The Uyghurs: Making a Nation

Author(s):  
David Brophy

The Uyghurs comprise a Turkic-speaking and predominantly Muslim nationality of China, with communities living in the independent republics of Central Asia that date to the 19th century, and now a global diaspora. As in the case of many national histories, the consolidation of a Uyghur nation was an early 20th-century innovation, which appropriated and revived the legacy of an earlier Uyghur people in Central Asia. This imagined past was grounded in the history of a Uyghur nomadic state and its successor principalities in Gansu and the Hami-Turfan region (known to Islamic geographers as “Uyghuristan”). From the late 19th century onward, the scholarly rediscovery of a Uyghur past in Central Asia presented an attractive civilizational narrative to Muslim intellectuals across Eurasia who were interested in forms of “Turkist” racial thinking. During the First World War, Muslim émigrés from Xinjiang (Chinese Turkistan) living in Russian territory laid claim to the Uyghur legacy as part of their communal genealogy. This group of budding “Uyghurists” then took advantage of conditions created by the Russian Revolution, particularly in the 1920s, to effect a radical redefinition of the community. In the wake of 1917, Uyghurist discourse was first mobilized as a cultural rallying point for all Muslims with links to China; it was then refracted through the lens of Soviet nationalities policy and made to conform with the Stalinist template of the nation. From Soviet territory, the newly refined idea of a Uyghur nation was exported to Xinjiang through official and unofficial conduits, and in the 1930s the Uyghur identity of Xinjiang’s Muslim majority was given state recognition. Since then, Uyghur nationhood has been a pillar of Beijing’s minzu system but has also provided grounds for opposition to Beijing’s policies, which many Uyghurs feel have failed to realize the rights that should accord to them as an Uyghur nation.

Author(s):  
Oksana Shukatka ◽  
Illya Kryvoruchko

The article raises an issue of preservation and strengthening health in pandemic conditions, because self-isolation and restrictions on the movement of people cause the loss of physical activity and the emergence of chronic diseases. It is known that all quarantine restrictions and rules are being created and regulated by the state at the legislative level. We appeal to the primary sources of quarantine legislation for deeper understanding of the issue. The purpose of the article is to investigate the historical background of legal and regulatory legislation on preservation of health in quarantine conditions. The following methods of analysis have been used: comparison and synthesis of theoretical data. The period of formation of quarantine legislation is divided into 3 phases: the period of the Middle Ages, the period before the First World War (the 19th century) and the postwar period. The article investigates the history of conduction of the first quarantine measures in Europe during the Middle Ages and the history of creation of the first quarantine legislation in Venice, Hetmanshchyna and the Russian Empire during the 14th – 18th centuries. It has been revealed that the rules of the fight against the spread of epidemiological diseases were established in the 19th century, the first international sanitary conventions and medical authorities in the Russian and Ottoman Empires were created to slow the spread of such dangerous diseases as cholera, plague and yellow fever, not harming the free international trade at that time. The article analyses the results of the first (1851), the fourth (1874) and the seventh (1892) International Sanitary Conferences and the positive and negative consequences of them. It also describes the creation of the first international medical organisations, such as the Office International d'Hygiène Publique (L'Office International d'Hygiene Publique), established in 1907, the Health Organization of the League of Nations, established in 1923 after the First World War, the Hygiene Committee of the League of Nations, established in 1926, and the World Health Organisation (WHO), established in April, 7, 1948 as the medical authority of the United Nations Organisation. The article generalizes the aims of the above-mentioned organisations and their contribution to the combat against the epidemiological diseases of the first half of the 20th century. It has been concluded that we should adhere to the classical principles of the preservation of health in the conditions of coronavirus pandemic to effectively withstand the spread of this virus.


Author(s):  
Barbara Buchenau ◽  
Elena Furlanetto

Nation and empire are intriguing conceptual frameworks for the study of the historical persistence of Atlantic entanglements—especially in the northern hemisphere. The Atlantic might generally be understood to have interlocked the Americas, Africa, and Europe from the beginning of European westward exploration until the official end of both slavery and European imperialism on Northern American soil. But Atlantic ideological battles extended well beyond the 19th century. Today, they are alive and kicking once more. As conceptual frameworks nation and empire organize ideas of belonging, community building, and social cohesion. In addition, they are short-hands for distinct, in fact competing, forms of political and economic hegemony. Since mechanisms of exclusion and seclusion have forged, delimited, and expanded nations as much as empires, this bibliographical essay will focus on studies that draw attention to the commonalities of nation and empire. Within the framework of the (Northern) Atlantic, nations and empires lose their cohesive and exclusivist aura, inviting persistent, if contrastive, comparisons of connective as well as divisive modes of transportation, exchange, and intellectual as well as cultural transformation. The idea of nation evokes several meanings: First used in Anglo-Norman and Middle French to denote birth, lineage, or family, the idea of the nation helped to lay the ground for modern-age ideas of race and biological descent. As a social and cultural concept, the nation organizes communities around questions of kinship, belonging, and culture until today. From the 19th century onward “nation” simultaneously described a political formation established by and for its diverse population. Empire likewise has many layers: etymologically speaking the word is used to speak about extensive territories controlled by a single ruler; politically speaking the term describes a system governed by ideas of supreme sovereignty and extensive subjection or domination; socially speaking it relates practices of command and control. Culturally speaking, empire denotes complex communication among communities with various degrees of authority and power. Scholarly analysis often delineates historical trajectories. From a Eurocentric perspective the New World attracted competing communities of settlers, planters, and traders, rewarding both an unbridled sense of possibility and the ambition to emulate and yet outdo European models. In this ambiguous setting the idea as well as institutional offsprings of empire proliferated long after empire officially ended with the First World War. With the return of empire (and nation) as imaginaries for new forms of coercion and collaboration, future scholarship will need to trace the Atlantic and its history of entanglements well into the 21st century.


