scholarly journals Introduction: The Transformation of Petitioning in the Long Nineteenth Century (1780–1914)

2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 409-429 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Miller

This introductory essay, firstly, offers a comparative, historical perspective on the transformation of petitioning into a vehicle for mass popular politics across North America and Western Europe during the “long” nineteenth century (1780–1914). While petitions were well established as an instrument of state in many early modern states, from the late eighteenth century a new type of mass, public, collective petitioning, based on established or invoked rights, emerged on an unprecedented scale in many countries. Mass petitioning underpinned the nascent repertoires of collective action pioneered by social movements. At the same time, the reception of petitions was institutionalized by political authorities, particularly legislatures elected under limited suffrage, as a potential source of legitimation. Secondly, the introduction suggests why people petitioned, and continued to petition, when their campaigns were often unsuccessful in achieving immediate results. The answer lies in the manifold advantages of petitioning in enabling political organization, mobilization, identity formation, citizenship, political change, and the forming of networks with elite political actors. By shaping an emerging field examining petitioning and petitions, raising awareness of petitions as sources and the methodologies to exploit them, and addressing broad questions of interest to historians and social scientists, this special issue hopes to stimulate further research and contribute to a rich dialogue in the years to come.


Itinerario ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 46-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gagan D. S. Sood

From the beginning of the nineteenth century, remarkable developments in the realm of law were witnessed throughout the world. They expressed and paved the way for a new type of dispensation. For those parts of Asia and the Middle East with a substantial European presence, the legitimate rules, principles, and procedures for resolving disputes were progressively assimilated into systems of state-sanctioned legal pluralism. The process—at once gradual, charged, and punctuated—coincided with the initial consolidation of European imperial dominance and the emergence of Europe's modern global empires.Though these changes in the realm of law date from the nineteenth century, the European presence there had long preceded them. This was perhaps most notable in maritime Asia. The Europeans in this region tended to cluster in their factories or in certain quarters of the towns and cities dotting the Indian Ocean rim. Notwithstanding differences between, say, a Mocha and an Aceh in size, location, and form of government, all these settlements had one quality in common: each was able to profit from the traffic conducted along the coast or across the high seas. As for the sovereign justice on offer, the dispensation that governed it in early modern times was far removed from its later analogue. This stemmed in large part from the rationale and basis for the European presence. In particular, Europeans could not dominate maritime Asia's provincial and imperial powers, especially those located inland, and the great majority of those arriving from western Europe intended to return as soon as possible; despite some involvement in racketeering and other forms of surplus extraction—famously in attempts to introduce and enforce a system of passports in maritime transport and travel—their interests were mainly commercial, oriented towards trade and shipping; the indigenous populations remained on the whole large and resilient; and many of the skills and techniques vested in livelihoods long associated with the region retained their primacy. As a result, the only realistic option for Europeans in maritime Asia was to reconcile themselves to the prevailing order. And this they did, with most of the region's fundamentals, not least in the realm of law, continuing to develop along what were essentially indigenous lines.



1999 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHARLES WETHERELL ◽  
ANDREJS PLAKANS

In his pioneering and now classic 1953 study, Nationalism and social communication, Karl Deutsch laid out a social science agenda for the study of national consciousness in contemporary and historic populations. Central to this agenda was communication, and central to communication was language: ‘If we knew how to compare and measure the ability of groups and cultures to transmit information, we might gain a better understanding of their behaviour and capacities.’ At that time historians were not paying attention to social scientists, as neither historical demography nor social science history had yet been born, and Deutsch's call remained unanswered. It took the study of the secular decline of fertility in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to raise the question again for the European past. When Susan Cotts Watkins concluded that ‘those people who spoke a common language appeared to behave in similar ways with respect to reproduction, but they behaved quite differently from those with whom they could not communicate’, she offered one answer to Deutsch's inquiry about social communication and social behaviour. Apparently the spread of linguistic uniformity in populations living within long-established boundaries helped to disseminate information about controlling marital fertility. Throughout Europe, or more precisely Western Europe in the first half of the twentieth century, variation in fertility within nations declined and variation between nations rose.From a different vantage point, historical questions about the process of individuation among European language communities, nationalities, and national cultures, and about communication between and within them, are inevitably questions about borders and borderlands. Nowhere is this more true than in Eastern Europe where, for the past two hundred years, few peoples remained untouched by changing borders. Official borders were alternately drawn around them and through them, separating fragments of language communities from each other, only to reunite them later and to separate them again later still. Starting in the second half of the nineteenth century, the sense of nationality, most often language-centred, became increasingly stronger, bringing with it the emergence of identifiable ‘national cultures’, entities within which, presumably, a single national language dominated and made the flow of information easier than in the past.



2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (10-2) ◽  
pp. 176-184
Author(s):  
Dmitry Nechevin ◽  
Leonard Kolodkin

The article is devoted to the prerequisites of the reforms of the Russian Empire of the sixties of the nineteenth century, their features, contradictions: the imperial status of foreign policy and the lagging behind the countries of Western Europe in special political, economic relations. The authors studied the activities of reformers and the nobility on the peasant question, as well as legitimate conservatism.



