Administering wealth: the concept of “economy” and the epistemic foundations of nationalism in late-imperial China (late-nineteenth–early-twentieth century)

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Pablo A. Blitstein
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Qing Empire ◽  
Late Imperial China ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The One

Abstract In this paper, I will focus on the emergence and uses of political economy in late-nineteenth–early-twentieth century China. I will discuss how the concept of “economy” came to be conceived as an autonomous sphere of human life, with its own rules and its own order, and how the production of “wealth” was conceptually divorced from ethics, politics, and administration. For this purpose, I will focus on a group which played a key role in reshaping the social and political discourse of the empire: a group of nationalist reformers who wanted to transform the Qing empire into a constitutional monarchy. I will explore how these reformers brought together two different sets of traditions – the Chinese imperial traditions of literati statecraft on the one hand, and mostly British, French, and German traditions of political economy on the other – and how they used them to naturalize a particular idea of what the “Chinese nation” was and should be.

‘Our Greatest Riches’: Horses at the Intersection of Settler and Kazakh Society in the Late Imperial Period

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 210-228
Author(s):  
Sean McDaniel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Land Use ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seasonal Migration ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Migration Routes ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Imperial Period ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This article examines interactions between Slavic peasant migrants and mobile pastoralist Kazakhs within the setting of the Kazakh Steppe during the period of heaviest resettlement to the region beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing into the early twentieth century. It considers how the importance of horses to both settlers and Kazakhs alike dictated these interactions and how the sedentary world of the settlers disrupted the seasonal migration routes of Kazakh horse herders. Particularly with concern to the greatly expanded horse market, issues regarding land use, and increased instances of horse theft throughout the region, the Russian state’s encroachment into the steppe forever altered the social and economic makeup of the region.

scholarly journals The “false” debate between positivism and Verstehen in the origins of sociology

Human Affairs ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Francisco Javier Ullan de la Rosa
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Basic Principles ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Nineteenth

AbstractThe article revisits the debate between the positivists and non-positivists currents in sociology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, concluding that it is actually a false debate, due to the fact that, beyond their differences, both shared some of the basic principles of the paradigm of modernity. From this historical analysis the article seeks to draw lessons for the social sciences in the present, at a time when these seem to have reached a certain synthesis between the modern and postmodern epistemologies. The article shows us that such a synthesis was already prefigured in the writing of classical theorists as it is, in fact, an ineluctable structural law of science itself if it wants to escape from the trap of skepticism and epistemological nihilism. The article also explores how, as a consequence of the pervasiveness of the modern paradigm, a common ethnocentric bias can be traced in all the fathers of sociology and wonders whether sociology today has actually got rid of this problem.

scholarly journals Thrifty Trustees, Curriculum Clashes, and Gender Disparities: Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Barriers in Education in Rural Renfrew County

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua C. Blank
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Rural Communities ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Rural Teachers ◽  
Barriers To Education ◽  
Gender Barriers ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The One

As several scholars contend, there is a paucity of material on the lives of thousands of rural teachers who taught in one-room Ontario schools and helped to build late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century rural communities. This article enriches the discourse on Canadian schooling by closely studying the life of one rural teacher, Elizabeth (Etmanski) Shalla, and several of her descendants by giving a glimpse into the one-room schoolhouse of yesteryear. More specifically, their first-hand experiences, as well as those of community members in western Renfrew County, sheds new light on geographical barriers to education and jurisdictional struggles between trustees and school inspectors and adds to the discourse on gender barriers and financial disparities in the struggle to obtain an, and maintain a life in, education on the rural Ontario frontier.

scholarly journals Ontario Retailers in the Early Twentieth Century: Dismantling the Social Bridge

2006 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 207-227
Author(s):  
David Monod
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Upward Mobility ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
Working People ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Abstract This article explores the theory that late-nineteenth century and eary-twentieth century retailing served as an avenue to upward mobility. An examination of retailing in Ontario suggests two things: first, that shopkeeping was a deeply stratified occupation in which the poor remained marginalized at the bottom: and second, that over the course of the early twentieth century interest in retailing declined among working people as the business of storekeeping “professionalized”.

