Fighting Unfair Competition: The Bamberger Riot and the Emergence of Hire Purchase in Switzerland around 1900

2018 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 194-217
Author(s):  
Matthias Ruoss
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Economic Rationality ◽  
Industrialized Countries ◽  
The West ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Great War ◽  
Market Ethic

Abstract Hire purchase is today one of the most popular modes of consumer finance worldwide, yet it is still in many ways stigmatized and controversial. In this respect, nothing much has changed since the late nineteenth century, when this new way of selling goods spread through the industrialized countries of the West. How unacceptable it was, Louis Bamberger—a pioneer of hire purchase in Switzerland—found out the hard way. In 1883, only months after the opening of his department store in St. Gallen, hundreds of angry people gathered in front of it and started smashing windows and looting. Beginning with this incident, which came to be known as the Bamberger Riot, this article traces the history of hire purchase and the controversy around it in Switzerland before the Great War. Focusing mainly on artisans and shopkeepers, I argue that the sudden emergence of hire purchase in Switzerland fundamentally challenged the market ethic and economic rationality of this section of the urban middle class.

Zen Art before Nothingness

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory P. A. Levine
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The West ◽  
Intercultural Encounters ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Chapter One describes the uncertain beginnings of Zen and Zen art within modern intercultural encounters between Japan and Europe and North America. The representations and perceptions of Zen in the West arising from initial contacts in the sixteenth century and thereafter from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth were not uniform with what we discover from the 1920s and 1930s onward, and certainly not identical to those of the postwar Zen boom. As a genealogical sketch, this history of Zen art before “Zen art,” suggests a sensibility of ambivalence or nascent interest during the mid-to-late nineteenth century leading to one of infatuation in the early twentieth, at which time there emerged a range of geo-political conditions and a group of active Zen campaigners promoting the formation of a specifically differentiated and instrumentalized Zen and Zen art.

Business Groups in the West: Origins, Evolution, and Resilience

2019 ◽  
Vol 93 (3) ◽  
pp. 599-609 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mira Wilkins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Business Groups ◽  
Organizational Structures ◽  
Business Group ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The West ◽  
New Horizons ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This is an important book. For business historians writing about the late nineteenth century to the present, it offers a kaleidoscope of ways to study the history of the forms and organizational structures of modern big business. Its handle for doing so is the business group. The book is a sequel to Asli Colpan, Takashi Hikino, and James Lincoln's edited, pathbreaking Oxford University Press volume published in 2010 and entitled The Oxford Handbook of Business Groups. The latter opened up new horizons.

scholarly journals Modernizing Childbirth in Colonial Bengal: A History of Institutionalization and Professionalization of Midwifery, c.1860-1947

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Ambalika Guha
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
National Development ◽  
Women's Magazines ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The West ◽  
Medical College ◽  
Medical Discipline ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Birthing Practices

<p>In colonial India, medicalization of childbirth has been historically perceived as an attempt to ‘sanitise’ the zenana (secluded quarters of a respectable household inhabited by women) as the chief site of birthing practices and to replace the dhais (traditional birth attendants ) with trained midwives and qualified female doctors. This thesis has taken a broader view of the subject but in doing so, focusses on Bengal as the geographical area of study. It has argued that medicalization of childbirth in Bengal was preceded by the reconstitution of midwifery as an academic subject and a medical discipline at the Calcutta Medical College. The consequence was the gradual ascendancy of professionalized obstetrics that prioritised research, surgical intervention and ‘surveillance’ over women’s bodies. The thesis also shows how the medicalization of childbirth was supported by the reformist and nationalist discourses of the middle-class Bengalis in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  The thesis begins from the 1860s when the earliest scientific essays on childbirth and pregnancy began to appear in Bengali women’s magazines such as Bamabodhini Patrika. It ends in the 1940s, when nationalism profoundly influenced the professionalization of obstetrics - midwifery being perceived as the keystone in a nation’s progress.  Bengal being the earliest seat of British power in India it was also the first to experience contact with the western civilization, culture and thought. It also had the most elaborate medical establishment along western medical lines since the foundation of the Calcutta Medical College in 1835. It is argued in the extant literature that unlike the West where professionalized obstetrics was characterised as essentially a male domain, the evolving professional domain of obstetrics in Bengal was dominated by female doctors alone. Questioning that argument, the thesis demonstrates that the domain of obstetrics in Bengal was since the 1880s shared by both female and male doctors, although the role of the latter was more pedagogic and ideological than being directly interventionist. Together they contributed to the evolution of a new medical discourse on childbirth in colonial Bengal.  The thesis shows how the late nineteenth century initiatives to reform birthing practices were essentially a modernist response of the western educated colonized middle class to the colonial critique of Indian socio-cultural codes that also included an explicit reference to the ‘low’ status of Bengali women. Reforming midwifery constituted one of the ways of modernizing the middle class women as mothers. In the twentieth century, the argument for medicalization was further driven by nationalist recognition of family and health as important elements of the nation building process. It also drew sustenance from international movements, such as the global eugenic discourse on the centrality of ‘racial regeneration’ in national development, and the maternal and infant welfare movement in England and elsewhere in the inter-war years. The thesis provides a historical analysis of how institutionalization of midwifery was shaped by the debates on women’s question, nationalism and colonial public health policies, all intersecting with each other in Bengal in the inter-war years.  The thesis has drawn upon a number of Bengali women’s magazines, popular health magazines, and professional medical journals in English and Bengali that represent both nationalist and official viewpoints on the medicalization of childbirth and maternal and infant health. It has also used annual reports of the medical institutions to chart the history of institutionalization of midwifery and draws upon archival sources - the medical and educational proceedings in particular - in the West Bengal State Archives and the National Archives of India.</p>

scholarly journals Modernizing Childbirth in Colonial Bengal: A History of Institutionalization and Professionalization of Midwifery, c.1860-1947

