies are, and indeed have always been, dysfunctional. This chapter also makes the case for open democracy, a new paradigm of democracy that takes more seriously the core ideal of people’s power and in which elections are no longer a central institutional principle.

Some Account of the Census, from 1801 to 1881

1885 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 83-113
Author(s):  
Arthur Francis Burridge
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Direct Method ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
The Third ◽  
Statistical Science ◽  
Religious Sects ◽  
Made In

Prior to the commencement of the present century, no direct method had been adopted to ascertain the number of the population in England. Various estimates, founded upon Domesday Books, Subsidy Rolls, and payments of Hearth and Poll taxes furnish, with more or less exactness, the numbers at previous periods. Three such calculations relating to the population towards the close of the 17th century are mentioned by Macaulay as being entitled to peculiar attention. “Of these computations one was made in the year 1696 by Gregory King, Lancaster Herald, a political arithmetician of great acuteness and judgment. The basis of his calculations was the number of houses returned in 1690 by the officers who made the last collection of hearth money. The conclusion at which he arrived was that the population of England was nearly five millions and a half. About the same time, King William the Third was desirous to ascertain the comparative strength of the religious sects into which the community was divided. According to the reports laid before him from all the dioceses of the realm, the number of his English subjects must have been about 5,200,000. Lastly, in our own days, Mr. Finlaison, an actuary of eminent still, subjected the parochial registers to all the tests which the modern improvements in statistical science enabled him to apply. His opinion was, that, at the close of the seventeenth century, the population of England was a little under 5,200,000 souls. … We may, therefore, with confidence pronounce that, when James the Second reigned, England contained between five million and five million five hundred thousand inhabitants.”

Cherchez la Femme: Gender-Related Issues in Eighteenth-Century Elmina

Itinerario ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-57
Author(s):  
Natalie Everts
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Black Woman ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Customary Law ◽  
The West ◽  
Indigenous Law ◽  
Descent Group ◽  
The Law ◽  
West India Company

In June 1760 Nicolaas Heinsius, Dutch factor in service of the West India Company (WIC) on the Gold Coast, and commander of fortress Batenstein at Butri, took the law into his own hands. He pawned three slaves owned by the black woman Paraba, because she had, in name of her abusua (matrilineal descent group) appropriated the inheritance of his deceased African concubine and, what is more, she had told Heinsius that she intended to take care of the raising of his Euro-African son. In a letter to his superiors, who resided at Elmina castle, he accounted for his action. Heinsius explained that he acted not for himself but in his little son's interests, the latter being, so he thought, according to indigenous law, the sole heir to his mother's legacy. The reaction he received from the president and the council at Elmina contained a sharp reprimand. The WIC-authorities designated his claim on the inheritance as unlawful and contrary to customary law, and ordered him to immediately return the slaves.

scholarly journals Barokna palača i vrt Giovannija Felicea de Gerliczyja u Rijeci: prilog identifikaciji i valorizaciji

Ars Adriatica ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 237
Author(s):  
Petar Puhmajer ◽  
Krasanka Majer Jurišić
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Spatial Organization ◽  
Central Position ◽  
Original Design ◽  
Late 19Th Century ◽  
The Third ◽  
Architectural Features ◽  
State Archives ◽  
Storey Building ◽  
Made In

The article focuses on the history and architectural features of a baroque palace formerly owned by Giovanni Felice de Gerliczy and nowadays hidden behind the historicist façade of the building at 14 Ciottina Street in Rijeka. The palace was built in the 1750s and its original appearance is known from a drawing made in 1780, now preserved at the Austrian State Archives. The palace’s design and spatial organization, as presented in the drawing, show that it was a representative residential palace built for a wealthy and important investor. Originally, it was a three-storey building with three wings and an asymmetrical distribution of rooms. However, one can still discern the typically baroque, central position of the grand hall on the first floor, stretching along the whole width of the building, and the entry hall positioned along the same axis on the ground floor. The authors have analysed the original design and spatial organization of the palace, especially the appearance, arrangement, and individual elements of the French parterre garden, which remained largely preserved until the late 19th century, same as the palace. During the 19th and 20th centuries, however, the palace suffered extensive reconstructions, which included an adaptation of its interior to create rental apartments, construction of the third floor, and addition of historicist ornamentation to the façades.

