‘A Character to lose’: Richard Goodlad, the Rangpur dhing, and the priorities of the East India Company's early colonial administrators

2014 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 301-315
Author(s):  
JAMES LEES
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Personal Interest ◽  
State Structure ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Local Officials ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
North Bengal

AbstractThis article examines the conduct of Richard Goodlad, the East India Company's collector in Rangpur, north Bengal, upon the outbreak of a peasant rebellion in his district during 1783. It uses his reaction to this event to illustrate the nature of the Company's district bureaucracy and its relationship with the central colonial authorities in Calcutta during the later eighteenth century.The article considers the aims and limitations of the European officials who were sent out to administer Bengal's districts, detailing their priorities and practices within a weak and decentralised state structure. Ultimately it argues that the relationship between these local and central components of the colonial state was, prior to the Company's rise to subcontinental hegemony in the early nineteenth-century, profoundly shaped both by widespread military under-resourcing, and by the primacy of personal interest among its local officials.

Air and Odour

2019 ◽  
pp. 67-87
Author(s):  
William Tullett
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Environmental Medicine ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sense Of Smell ◽  
Royal Institution ◽  
Airborne Disease ◽  
The Relationship

Starting with the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s experience of the Royal Institution lectures of 1802, this chapter sets out the relationship between smell, chemistry, and environmental medicine in the period from the 1660s to the 1820s. Putridity and putrefaction had long been associated with bad smell, but what the chemical investigations of the mid-eighteenth century succeeded in doing was separating the stink of putridity from its unhealthy qualities. Eudiometers, devices for measuring the quality of air that enjoyed a short vogue in the later eighteenth century, were one way of replacing the, now untrustworthy, sense of smell. Ultimately smell became a useful analogy for thinking about airborne disease or contagious particles, but by the early nineteenth century most physicians and chemists no longer believed that all smell was disease.

scholarly journals Governors, Regents, and Rituals: an Exploration of Colonial Diplomacy in Ambon at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century

Diplomatica ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-94
Author(s):  
Philip Post
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
British Rule ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Dutch Colonial

Abstract This article analyses how the Dutch colonial state in Ambon in the early nineteenth century tried to reestablish relations with local regents, making use of already existing protocols that were produced during the period of the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (1602–1799). Engaging in colonial diplomacy was very important because the demise of the voc (1796) and two short periods of British rule in Ambon (1796–1803 and 1810–17) had shaken Dutch rule to its foundations. To reestablish its legitimacy with these local rulers, the colonial state made use of diplomatic protocols, documents and rituals which had been drawn up and negotiated by the voc. This article will focus on comparing the so-called “Instruction for the Regents,” which was drawn up in 1771 by a voc administrator, with one that was reissued in 1818 by the colonial state and will analyze a number of rituals and protocols which played an important role in defining the relationship between the governor and the regents.

Forgetting like a State in Colonial North-East India

2019 ◽  
pp. 223-248
Author(s):  
Thomas Simpson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
State Building ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
North East India ◽  
North East ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Conventional Models

What if governing and "seeing" like a state is actually about forgetting and misdirecting as much as it is about accumulating and communicating? In the colonial north-east during the early nineteenth century, governing and knowing peoples and spaces relied not on flows of knowledge, but on intermittent and selective adaptations of previously formulated information. This was not simply a product of unintended shortcomings, but resulted from deliberate attempts by British administrators to ensure that knowledge did not easily traverse time and space. These "men on the spot" sought to make many of their activities opaque to outsiders, including their institutional superiors. Focusing on David Scott, the leading colonial official during and immediately after the British annexation of Assam, this chapter proposes that conventional models for understanding modern colonial state-building and knowledge production do not fit this region. It argues that governing and comprehending the early colonial north-east emerged as much from creative engagements with myopia and amnesia as from clear-sighted and accumulative "state simplifications".

Disease and Civilization: A Scottish Atlantic Network of Physicians in the Enlightenment

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-216
Author(s):  
Sarah Irving-Stonebraker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Historical Progress ◽  
Practice Of Medicine ◽  
Benjamin Rush ◽  
American Physician ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
A Current

Through an examination of the extensive papers, manuscripts and correspondence of American physician Benjamin Rush and his friends, this article argues that it is possible to map a network of Scottish-trained physicians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world. These physicians, whose members included Benjamin Rush, John Redman, John Morgan, Adam Kuhn, and others, not only brought the Edinburgh model for medical pedagogy across the Atlantic, but also disseminated Scottish stadial theories of development, which they applied to their study of the natural history and medical practices of Native Americans and slaves. In doing so, these physicians developed theories about the relationship between civilization, historical progress and the practice of medicine. Exploring this network deepens our understanding of the transnational intellectual geography of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century British World. This article develops, in relation to Scotland, a current strand of scholarship that maps the colonial and global contexts of Enlightenment thought.

