Reconstructing the Past Using the British Parliamentary Papers: The Anglo-Zulu War of 1879

2004 ◽  
Vol 31 ◽  
pp. 117-132
Author(s):  
Joye Bowman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Valuable Source ◽  
Vast Amount ◽  
Secondary Sources ◽  
The Past ◽  
Precise Sense ◽  
The Government ◽  
Source Of Information

The British Parliamentary Papers continue to be a valuable source of information for historians of the African past. A vast amount of material on African affairs involving British interests can be found in these Papers. This essay deals with the way that the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 was presented in the Parliamentary Papers, specifically volume 13 of the Irish University Reprint Series entitled Colonies—Africa: Southern Africa General, 1878-80. It examines the kind of information presented, as well as the kind of material not presented. It analyzes the function of these Papers in their own time and in secondary sources on the Anglo-Zulu War. Finally, it considers the kinds of questions historians must ask in order to make these documents as useful as possible.The term “Parliamentary Papers” used in the broadest sense refers to all of the official published records of the British Parliament. This includes the record of its proceedings and various debates; the reports of Parliamentary Committees and non-Parliamentary Committees; and the official documents of various departments that discuss routine business. In a narrower and more precise sense, the term “Parliamentary Papers refers to specific sets of papers that came before the House of Commons, were printed for Parliament's use, and were part of a numbered series of papers.” The papers in this narrower group are considered “Sessional Papers,” popularly called “Blue Books,” a name given them in the nineteenth century because the government printers bound the majority of the papers in blue covers.

scholarly journals Abrupt Termination of Employee Contracts In a Democratic State: The Case of Botswana

2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 71
Author(s):  
Baakile Motshegwa ◽  
Keratilwe Bodilenyane
Keyword(s):  
Southern Africa ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
The State ◽  
The Past ◽  
Democratic State ◽  
Essential Services ◽  
Disciplinary Procedures ◽  
The Government

Botswana has in the past received accolades of being the most peaceful country in Southern Africa. Any disturbance of this peace is either shunned or seen as a departure from the norm. The advent of trade unions in Botswana has always been looked at with suspicion and they have been seen as militant, which is contrary to the peaceful existence the country has enjoyed regardless of the fact that it is surrounded by countries that have been to war at some point in their history. Therefore, the state has made it a point that any sign of unrest is severely dealt with by the government. Some employees were dismissed un-procedurally as disciplinary procedures were not followed and the court ruled in the employee’s favour in 2012. The majority of those dismissed were from the essential services sections of government even though at the beginning some were released through the strike rules agreement between government and unions. Laid down disciplinary rules and procedures of having a hearing were not followed. 

Parties and Issues in Early Victorian England

1966 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 95-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
William O. Aydelotte
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political History ◽  
The Other ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Victorian England ◽  
Parliamentary Reform ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Government ◽  
Political Oratory

It has never been established how far, in the early Victorian House of Commons, voting on issues followed party lines. It might in general seem plausible to assume — what political oratory generally contrives to suggest — that there are ideological disagreements between parties and that it makes a difference which of two major opposing parties is in control of the Government. This is, indeed, the line taken by some students of politics. A number of historians and political observers have, however, inclined to the contrary opinion and have, for various reasons, tended to play down the role of issues in party disputes. Much of what has been written on political history and, in particular, on the history of Parliament has had a distinct anti-ideological flavor.One line of argument is that issues on which disagreement exists are not always party questions. Robert Trelford McKenzie begins his study of British parties by pointing out that Parliament just before 1830 was “divided on a great issue of principle, namely Catholic emancipation,” and just after 1830, on another, parliamentary reform. He continues: “But on neither issue was there a clear division along strict party lines.” The distinguished administration of Sir Robert Peel in the 1840s was based, according to Norman Gash, on a party “deeply divided both on policy and personalities.” The other side of the House at that time is usually thought to have been even more disunited. It has even been suggested that, in the confused politics of the mid-nineteenth century, the wordsconservativeandradicaleach meant so many different things that they cannot be defined in terms of programs and objectives and that these polarities may more usefully be considered in terms of tempers and approaches.

