Modern Nepal

Author(s):  
Marie Lecomte-Tilouine

Within the study of the modern period of Nepali history, history is considered here both as a narrative with its internal logic, notably the periodization of history produced by Nepali historians, as well as a series of statements, events, regulations, etc., which are incorporated in this narrative. Periodization of history in Nepal establishes a direct and necessary link between modern Nepal and its national territory. Indeed, the beginning of the modern era is determined by the “unification” of the fifty independent kingdoms and tribal territories that gave birth to the anational territory of Nepal during the second half of the 18th century. Such a correspondence makes modernity and the unified territory of Nepal coincide in a single space time. Yet, a closer examination of the logic behind periodization sheds light on its Kathmandu-centric, and dynastic perspective. This resulted in the formation of a hybrid conception of the national territory and of its center of power. From being the standard of the territory’s time and space, the Kathmandu Valley became the chronotope of the historical narrative dealing with the first half of the 19th century. It continued to form the territory’s remarkable center following the seizing of power by the Rana prime ministers (1846–1951), but now by assuming a futurist dimension, which conversely, plunged the rest of the country back in time.

2021 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
pp. 39-48
Author(s):  
Radosław Zdaniewicz ◽  
Henryk Postawka

An analysis of map charts of Upper Silesia from the second half of the 18th century allows us to identify at least a few lost settlements and hamlets. There is no doubt that one such lost settlement existed upon the Bierawka river, in the vicinity of the present-day villages of Trachy (Althammer) and Tworóg Mały (Quarghammer). Regrettably, the exact location of this settlement has never been identified. An archival query and test excavations demonstrated that the settlement actually came into existence and developed as late as the Modern Period. A fragment of a stone and brick foundation that was uncovered in the course of excavations was the vestige of a hut or of a more professional industrial workshop, such as a finery or forge. It was equipped with a waterwheel. Unfortunately, the reasons behind the disappearance of the village are unknown. It may have been caused by one of the epidemics which affected the inhabitants of Upper Silesia in the 19th century or by another cataclysm. It cannot be excluded, however, that the disappearance may have been due to the economic transformations of the 19th century.


Author(s):  
Claire Brizon

Based on three case studies of artifacts from 18th century collections preserved in Swiss cultural institutions, I attempt to rethink the use of the word "colonial" before the 19th century, and to apply it to describe collections from the modern period. I attempt to shed light on how these collections could be exhibited to provide critical perspective on these artefacts and the stories they are allowed to tell, in view of the upcoming exhibition entitled Exotic Switzerland? A Global History of the Enlightenment to open in 2020 at the Palais de Rumine in Lausanne.


1979 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 247-255 ◽  
Author(s):  
John C. Kramer

Opium smoking began spreading slowly but steadily in China from early in the 18th Century. It grew through the 19th Century to the point that by the end of the century it became a nearly universal practice among males in some regions. While estimates vary, it appears that most smokers consumed six grams or less daily. Addicted smokers were occasionally found among those smoking as little as three grams daily, but more often addicted smokers reported use of about 12 grams a day or more. An individual smoking twelve grams of opium probably ingests about 80 mg. of morphine. Thirty mg. of morphine daily may induce some withdrawal signs, while 60 mg. daily are clearly addicting. While testimony varied widely, it appears likely that most opium smokers were not disabled by their practice. This appears to be the case today, too, among those peoples in southeast Asia who have continued to smoke opium. There appear to be social and perhaps psychophysiological forces which work toward limiting the liabilities of drug use.


Polar Record ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 291-303 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Lähteenmäki

ABSTRACTThe academic study of local and regional history in Sweden took on a quite new form and significance in the 18th century. Humiliating defeats in wars had brought the kingdom's period of greatness to an end and forced the crown to re-evaluate the country's position and image and reconsider the internal questions of economic efficiency and settlement. One aspect in this was more effective economic and political control over the peripheral parts of the realm, which meant that also the distant region of Kemi Lapland, bordering on Russia, became an object of systematic government interest. The practical local documentation of this area took the form of dissertations prepared by students native to the area under the supervision of well known professors, reports sent back by local ministers and newspaper articles. The people responsible for communicating this information may be said to have functioned as ‘mimic men’ in the terminology of H.K. Bhabha. This supervised gathering and publication of local information created the foundation for the nationalist ideology and interest in ordinary people and local cultures that emerged at the end of the century and flourished during the 19th century.