2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Knowles ◽  
Linda Tropp

Donald Trump's ascent to the Presidency of the United States defied the expectations of many social scientists, pundits, and laypeople. To date, most efforts to understand Trump's rise have focused on personality and demographic characteristics of White Americans. In contrast, the present work leverages a nationally representative sample of Whites to examine how contextual factors may have shaped support for Trump during the 2016 presidential primaries. Results reveal that neighborhood-level exposure to racial and ethnic minorities is associated with greater group threat and racial identification among Whites, as well as greater intentions to vote for Trump in the general election. At the same time, however, neighborhood diversity afforded Whites with opportunities for intergroup contact, which is associated with lower levels of threat, White identification, and Trump support. Further analyses suggest that a healthy local economy mutes threat effects in diverse contexts, allowing contact processes to come to the fore.



Author(s):  
Larysa Kovryk-Tokar

Every nation is quite diverse in terms of his historical destiny, spiritual priorities, and cultural heritage. However, voluntary European integration, which is the final aim of political integration that began in the second half of the twentieth century from Western Europe, provided for an availability of large number of characteristics in common in political cultures of their societies. Therefore, Ukraine needs to find some common determinants that can create inextricable relationship between the European Community and Ukraine. Although Ukrainian culture is an intercultural weave of two East macrocivilizations, according to the author, Ukraine tends to Western-style society with its openness, democracy, tolerance, which constitute the basic values of Europeans. Keywords: Identity, collective identity, European values, European integration



2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 283-298 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abdul Ghani Imad

The problematic addressed in this article is the challenge initiated by the Arab revolutions to reform the Arab political system in such a way as to facilitate the incorporation of ‘democracy’ at the core of its structure. Given the profound repercussions, this issue has become the most serious matter facing the forces of change in the Arab world today; meanwhile, it forms the most prominent challenge and the most difficult test confronting Islamists. The Islamist phenomenon is not an alien implant that descended upon us from another planet beyond the social context or manifestations of history. Thus it cannot but be an expression of political, cultural, and social needs and crises. Over the years this phenomenon has presented, through its discourse, an ideological logic that falls within the context of ‘advocacy’; however, today Islamists find themselves in office, and in a new context that requires them to produce a new type of discourse that pertains to the context of a ‘state’. Political participation ‘tames’ ideology and pushes political actors to rationalize their discourse in the face of daily political realities and the necessity of achievement. The logic of advocacy differs from that of the state: in the case of advocacy, ideology represents an enriching asset, whereas in the case of the state, it constitutes a heavy burden. This is one reason why so much discourse exists within religious jurisprudence related to interest or necessity or balancing outcomes. This article forms an epilogue to the series of articles on religion and the state published in previous issues of this journal. It adopts the methodologies of ‘discourse analysis’ and ‘case studies’ in an attempt to examine the arguments presented by Islamists under pressure from the opposition. It analyses the experiences, and the constraints, that inhibit the production of a ‘model’, and monitors the development of the discourse, its structure, and transformations between advocacy, revolution and the state.



2019 ◽  
Vol 59 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 384-410
Author(s):  
Bashir Saade

AbstractThe Lebanese political organization Hizbullah has developed its own style of commemorating ʿāshūrāʾ, the Shiʿi period of mourning in remembrance of the Battle of Karbalāʾ. Previous scholarship has analyzed Hizbullah’s ʿāshūrāʾ with prevailing conceptual binaries such as politics/religion, reason/tradition, or reason/emotion. This article challenges such binaries by looking at the series of speeches given by Hizbullah’s secretary general, Ḥasan Naṣrallāh, during the annual ʿāshūrāʾ rituals. Naṣrallāh’s oratory skills, and most importantly the careful structuring of the ten-day mourning event, show clearly that the production of reasoned arguments through speech involves the cultivation of intense emotions and states of consciousness. These are conducive not only to collective action and identity formation but also to ethical practices.



1947 ◽  
Vol 37 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 70-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joan Hussey

John Mauropous, an eleventh-century Metropolitan of Euchaïta, has long been commemorated in the service books of the Orthodox Church. The Synaxarion for the Office of Orthros on 30th January, the day dedicated to the Three Fathers, St. Basil the Great, St. Gregory the Theologian, and St. John Chrysostom, tells how the festival was instituted by Mauropous and describes him as ‘the well-known John, a man of great repute and well-versed in the learning of the Hellenes, as his writings show, and moreover one who has attained to the highest virtue’. In western Europe something was known of him certainly as early as the end of the sixteenth century; his iambic poems were published for the first time by an Englishman in 1610, and his ‘Vita S. Dorothei’ in the Acta Sanctorum in 1695. But it was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that scholars were really able to form some idea of the character and achievement of this Metropolitan of Euchaïta. Particularly important were two publications: Sathas' edition in 1876 of Michael Psellus' oration on John, and Paul de Lagarde's edition in 1882 of some of John's own writings. This last contained not only the works already printed, but a number of hitherto unpublished sermons and letters, together with the constitution of the Faculty of Law in the University of Constantinople, and a short introduction containing part of an etymological poem. But there remained, and still remains, one significant omission: John's canons have been almost consistently neglected.



1984 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alice Goldstein

During the last half of the nineteenth century, major population shifts occurred throughout Western Europe, reflecting heavy international migration as well as internal movement from rural to urban places. The latter process, in particular, has been an integral part of the modernization process and was a response both to rural population pressures and to expanding opportunities in the cities. Yet the pace of urbanization was by no means uniform for different countries, in different regions of the same country, or among various subgroups within a single region or province. As a result, analyses using large geographic units or aggregated statistics may mask variations in the underlying dynamics of internal migration.



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