scholarly journals Public Military Music and the Promotion of Patriotism in the British Provinces, c. 1780-c. 1850

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 427-444
Author(s):  
Trevor Herbert

The role and importance of military musicians changed and intensified in the late eighteenth century through two important processes. The first was the culture of display that took root in both the home-based army and units in the colonies. The second was the result of successive militia acts which effectively ensured that military units with bands would be systematically placed in every corner of the British Isles.It became evident that music as a component of military display served an important diplomatic purpose. Music performed in public spaces was heard by a population deeply sceptical of the army and with an essentially local sense of identity. The experience of the sight and sound of military music raised entirely new perceptions of nation and of the state as a benign power.Two important and related themes emerge here. The first is the historical process that led, almost accidentally, to a realization that music as part of military display had potential to influence populations across the country and in the colonies. The second, more challenging, theme concerns the nature of the evidence for this idea and how it is to be treated. It is an idea that is totally convincing if the experience of hearing and seeing military spectacle by the mass of the people can be shown to have had impact. What is the evidence of listening to music by those people at whom it was targeted, how robust is it and what can be made of it?

Author(s):  
Will Smiley

This chapter explores captives’ fates after their capture, all along the Ottoman land and maritime frontiers, arguing that this was largely determined by individuals’ value for ransom or sale. First this was a matter of localized customary law; then it became a matter of inter-imperial rules, the “Law of Ransom.” The chapter discusses the nature of slavery in the Ottoman Empire, emphasizing the role of elite households, and the varying prices for captives based on their individual characteristics. It shows that the Ottoman state participated in ransoming, buying, exploiting, and sometimes selling both female and male captives. The state particularly needed young men to row on its galleys, but this changed in the late eighteenth century as the fleet moved from oars to sails. The chapter then turns to ransom, showing that a captive’s ability to be ransomed, and value, depended on a variety of individualized factors.


1964 ◽  
Vol 14 (53) ◽  
pp. 20-38
Author(s):  
J.C. Beckett

Few periods of Irish history have been more extensively written about than the later eighteenth century: a mere list of books and papers dealing with the Volunteer movement, ‘Grattan's parliament’, the insurrection of 1798 and the legislative union of 1800 would make up a moderate-sized volume. Most of these writings are concerned, directly or indirectly, with the constitutional relationship between Ireland and Great Britain. Indeed, it might be said that this relationship is the basic theme in the Irish history of the period, even for social and economic historians; and the pattern is so well-established that it may well seem rash to assume that it can be substantially modified, or even made significantly clearer, except, perhaps, by the production of new and hitherto unsuspected evidence. Yet there is something to be said for looking again at the whole subject on the basis of our existing knowledge, not simply, as Irish historians are inclined to do, from the standpoint of Ireland, nor yet as if events in Ireland were a mere appendage to British history, but rather, as Professor Butterfield has done for one brief period in his George III, Lord North and the people, to consider Anglo-Irish constitutional relations during the late eighteenth century as part of the general political history of the British Isles.


1973 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
N. L. Tranter

In an earlier article, I outlined some of the main social and demographic characteristics of the Bedfordshire parish of Cardington during the late eighteenth century, using for the purpose the invaluable survey of the parish compiled by a local schoolmaster, James Lilbourne, in 1782. Because of the growing interest in the historical process of social change, it has been thought worthwhile to examine the socio-demographic structure of Cardington at a later period. The date chosen for this second snap-shot was 1851 and the source materials used are the enumerators' schedules of the parish which were prepared for the census of that year. Although the listings for 1782 and 1851 differ somewhat, both in the nature of their content and in the degree of their coverage of the local population, a crude comparison between them has proved to be possible.


Romantik ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 129
Author(s):  
Jennifer Wawrzinek

<p>In the summer of 1795, when Mary Wollstonecraft journeyed to Scandinavia, she was disillusioned with human society and the possibility of meaningful relation with others. She had recently been in Paris, where she had seen many of her moderate revolutionary friends executed under Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, and by the time of her arrival in Scandinavia her unsatisfactory relationship with Gilbert Imlay was coming to an end. The book that resulted from this journey, A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, is remarkable for its critique of sovereignty and the reification of difference inherent to the construction of national borders and the drives of commercial exchange. The article argues that Wollstonecraft insists upon openness to the people and cultures she encounters through configuring epistemology as a twin process of experiential contact and sceptical inquiry. This a process that remains inherently and necessarily ethical because it resists the structures of tyranny, domination, and control, which Wollstonecraft perceives to be afflicting late-eighteenth-century Europe, whilst simultaneously allowing for a re-conception of politics and justice according to the demands both of the present and the not-yet-formalised future.</p>


