To Be a Sikh King

2020 ◽  
pp. 11-42
Author(s):  
Priya Atwal
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Early Years ◽  
The Political ◽  
Scholarly Research ◽  
Intellectual Context ◽  
Changing World

This chapter provides a sense of the political, cultural and intellectual context in which Ranjit Singh was able to claim the title of ‘Maharajah’. It examines the development of ‘Sikh’ ideas about monarchy, power and rulership that first emerged within the earliest writings of the first Sikh ‘master’, Guru Nanak, in the fifteenth century; whilst considering how attempts to practically interpret and set into action such ideas also evolved within the changing world of the Punjab, leading up to the early years of Ranjit Singh’s reign. This chapter draws upon recent scholarly research that has re-evaluated the dynamics between the Sikhs and the Mughal imperial dynasty, and about the emergence of the Khalsa and Sikh sardars as powers in their own right across eighteenth-century Punjab: studies that casts doubt on earlier scholarly contentions about the ‘republican’ nature of the Khalsa. It thereby aims to outline ideas of Sikh kingship that may have inspired and legitimised Ranjit Singh’s rise to power as a self-styled monarch by the turn of the nineteenth century.

The Wasteland of William Blake

1947 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-204
Author(s):  
Frank O'Malley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
William Blake ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern Mind ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future

The question is: how can you put a prophet in his place when, by the very character of prophecy, he is eternally slipping out of place? William Blake was not an eighteenth century or nineteenth century mind or a typically modern mind at all. What I mean to say, right at the start, is that, although well aware of his time and of time altogether, he was not in tune with the main tendencies of his or our own time. Indeed time was a barrier he was forever crashing against. Blake's talent raved through the world into the fastnesses of die past and dramatically confronted the abysses of the future. His age did not confine him. As a poet he does not seem finally to have had real spiritual or artistic rinship with any of the rationalist or romantic writers of England. As a thinker he came to despise the inadequacy of the limited revolutionary effort of the political rebels of the Romantic Revolution. Blake's name is not to be seen mounted first with that of Paine or Godwin, of Rousseau or Voltaire, of Wordsworth or Shelley or Byron or Keats. With these he has, ultimately, little or nothing in common. At any rate, his voice and mood and impact are thoroughly different from the more publicly successful voices of the period of his life, older and younger generations alike.

The Luso-Brazilian Enlightenment: Between Reform and Revolution

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alice Soares Guimarães
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Absolute Power ◽  
Portuguese Empire ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Political Form

This chapter examines transformations of state–society relations in eighteenth-century Portugal in relation to Enlightened political debates of the time. It also explores how these transformations shaped the relations between Portugal and Brazil in the nineteenth century, the debate about the political form of independent Brazil, and the intra-Brazilian struggles over this form before and after independence. More importantly, it challenges the notion that the Enlightenment was absent from the Portuguese Empire as a result of the rejection of modern ideas by conservative world views and projects. It argues that there was a Luso-Brazilian Enlightenment that was plural and eclectic, supporting both critiques and defences of the absolute power of the king, endorsing simultaneously a secularisation process, the promotion of reason and Roman Catholicism, and fostering not only revolutionary projects but also conservative state reforms.

Introduction

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. C. Smout
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
The People ◽  
Short Run ◽  
Political Scene ◽  
The Way

This book presents an overview of the first six decades of the Union of the Crowns. It also provides a picture of the uses to which judicial torture was put after 1660 and a summary of the straits in which Scotland found itself in the opening years of the eighteenth century. It then explores the problems which union posed to maritime lawyers of both nations, the dark reception that the Scots received in eighteenth-century England, and the way Enlightenment Scotland viewed the British unions. It examines the ambitions of Scottish élites in India, the frame for radical cooperation in the age of the Friends of the People and later, and the background for the sojourn of Thomas and Jane Carlyle in London. It finally outlined the Anglo-Scottish relations on the political scene in the nineteenth century. The parliamentary union did little in the short run for Anglo-Scottish relations. It is shown that Scots are indeed worried and worry a lot about Anglo-Scottish relations, but the English worried and worry about them hardly at all, except in times of exceptional crisis, as in 1638–54, 1703–7, 1745–7 and perhaps much later in the 1970s after oil had been discovered.

