The People Are King

Author(s):  
S. Elizabeth Penry

The People Are King traces the transformation of Andean communities under Inca and Spanish rule. The sixteenth-century Spanish resettlement policy known as reducción was pivotal to this transformation. Modeled on the Spanish ideal of república (self-government within planned towns) and shared sovereignty with their monarch, Spaniards in the Viceroyalty of Peru forced Andeans into resettlement towns. Andeans turned the tables on forced resettlement by making the towns their own and the center of their social, political, and religious lives. Andeans made a coherent life for themselves in a complex process of ethnogenesis that blended preconquest ways of life (the ayllu) with the imposed institutions of town life and Christian religious practices. Within these towns, Andeans claimed the right to self-government, and increasingly regarded their native lords, the caciques, as tyrants. A series of microhistorical accounts in these repúblicas reveals that Andeans believed that commoner people, collectively called the común, could rule themselves. With both Andean and Spanish antecedents, this political philosophy of radical democracy was key to the Great Rebellion of the late eighteenth century. Rather than focusing on well-known leaders such as Tupac Amaru, this book demonstrates through commoner rebels’ holographic letters that it was commoner Andean people who made the late eighteenth-century a revolutionary moment by asserting their rights to self-government. In the final chapter the book follows the commoner-lead towns of the Andes from the era of independence into the present day of the Plurinational State of Bolivia.

1964 ◽  
Vol 14 (53) ◽  
pp. 20-38
Author(s):  
J.C. Beckett

Few periods of Irish history have been more extensively written about than the later eighteenth century: a mere list of books and papers dealing with the Volunteer movement, ‘Grattan's parliament’, the insurrection of 1798 and the legislative union of 1800 would make up a moderate-sized volume. Most of these writings are concerned, directly or indirectly, with the constitutional relationship between Ireland and Great Britain. Indeed, it might be said that this relationship is the basic theme in the Irish history of the period, even for social and economic historians; and the pattern is so well-established that it may well seem rash to assume that it can be substantially modified, or even made significantly clearer, except, perhaps, by the production of new and hitherto unsuspected evidence. Yet there is something to be said for looking again at the whole subject on the basis of our existing knowledge, not simply, as Irish historians are inclined to do, from the standpoint of Ireland, nor yet as if events in Ireland were a mere appendage to British history, but rather, as Professor Butterfield has done for one brief period in his George III, Lord North and the people, to consider Anglo-Irish constitutional relations during the late eighteenth century as part of the general political history of the British Isles.


Romantik ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 129
Author(s):  
Jennifer Wawrzinek

<p>In the summer of 1795, when Mary Wollstonecraft journeyed to Scandinavia, she was disillusioned with human society and the possibility of meaningful relation with others. She had recently been in Paris, where she had seen many of her moderate revolutionary friends executed under Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, and by the time of her arrival in Scandinavia her unsatisfactory relationship with Gilbert Imlay was coming to an end. The book that resulted from this journey, A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, is remarkable for its critique of sovereignty and the reification of difference inherent to the construction of national borders and the drives of commercial exchange. The article argues that Wollstonecraft insists upon openness to the people and cultures she encounters through configuring epistemology as a twin process of experiential contact and sceptical inquiry. This a process that remains inherently and necessarily ethical because it resists the structures of tyranny, domination, and control, which Wollstonecraft perceives to be afflicting late-eighteenth-century Europe, whilst simultaneously allowing for a re-conception of politics and justice according to the demands both of the present and the not-yet-formalised future.</p>


2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 537-553
Author(s):  
Stéphanie Roza

Abstract This article examines the conception of social rights found in the writings of François-Noël Babeuf in the late eighteenth century and those of his followers, the neo-Babouvists, in the first half of the nineteenth. Both believed that social rights were to be based on natural needs, which they categorized as physical and moral: while physical needs necessitated the right to subsistence, moral needs encompassed the right to education. Babeuf and the neo-Babouvists also believed that social rights were inseparable from principles of equality and the reciprocity of rights and duties among society’s members. The neo-Babouvists developed this notion of reciprocity into the view that labour laws and the right to work constituted the legitimate and reciprocal counterparts of the property rights of employers. This balancing of property rights and workers’ rights was to be provisional, however, pending the transformation of society towards a community of goods.


2019 ◽  
pp. 263-288
Author(s):  
Lawrence M. Friedman

This chapter discusses the history of American criminal law, covering penal law and penal reform, prison, and tort. The criminal law is an important lever of power, for any government. The leaders of the American Revolution felt strongly that the British were trampling on American rights and were abusing criminal justice. The right to a fair criminal trial was a fundamental right, in their eyes. The Bill of Rights was a kind of minicode of criminal procedure. Moreover, in the late eighteenth century, scholars were rethinking the premises on which criminal law rested. Great reformers called for a more enlightened system of criminal law.


2011 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Inés Valdez

Can Kantian cosmopolitanism contribute to normative approaches to immigration? Kant developed the universal right to hospitality in the context of late eighteenth-century colonialism. He claimed that non-European countries had a sovereign right over their territory and the conditions of foreigners' visits. This sovereign prerogative limited visitors' right to hospitality. The interconnected and complementary system of right he devised is influential today, but this article argues that maintaining the complementarity of the three realms involves reconsidering its application to contemporary immigration. It situates Kant's Perpetual Peace within the context of debates about conquest and colonialism and argues that Kant's strict conception of sovereignty is justified by his concern in maintaining a realm of sovereignty that is complementary with cosmopolitanism and his prioritization of mutual agreements in each of the realms, particularly in a context of international power asymmetry. In Kant's time, European powers appropriated cosmopolitan discourses to defend their right to visit other countries and it was necessary to strengthen non-Europeans' sovereign claims. The strength and hostility of the visitors made limited hospitality and strong sovereignty act in tandem to keep away conquerors, expanding cosmopolitanism. Today, individuals from poor countries migrate to wealthier ones where they are subject to a sovereign authority that excludes them. Sovereignty and cosmopolitanism no longer work complementarily, but rather strengthen powerful state actors vis-à-vis non-citizens subject to unilateral rule. Maintaining the pre-eminence of the right to freedom, the article suggests that only through the creation of ‘cosmopolitan spaces' of politics can we reproduce today the complementarity that Kant envisioned.


