Elections and Democracy in France, 1789–1848

2013 ◽  
pp. 83-97
Author(s):  
Malcolm Crook
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Traditional Model ◽  
Second Republic ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Direct Election ◽  
The People ◽  
Complex Picture

When French revolutionaries abolished privilege, they undermined the traditional basis for representing society. Elections acquired a central role in the new political order, because they could be seen as expressing its fundamental legitimating principle: the sovereignty of the people. But what forms could elections appropriately take in a post-privilege society? The French experimented with answers to this question through the revolutionary and Napoleonic years, across the Restoration and liberal eras, into the Second Republic and beyond. Changes from time to time in who was allowed to vote provided only one element in a complex picture. Following a traditional model, revolutionary elections to national bodies were usually indirect, though in the early nineteenth century direct election came to be preferred. The physical and social context of the voting process provided another focus for experimentation.

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.

Creation, Fall and Political Order — Prussian Conservatism and the Old Testament

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-181
Author(s):  
Laura C. Achtelstetter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Role Model ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religious Wars

Abstract This article examines differences within the theological basis of early nineteenth-century Prussian conservatism. By exploring the usage of the Old Testament in the writings of conservative thought leaders Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg, Ernst Ludwig von Gerlach, and Friedrich Julius Stahl, this article contributes to scholarship of both traditions of biblical interpretation and that of the relation of theology and political theory. The focus of this article centers on three concepts of the Old Testament and their implementation in conservative political doctrine. I will discuss Hengstenberg’s concept of biblical historicity and unity of Scripture, Gerlach’s use of the Old Testament as the source of a role model for just religious wars and a theocratic concept of law, as well as Stahl’s bible-based political philosophy of history and the resulting model of political order. Thus, the basis for different, resulting concepts of church, state, and nation that were merged into an overall religion-based political conservative doctrine in pre-1848 Prussia are analyzed.

scholarly journals The Bones of Contention: The Secularization of Cemeteries and Funerals in the Spanish Second Republic

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-95
Author(s):  
Matthew Kerry
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Property Rights ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Culture War ◽  
Second Republic ◽  
The People ◽  
Legal Context ◽  
Role Of Religion ◽  
The Church

The secularizing efforts of the Spanish Second Republic met fierce resistance from Catholics and the Church. Local authorities spearheaded secularization in an unclear legal context, yet they also attempted to mediate between different demands, while protecting Catholic sentiment and respecting property rights. Cemeteries and funeral processions were a key battleground in a ‘culture war’ which straddles the nineteenth-century preoccupation with the role of religion in the lives of Spanish citizens and the intensity of interwar conflict, the bitter struggles to occupy public space, and the mobilization of antagonistic conceptualizations of the ‘people’.

Chronological Problems in C.G. Okojie's Esan Narrative Traditions

1997 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 345-362
Author(s):  
James B. Webster ◽  
Onaiwu W. Ogbomo
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Local Government ◽  
Word Meaning ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The People ◽  
Edo State

The Esan who presently inhabit four local government areas of Edo State, Nigeria, share an exclusive feeling of being one people. In language and custom they are akin to the Edo people of Benin. The name “Esan” is an Edo word meaning “jump” or “flee,” which explains the manner in which they departed the Benin kingdom. The Esan region is divided roughly into the plateau—about one-third the total area but containing three-fifths of the people—and the lowlands. The plateau chiefdoms, originally seven of them, have been classed as Esan ‘A’ and include Irrua, Ekpoma, Uromi, Ewu, Ubiaja, Udo, and Ugboha. The lowland chief doms, originally eight, are known as Esan ‘B’ and consist of Ewohimi (Orikhimi), Ohordua, Emu, Ebelle, Okalo, Amahor, Ezen, and Okaigun.According to Esan traditions all the ancestors of the people, royal and commoner alike, came from Benin, the first groups being escapees and pioneers, the royal groups coming into the region later, during the reign of Ewuare, ca. 1455-82. Closer interviewing of clans, neither royal nor holding titles, demonstrates that many do not hold to this popular tradition, claiming either to be indigenous or to have migrated from elsewhere. Even in the intelligence report on the Esan, a significant number of clans reported origins other than in Benin. It seems that Esan ‘A’ chiefdoms on the plateau were the earliest established, and paid tribute to Benin through the Onojie (chief) of Irrua, who was therefore roughly the paramount of the Esan province of Benin. As the chiefdoms grew in numbers and spread on to the lowlands, he remained their overlord or governor. However, by the early nineteenth century the Oba of Benin installed the chief of Ewohimi as paramount over the lowland or Esan ‘B’ chiefdoms. By the advent of the British in the 1890s the earliest fifteen chiefdoms had grown to thirty.

Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century England: the social context of illegitimacy in rural Kent

Rural History ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Reay
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
General Phenomenon ◽  
Local Study ◽  
The Past ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject

More bad history has been written about sex than any other subject. Our ignorance about the sexual attitudes and behaviour of people in the past is compounded by a desire to rush to rash generalisation. This is unfortunate, for (consciously or not) our perceptions of the present are shaped by our assumptions about the past. Britain's current preoccupation with ‘Victorian values’ is but a politically visible example of a more general phenomenon. And, more specifically, we do not know a great deal about lower-class sexuality in nineteenth-century England. There are studies of bourgeois desires and sensibilities, but little on the mores of the vast bulk of the population.As Jean Robin has demonstrated recently, one of the most fruitful approaches to the subject is the detailed local study – the micro-study. It may not appeal to those with a penchant for the broad sweep, but such an approach can provide a useful entry into the sexual habits of the people of the past. This article is intended as a follow-up to Robin's work. It deals with a part of rural Kent and, like Robin's work, it covers an aspect of nineteenth-century sexuality – in this case, the social context of illegitimacy. More particularly, this study (and here I differ from Robin) will question the usefulness of the concept of a ‘bastardy-prone sub-society’ (more of which later), a term still favoured by many historical sociologists. The experience of rural Kent suggests that bearing children outside marriage should be seen not as a form of deviancy but rather as part of normal sexual culture.