Neoclassical Modernity

2020 ◽  
pp. 21-47
Author(s):  
Kevin M. Jones
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
New Generation ◽  
Late Ottoman

This chapter details the engagement of Iraqi poets with the Arab Nahda of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It provides a brief account of the social role of poetry in late Ottoman Iraq and a survey of the neoclassical poetry revival in Egypt and Syria. The chapter shows how Iraqi poets used the Nahda press to articulate their own relationship to modernity and reveals how new appreciations of the singularity of Iraq’s poetry tradition inspired proto-nationalist conceptions of Iraqi culture. Finally, the chapter examines the efforts of a new generation of young Najafi poets to promote the pioneering role of their own Najafi predecessors and reconstruct the historiography of the Arab Nahda for a broader Arab audience in the early twentieth century.

Africa and The Global Lives of Things

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy Prestholdt
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Consumer Demand ◽  
Life Cycles ◽  
Three Dimensions ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Inquiries into commodification, social distinction, and fashion have offered fresh perspectives on social relations and cultural formations in Africa. Imported consumer goods were both elemental to social relationships and a cornerstone of Africa's global interfaces. This article explores how the social dynamics of consumer demand in Africa were shaped by, and gave shape to, larger social, economic, and political relationships from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century. This approach underscores the interrelation of African cultural imperatives and histories of globalization. Focusing on East Africa in the late nineteenth century, the article begins with a snapshot of consumer trends before the nineteenth century. It then examines three dimensions of consumption in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: marketing consumer objects, the social relations of consumption, and the ways manufacturers accommodated African consumer demand. Taken together, these themes augment our understanding of social change in Africa, contribute to wider reflections on consumption as a mode of trans-societal relation, and highlight how manufactured objects can be conceptually and physically transformed throughout their global life cycles.

INSANITY AND PARRICIDE IN LATE IMPERIAL CHINA (EIGHTEENTH–TWENTIETH CENTURIES)

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luca Gabbiani
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Severe Form ◽  
Judicial Process ◽  
Late Imperial China ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Depth Analysis

This article provides an in-depth analysis of the reasons for which insane individuals who had committed patricide were systematically sentenced to dismemberment (lingchi 凌遲) under the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), the most severe form of capital punishment that could be called for in the state's administrative and penal Code. This extreme harshness ran contrary to several “theoretical” foundations of Chinese traditional law, first and foremost the principle of criminal intent. Through the study of such criminal cases, and others legally affiliated to patricide, spanning the seventeenth to the early twentieth century, it underlines the importance of the relationship between a parent and his child, which was prominent in China's moral and cultural context at the time. It also stresses the role of political issues related to the legitimacy of the imperial state and to the upholding of the legality of its judicial process. Even though legal tools existed in the Qing Code, which would have allowed for a more lenient approach, and notwithstanding the Qing authorities' ongoing effort at defining specific legal procedures for insane homicides, lingchi was systematically applied to insane patricides until the early twentieth century, when the far-reaching legal reforms implemented during the last years of the imperial regime progressively opened the way for the recognition of the legal irresponsibility of insane individuals.

Invoking ‘Hindu’ Ayurveda: Communalisation of the late colonial Ayurvedic discourse

2019 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 411-426
Author(s):  
Saurav Kumar Rai
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
North India ◽  
Social Culture ◽  
Healing System ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Cow Protection

The late nineteenth and early twentieth century in India witnessed a tremendous growth of vernacular Ayurvedic tracts, journals, pamphlets and public polemics. Incidentally, the consequent Ayurvedic discourse was not merely about the medical aspects of the Ayurvedic healing system. Rather, a careful reading of these published materials on Ayurveda throws immense light on the ongoing debates about sociocultural and religious processes. Interestingly, the social culture manifested by the early twentieth century Ayurvedic discourse was highly communalist, casteist, and gender-and class-biased in its content. In this regard, the present article explores how, in the era of communal polarisation, healing systems acquired religious identities. For example, from the 1920s onwards the cause of Ayurveda was promulgated by many vaids (Ayurvedic practitioners) and publicists by linking it with the broader agenda of ‘Hindu’ revivalism and the consolidation of a ‘Hindu’ religious, cultural and national identity. That is why issues like ‘Hindi prachar’, ‘cow protection’ and the cause of ‘Hindu education’ often formed the subject of vaid campaigns throughout North India. Related to this was the demonisation of ‘Muslim rule’ in India from the apparent perspective of health in the Ayurvedic discourse of the time. Simultaneously, this article argues that this communalisation of the Ayurvedic discourse, besides creating external religious boundaries, also unleashed hegemonic upper-caste and -class ideas that served to homogenise the community internally as well.

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