Suffering in Art

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ritchie Robertson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Words And Images ◽  
The Relationship

Ritchie Robertson situates Lessing’s text within debates over the proper depiction of extreme suffering in art, focusing on Goethe’s essay on the Laocoon group (1798), as well as other late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century works on the representation of pain. The issue of suffering in art was of utmost significance to Goethe’s ideology of the classical, Robertson explains; more than that, the themes introduced in Lessing’s essay—above all, its concerns with how suffering can be depicted in words and images—proved pivotal within Goethe’s prescriptions about the relationship between idealism and individuality (or ‘the characteristic’) in art. As part of a larger campaign against what he called ‘naturalism’ in art, Goethe argued that the ancients did not share the false notion that art must imitate nature. For Goethe, responding to Lessing, the power of the Laocoon group lay precisely in its depiction of bodily suffering as something not just beautiful, but also anmutig (‘sensuously pleasing’).

The Languages of Petitioning in Early Colonial India

2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 581-597 ◽  
Author(s):  
James A. Jaffe
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Western India ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
The Public ◽  
The People ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
The Social ◽  
Different Levels

With relatively few exceptions, personal petitions from individuals have received much less attention from historians than those from groups in the public political sphere. In one sense, personal petitions adopted many of the same rhetorical strategies as those delivered by a group. However, they also offer unique insights into the quotidian relationship between the people and their rulers. This article examines surviving personal petitions to various administrators at different levels of government in western India during the decades surrounding the East India Company’s conquests. The analysis of these petitions helps to refine our understanding of the place of the new judicial system in the social world of early-nineteenth-century India, especially by illuminating the discourse of justice that petitioners brought to the presentation of their cases to their new governors. The conclusion of this article seeks to place the rhetoric of personal petitioning within the larger context of mass political petitioning in India during the early nineteenth century.

scholarly journals Smoking Clubs in Graphic Satire and the Anglicizing of Tobacco in Eighteenth-Century Britain

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Cynthia Roman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Knowledge ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Associational Life ◽  
Graphic Satire ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Eighteenth Century Britain ◽  
Cultural Connotations

Abstract Focusing on A smoking club (1793/7) by James Gillray, this essay presents satiric representations of smoking clubs in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British prints, arguing that they reflect and mediate contemporary understandings of tobacco as an intoxicant in British associational life. The breadth of potential cultural connotations – from political and social parody to light-hearted humour – is traced through the content and imagery of selected prints. These prints rely on the familiarity of contemporary audiences with political and social knowledge, as well as a visual iconography iconically realized in William Hogarth's A midnight modern conversation (1732).

scholarly journals “Come brother Opie!”

2021 ◽  
Vol 76 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-162
Author(s):  
Joe Bray
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Emotional Engagement ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Affective Dimension ◽  
Nineteenth Century Literature ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Century Literature ◽  
Amelia Opie

Joe Bray, “‘Come brother Opie!’: Amelia Opie and the Courtroom” (pp. 137–162) This essay examines how Amelia Opie’s lifelong fascination with the human drama of the courtroom is reflected in her fiction, specifically in her tales that revolve around trial scenes. Focusing on three examples in particular, “Henry Woodville” (1818), “The Robber” (1806), and “The Mysterious Stranger” (1813), it argues that Opie’s fictional courtrooms encourage an emotional engagement on the part of both characters and narrators, which in turn can be extended to that of the reader. In the case of “The Mysterious Stranger,” a character is on figurative trial throughout, with both narrator and reader frequently in the dark as to her motives. As a result, judgment is both hazardous and uncertain. Through a sympathetic representation of the passions and vicissitudes experienced by all those in the courtroom context, whether real or metaphorical, Opie’s fiction develops a model of readerly participation that adds a new, affective dimension to traditional accounts of the relationship between early-nineteenth-century literature and the law.

Geopolitics of Comparison: World Literature Avant la Lettre

2021 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 255-269
Author(s):  
Waïl S. Hassan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Comparative Literature ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of

Abstract According to a well-known narrative, the concept of Weltliteratur and its academic correlative, the discipline of comparative literature, originated in Germany and France in the early nineteenth century, influenced by the spread of scientism and nationalism. But there is another genesis story that begins in the late eighteenth century in Spain and Italy, countries with histories entangled with the Arab presence in Europe during the medieval period. Emphasizing the role of Arabic in the formation of European literatures, Juan Andrés wrote the first comparative history of “all literature,” before the concepts of Weltliteratur and comparative literature gained currency. The divergence of the two genesis stories is the result of competing geopolitical interests, which determine which literatures enter into the sphere of comparison, on what terms, within which paradigms, and under what ideological and discursive conditions.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document