Little Shell II’s World

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith Richotte
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Environment ◽  
The Future ◽  
To Come ◽  
Changing World

Chapter two describes the early treaty and social history that defined the political stakes for the Plains Ojibwe and Métis into the future. This discussion includes a number of various treaties and their contexts that eventually came to define the boundaries of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. Focusing primarily on the middle third of the nineteenth century, this chapter also demonstrates the growing colonial impositions that Plains Ojibwe and Métis were beginning to face in a rapidly changing world. The political environment that set the stage for the rest of what was to come was built in this time.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-147
Author(s):  
Stephen Menn ◽  
Justin E. H. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Medical Philosophy ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
History Of ◽  
Intellectual Context ◽  
Academic Dissertations

The life of Anton Wilhelm Amo is summarized, with close attention to the archival documents that establish key moments in his biography. Next the history of Amo’s reception is considered, from the first summaries of his work in German periodicals during his lifetime, through his legacy in African nationalist thought in the twentieth century. Then the political and intellectual context at Halle is addressed, considering the likely influence on Amo’s work of Halle Pietism, of the local currents of medical philosophy as represented by Friedrich Hoffmann, and of legal thought as represented by Christian Thomasius. The legacy of major early modern philosophers, such as René Descartes and G. W. Leibniz, is also considered, in the aim of understanding how Amo himself might have understood them and how they might have shaped his work. Next a detailed analysis of the conventions of academic dissertations and disputations in early eighteenth-century Germany is provided, in order to better understand how these conventions give shape to Amo’s published works. Finally, ancient and modern debates on action and passion and on sensation are investigated, providing key context for the summary of the principal arguments of Amo’s two treatises, which are summarized in the final section of the introduction.

Jews and the Criminalization of Madness

1999 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Goldberg
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
The Political ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Grey Zone ◽  
Social Type ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Mental Pathology ◽  
Medical Process

Distinctions between delinquency and illness were ill-defined and problematic, as we have seen in the case of the masturbator Johann A. And it was precisely in this vague grey zone between the two that psychiatry was able to insert itself in defining a new mental pathology. The problem of deciphering the difference between delinquency/criminality and madness was further complicated and given a unique twist in the cases of Jewish patients, whose Jewishness (in the eyes of the asylum) was by definition a kind of criminality and immorality. Jewishness, in other words, represented a category of interpretation distinct from illness, one which, in turn, had become highly politicized in the debates about Jewish emancipation since the eighteenth century. Therefore, when race was used to interpret patient behavior, it constituted a form of thinking outside of the medical domain in the strictest sense. In this way, it was potentially at odds with the medical process, and could, as I will show in two case studies, function to prevent the asylum staff from seeing and treating patients as ill. This chapter thus examines the limits of the medicalization of deviancy— the points where, in contrast to the “illnesses” discussed heretofore (male masturbation, nymphomania, and religious madness), medicine pulled back, seeking explanations for the person in a framework outside of the terms of medicine. That extramedical framework drew from long-standing stereotypes of Jews as immoral and criminal; but it also had a more immediate source in a contemporary trope that united Jewishness and criminality in a social type: the jüdischer Gauner (Jewish crook). Such images of Jews had in turn become part of the political arsenal of those opposing Jewish emancipation on the grounds of an incorrigible Jewish “character.” My argument here runs counter to the few historical works on Jews and insanity, which, consistent with the medicalization thesis, have focused exclusively on the conflation of Jewishness and illness in medical theories. In part, this approach derives from their focus on the second half of the nineteenth century, where the conflation was indeed overwhelming, psychiatry and medicine (as well as other human sciences) having become saturated with racial and degeneration theories.

