The Boundaries of Pure Science and Navigation

1948 ◽  
Vol 1 (01) ◽  
pp. 13-14
Author(s):  
Charles Darwin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Pure Science ◽  
Scientific World ◽  
Royal Observatory ◽  
The World

The scientific world will warmly welcome the foundation of the Institute of Navigation, and indeed we may regret that it was not founded long ago. The interest in scientific navigation goes back nearly 300 years, since it was with the aim of assisting navigation that the Royal Observatory was founded, and during the eighteenth century navigation was greatly advanced by the encouragement given to Harrison in his work on the chronometer. It took some time before this was extensively used at sea, but by the beginning of the nineteenth century it would have appeared that astronomical navigation had nearly reached perfection. It was a fine and accurate science, as witnessed by the world surveys made by such seamen as Captain Fitzroy in the 1820's and 1830's, and little more seemed to be called for, or indeed could be expected as long as astronomy was the sole means of location. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries our Institute would have had a great many interesting activities, but in the nineteenth we cannot help feeling it would have been rather dull. Even then, however, there is a matter that may excite our surprise, for the ‘Sumner’ line was discovered at a rather late date, by a master mariner at sea, whereas it ought to have been an obvious idea to anyone with even a rudimentary mathematical training.

The Wasteland of William Blake

1947 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-204
Author(s):  
Frank O'Malley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
William Blake ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern Mind ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future

The question is: how can you put a prophet in his place when, by the very character of prophecy, he is eternally slipping out of place? William Blake was not an eighteenth century or nineteenth century mind or a typically modern mind at all. What I mean to say, right at the start, is that, although well aware of his time and of time altogether, he was not in tune with the main tendencies of his or our own time. Indeed time was a barrier he was forever crashing against. Blake's talent raved through the world into the fastnesses of die past and dramatically confronted the abysses of the future. His age did not confine him. As a poet he does not seem finally to have had real spiritual or artistic rinship with any of the rationalist or romantic writers of England. As a thinker he came to despise the inadequacy of the limited revolutionary effort of the political rebels of the Romantic Revolution. Blake's name is not to be seen mounted first with that of Paine or Godwin, of Rousseau or Voltaire, of Wordsworth or Shelley or Byron or Keats. With these he has, ultimately, little or nothing in common. At any rate, his voice and mood and impact are thoroughly different from the more publicly successful voices of the period of his life, older and younger generations alike.

All That Glittered

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Alborn
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
International Monetary System ◽  
Social Hierarchy ◽  
British Society ◽  
Monetary System ◽  
The World ◽  
Origin Story ◽  
At Home

From the early eighteenth century into the 1830s, Great Britain was the only major country in the world to adopt gold as the sole basis of its currency, in the process absorbing much of the world’s supply of that metal into its pockets, cupboards, and coffers. During the same period, Britons forged a nation by distilling a heady brew of Protestantism, commerce, and military might, while preserving important features of its older social hierarchy. All That Glittered argues for a close connection between these occurrences, by linking justifications for gold’s role in British society—starting in the 1750s and running through the mid-nineteenth century gold rushes in California and Australia—to contemporary descriptions of that metal’s varied values at home and abroad. Most of these accounts attributed British commercial and military success to a credit economy pinned on gold, stigmatized southern European and subaltern peoples for their nonmonetary uses of gold, or tried to marginalize people at home for similar forms of alleged misconduct. This book tells a primarily cultural origin story about the gold standard’s emergence after 1850 as an international monetary system, while providing a new window on British exceptionalism during the previous century.

Orientalism, Medievalism, Colonialism, and Militarized Mercantilism

2020 ◽  
pp. 415-429
Author(s):  
Kathleen Davis ◽  
Nadia R. Altschul
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Spanish Empire ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Economic Interests ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of

This chapter investigates the intersections of British medievalism and colonialism in two very different places in the world: early nineteenth-century Chile, as Britain exercised economic domination over parts of the former Spanish Empire (thus it will be termed neocolonial); and late eighteenth-century India, as British officials devised strategies for extracting revenue from Bengal. Despite their many differences, in both cases an area beyond Europe is defined as Moorish and its present is associated with Europe’s past, specifically with the centuries now termed ‘medieval’. In both cases, too, medievalization forwards the economic interests at the basis of this temporal discourse, which is also fully enmeshed in the history of Orientalism. These similarities demonstrate the value of studying the under-examined effects of British medievalism beyond the familiar national frameworks, and, more broadly, underscore the importance of investigating the global dimensions of temporalizing phenomena.

