The Highland Society of London, material culture and the development of Scottish military identity, 1798–1817*

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Watt
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Symbol ◽  
The Military

Abstract The image of the Highland soldier as a brave, loyal warrior was central to nineteenth-century notions of Scottish national identity. This article uses material culture evidence alongside traditional archival sources to provide an interdisciplinary explanation of how the military dimension of Scottish identity was shaped in the early nineteenth century. It finds that it was the responses of the Highland Society of London to Scottish battlefield valour – rather than the actions themselves – that created the enduring popular perception of the Highland soldier as a desirable national symbol and as an icon of empire.

Commentary: A Stroll in the Piazza and a Night at the Opera

2006 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 621-628
Author(s):  
Mary Ann Smart
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Social Engagement ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Discourse ◽  
Music Journalism ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Giacomo Leopardi

Giacomo Leopardi was convinced that the willingness of Italians to wallow passively in operatic spectacle was an important reason for Italy's lack of a civil society based on debate and the exchange of opinions. Despite recent proposals that opera and opera going constituted signiªcant means of social engagement and contributed to regional and/or national identity, the preoccupations of early nineteenth-century music journalism suggest that opera existed outside the mainstream of both political and aesthetic debate, and was not yet the subject of a truly vibrant national discourse.

Politics and the Military, 1790–1832

2019 ◽  
pp. 12-27
Author(s):  
Nick Mansfield
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Military ◽  
Political Radicalism

This chapter reviews the involvement of soldiers in conventional politics in the early nineteenth century. In contrast to the leeway which allowed officers to be involved in politics (both as voters and MPs), the rank and file were discouraged from taking part. It outlines military policies of Whigs and Tories in the early nineteenth century and profiles key individual officers. It discusses the emergent influence of political radicalism on both parties, with some Whig officers embracing the concept, in contrast to Tory anathema.

Egypt’s Coptic Museum: From Patriarchal to National

2020 ◽  
pp. 181-204
Author(s):  
Dina Ishak Bakhoum
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Public Domain ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Religious Nature ◽  
Egyptian History

This chapter traces the most significant episodes of the Coptic Museum’s history and argues that the museum was not founded as a ‘minority’ museum but rather as an archaeological museum holding valuable religious Coptic art. Its foundation aimed at demonstrating that Coptic material culture had equivalent value in Egyptian history to Pharaonic, Greco-Roman and Islamic arts, which in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries already had their own museums. Unlike other museums, however, the Coptic Museum was established under the aegis of the Patriarch, giving it an unconventional status within Egyptian heritage owing to the religious nature of its initial collection. The essay presents the museum’s foundation during the early nineteenth century and discusses the context of its nationalization and transformation into a public domain museum (1931) as well as its expansion (1947).

German Neo-Pietism and the Formation of National Identity

2019 ◽  
Vol 88 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-119
Author(s):  
Doron Avraham
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religious Devotion ◽  
Alternative Meaning ◽  
Christian Conservatives ◽  
Prevailing View

In the early nineteenth century, a neo-Pietist circle of awakened Protestants emerged in Prussia and other German lands. Disturbed by the consequences of the French Revolution, the ensuing reforms and the rising national movement, these neo-Pietists—among them noble estate owners, theologians, and other scholars—tried to introduce an alternative meaning for the alliance between state and religion. Drawing on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pietist traditions, neo-Pietists fused their keen religious devotion with newly constructed conservative ideals, thus rehabilitating the legitimacy of political authority while investing the people's confession with additional meaning. At the same time, and through the same pietistic source of inspiration, conservative neo-Pietists forged their own understanding of national identity: its origins, values, and implications. In this regard, and against the prevailing view of the antagonist stance taken by Christian conservatives toward nationalism in the first half on the nineteenth century, this article argues for the consolidation of certain concepts of German national identity within Christian conservatism.

Black Erased

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathy M. Milazzo
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Construction Of Identity

One of flamenco’s many palos, or forms, is the tango, which was transported as the tango de negros or tangos de Americas from Cuba to Spain in the mid-nineteenth century. There, it was transformed into the tango de gitanos and the tango flamenco, an action which disassociated it from its Africanist roots. In order to illustrate the consequences of omitting negro references to the tango in flamenco narratives, this chapter addresses the mechanisms of myth-making in the construction of identity as the Cuban tango was appropriated and subsumed into the flamenco repertoire. This chapter argues that despite the open acknowledgement of negro influences in southern Spanish dance in the early nineteenth century, negotiations during the development of Spain’s national identity affected the eventual denial of the tango as “negro” because concepts of negro were less valued as imperial commodities in Romantic discourses.

The Way of Napoleon: The Uniformisation of Esprit de Corps in Early Nineteenth-Century France

Ensemblance ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 112-139
Author(s):  
Luis de Miranda
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Similar Model ◽  
French Society ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
National System ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
The Military

After 1800, esprit de corps was often nationally manufactured, and Napoleon was its first engineer. French society became a reflection of the military. This chapter shows how the Bonapartists succeeded in building a national system of rewards and interdependent privileged corps in which ‘esprit de corps’ was encouraged according to a military model of general agonism. The transformation of the organisation of labour, of the army, and of education after the French Revolution is narrated. This chapter is essential to understand not only today’s France, but also most nation-states, functioning more or less under a similar model. The author also analyses the decline of labour communities and their form of belonging since the eighteenth century. The Revolutiondiscredited the esprit de corporation, and capitalist merchants were often thankful for the republican defence of more competitive and less-regulated entrepreneurship.