Turning Vanity Fair into The Cœlestial City: England’s Legal Narratives of the Body Politic from Bunyan to Thackeray

Pólemos ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-145
Author(s):  
Matteo Nicolini
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Strong Influence ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
Constitutional History ◽  
Vanity Fair ◽  
Legal Narratives ◽  
English Constitutional History

Abstract The article addresses the different narratives that characterize English constitutional history. It first examines the mainstream narrative, i. e., the retrospective reading of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century constitutional events dispensed by jurists and politicians in an attempt to pack the Establishment Constitution. It then focuses on the alternative legal narratives about the Constitution elaborated during the Civil War and the Restoration. Among them, it ascertains John Bunyan’s impact on the Establishment Constitution. Bunyan was a member of the New Model Army, a radical, and a Puritan who ended up in prison. Despite this background, he exerted a strong influence on Victorian society and on Thackeray’s representation of the body politic. As a consequence, Bunyan entered the political discourse in the first half of the nineteenth century when politicians started to reform English representative institutions, and therefore became part of the Establishment Constitution.

The Political Significance of Religious Wealth in Burmese History: Some Further Thoughts

1980 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 753-769 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor B. Lieberman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
The Political

This article examines the recent assertion by a scholar of Burmese history that extensive landholding by the Buddhist monkhood helped to undermine every dynasty between the ninth and nineteenth century. It argues that religious wealth, possibly before the fifteenth century and certainly after that period, was less significant than has been suggested, and that the institutional relation between throne and monkhood was by no means static. During the later dynasties, secular elites represented the principal threat to the centralization of resources. Further, in certain instances, royal purification of the Religion sought not to deprive the monkhood of wealth, but to strengthen both the Religion and the crown at the expense of private lay interests.

Révolte, Pouvoir, Religion: Les Hubbu du Fūta-Jalon (Guinée)

1988 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 391-413 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Botte
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Minority Groups ◽  
The Political ◽  
Islamic Revolution ◽  
Political Struggle ◽  
Eastern Province ◽  
Key Word ◽  
State Capital ◽  
Holy Man

In the middle of the nineteenth century, in Futa Jalon, the popular revolt of the Hubbu brutally revealed the underlying weaknesses of the most powerful state of its time in the region. A marabout of the Qādiriyya, Alfā Mamadu Dyuhe, took upon himself the leadership of the oppressed, the discontented, and the minority groups. The Hubbu survived for forty years, until exterminated by Samori in 1884, but the article concentrates on the movement from its inception in 1845 to the death of its founder in 1854, at the pinnacle of his success, in possession of the Futa state capital, Timbo. The Futa state, product of an Islamic revolution in the eighteenth century, had lost the fervour of its Fulbe founders in the endless contest for the position of Almamy between the rival lineages of Alfāyā and Soriyā. Based upon the jihād against paganism, upon the taxation of the conquered, and upon the slavery of more than half its population, it was rendered doubly oppressive by the political struggle for the rewards of power at all levels down to that of village headman, and doubly weak in consequence. The nomadic Fulbe, particularly angered by their treatment, were notably responsive to the preaching of Alfā Mamadu against the decadence and injustice of the rulers; so too were the Malinke of the eastern province of Fōduye-Haji. It was the breakdown of this large region into smaller and smaller chieftaincies, increasing the patronage of the reigning Almamy by multiplying the number of official predators, that created the special conditions for the Hubbu revolt. First the representations of Timbo, then the Alfāyā and the Soriyā themselves, were routed by the holy man and his increasingly numerous following. The religious leadership which had inspired the rising, however, faltered after Alfā Mamadu's death. The Hubbu, from hubb, ‘love’, the key word in the Arabic chant that bound them into a religious fraternity, failed to carry through their revolution, and instead became a community of refugees living by banditry. More important to their failure than the reform of the Futa state, undertaken by the Almamys at the insistence of their own clerics, was the fundamental inability of the movement, so characteristic of other popular revolts, to see the new society they wished to bring into existence as in any way different from the old. Slavery, for instance, was not abolished, despite the numbers of ex-slaves in the Hubbu ranks. Their failure was a failure of imagination.

The Initial British Impact on India: A Case Study of the Benares Region

1960 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 418-431 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernard S. Cohn
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Impact

The British administrative frontier in India had widely differing effects on the political and social structures of the regions into which it moved from the middle of the eighteenth century until the middle of the nineteenth century. It is impossible to generalize on the impact of the administration, because the regions into which it moved differed in their political and social structures, and because British administration and ideas about administration, both in India and in Great Britain, changed markedly throughout this hundred year period.

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