Bishops and Scottish Representative Peers in the House of Lords, 1760-1775

1978 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 86-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
William C. Lowe
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
National Level ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Great Weight ◽  
Political Structure ◽  
The Past ◽  
House Of Lords ◽  
Lower Chamber

Despite all the attention lavished on the mid-eighteenth-century parliament, the House of Lords has been largely ignored by historians. The Whig historians of the nineteenth century were concerned with tracing the development of the House of Commons as the principal vehicle of constitutional progress, and in this century Namierites and neo-Whigs have alternately challenged and defended the Whig position, basing their arguments almost entirely on their views of proceedings in the lower chamber. The House of Lords was easy to neglect, one suspects, because most historians assumed that the upper House could be conveniently explained away as an appendage of the crown where an institutionalized majority of bishops, Scottish representative peers, placeholders, and newly-created peers could easily maintain a ministry. This, in turn, has led to a tendency to explain events in the House of Lords at any point in the century in terms of a static political structure, largely without regard to current issues or changes in the “structure of politics” at the national level.The two most conspicuous segments of the “Party of the Crown” in the Lords (and the two most abused for their alleged political servility) were the bishops and representative Scottish peers. The second Earl of Effingham expressed the conventional political wisdom of the eighteenth century when he told the House in 1780 that “those two descriptions threw a great weight into the scale of the Crown,” and historians have generally echoed this view. In the past two decades scholarship has begun to modify this picture for both ends of the century, though the old clichés still hold sway for the decades from Walpole to North.

scholarly journals A forgotten past is the past that is yet to be

2021 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 60-78
Author(s):  
Sindiso Bhebhe ◽  
Mpho Ngoepe
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
Document Analysis ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Positive Development ◽  
Natural Death ◽  
The Past ◽  
Working Model ◽  
The Government

South Africa is one of the few countries in Africa that has a running oral history association. In some countries, especially in southern Africa, these oral history associations have arisen and then died a natural death. For example, Oral Traditions Association of Zimbabwe (OTAZI) did not last long. Therefore, it is a positive development for South Africa to have a functioning oral history association. The Oral History Association of South Africa (OHASA) is the brainchild of the government and is mainly funded by the government. It is involved in the coordination and documentation of stories that were silent during the apartheid era. Therefore, with this highly perceived task it is necessary to critically evaluate its successes and failures in meeting the objectives of the National Oral History Programme (NOHP). This paper, through document analysis and purposively selected interviews, critically evaluates the achievements and shortcomings of the OHASA from its inception to present with the aim of proposing a ‘working’ model which involves the setting up of a monitoring and evaluating system. The paper concludes that although OHASA unveiled the muted marginalised voices, it soral history programme demonstrate elitism in critical emancipatory as mostly the stories of the elites are covered. Furthermore, such recorded stories are not accessible as the recordings are stashed in the boxes in archives repositories.

scholarly journals A forgotten past is the past that is yet to be

2021 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 60-78
Author(s):  
Sindiso Bhebhe ◽  
Mpho Ngoepe
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
Document Analysis ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Positive Development ◽  
Natural Death ◽  
The Past ◽  
Working Model ◽  
The Government

South Africa is one of the few countries in Africa that has a running oral history association. In some countries, especially in southern Africa, these oral history associations have arisen and then died a natural death. For example, Oral Traditions Association of Zimbabwe (OTAZI) did not last long. Therefore, it is a positive development for South Africa to have a functioning oral history association. The Oral History Association of South Africa (OHASA) is the brainchild of the government and is mainly funded by the government. It is involved in the coordination and documentation of stories that were silent during the apartheid era. Therefore, with this highly perceived task it is necessary to critically evaluate its successes and failures in meeting the objectives of the National Oral History Programme (NOHP). This paper, through document analysis and purposively selected interviews, critically evaluates the achievements and shortcomings of the OHASA from its inception to present with the aim of proposing a ‘working’ model which involves the setting up of a monitoring and evaluating system. The paper concludes that although OHASA unveiled the muted marginalised voices, it soral history programme demonstrate elitism in critical emancipatory as mostly the stories of the elites are covered. Furthermore, such recorded stories are not accessible as the recordings are stashed in the boxes in archives repositories.

