ANXIETIES OF DISTANCE: CODIF ICATION IN EARLY COLONIAL BENGAL

2007 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
JON E. WILSON
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Continuous Flow ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Property Law ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of

Historians of political thought tend to emphasize the continuous flow and transmission of concepts from one generation to the next, and from one place to another. Historians of Indian ideas suggest that India was governed with concepts imported from Europe. This article argues instead that the sense of rupture that British officials experienced, from both the intellectual history of Britain and Indian society, played a significant role in forming colonial political culture. It examines the practice of “Hindu” property law in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Bengal. It suggests that the attempt to textualize and codify law in the 1810s and 1820s emerged from British doubts about their ability to construct viable forms of rule on the basis of existing intellectual and institutional traditions. The abstract and seemingly “utilitarian” tone of colonial political discourse was a practical response to British anxieties about their distance from Indian society. It was not a result of the “influence” of a particular school of British thinkers.

scholarly journals An Origin for Political Culture’: Laws 3 as Political Thought and Intellectual History

2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 468-484
Author(s):  
Carol Atack
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Critical Engagement ◽  
Greek Epic ◽  
History Of ◽  
Conjectural History

Abstract Plato’s survey in Laws book 3 of the development of human society from its earliest stages to the complex institutions of democratic Athens and monarchical Persia operates both as a conjectural history of human life and as a critical engagement with Greek political thought. The examples Plato uses to illustrate the stages of his stadial account, such as the society of the Cyclops and the myths of Spartan prehistory, are those used by other political theorists and philosophers, in some cases also drawing on the presence of the same stories in classical Greek epic and tragedy. By incorporating his critique into a timeline Plato is able to suggest that some approaches are limited in scope to specific social conditions, whereas his Athenian Stranger presents his analysis from an external and superior viewpoint, looking down on human society from above.

Nnamdi Azikiwe and Nineteenth - Century Nigerian Thought

1974 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-263 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. C. Echeruo
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
History Of ◽  
Black Man

This article is concerned chiefly with the connection between Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe's thought and that part of Nigeria's intellectual history which was the product of its nineteenth-century heritage. This relationship is important because, until comparatively recently, the intellectual life of what is now Nigeria was really an extension of that of the Negro. What we generally speak of as the beginnings of modern Nigerian social and political thought are really parochial manifestations of the more general history of the black man.

Accumulation, wealth and belief in Asante history: I. To the close of the nineteenth century

Africa ◽  
1983 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. C. McCaskie
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Detailed Examination ◽  
West African ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
History Of ◽  
Research Findings ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Opening Paragraph

Opening ParagraphThe present article is intended as the first of two contributions to the economic and social– but above all to the intellectual– history of the West African forest kingdom of Asante or Ashanti (now located in the Republic of Ghana). Both papers will attempt to pull together and to situate in a ‘mentalist’ framework a number of recent and confessedly disparate research findings concerning a cluster of concepts, ideas and beliefs that, merely for the sake of brevity at this point, I will assign simply to the embracing ‘neutral’ rubric of general transformations in the ideology (or ideologies) of wealth. The first article will be concerned with developments in Asante society up to the close of the nineteenth century (defined here interpretatively rather than in strictly chronological terms); its successor will concentrate on a highly detailed examination of a sequence of crucially telling events in the early colonial period, and upon selected developments thereafter in the twentieth century. The articles are designed and intended to be read sequentially; the first, it is hoped, will assist in making sense of the significantly denser context (and more detailed content) of the second.

THE SEARCH FOR THE ORIGINS OF MODERN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLICAN POLITICAL THOUGHT IN EARLY MODERN SWITZERLAND

2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 647-658 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARC H. LERNER
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Political World ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Good Government ◽  
History Of

What are the debts that the modern world owes to the political culture of the Enlightenment? For historians of political thought this is a widely debated subject. Throughout Europe, the Enlightenment provided the critical lens for a widespread reassessment of the nature of political authority. Much of the intellectual history of the eighteenth century focuses on this reassessment and the debates over the nature of good government, liberty and sovereignty. The discussion of these issues is linked to the history of liberalism, democratic republicanism, popular sovereignty, and the nature of the modern political world itself.

Indian Sex Life

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Durba Mitra
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Social Thought ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Global History ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Indentured Servitude ◽  
History Of

During the colonial period in India, European scholars, British officials, and elite Indian intellectuals—philologists, administrators, doctors, ethnologists, sociologists, and social critics—deployed ideas about sexuality to understand modern Indian society. This book shows how deviant female sexuality, particularly the concept of the prostitute, became foundational to this knowledge project and became the primary way to think and write about Indian society. The book reveals that deviant female sexuality was critical to debates about social progress and exclusion, caste domination, marriage, widowhood and inheritance, women's performance, the trafficking of girls, abortion and infanticide, industrial and domestic labor, indentured servitude, and ideologies about the dangers of Muslim sexuality. British authorities and Indian intellectuals used the concept of the prostitute to argue for the dramatic reorganization of modern Indian society around Hindu monogamy. The book demonstrates how the intellectual history of modern social thought is based in a dangerous civilizational logic built on the control and erasure of women's sexuality. This logic continues to hold sway in present-day South Asia and the postcolonial world. Reframing the prostitute as a concept, the book overturns long-established notions of how to write the history of modern social thought in colonial India, and opens up new approaches for the global history of sexuality.