A Powerful Sympathy: Terror, the Prison, and Humanitarian Reform in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain

1986 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 312-334 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randall McGowen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The People ◽  
Difficult Time ◽  
Administration Of Justice ◽  
Moral Taste

It is felt that men are henceforth to be held together by new ties, and separated by new barriere; for the ancient bonds will now no longer unite, nor the ancient boundaries confine. [J. S. Mill, “The Spirit of the Age” (1831)]I“The punishment of death shocks every mind to which it is vividly presented,” wrote Edward Gibbon Wakefield in 1832. It “overturns the most settled notions of right and wrong.” H. G. Bennet announced in Parliament in 1820 that he thought an execution “weakened the moral taste or sensibility of the people.” Such high-minded but platitudinous phrases frequently recurred in the early nineteenth-century debate over the criminal law, though historians have had a difficult time knowing what to make of them. Yet for all their vagueness such expressions do reveal a sensibility whose outline we can trace and whose influence we can measure. In drawing a connection between feeling and morality Wakefield appealed to social assumptions and values that were popular among humanitarians. Criminal law reformers proposed a new and exacting standard for the administration of justice: “Punishment,” argued James Scarlett, “ought to be consonant to the feelings and sympathies of mankind; and … those feelings ought to be enlisted on the side of the administration of justice.” They argued that the heavy reliance on the death penalty was a mistaken policy. The gallows aroused dangerous passions that signaled the existence of intractable social antagonism. They opposed such a spectacle with reforms that aimed at the promotion of a social union founded on shared feeling.

The Idea of ‘Character’ in Victorian Political Thought

1985 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 29-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Collini
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Classical Economics ◽  
The People ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Way

When in the summer of 1902 Helen Bosanquet published a book called The Strength of the People she sent a copy to Alfred Marshall. On the face of it, this might seem a rather unpromising thing to have done. Mrs Bosanquet, an active exponent of the Charity Organisation Society's ‘casework’ approach to social problems, had frequently expressed her dissatisfaction with what she regarded as the misleading abstractions of orthodox economics, and in her book she had even ventured a direct criticism of a point in Marshall's Principles. Marshall, then Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge and at the peak of his reputation as the most authoritative exponent of neo-classical economics in Britain, was, to say the least, sensitive to criticism, and he had, moreover, publicly taken issue with the C.O.S. on several previous occasions. But perhaps Mrs Bosanquet knew what she was about after all. In her book she had taken her text from the early nineteenth-century Evangelical Thomas Chalmers on the way in which character determines circumstances rather than vice versa, and, as the historian of the C.O.S. justly remarks, her book ‘is a long sermon on the importance of character in making one family rich and another poor’. Although Marshall can hardly have welcomed the general strictures on economics, he was able to reassure Mrs Bosanquet that ‘in the main’ he agreed with her: ‘I have always held’, he wrote to her, ‘that poverty and pain, disease and death are evils of greatly less importance than they appear, except in so far as they lead to weakness of life and character’.

Imperialism, Botany and Statistics in early Nineteenth-Century India: The Surveys of Francis Buchanan (1762–1829)

1986 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 625-660 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marika Vicziany
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Data Base ◽  
Statistical Evidence ◽  
Early Years ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Indian Economy ◽  
British Rule ◽  
The People

Buchanan arrived in India in 1794 and left in 1815. He was employed by the East India Company for these twenty years in a number of capacities but he is chiefly remembered today for two surveys he conducted: the first of Mysore in 1800 and the second of Bengal in 1807–14. These surveys have long been used by historians, anthropologists and Indian politicians to depict the nature of Indian society in the early years of British rule. Recently economic historians, Bagchi in particular, have used the ‘statistical’ tables compiled by Buchanan as a data base against which later statistical evidence about the Indian economy is measured. Bagchi believes that by doing this he can furnish firm proof of the extent to which British rule was detrimental to the people of India in the nineteenth century.

Alfred Russel Wallace, Robert Owen and the theory of natural selection

2002 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
GRETA JONES
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural Selection ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Human Behaviour ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Alfred Russel Wallace ◽  
The Social ◽  
Considerable Debate

Whereas there has been considerable debate about the social context of Darwin's theory of natural selection, much less focus has been placed upon Alfred Russel Wallace. This article looks at Wallace's socialism and, in particular, the influence upon his thought of the early nineteenth-century socialist Robert Owen. It argues that a case can be made for seeing Wallace's thought about nature and natural selection in the years up to 1858 in the context of Owenism. Three aspects of his thought are singled out for examination. These are, first, Wallace's views on the role of instinct in animal and human behaviour; second, the idea of colonization in human society and in nature; and third, a re-examination of the role of Malthus in Wallace's thought, emphasizing the influence upon him of the early nineteenth-century socialist critique of Malthusianism.

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