scholarly journals Cyclone, Salinity Intrusion and Adaptation and Coping Measures in Coastal Bangladesh

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebak Kumar Saha
Keyword(s):  
Natural Hazards ◽  
Coastal Areas ◽  
Salinity Intrusion ◽  
Secondary Sources ◽  
Coastal Bangladesh ◽  
The Past ◽  
Adverse Impacts ◽  
The Government ◽  
And Coping ◽  
Impacts Of Climate Change

Although households in the coastal areas of Bangladesh undertake various adaptation and coping measures to minimise their vulnerability to cyclone hazards and salinity intrusion, these autonomous measures have received little attention in the past. However, the Government of Bangladesh has recently emphasised the importance of understanding these measures so that necessary interventions to make households more resilient to natural hazards and the adverse impacts of climate change can be introduced. This paper, based on secondary sources, explores adaptation and coping measures that households in the coastal areas of Bangladesh undertake to minimise their vulnerability to cyclone hazards and salinity intrusion. This paper shows that many of the adaptation and coping measures contribute to making households less vulnerable and more resilient to cyclone hazards and salinity intrusion, although some coping measures do the opposite as they reduce households’ adaptive capacities instead of improving them. This paper argues that the adaptation and coping measures that contribute to reducing households’ vulnerability to natural hazards need to be supported and guided by the government and NGOs to make them more effective. Additionally, measures that make households more vulnerable also need to be addressed by the government and NGOs, as most of these measures are related to and constrained by both poverty, and because the households have little or no access to economic opportunities.   

Textual Incest: Nathaniel Isaacs and the Development of the Shaka Myth

1992 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 411-433 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan Wylie
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South African ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Harold Bloom ◽  
The Past ◽  
Anxiety Of Influence ◽  
Storm Center ◽  
Verbal Construction ◽  
The University

Literary practitioners have long been, often uncomfortably, aware of the ambivalently fruitful and constraining rhetorical influences of the past. Writers successively utilize or rebel against traditional tropes, poetic conventions, and narrative norms, balancing cultural depth against individualist innovation, acceptability against rejection, public intelligibility against the opacity of private connotation. By such gestures towards the traditions, literature challenges, upholds, or leaves unquestioned the moral, political, and cultural pre-suppositions of its day.South African historiography is less aware than it might be of its textuality, in this sense, of its immersion in a similar “anxiety of influence,” as Harold Bloom has termed it. Little attention has been paid to its rhetorical lineaments and heritage or to the ways historians have read, used, and departed from one another. This is dramatically illustrated by the case of the historiography of Shaka Zulu (assassinated in 1828). Nowhere else has such poverty of evidence and research spawned such a massively unquestioned, long-lived, and monolithic “history.” Only in the last decade has the legendary, verbal construction of the Shaka figure been seriously questioned; only in 1991, at an important colloquium at the University of the Witwatersrand, was something approaching an academic consensus reached that themfecane—the notion of Shaka's Zulus as the “storm-center” of a sub-continental explosion of autophagous, black-on-black violence—was no longer a credible vehicle for understanding the early nineteenth century in southern Africa.