2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (5) ◽  
pp. 840-852
Author(s):  
Stephen O’Donnell

AbstractUse of the Slovak literary language was central to the Slovak nationalist political movement in the Kingdom of Hungary before 1918. Yet beyond a Slovak nationalist intelligentsia of just 1,000 or so individuals, this idea had little purchase among the claimed nation of two million Slovak-speakers living in “Upper Hungary”—who Slovak nationalists typically understood as lacking sufficient “national consciousness” to support their political aims. As mass, transatlantic migration led to nearly half a million Slovak-speakers leaving Upper Hungary for the United States between 1870 and 1914, these linked issues of language use and “national consciousness” were carried over to the migrant colony. Rather than being a widely held sentiment among migrants from Upper Hungary, this article shows how Slovak national consciousness was generated within the Slovak American community in the final decades of the 19th century. This case study shows how a small group of nationalist leaders consciously promoted literary Slovak as the “print language” of the migrant colony to instill the idea of a common, Slovak nationhood among migrants living on the other side of the Atlantic—a project that helped in turn to create a Slovak national homeland in central Europe after the First World War.


2020 ◽  
Vol 58 ◽  
pp. 349-358
Author(s):  
Kirill V. Shevchenko

The article analyzes the views of the leading Galician-Russian socio-public and cultural activists of the 19th century on the history and culture of Galician Rus. Most Galician-Russian intelligentsia of the 19th century shared the idea of Galician Rusyns being an inseparable and organic part of the triune Russian people consisting of Great Russians, Little Russians and White Russians. Galician Rusyns were considered by Galician-Russian intelligentsia as a kinship branch of Little Russian people. Galician-Russian cultural figures stressed the primordial tradition of cultural and historical unity of all Russian lands as well as the important role of Galicia in common Russian history. Thus, they considered the native of Galicia Metropolitan Peter to be one of the major figures in mutual Russian history as he supported the policy of Moscow Prince Ivan Kalita and played the crucial role in turning Moscow into the church capital of Russian lands in early 14thcentury. Moreover, the Galicians and Little Russians by birth played very important role in developing Russian culture, education and public thought in the period of the 17th –19th centuries. Traditional orientation of Galician-Russian intelligentsia on Russian culture and Russian literary language in the 19th century was strongly opposed by the representatives of the Ukrainian movement, which supported the idea of Galician Rusyns being a part of the Ukrainians, not belonging to Russian nationality. Due to political reasons, Ukrainian movement was widely supported by Austrian and Polish authorities, who used the First World War as a suitable pretext for mass repressions against the representatives of Galician-Russian movement in Galician region.


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 227-237
Author(s):  
Elchin Ibrahimov ◽  

The history of the language policy of the Turks begins with the work Divanu lugat at-turk, written by Mahmud Kashgari in the 11th century. Despite the fact that the XI-XVII centuries were a mixed period for the language policy of the Turkic states and communities, it contained many guiding and important questions for subsequent stages. Issues of language policy, originating from the work of Kashgari, continued with the publication in 1277 of the first order in the Turkic language by Mehmet-bey Karamanoglu, who is one of the most prominent figures in Anatolian Turkic history, and culminated in the creation of the impeccable work Divan in the Turkic language by the great Azerbaijani poet Imadaddin Nasimi who lived in the late XIV - early XV centuries. Later, the great Uzbek poet of the 15th century, Alisher Navoi, improved the Turkic language both culturally and literally, putting it on a par with the two most influential languages of that time, Arabic and Persian. The appeal to the Turkic language and the revival of the Turkic language in literature before Alisher Navoi, the emergence of the Turkic language, both in Azerbaijan and in Anatolia and Central Asia, as well as in the works of I. Nasimi, G. Burkhanaddin, Y. Emre, Mevlana, made this the language of the common literary language of the Turkic tribes: Uzbeks, Kazakhs-Kyrgyz, Turkmens of Central Asia, Idil-Ural Turks, Uighurs, Karakhanids, Khorezmians and Kashgharts. This situation continued until the 19th century. This article highlights the history of the language policy of the Turkic states and communities.