2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 427-444
Author(s):  
Trevor Herbert

The role and importance of military musicians changed and intensified in the late eighteenth century through two important processes. The first was the culture of display that took root in both the home-based army and units in the colonies. The second was the result of successive militia acts which effectively ensured that military units with bands would be systematically placed in every corner of the British Isles.It became evident that music as a component of military display served an important diplomatic purpose. Music performed in public spaces was heard by a population deeply sceptical of the army and with an essentially local sense of identity. The experience of the sight and sound of military music raised entirely new perceptions of nation and of the state as a benign power.Two important and related themes emerge here. The first is the historical process that led, almost accidentally, to a realization that music as part of military display had potential to influence populations across the country and in the colonies. The second, more challenging, theme concerns the nature of the evidence for this idea and how it is to be treated. It is an idea that is totally convincing if the experience of hearing and seeing military spectacle by the mass of the people can be shown to have had impact. What is the evidence of listening to music by those people at whom it was targeted, how robust is it and what can be made of it?


Author(s):  
Paul Keen

AbstractThis essay explores the ways that Herbert Croft’s ultimately unsuccessful literary career epitomized the late eighteenth-century world of struggling authors, pursuing their fortune along whatever paths seemed to be the most promising or, failing that, most available, across a far broader range of genres than we normally acknowledge in our accounts of professional authorship in this period. It explores Croft’s failed plans to produce what theGentleman’s Magazinecalled the “Oxford Dictionary of the English Language,” but also on his considerable efforts to promote this and other literary projects. The second half of the essay focuses on Croft’sLetter to the Right Honourable William Pitt, which was printed in early March, 1788, at the end of a trip to London, and which was intended to generate support for his dictionary project. If theLetter to Pittwas remarkable for the dexterity with which Croft aligned his argument for the importance of a particular form literary professionalism with a set of related assumptions about the connections between public virtue and the national good, its many tensions foregrounded some of the paradoxes that were implicit in this process. Like many of the newspaper ads for his other works, theLetter to Pittoffers a compelling example of the extent to which Croft’s promotional efforts resulted in more intriguing literary texts than the works they were intended to promote.


2011 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 20
Author(s):  
Anna Cullhed

Bengt Lidner's poem &lsquo;Ode to the Finnish Soldier' from 1788 was written during the Swedish war with Russia. This paper argues that Lidner took part in Gustav III's staging of the war by accusing the officers of the so-called Anjala league of treachery, and at the same time turning to &lsquo;the people' for support. &lsquo;The people' were defined as subjects of the Swedish crown from the core parts of the realm, today's Finland and Sweden, irrespective of language or ethnicity, but sharing a common and glorious history. Lidner combines a cosmopolitan perspective with a patriotic tendency in his poem. Some of the central concepts of the ode, such as &lsquo;citizen' and &lsquo;citizen-ness', carry potentially republican and egalitarian connotations, but this tendency is counteracted by the poet's obvious praise of the king. Lidner's ode stands as an example of the ambivalent use of political concepts during the late eighteenth century, the very concepts that would transform into the key concepts of nineteenth-century nationalism.


1965 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 23-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. M. L. Thompson

In every generation since the pace of economic and social change began to accelerate in the late-eighteenth century the wildest hopes, aspirations and fears of the previous generation have been realized. The revolutionary prospect of heeding the will of the people in the 1790's became the conservative measure of 1832. The terrifying demands of the Chartists were well on the way to enactment by 1885, and with the payment of M.P.s in 1911 were substantially achieved, apart from the silliest of all the demands, that for annual parliaments.


1989 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 311-324 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Ross

In a book in which he gave an account of the reign of Tegbesu (1740-1774), Robert Norris, the late eighteenth-century slave trader historian of Dahomey, included a brief sketch of the career of Tegbesu's father, Agaja (1718-1740), the conqueror of Allada and Whydah. Norris portrayed Agaja as a nation-builder who brought the Dahomeans and the people of Allada and Whydah, “the conquerors and the conquered,” to think of themselves as “one people.” The author claimed that Agaja saw to it after the conquest that “every part of his dominions became replenished with people.” He also argued that Agaja's new subjects were so pleased with his policy of reconciliation that they made no “efforts to regain their independence.”Norris' account of Agaja has been very influential, especially since the 1960s when I. A. Akinjogbin not only endorsed it but added both that Dahomey was founded by a group of patriotic anti-slave trade Aja and that post-1740 Dahomey was a European-like nation state. Norris' argument, as embellished by Akinjogbin, was reproduced in a number of authoritative 1970s works and appears to have retained its appeal even though Akinjogbin's addenda have been shown to be at odds with the evidence. Norris' original thesis nevertheless is just as flawed as Akinjogbin's various supplementary claims. Agaja was far from having been a nation-builder; still less was he a far sighted statesman who saw to it that “every part of his dominions became replenished with people.”


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