Printed Emigrants’ Letters: Networks of Affect and Authenticity

2018 ◽  
pp. 31-62
Author(s):  
Fariha Shaikh
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Personal Networks ◽  
Vicarious Experience ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Valuable Source ◽  
Source Of Information

Chapter One looks at printed emigrants’ letters, a genre that has hitherto been neglected in both literary and historical studies of emigration on account of their dubious authenticity. Nineteenth-century publishers saw emigrants’ letters written to friends, family, emigration societies and philanthropists as a valuable source of information on emigration. Letters were often printed and circulated in a wide array of places, from periodicals to emigration society reports, pamphlets to edited collections. This chapter explores the ways in which printed emigrants’ letters manage the text’s transition from manuscript to print. It focusses on collections of edited letters which were published by an emigration scheme or society, such as the New Zealand Company, Thomas Sockett’s Petworth Emigration Scheme, and Caroline Chisholm’s Family Colonisation Loan Society. These letters provide first-hand accounts of emigration, of the colonies and of settling. They exude an intimate, personal tone and provide readers with a vicarious experience of emigration. At the same time, however, printed letters have been taken out of the context of small, personal networks of circulation and placed in the larger, and more public circulation, of print. Editors were keen to impress upon a suspicious reading public that the letter’s mobility, as it travelled from the colonies back to Britain and into print, had not compromised its authenticity. Producing the effect of being authentic was an integral part of these letters’ commodity status: potential emigrants had to be convinced that the tales of the colonies in the letters really were true if they were going to buy them.

Calhoun's Idea of “Concurrent Majority” and the Constitutional Theory of Hegel

1939 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 585-590
Author(s):  
Gunnar Heckscher
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Constitutional Theory ◽  
Federal System ◽  
German Empire ◽  
Valuable Source ◽  
American Experience ◽  
The Government

It is a well-known fact that the writings of John C. Calhoun were read and admired by German political theorists in the latter part of the nineteenth century. When the problems of federalism became predominant in the German Empire, it was found natural to turn to American experience and to study the works of the leaders of contending factions in the United States before the Civil War.There may, however, be another reason why Calhoun, in particular, proved such a valuable source for the German authors. His theory of the concurrent majority, in many parts, presents a striking resemblance to the arguments advanced on the continent of Europe in defense of legislatures built on representation, not of individuals, but of groups, interests, or estates. It can be assumed that Calhoun, when speaking of the safeguards necessary against the despotism of the numerical majority, was thinking primarily of the federal system and states' rights. On the other hand, he can hardly have regarded this arrangement as the only possible solution to his problem. He defines the government of the concurrent majority as one “where the organism is perfect, excludes the possibility of oppression, by giving to each interest, or portion, or order,—where there are established classes,—the means of protecting itself, by its negative, against all measures calculated to advance the peculiar interests of others at its expense.” Especially in view of the expression “where there are established classes,” it seems safe to say that Calhoun probably knew of the existence of representation by estates of the realm in European countries, and regarded such systems with favor.

scholarly journals Demo Penolakan RUU Cipta Kerja dalam Kacamata Teori Konflik Sosiologi

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-67
Author(s):  
Ferdi Gultom ◽  
Agus Machfud Fauzi
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Conflict Theory ◽  
Data Sources ◽  
Sociology Of Law ◽  
Sociological Perspective ◽  
Literature Study ◽  
Secondary Sources ◽  
The Past ◽  
News Sources ◽  
The Government

RUU Cipta Kejra is part of the Omnibus Law in the ratification of many verses which are in the context of controversy. The ratification of the RUU Cipta Kerja invites conflict between workers and the government. Both parties experienced collisions, which resulted in demonstrations on 8-10 October. The demonstration involved workers and students. The demonstration was also chaotic because of the elements who carried out acts of fandalism. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the rejection of the RUU in the View of Sociological Conflict Theory. So this paper will discuss how the demonstration was carried out from a sociological perspective, particularly in sociology of law through conflict theory. This paper uses the literature study method, which data sources come from secondary sources obtained through news sources, articles, journals, and books. Then from the data obtained, it is processed and analyzed using Conflict Theory. The results of this study were demonstrations caused by conflicts between students and workers and the government. There are several factors that led to the demonstration, namely, First, communication between workers and the government. Second, there is a change in the balance in society where the workers are threatened by their human rights. Third, interests. Fourth, there is pressure from the past or unresolved problems, where the reserves of workers are not fulfilled.

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