Author(s):  
S. Elizabeth Penry

The People Are King traces the transformation of Andean communities under Inca and Spanish rule. The sixteenth-century Spanish resettlement policy known as reducción was pivotal to this transformation. Modeled on the Spanish ideal of república (self-government within planned towns) and shared sovereignty with their monarch, Spaniards in the Viceroyalty of Peru forced Andeans into resettlement towns. Andeans turned the tables on forced resettlement by making the towns their own and the center of their social, political, and religious lives. Andeans made a coherent life for themselves in a complex process of ethnogenesis that blended preconquest ways of life (the ayllu) with the imposed institutions of town life and Christian religious practices. Within these towns, Andeans claimed the right to self-government, and increasingly regarded their native lords, the caciques, as tyrants. A series of microhistorical accounts in these repúblicas reveals that Andeans believed that commoner people, collectively called the común, could rule themselves. With both Andean and Spanish antecedents, this political philosophy of radical democracy was key to the Great Rebellion of the late eighteenth century. Rather than focusing on well-known leaders such as Tupac Amaru, this book demonstrates through commoner rebels’ holographic letters that it was commoner Andean people who made the late eighteenth-century a revolutionary moment by asserting their rights to self-government. In the final chapter the book follows the commoner-lead towns of the Andes from the era of independence into the present day of the Plurinational State of Bolivia.


Author(s):  
Eric Richards

Wales, in common with many locations in the British Isles, had a mixed career during the economic and demographic upheavals of the late eighteenth century. Rural west Wales was especially prominent in the emigration account; it also vividly manifested some of the classic conditions making for mobility. Increased mobility in rural Wales was marked also by particular episodes of emigration which entered the folk memory. The demographic and economic career of the upland Swaledale region in the North Yorkshire Pennines demonstrates with unusual clarity several typical sequences within the long-term decline of its rural population. The Swaledale economy remained dominated by agriculture, and productivity increases were impressive, especially in dairying. Swaledale was a classic case of rural change associated with migratory adjustments to demographic and economic pressures, and was a regional variant of the common experience in rural Britain.


2011 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 20
Author(s):  
Anna Cullhed

Bengt Lidner's poem &lsquo;Ode to the Finnish Soldier' from 1788 was written during the Swedish war with Russia. This paper argues that Lidner took part in Gustav III's staging of the war by accusing the officers of the so-called Anjala league of treachery, and at the same time turning to &lsquo;the people' for support. &lsquo;The people' were defined as subjects of the Swedish crown from the core parts of the realm, today's Finland and Sweden, irrespective of language or ethnicity, but sharing a common and glorious history. Lidner combines a cosmopolitan perspective with a patriotic tendency in his poem. Some of the central concepts of the ode, such as &lsquo;citizen' and &lsquo;citizen-ness', carry potentially republican and egalitarian connotations, but this tendency is counteracted by the poet's obvious praise of the king. Lidner's ode stands as an example of the ambivalent use of political concepts during the late eighteenth century, the very concepts that would transform into the key concepts of nineteenth-century nationalism.


1965 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 23-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. M. L. Thompson

In every generation since the pace of economic and social change began to accelerate in the late-eighteenth century the wildest hopes, aspirations and fears of the previous generation have been realized. The revolutionary prospect of heeding the will of the people in the 1790's became the conservative measure of 1832. The terrifying demands of the Chartists were well on the way to enactment by 1885, and with the payment of M.P.s in 1911 were substantially achieved, apart from the silliest of all the demands, that for annual parliaments.


1989 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 311-324 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Ross

In a book in which he gave an account of the reign of Tegbesu (1740-1774), Robert Norris, the late eighteenth-century slave trader historian of Dahomey, included a brief sketch of the career of Tegbesu's father, Agaja (1718-1740), the conqueror of Allada and Whydah. Norris portrayed Agaja as a nation-builder who brought the Dahomeans and the people of Allada and Whydah, “the conquerors and the conquered,” to think of themselves as “one people.” The author claimed that Agaja saw to it after the conquest that “every part of his dominions became replenished with people.” He also argued that Agaja's new subjects were so pleased with his policy of reconciliation that they made no “efforts to regain their independence.”Norris' account of Agaja has been very influential, especially since the 1960s when I. A. Akinjogbin not only endorsed it but added both that Dahomey was founded by a group of patriotic anti-slave trade Aja and that post-1740 Dahomey was a European-like nation state. Norris' argument, as embellished by Akinjogbin, was reproduced in a number of authoritative 1970s works and appears to have retained its appeal even though Akinjogbin's addenda have been shown to be at odds with the evidence. Norris' original thesis nevertheless is just as flawed as Akinjogbin's various supplementary claims. Agaja was far from having been a nation-builder; still less was he a far sighted statesman who saw to it that “every part of his dominions became replenished with people.”


Author(s):  
Geoffrey Hosking

Whereas many European states sought to dominate corporate associations in order to exploit their resources, the Russian monarchy had to create them in the late eighteenth century in order to transmit its own authority. Both before and after that, however, the Tsars mediated authority downwards through persons rather than institutions. This chapter highlights the paradoxes of a system which compensated for under-institutionalization through the workings of competing elite patron-client networks and small-scale popular communities of joint responsibility which survived long beyond 1917. Communists may have transformed and modernized society in appearance, but in reality that modernization perpetuated or even restored some of the archaic practices of pre-revolutionary society. The Soviet state, like the Tsarist one, depended on archaic social arrangements which lubricated its everyday functioning, but frustrated its ultimate purposes. Even at the start of the twenty-first century Russian politics were still in thrall to personalized power factions.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document