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Ambalika Guha
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
National Development ◽  
Women's Magazines ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The West ◽  
Medical College ◽  
Medical Discipline ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Birthing Practices

<p>In colonial India, medicalization of childbirth has been historically perceived as an attempt to ‘sanitise’ the zenana (secluded quarters of a respectable household inhabited by women) as the chief site of birthing practices and to replace the dhais (traditional birth attendants ) with trained midwives and qualified female doctors. This thesis has taken a broader view of the subject but in doing so, focusses on Bengal as the geographical area of study. It has argued that medicalization of childbirth in Bengal was preceded by the reconstitution of midwifery as an academic subject and a medical discipline at the Calcutta Medical College. The consequence was the gradual ascendancy of professionalized obstetrics that prioritised research, surgical intervention and ‘surveillance’ over women’s bodies. The thesis also shows how the medicalization of childbirth was supported by the reformist and nationalist discourses of the middle-class Bengalis in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  The thesis begins from the 1860s when the earliest scientific essays on childbirth and pregnancy began to appear in Bengali women’s magazines such as Bamabodhini Patrika. It ends in the 1940s, when nationalism profoundly influenced the professionalization of obstetrics - midwifery being perceived as the keystone in a nation’s progress.  Bengal being the earliest seat of British power in India it was also the first to experience contact with the western civilization, culture and thought. It also had the most elaborate medical establishment along western medical lines since the foundation of the Calcutta Medical College in 1835. It is argued in the extant literature that unlike the West where professionalized obstetrics was characterised as essentially a male domain, the evolving professional domain of obstetrics in Bengal was dominated by female doctors alone. Questioning that argument, the thesis demonstrates that the domain of obstetrics in Bengal was since the 1880s shared by both female and male doctors, although the role of the latter was more pedagogic and ideological than being directly interventionist. Together they contributed to the evolution of a new medical discourse on childbirth in colonial Bengal.  The thesis shows how the late nineteenth century initiatives to reform birthing practices were essentially a modernist response of the western educated colonized middle class to the colonial critique of Indian socio-cultural codes that also included an explicit reference to the ‘low’ status of Bengali women. Reforming midwifery constituted one of the ways of modernizing the middle class women as mothers. In the twentieth century, the argument for medicalization was further driven by nationalist recognition of family and health as important elements of the nation building process. It also drew sustenance from international movements, such as the global eugenic discourse on the centrality of ‘racial regeneration’ in national development, and the maternal and infant welfare movement in England and elsewhere in the inter-war years. The thesis provides a historical analysis of how institutionalization of midwifery was shaped by the debates on women’s question, nationalism and colonial public health policies, all intersecting with each other in Bengal in the inter-war years.  The thesis has drawn upon a number of Bengali women’s magazines, popular health magazines, and professional medical journals in English and Bengali that represent both nationalist and official viewpoints on the medicalization of childbirth and maternal and infant health. It has also used annual reports of the medical institutions to chart the history of institutionalization of midwifery and draws upon archival sources - the medical and educational proceedings in particular - in the West Bengal State Archives and the National Archives of India.</p>

Contents of Western Sociology of Religion as a Science and Educational Discipline

2002 ◽  
pp. 106-110
Author(s):  
Liudmyla O. Fylypovych
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
International Society ◽  
Sociology Of Religion ◽  
Scientific Study ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The West ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Sociology of religion in the West is a field of knowledge with at least 100 years of history. As a science and as a discipline, the sociology of religion has been developing in most Western universities since the late nineteenth century, having established traditions, forming well-known schools, areas related to the names of famous scholars. The total number of researchers of religion abroad has never been counted, but there are more than a thousand different centers, universities, colleges where religion is taught and studied. If we assume that each of them has an average of 10 religious scholars, theologians, then the army of scholars of religion is amazing. Most of them are united in representative associations of researchers of religion, which have a clear sociological color. Among them are the most famous International Society for the Sociology of Religion (ISSR) and the Society for Scientific Study of Religion (SSSR).

