5. Long Waves and Conjunctures of Democratization

2018 ◽  
pp. 67-81
Author(s):  
Dirk Berg-Schlosser

This chapter focuses on the history of democratization since the late eighteenth century. It introduces the concepts of ‘waves’ (trends) and ‘conjunctures’ (briefer turmoils) and delineates the major developments in this respect. In this way, the major long-term and short-term factors leading to the emergence and breakdowns of democracies are also highlighted. The first long wave occurred during the period 1776–1914, followed by the first positive conjuncture in 1918–19, the second long wave (with some intermittent turbulences) in 1945–88, and the latest conjuncture in 1989–90. The chapter identifies the main ingredients to democratization throughout history, namely: republicanism, representation, and political equality. It concludes by considering some of the current perspectives and dangers for the future of democracy.

Author(s):  
Dirk Berg-Schlosser

This chapter focuses on the history of democratization since the late eighteenth century. It introduces the concepts of ‘waves’ (trends) and ‘conjunctures’ (briefer turmoils) and delineates the major developments in this respect. In this way, the major long-term and short-term factors leading to the emergence and breakdowns of democracies are also highlighted. The first long wave occurred during the period 1776–1914, followed by the first positive conjuncture in 1918–19, the second long wave (with some intermittent turbulences) in 1945–88, and the latest conjuncture in 1989–90. The chapter identifies the main ingredients to democratization throughout history, namely: republicanism, representation, and political equality. It concludes by considering some of the current perspectives and dangers for the future of democracy.


1999 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 405-433 ◽  
Author(s):  
SIMON DEVEREAUX

This article examines the series of legislative measures, beginning in 1776, which culminated in the passage of the Penitentiary Act of 1779. It argues that, although the Penitentiary Act is of considerable long-term significance in the history of English criminal justice and penal practices, the act passed in 1779 was in fact a somewhat modest affair by comparison with the scheme originally envisioned by its principal architects. The act embodied a decisive retreat from an original ambition to replace transportation with imprisonment at hard labour as the principal punishment next to death in late eighteenth-century England. This modification arose from a pragmatic appreciation of the limitations imposed, first, by a persistent preference amongst most legislators for transportation of the worst classes of offenders not actually put to death and, secondly, by the reluctance of local authorities to have such a preference imposed upon them to the detriment of local control of punishment and of the finances which paid for it. Attention is also drawn to how the course of events was shaped by the interaction of the act's main architects, William Eden and Sir William Blackstone, with both government and non-ministerial MPs such as Sir Charles Bunbury.


BJHS Themes ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Suman Seth

Abstract In the course of his discussion of the origin of variations in skin colour among humans in the Descent of Man, Charles Darwin suggested that darker skin might be correlated with immunity to certain diseases. To make that suggestion, he drew upon a claim that seemed self-evidently correct in 1871, although it had seemed almost certainly incorrect in the late eighteenth century: that immunity to disease could be understood as a hereditary racial trait. This paper aims to show how fundamental was the idea of ‘constitutions selection’, as Darwin would call it, for his thinking about human races, tracking his (ultimately unsuccessful) attempts to find proof of its operation over a period of more than thirty years. At the same time and more broadly, following Darwin's conceptual resources on this question helps explicate relationships between conceptions of disease and conceptions of race in the nineteenth century. That period saw the birth of a modern, fixist, biologically determinist racism, which increasingly manifested itself in medical writings. The reverse was also true: medicine was a crucial site in which race was forged. The history of what has been called ‘race-science’, it is argued, cannot and should not be written independent of the history of ‘race-medicine’.


10.31022/n023 ◽  
1994 ◽  

Few poets have had so profound an influence on the history of German art music as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Since the late eighteenth century, over seven hundred of his poems have been set by nearly six hundred composers as lieder for voice and piano. This anthology gathers twenty-two such settings, in a wide variety of styles, by composers ranging from Goethe's friend Carl Zelter to Hans von Bülow, Ferruccio Busoni, and Othmar Schoeck.