scholarly journals La diffusione delle opere antilatine di Nilo Cabasilas in manoscritti russi nel XVII secolo

2017 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marco Scarpa
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Holy Spirit ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
Made In

The Spread of Neilos Kabasilas’s Anti-Latin Treaties in Russian Manuscripts in the 17th Century In the 17th century, Neilos Kabasilas’s anti-Latin works, along with Gregory Palamas’s Contro Becco, were considerably widespread in Russia. The first copy was made for Arseniĭ Sukhanov in the 1630s, another copy – supplemented with several polemical texts – was then prepared for the Patriarchal Library. Four manuscripts are associated with the activity of the monks Simon Azar’in, Efrem Kvašnin and Sergij Šelonin, who were in Moscow in the 1640s, and are perhaps related to the question of the religious confession of Prince Valdemar, who was designated to marry the Tsar’s daughter. In mid-seventeenth century another manuscript appeared in Ukraine, marked at that time by the controversies which followed the Union of Brest. In the 1660s, two copies were made in the Solovetskiĭ Monastery. At the end of the century, Archbishop Atanasiĭ Kholmogorskij, involved in the controversy over Christ’s presence in the Eucharist, made further three copies of these works. Four manuscripts from the first half of the eighteenth century testify in their turn to the interest of particular individuals in this collection of texts on the Procession of the Holy Spirit. Rozpowszechnienie antyłacińskich traktatów Nila Kabazylasa w rękopisach ruskich w XVII wieku W XVII wieku antyłacińskie traktaty Nila Kabazylasa, obok Contro Becco Grzegorza Palamasa, były dość dobrze rozpowszechnione na Rusi. Pierwszy odpis został przygotowany przez Arsenija Suchanowa w latach trzydziestych XVII wieku. Drugi wzbogacony o kilka tekstów polemicznych powstał dla biblioteki patriarchalnej. Cztery kolejne rękopisy wiążą się z działalnością przebywających w latach czterdziestych w Moskwie mnichów Simona Azarina, Efrema Kwasznina i Sergija Szelonina i odsyłają prawdopodobnie do sprawy wyznania księcia Waldemara, kandydata na męża dla carskiej córki. W połowie XVII wieku tekst pojawia się na naznaczonych polemikami wyznaniowymi po unii brzeskiej ziemiach ukraińskich. W latach sześćdziesiątych dwa odpisy powstają w Monastyrze Sołowieckim. Pod koniec stulecia, zaangażowany w polemiki wokół obecności Chrystusa w Eucharystii, arcybiskup Atanasy Chołmogorski dokonuje kolejnych trzech odpisów. Cztery odpisy z pierwszej połowy XVIII wieku świadczą natomiast o zainteresowaniu indywidualnych osób zbiorem tekstów o pochodzeniu Ducha Świętego.

From Persecuted Minority to Confessional Church

2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 322-337
Author(s):  
Georg Michels
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Teaching Methods ◽  
School System ◽  
Community Leaders ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Old Believers ◽  
The Third ◽  
Elite Culture ◽  
Popular Movement

The essay argues that Old Belief did not emerge as a popular movement giving voice to the aspirations of ordinary Muscovites but rather as an elite culture that drew its inspiration from erudite churchmen closely affiliated with the Kremlin. The popularization of Old Belief occurred only during the last two decades of the seventeenth century, and was not completed even until the third decade of the eighteenth century. Most important in this process – which one might call the confessionalization of Old Belief – were the systematic dissemination of manuscripts, the canonization of Old Believer saints (such as the martyred Avvakum), and the development of an efficient school system. The author draws attention to the little-studied fact that Old Believers – both the founding fathers of the 1650s and eighteenth-century community leaders such as Andrei Denisov – drew inspiration from Ukrainian Orthodox models: they assimilated ideas from polemical texts against the Union of Brest (such as the idea of the Antichrist) and adopted the teaching methods of the Ukrainian seminary school which Denisov and other Old Believer intellectuals observed while studying at the Kievan Theological Academy.

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