The Modernities of H. Lawrence Freeman

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 719-779
Author(s):  
David Gutkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
White Press ◽  
Grand Opera

H. Lawrence Freeman's “Negro Jazz Grand Opera,” Voodoo, was premiered in 1928 in Manhattan's Broadway district. Its reception bespoke competing, racially charged values that underpinned the idea of the “modern” in the 1920s. The white press critiqued the opera for its allegedly anxiety-ridden indebtedness to nineteenth-century European conventions, while the black press hailed it as the pathbreaking work of a “pioneer composer.” Taking the reception history of Voodoo as a starting point, this article shows how Freeman's lifelong project, the creation of what he would call “Negro Grand Opera,” mediated between disparate and sometimes apparently irreconcilable figurations of the modern that spanned the late nineteenth century through the interwar years: Wagnerism, uplift ideology, primitivism, and popular music (including, but not limited to, jazz). I focus on Freeman's inheritance of a worldview that could be called progressivist, evolutionist, or, to borrow a term from Wilson Moses, civilizationist. I then trace the complex relationship between this mode of imagining modernity and subsequent versions of modernism that Freeman engaged with during the first decades of the twentieth century. Through readings of Freeman's aesthetic manifestos and his stylistically syncretic musical corpus I show how ideas about race inflected the process by which the qualitatively modern slips out of joint with temporal modernity. The most substantial musical analysis examines leitmotivic transformations that play out across Freeman's jazz opera American Romance (1924–29): lions become subways; Mississippi becomes New York; and jazz, like modernity itself, keeps metamorphosing. A concluding section considers a broader set of questions concerning the historiography of modernism and modernity.

Theodore H. Friedgut, Stepmother Russia, Foster Mother America: Identity Transitions in the New Odessa Jewish Commune, Odessa, Oregon, New York, 1881–1891, together with Israel Mandelkern, Recollections of a Communist (ed. and annotated Theodore H. Friedgut). Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2014. 199 pp.

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Life Experience ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Foster Mother ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Identity Transitions ◽  
Israeli Kibbutz

This chapter reviews the book Stepmother Russia, Foster Mother America: Identity Transitions in the New Odessa Jewish Commune, Odessa, Oregon, New York, 1881–1891 (2014), by Theodore H. Friedgut, together with Israel Mandelkern, Recollections of a Communist (edited and annotated by Theodore H. Friedgut). Stepmother Russia, Foster Mother America is a two-in-one volume that explores an obscure episode in the history of the Jews in the late nineteenth century while at the same time connecting much of its content to the author’s own life experience as a son of western Canada’s Jewish farming colonies and, later, as an ideologically driven halutz on an Israeli kibbutz. Stepmother Russia, Foster Mother America retells one branch of the mostly forgotten history of the Am Olam agricultural movement and brings a new layer into the discussion of global Jewish agrarianism, while Recollections of a Communist offers an edited and annotated version of a memoir written by Mandelkern.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nurit Yaari
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
The Political ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
The Past ◽  
Future State ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
State Of Israel

This chapter examines the lack of continuous tradition of the art of the theatre in the history of Jewish culture. Theatre as art and institution was forbidden for Jews during most of their history, and although there were plays written in different times and places during the past centuries, no tradition of theatre evolved in Jewish culture until the middle of the nineteenth century. In view of this absence, the author discusses the genesis of Jewish theatre in Eastern Europe and in Eretz-Yisrael (The Land of Israel) since the late nineteenth century, encouraged by the Jewish Enlightenment movement, the emergence of Jewish nationalism, and the rebirth of Hebrew as a language of everyday life. Finally, the chapter traces the development of parallel strands of theatre that preceded the Israeli theatre and shadowed the emergence of the political infrastructure of the future State of Israel.

Schopenhauer’s Pessimism in Context

2020 ◽  
pp. 283-298
Author(s):  
Mark Migotti
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Flourishing ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

In this chapter, the author attempts to establish what is philosophically living and what is philosophically dead in Schopenhauer’s pessimism. Against the background of the intriguing the history of the terms “optimism” and “pessimism”—in debates about Leibniz’s theodicy in the early eighteenth century and the popularity of Schopenhauer in the late nineteenth century, respectively—the author points up the distinction between affirming life, which all living beings do naturally, and subscribing to philosophical optimism (or pessimism), which is possible only for reflective beings like us. Next, the author notes the significance of Schopenhauer’s claim that optimism is a necessary condition of theism and explains its bearing on his pessimistic argument for the moral unacceptability of suicide. The chapter concludes that Schopenhauer’s case for pessimism is not conclusive, but instructive; his dim view of the prospects for leading a truly rewarding, worthwhile human life draws vivid attention to important questions about how and to what degree an atheistic world can nevertheless be conducive to human flourishing.

Police Records

2019 ◽  
pp. 797-819
Author(s):  
Cristina Vatulescu
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Media History ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Police Records ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter approaches police records as a genre that gains from being considered in its relationships with other genres of writing. In particular, we will follow its long-standing relationship to detective fiction, the novel, and biography. Going further, the chapter emphasizes the intermedia character of police records not just in our time but also throughout their existence, indeed from their very origins. This approach opens to a more inclusive media history of police files. We will start with an analysis of the seminal late nineteenth-century French manuals prescribing the writing of a police file, the famous Bertillon-method manuals. We will then track their influence following their adoption nationally and internationally, with particular attention to the politics of their adoption in the colonies. We will also touch briefly on the relationship of early policing to other disciplines, such as anthropology and statistics, before moving to a closer look at its intersections with photography and literature.

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