“Not Altogether Ridiculous”

2021 ◽  
Vol 155 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-54
Author(s):  
SJ Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Victor Hugo ◽  
William Wells Brown ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial Authority ◽  
Martin Delany ◽  
Military Uniform ◽  
The Military

Spanning a long literary history, from 1742 to 1934, this essay argues for the military epaulette as an important material signifier through which the arbitrary nature of rank and colonial authority was revealed and challenged. This essay connects the anxieties attending the introduction of epaulettes in newly nationalized European armies to the historical and rhetorical impact of such uniforms on depictions of so-called Black chiefs, including Toussaint Louverture, Lamour Derance, and Nat Turner. In the context of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century slave revolts and imperial and colonial war fronts, this otherwise semiotic feature of the military uniform was a catalyst for a particular kind of confrontation over authority of signification in the tug-of-war between rank and race. This essay tracks a consistent rhetoric of violence and ridicule in these confrontations as they appear in histories, novels, and plays. In the work of Walter Scott, Victor Hugo, William Wells Brown, and Martin Delany, attempts to read epaulettes produce a violent form of colonial desire that is only permitted when couched in the rhetoric of ridicule and the ridiculous. The essay’s final pages turn to the first half of the twentieth century, when the still violent stakes of subverting the uniform persist through an ambivalence stemming from the literal and figural “costuming” of the Black chief.

Prince Adam Czartoryski as a liminal figure in the development of modern nationalism in Eastern Europe at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

2010 ◽  
Vol 38 (5) ◽  
pp. 647-669
Author(s):  
Paul Brykczynski
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Foreign Minister ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Imperial Russia ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries

In Polish history, Prince Adam Czartoryski is almost universally regarded as one of the most important Polish statesmen and patriots of the first half of the nineteenth century. In Russian history, on the other hand, he is remembered chiefly as the Foreign Minister of the Russian Empire, and a close personal friend of Tsar Alexander I. How did Czartoryski reconcile his commitment to the Polish nation with his service to the Russian Empire (a state which occupied most of Poland)? This paper will attempt to place Prince Adam's friendship with Alexander, and his service to Imperial Russia, in the broader context of national identity formation in early nineteenth-century eastern Europe. It will be argued that the idea of finding a workable relationship between Poland and Russia, even within the framework of a single state for a “Slavic nation,” was an important and forgotten feature of Polish political thought at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By answering the question of precisely how Czartoryski was able to negotiate between the identities of a “Polish patriot” and “Russian statesman,” the paper will shed light on the broader development of national identity in early nineteenth-century Poland and Russia.

D.176: Sextants, numbers, and the Hydrographic Office of the Admiralty

2017 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
pp. 431-456 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Barford
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Public Service ◽  
Museum Collections ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Bureaucratic Organization ◽  
Hierarchical Order ◽  
Hydrographic Surveying

In the 1830s and 1840s, the Hydrographic Office of the British Admiralty developed and oversaw one of the major state-run surveying projects of the nineteenth century. This involved a range of instruments whose circulation was increasingly regulated. Using extant museum collections and the correspondence of those involved, this article explores how such objects can be used to discuss both bureaucratic organization at a time of expanding government and the complex issues of sociability involved in hydrographic surveying. Surveying officers worked in a context in which the propriety of property on public service was a pervasive question. Instruments might be given as gifts between officers, appropriated as recompense, absorbed as state property, and disputed between friends. The ownership, provision, and treatment of instruments in particular could be used to demonstrate an officer’s peculiar zeal or institutional neglect. To those outside the ship, what was understood as over-instrumentation became amusing spectacle. On board, their use was part of a deeply hierarchical order of work in regions of colonial and mercantile importance. In examining the relationships around these instruments of survey, the paper proposes a richer understanding of the material culture of hydrography in the early nineteenth century.

A West African Cavalry State: the Kingdom of Oyo

1975 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Law
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Economic Burden ◽  
West African ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Considerable Evidence ◽  
Central Sudan ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
The Military

Following an earlier article in this Journal, by Humphrey Fisher, dealing with the role of the horse in the Central Sudan, this article considers the role of cavalry in the kingdom of Oyo. It is suggested that the use of cavalry may have been adopted by Oyo during the sixteenth century. Oyo never became self-sufficient in horses, but remained dependent for its horses upon importation from the Central Sudan, while local mortality from trypanosomiasis was considerable. Evidence relating to the operations of Oyo armies supports the view that cavalry was of substantial military value, while at the same time illustrating the limitations of the military efficacy of cavalry. The acquisition and maintenance of large numbers of horses represented a considerable economic burden for Oyo, and the high cost of maintaining a large cavalry force may have inhibited the establishment of a royal autocracy in Oyo. The decline of the cavalry strength of Oyo in the early nineteenth century was due, it is suggested, to economic difficulties.

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