Byron and the Politics of Paradise

PMLA ◽  
1960 ◽  
Vol 75 (5) ◽  
pp. 571-576 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward E. Bostetter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Significant Degree ◽  
Public Domain ◽  
Profound Change ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World ◽  
Great Chain Of Being ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
The Universe

In The Great Chain of Being Professor Lovejoy pointed out that in the eighteenth century a profound change took place in the ways of thinking about the universe—from conceiving of it as static and complete to conceiving of it as organic and infinitely changing. Recently, in The Subtler Language, Earl Wasserman has discussed the acute artistic problems that this shift in thought created for the poet. Until the end of the eighteenth century there were certain “cosmic syntaxes” in the public domain such as the Christian interpretation of history and the concept of the great chain of being which the poet could expect his audience to recognize and accept. He “could transform language by means of them, and could survey reality and experience in the presence of the world these syntaxes implied… By the nineteenth century these world pictures had passed from consciousness for the purpose of public poetry, and no longer did men share in any significant degree a sense of cosmic design.” Therefore, says Wasserman, the Romantic poets—and poets ever since—have been forced to formulate their own cosmic syntax and “shape the autonomous poetic reality that the cosmic syntax permits.”

Sutton and Jenner

2020 ◽  
pp. 156-161
Author(s):  
Gavin Weightman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Beneficial Effect ◽  
The World

This chapter looks at how Daniel Sutton died forgotten at the age of eighty-three on February 3, 1819. There was no institution to carry Sutton's name into the era of vaccination; his family was scattered and none had any connection with medicine. There is not a single Sutton memorial in London or anywhere in the country, or, as far as is known, in the rest of the world. His importance in the defeat of smallpox would not be acknowledged even now if it were not for the interest historians have taken in eighteenth-century medicine in recent years. There was certainly contemporary support for the view that Suttonian inoculation had had a hugely beneficial effect on health in the eighteenth century. While vaccination was hailed as much safer and more successful than Suttonian inoculation, smallpox continued to attack communities throughout the nineteenth century and Edward Jenner's reputation waxed and waned.

Forgetting and Remembering: Scots and Ulster Scots Memorials in Eighteenth-century Ulster, Pennsylvania and Nineteenth-century New South Wales

2020 ◽  
pp. 14-51
Author(s):  
Harold Mytum
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Family History ◽  
Survey Data ◽  
New South ◽  
New South Wales ◽  
South Wales ◽  
Look Back ◽  
The World ◽  
Formed Part

Mortuary monuments were used by Scots and Ulster Scots as they selectively chose to forget or remember their origins once they settled in new lands around the world. Those who moved to Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century and New South Wales in the nineteenth century employed different strategies regarding how they would create their identities and promote or discard aspects of their origins. Burial monument texts look back over the deceased’s life, but they are also selected by the living to create publicly visible family history and affiliation. Through both text and symbol on the memorials, families create visible, meaningful, biographies. Using survey data from Pennsylvania and New South Wales collected to investigate diasporic remembering and forgetting, this analysis recognises a widespread prevalence of forgetting and an increasing interest in creating new identities in the colonial context. However, some saw their origins as part of their identity and this formed part of the visible family biography.