scholarly journals ‘Constitutions selection’: Darwin, race and medicine

BJHS Themes ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Suman Seth
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Skin Colour ◽  
Race Science ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Race ◽  
Descent Of Man

Abstract In the course of his discussion of the origin of variations in skin colour among humans in the Descent of Man, Charles Darwin suggested that darker skin might be correlated with immunity to certain diseases. To make that suggestion, he drew upon a claim that seemed self-evidently correct in 1871, although it had seemed almost certainly incorrect in the late eighteenth century: that immunity to disease could be understood as a hereditary racial trait. This paper aims to show how fundamental was the idea of ‘constitutions selection’, as Darwin would call it, for his thinking about human races, tracking his (ultimately unsuccessful) attempts to find proof of its operation over a period of more than thirty years. At the same time and more broadly, following Darwin's conceptual resources on this question helps explicate relationships between conceptions of disease and conceptions of race in the nineteenth century. That period saw the birth of a modern, fixist, biologically determinist racism, which increasingly manifested itself in medical writings. The reverse was also true: medicine was a crucial site in which race was forged. The history of what has been called ‘race-science’, it is argued, cannot and should not be written independent of the history of ‘race-medicine’.

scholarly journals In the Theater of Counterrevolution: Loyalist Association and Conservative Opinion in the 1790s

2002 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 291-328 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Gilmartin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Free Expression ◽  
Political Repression ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Expression ◽  
Civic Activism ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
Negative Role

Conservative movements have generally played a negative role in accounts of the history of political expression in Britain during the period of the French Revolution. Where E. P. Thompson and others on the Left tended to identify radicalism with the disenfranchised and with a struggle for the rights of free expression and public assembly, conservative activists have been associated with state campaigns of political repression and legal interference. Indeed, conservatism in this period is typically conceived in negative terms, as antiradicalism or counterrevolution. If this has been the view of hostile commentators, it is consistent with a more sympathetic mythology that sees nothing novel about the conservative principles that emerged in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. They represent an establishment response to alien challenges. Even where conservatives set about mobilizing the resources of print, opinion, and assembly in a constructive fashion, the reputation for interference has endured. John Reeves's Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers is a useful case in point, since it managed in its brief but enterprising history to combine fierce anti-Jacobinism with the later eighteenth century's rising tide of voluntary civic activism. The association came together at the Crown and Anchor Tavern when a group of self-professed “private men” decided “to form ourselves into an Association” and announced their intentions through the major London newspapers in November and December of 1792. The original committee then called on others “to make similar exertions in their respective neighbourhoods,” forming energetic local associations that would be linked by regular correspondence with the central London committee. In this way, the loyalist movement grew with astonishing speed.

Indigenous Written Sources for the History of Bonny

1989 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 185-196
Author(s):  
Susan M. Hargreaves
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Niger Delta ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Additional Material ◽  
Court Records ◽  
General Terms ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
History Of ◽  
Similar Character ◽  
Written Sources

It is well known that indigenous contemporary written documentation exists for the precolonial and early colonial history of some of the coastal societies of South-Eastern Nigeria. The best known example is Old Calabar, for which there exists most notably the diary of Antera Duke, covering the years 1785-88, a document brought from Old Calabar to Britain already during the nineteenth century. More recently John Latham has discovered additional material of a similar character still preserved locally in Old Calabar, principally the Black Davis House Book (containing material dating from the 1830s onwards), the papers of Coco Bassey (including diaries covering the years 1878-89), and the papers of E. O. Offiong (comprising trade ledgers, court records, and letter books relating to the period 1885-1907). In the Niger Delta S. J. S. Cookey, for his biography of King Jaja of Opobo, was able to use contemporary documents in Jaja's own papers, including correspondence from the late 1860s onwards. In the case of the neighboring community of Bonny (from which Jaja seceded to found Opobo after a civil war in 1869), while earlier historians have alluded to the existence of indigenous written documentation, they have done so only in very general terms and without any indication of the quantity or nature of this material.

scholarly journals The Politics of Gift Exchange in Early Qajar Iran, 1785–1834

2016 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 550-576 ◽  
Author(s):  
Assef Ashraf
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Political History ◽  
Gift Exchange ◽  
The Political ◽  
Gift Giving ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Center Periphery

AbstractThis article uses gift-giving practices in early nineteenth-century Iran as a window onto statecraft, governance, and center-periphery relations in the early Qajar state (1785–1925). It first demonstrates that gifts have a long history in the administrative and political history of Iran, the Persianate world, and broader Eurasia, before highlighting specific features found in Iran. The article argues that the pīshkish, a tributary gift-giving ceremony, constituted a central role in the political culture and economy of Qajar Iran, and was part of the process of presenting Qajar rule as a continuation of previous Iranian royal dynasties. Nevertheless, pīshkish ceremonies also illustrated the challenges Qajar rulers faced in exerting power in the provinces and winning the loyalty of provincial elites. Qajar statesmen viewed gifts and bribes, at least at a discursive level, in different terms, with the former clearly understood as an acceptable practice. Gifts and honors, like the khil‘at, presented to society were part of Qajar rulers' strategy of presenting themselves as just and legitimate. Finally, the article considers the use of gifts to influence diplomacy and ease relations between Iranians and foreign envoys, as well as the ways in which an inadequate gift could cause offense.

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