Impact ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (7) ◽  
pp. 26-29
Author(s):  
Fumiko Sugimoto

Professor Fumiko Sugimoto has been analysing the history of the 18th century and first half of the 19th century with a focus not only on the temporal axis but also on the relationships between specific spaces and the people who live and act as subjective agents in these spaces. During the past few years, she has been endeavouring to decipher the history in the period of transition from the early modern period to the modern period by introducing the perspective of oceans, with a focus on Japan. Through the study of history in terms of spatial theory that also takes oceans into consideration, she is proposing to present a new concept about the territorial formation of modern states. [Main subjects] Law and Governance in Early Modern Japan Judgement in Early Modern Society The Evolution of Control over Territory under the Tokugawa State A Human Being in the Nineteenth Century: WATANABE Kazan, a Conflicting Consciousness of Status as an Artist and as a Samurai Early Modern Maps in the Social-standing-based Order of Tokugawa Japan The World of Information in Bakumatsu Japan: Timely News and Bird's Eye Views Early Modern Political History in Terms of Spatial Theory The Emergence of Newly Defined Oceans and the Transformation of Political Culture.


2021 ◽  
Vol 133 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-27
Author(s):  
Sara Matrisciano ◽  
Franz Rainer

All major Romance languages have patterns of the type jaune paille for expressing shades of colour represented by some prototypical object. The first constituent of this pattern is a colour term, while the second one designates a prototypical representative of the colour shade. The present paper starts with a short discussion of the controversial grammatical status of this pattern and its constituents. Its main aim, however, concerns the origin and diffusion of this pattern. We have not found hard and fast evidence that Medieval Italian pigment compounds of the type verderame influenced the rise of the jaune paille pattern, which first appears in French in the 16th century. This pattern continued to be a minority solution during the 17th century, but established itself during the 18th century. In the 19th century, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese adopted the pattern jaune paille, while it did not reach Catalan and Romanian before the 20th century.


Author(s):  
Maria Berbara

There are at least two ways to think about the term “Brazilian colonial art.” It can refer, in general, to the art produced in the region presently known as Brazil between 1500, when navigator Pedro Álvares Cabral claimed the coastal territory for the Lusitanian crown, and the country’s independence in the early 19th century. It can also refer, more specifically, to the artistic manifestations produced in certain Brazilian regions—most notably Bahia, Minas Gerais, and Rio de Janeiro—over the 18th century and first decades of the 19th century. In other words, while denotatively it corresponds to the art produced in the period during which Brazil was a colony, it can also work as a metonym valid to indicate particular temporal and geographical arcs within this period. The reasons for its widespread metonymical use are related, on the one hand, to the survival of a relatively large number of art objects and buildings produced in these arcs, but also to a judicative value: at least since the 1920s, artists, historians, and cultivated Brazilians have tended to regard Brazilian colonial art—in its more specific meaning—as the greatest cultural product of those centuries. In this sense, Brazilian colonial art is often identified with the Baroque—to the extent that the terms “Brazilian Baroque,” “Brazilian colonial art,” and even “barroco mineiro” (i.e., Baroque produced in the province of Minas Gerais) may be used interchangeably by some scholars and, even more so, the general public. The study of Brazilian colonial art is currently intermingled with the question of what should be understood as Brazil in the early modern period. Just like some 20th- and 21st-century scholars have been questioning, for example, the term “Italian Renaissance”—given the fact that Italy, as a political entity, did not exist until the 19th century—so have researchers problematized the concept of a unified term to designate the whole artistic production of the territory that would later become the Federative Republic of Brazil between the 16th and 19th centuries. This territory, moreover, encompassed a myriad of very different societies and languages originating from at least three different continents. Should the production, for example, of Tupi or Yoruba artworks be considered colonial? Or should they, instead, be understood as belonging to a distinctive path and independent art historical process? Is it viable to propose a transcultural academic approach without, at the same time, flattening the specificities and richness of the various societies that inhabited the territory? Recent scholarly work has been bringing together traditional historiographical references in Brazilian colonial art and perspectives from so-called “global art history.” These efforts have not only internationalized the field, but also made it multidisciplinary by combining researches in anthropology, ethnography, archaeology, history, and art history.