Author(s):  
George S. Prokhorov ◽  

Julio Jurenito – a 1924 Modernist novel by Ilya Ehrenburg, written hot on the heels of the 1917 Revolution and is distinguished by both a wide intertextual spectrum and an acute satirical orientation in relation to all ideological trends and factions. The article focuses on references of the novel by Ilya Ehrenburg to the legacy of Dostoevsky – primarily – The Brothers Karamazov. Ilya Ehrenburg resets Dostoevsky’s features – his protagonists and some elements of plot – into the reality of European history of the First World War, Russian Revolution and Civil War. But also, Ehrenburg goes beyond Dostoevsky’s semantic continuum, replacing the author’s sense of History as a process striving for its endpoint with a History in which an end is fundamentally impossible, and there is always at least the potential to put the flow of event on pause and rewrite their mistakes. As well, the idea important for Dostoevsky that of the moral damage of the modern atheist-minded person is transformed into a demonstration of the people’s inclination to create idols and devoutly worship the latter. Ilya Ehrenburg’s novel is grounded on an interpretation of Dostoevsky, perfected through the prism of the traditions of the Jewish Enlightenment.


Author(s):  
Herbert P. Schneider

Until the middle of the 19th century, very few references exist regarding the occurrence of animal diseases in Namibia. With the introduction of contagious bovine pleuropneumonia (CBPP) in 1859, this picture changed completely and livestock owners implemented various forms of disease control in an effort to contain the spread of this disease and minimise its devastating effects. After the establishment of the colonial administration in 1884, the first animal disease legislation was introduced in 1887 and the first veterinarian, Dr Wilhelm Rickmann, arrived in 1894. CBPP and the outbreak of rinderpest in 1897 necessitated a greatly expanded veterinary infrastructure and the first veterinary laboratory was erected at Gammams near Windhoek in 1897. To prevent the spread of rinderpest, a veterinary cordon line was established, which was the very beginning of the Veterinary Cordon Fence as it is known today. After the First World War, a small but dedicated corps of veterinarians again built up an efficient animal health service in the following decades, with veterinary private practice developing from the mid–1950s. The veterinary profession organised itself in 1947 in the form of a veterinary association and, in 1984, legislation was passed to regulate the veterinary profession by the establishment of the Veterinary Council of Namibia. The outbreak of foot and mouth disease in 1961 was instrumental in the creation of an effective veterinary service, meeting international veterinary standards of quality and performance which are still maintained today.


2019 ◽  
pp. 33-54
Author(s):  
Julie Rugg

Este artículo cuestiona la afirmación de que la secularidad ha sido siempre un debate central en la idea de cementerio. En gran parte de Inglaterra se impuso una ‘guerra cultural’ entre partidarios de la Iglesia Anglicana y varias confesiones de Disidencia protestante. El cementerio fue un foco de conflicto, centra- do en el grado de control ejercido por la Iglesia Establecida. Este conflicto no reflejó la demanda de funerales ‘civiles’. Los protestantes No Conformistas buscaron asegurar un espacio de enterramiento y donde pudieran expresar sus propias creencias. A lo largo del siglo XIX y hasta la I Guerra Mundial, la formulación del derecho de enterramiento estuvo acompañada de conflictivos debates. Los cementerios llegaron a significar tanto la libertad religiosa como la influencia opresiva de la Iglesia Establecida. También estuvieron acompañados de una regulación sobre el gestión de entierros sanitarios, pero esto no definió el espacio de enterramiento como específicamente secular. Más bien, en Inglaterra, el cementerio fue, y sigue siendo, una coproducción espacial de tecnología sanitaria, burocracia municipal y expresión espiritual. This paper challenges the contention that secularity is always central to the idea of the cemetery. In largely England a ‘culture war’ was enjoined between supporters of the Church of England and various denom- inations of Protestant Dissent. The cemetery was a focus of conflict, centred on the degree of control exercised by the Established Church. This conflict did not reflect demand for ‘civic’ funerals. Protestant Nonconformists sought to secure burial space where they might express their own beliefs. Through the 19th century and up until the First World War, the framing of burial law was accompanied by divisive debate. Cemeteries came to signify both religious freedom and the oppressive influence of the Established Church. Cemetery establishment was also accompanied by regulation on sanitary burial management, but this did not define burial space as being innately secular. Rather, in England the cemetery was, and remains, a spatial co-production of sanitary technology, municipal bureaucracy and spiritual expression.


2006 ◽  
Vol 59 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 391-393
Author(s):  
Marina Martinovic ◽  
Vladimir Jokanovic

The authors are dealing with historical and political situation in Montenegro in the second part of the 19th century. They emphasized the importance of foundation of the Empress Maria Girls' Institute, which was financed by the Empress of Russia. Many famous South-Slav intellectuals have graduated from this Institute. Among them, the name of Divna Vekovic, the first woman physician in Montenegro, particularly stands out. A Sorbonne student, she was an outstanding physician and hu?manitarian during the First World War. Between the two World Wars, she revealed the spiritual wealth of Montenegro to Europe. She was the first to translate the Mountain of Wreath into French. She also translated the poetry of J. J. Zmaj and of other poets. During the World War II she continued her work in her birth place. She cared for the sick, the wounded and the poor. She died at the end of the war under mysterious circumstances. In the history of Montenegrin medicine, she has almost been forgotten. The aim of this paper is to lift the veil of oblivion from the life and work of this noble woman. .


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