2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
JULIA DOE

ABSTRACTLarge-scale programming studies of French Revolutionary theatre confirm that the most frequently staged opera of the 1790s was not one of the politically charged, compositionally progressive works that have come to define the era for posterity, but rather a pastoral comedy from mid-century:Les deux chasseurs et la laitière(1763), with a score by Egidio Duni to a libretto by Louis Anseaume. This article draws upon both musical and archival evidence to establish an extended performance history ofLes deux chasseurs, and a more nuanced explanation for its enduring hold on the French lyric stage. I consider the pragmatic, legal and aesthetic factors contributing to the comedy's widespread adaptability, including its cosmopolitan musical idiom, scenographic simplicity and ready familiarity amongst consumers of printed music. More broadly, I address the advantages and limitations of corpus-based analysis with respect to delineating the operatic canon. In late eighteenth-century Paris, observers were already beginning to identify a chasm between their theatre-going experiences and the reactions of critics: Was a true piece of ‘Revolutionary’ theatre one that was heralded as emblematic of its time, or one, likeLes deux chasseurs, that was so frequently seen that it hardly elicited a mention in the printed record?


2021 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 255-269
Author(s):  
Waïl S. Hassan

Abstract According to a well-known narrative, the concept of Weltliteratur and its academic correlative, the discipline of comparative literature, originated in Germany and France in the early nineteenth century, influenced by the spread of scientism and nationalism. But there is another genesis story that begins in the late eighteenth century in Spain and Italy, countries with histories entangled with the Arab presence in Europe during the medieval period. Emphasizing the role of Arabic in the formation of European literatures, Juan Andrés wrote the first comparative history of “all literature,” before the concepts of Weltliteratur and comparative literature gained currency. The divergence of the two genesis stories is the result of competing geopolitical interests, which determine which literatures enter into the sphere of comparison, on what terms, within which paradigms, and under what ideological and discursive conditions.


Author(s):  
Nicola Miller

This chapter explains that the arrival of lithography in the 1820s made it possible to illustrate printed matter with beautiful scenic engravings. It analyses the evocations of distinctive natural phenomena that constituted a rare element of continuity between the creole patriotism of the late eighteenth century and the post-independence debates about the future. It also discusses how utility and utopianism were enfolded into investigations of the biblical and secular paradise of American nature. The chapter cites how Bello's famous Ode to Tropical Agriculture summoned its audience to live out the freedom won by independence through working the soil, exhorting them not to let the prodigious bounty of tropical fruits lure them into sterile idleness. It mentions that the Argentine anthem mapped out the battlegrounds where liberty had been won, and the Chilean anthem celebrated the clarity of the sky, the tranquillity of the sea, and the majesty of the mountains.


2019 ◽  
pp. 210-226
Author(s):  
Simon Mills

This chapter explains the remarkable popularity of Henry Maundrell’s A Journey from Aleppo to Jerusalem at Easter AD 1697 (1703). It argues that Maundrell’s eye-witness reportage of his travels in the Holy Land provided the book’s readers with a storehouse of geographical observations and descriptions of eastern customs with which they could recreate imaginatively the world of the Scriptures. Tracing the book’s use by editors, commentators, translators, and paraphrasts, it argues that Maundrell was most often put to work in defence of the Bible against attacks on its claims to truth. Yet in the hands of Maundrell’s late eighteenth-century German translator, the naturalist and historicist tendencies inherent in his account were brought into sharper focus; ‘sacred geography’ was transformed into a history of biblical culture.


2018 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Benjamin Kingsbury

A history of environmental, economic, and social change in the Meghna estuary from the late eighteenth century to the 1870s. A new frontier of alluvial land was being created along the edge of the Bay of Bengal, presenting opportunities for profit as well as great risks. The settlement of this frontier was not simply a natural outcome of the availability of new land: it was also encouraged by imperial policy. And just as British rule was not a product of nature, neither were the divisions within Bengali society that helped to determine who would be exposed to disaster.


2019 ◽  
pp. 138-152
Author(s):  
João José Reis ◽  
Flávio dos Santos Gomes ◽  
Marcus J. M. de Carvalho ◽  
H. Sabrina Gledhill

After being captured by the Royal Navy brig Water Witch, the Ermelinda is taken to Sierra Leone, a British colony, the history of which is narrated from its foundation by philanthroposts, including the leading abolitionist Granville Sharp, in the late eighteenth century up until Rufino landed there in December 1841. British cruisers deposited scores of liberated Africans there40,000 in the 1830s alone. As a result, Sierra Leone’s population included people of different faiths and ethnicities from all over the western coast of Africa and Mozambique. Anti–slave trade Mixed Commissions were installed in Freetown, where the trial of the Ermelinda was carried out for two months.


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