2004 ◽  
Vol 31 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 367-388 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christiane Schlaps

Summary The so-called ‘genius of language’ may be regarded as one of the most influential, and versatile, metalinguistic metaphors used to describe vernacular languages from the 17th century onwards. Over the centuries, philosophers, grammarians, trans­lators and language critics etc. wrote of the ‘genius of language’ in a wide range of text types and with reference to various linguistic positions so that a set of rather diverse types of the concept was created. This paper traces three prominent stages in the development of the ‘genius of language’ argument and, by identifying some of the most frequent types as they evolved in the context of the various linguistic dis­courses, endeavours to show the major transformations of the concept. While early on, discussion of the stylistic and grammatical type of the ‘genius of language’ concentrates on surface features in the languages considered, during the middle of the 18th century, the ‘genius of language’ is relocated to the semantic, interior part of language. With the 19th-century notion of an organological ‘genius of language’, the former static concept is personified and recast in a dynamic form until, taken to its nationalistic extremes, the ‘genius of language’ argument finally ceases to be of any epistemological and scientific value.


Author(s):  
K.Yu. Anders-Namzhilova

The article describes the problem of searching for unknown manuscripts in the study of new spiritual literature that occurred in the Russian Empire at the turn of 18th century. The documents of Moscow Ecclesiastical Censor’s Archive are the main information source of church and religious materials written during that period. The Moscow Ecclesiastical Censor was the first specialized authority established by Synod in 1799 for considering the religious compositions. Compositions which were banned by censors couldn’t be printed and for this reason they become unknown even for modern scientific society. However, a lot of these compositions weren’t lost: they are kept in manuscripts which are dispersed throughout different archive and library funds, that’s why they cannot be attributed without the engagement of the censor committee’s archive documents.


2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-16
Author(s):  
Kawanishi Takao

Abstract John Wesley (1703-91)is known as the founder of Methodism in his time of Oxford University’s Scholar. However, about his Methodical religious theory, he got more spiritual and important influence from other continents not only Oxford in Great Britain but also Europe and America. Through Wesley’s experience and awakening in those continents, Methodism became the new religion with Revival by the spiritual power of “Holy Grail”. By this research using Multidisciplinary approach about the study of Legend of Holy Grail’s Knight, - from King Arthur and Knights of the Round Table in the Medieval Period, and in 18th century Wesley, who went to America in the way on ship where he met the Moravian Church group also called Herrnhut having root of Pietisms, got important impression in his life. After this awakening, he went to meet Herrnhut supervisor Zinzendorf (1700-60) in Germany who had root of a noble house in the Holy Roman Empire, - and to Legend of Holy Grail’s Knight Opera “Parsifal” by Richard Wagner at Bayreuth near Herrnhut’s land in the 19th century, Wesley’s Methodism is able to reach new states with the legend, such as the historical meaning of Christianity not only Protestantism but also Catholicism. I wish to point out Wesley’s Methodism has very close to Legend of Holy Grail’s Knight. In addition, after the circulation in America, in the late 19th century Methodism spread toward Africa, and Asian Continents. Especially in Japan, by Methodist Episcopal Church South, Methodism landed in the Kansai-area such international port city Kobe. Methodist missionary Walter Russel Lambuth (1854-1921) who entered into Japan founded English schools to do his missionary works. Afterward, one of them became Kwansei-Gakuin University in Kobe. Moreover, Lambuth such as Parsifal with Wesley’s theories went around the world to spread Methodism with the Spirit’s the Legend of Holy Grail’s Knight as World Citizen.


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