Putting Horse Nations in Context

Horse Nations ◽  
2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
World Wide ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Main Prey ◽  
The North ◽  
Indigenous Groups ◽  
The World

Set against the millennia in which people have herded or hunted horses, the few centuries on which this book concentrates were short-lived. Only 350 years, or 14 human generations, passed between the Araucanians and Chichimecs first acquiring horses and the world-wide closure of colonial frontiers at the close of the nineteenth century. Yet in that time many different equestrian adaptations emerged. This chapter looks for patterning within them and sets out some of the directions in which future studies of Horse Nations might progress. It also draws parallels with the historical experience of equestrian nomads in Eurasia and the ethnically mixed cattle frontiers of Latin America, asks how far an equestrian way of life turned those who committed to it into pastoralists, and enquires into the circumstances—ecological and political—that favoured, or discouraged, the adoption of horses. Recognizing their agency, as well as that of people, it tries to gauge the importance of horses relative to other factors in the histories of the societies that adopted them, before asking where those Horse Nations are now. Having looked at four continents, four centuries, and well over forty Indigenous groups, what stands out is surely the diversity of Native societies that made horses their own. Employed to hunt deer to make European trousers in eighteenth-century Mississippi, on the North American Plains horses led to a wholesale reorganization of how people used bows and arrows to kill bison. In Patagonia, by contrast, where guanaco and rhea were the main prey, they encouraged that same technology to disappear, replaced by a much older weapons system, the bolas, while in southern Africa eland came to be killed with metal spears, not poisoned arrows. The variety of ways in which people hunted from horseback offer just one illustration of an unsurprising fact: not all Horse Nations were alike. Much the same can be said of the details of the equipment people employed to ride, or the variations in how they transported household possessions, and even houses: the travois, for example, was unique to the Plains and to nearby groups influenced by their inhabitants.

2. Smallpox

2016 ◽  
pp. 31-44
Author(s):  
Christian W. McMillen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Virgin Soil ◽  
Human Host ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Eighteenth

The world was declared smallpox-free in 1980, but this endemic and pandemic disease had killed hundreds of millions of people over the preceding millennium. Smallpox was first described in fourth-century China, but the most deadly epidemics occurred from the early sixteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century. ‘Smallpox’ considers how the disease became such a killer in the Americas, explaining virgin soil epidemics. It also describes the development of vaccination by Edward Jenner in the late eighteenth century, which was a success, but major epidemics continued to break out. Once enough people had been vaccinated, smallpox, with no non-human host, had no place to go.

Britain and America - The cultural tradition

1977 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-243
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
Horse Racing ◽  
The World

From the early days of Jamestown or Plymouth the cultural relationship between England and America has been, and indeed still is, complex, and at times surprisingly capricious. In the eighteenth century Virginia adopted with alacrity the highly developed industry of horse-racing which was imported from Britain, from the jockey’s silk to brood mares and stallions. New York accepted with equal alacrity the commercialized sport of pugilism and we should remember that all the antics of promotion practised by Muhammed Ali —apart from fighting a Japanese wrestler—were commonplaces of this English eighteenth-century sport; indeed, they stemmed from it. But other games that England invented at that time, and in which the British took immense delight, the Americans rejected. Cricket scarcely took root, struggling along in a very sub-fuse way for two centuries. The colonists preferred the English child’s game of rounders, complicated by statistics, in spite of the fact that cricket is even more statistic prone than baseball, and a far better game for gambling. As with cricket, so with football. America took over the schoolboys’ game and turned it into a sport for dinosaurs, ignoring in the nineteenth century the game of soccer, of far greater skill and aesthetic delight, which swept the world. Last month, however, the Yankee Stadium was filled with fifty-five thousand people who had come to watch England play Italy at soccer. True, most of them booed England and cheered Italy, for they were mainly Italians, however, no-one could deny that the game itself was essentially British. Tennis and golf are, of course, both British; so, on cultural balance, America has been indebted to Britain for most of its games these last two hundred years.

Class, Community, and Arab Historiography in the Early Nineteenth Century—The Dawn of a New Era

1984 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Philipp
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Political Transformation ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Era ◽  
Present Essay ◽  
The World ◽  
Traditional Patterns ◽  
Arab Historiography

The aim of the present essay is to explore some of the relations between the socioeconomic and political transformation which occurred in Syria during the eighteenth century and the development of a new view of the world and the self as it came to be expressed in the writings of several Arab historians at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Of particular interest in this context is the question of whether and when a clear departure from traditional patterns of society and thought can be discerned.

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