The Public Life and Death of a Propertied, but Artificial Person

Author(s):  
William A. Pettigrew

This chapter uses the divestment of the Royal African Company (1747–1752) to shed light on a central question posed by Paul Langford’s work: how did the eighteenth-century British Parliament reconcile its primacy within the British state’s regulatory apparatus with its role as the upholder of the sanctity of property? Between 1747 and 1752, a series of statutes dissolved the Royal African Company, divested it of its African properties (including forts and enslaved people) and transferred these assets to a new (non-corporate) body. Parliament distributed £112,142 of public funds to compensate the Company’s creditors (including several of its former officers) and proprietors. The chapter explores the distinctive challenges posed to the legislature of corporate property. It places the African Company divestment into the larger history of corporate dissolution across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the ways in which constitutional changes altered that process. It uses the African Company case to challenge those who have depicted Parliament’s actions in undermining private property as compulsory. The chapter instead emphasizes the negotiations and compromises and the wilful leadership the Company took in the process of ending its life. The chapter offers a full prosopographical analysis of the recipients of compensation. The importance of former officers of the African Company in the list of major recipients confirms that public concern about Britain’s prestige on the African coast proved crucial to the passing of this legislation.

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 146 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abdulkader Tayob

Scholars of Religion Education (RE) have promoted a non-confessional approach to the teaching of religions that explores and examines the religious history of humankind, with due attention paid to its complexity and plurality. In this promotion, the public representation of religion and its impact on RE has not received sufficient attention. An often hegemonic representation of religion constitutes an important part of religion in public life. Moreover, this article argues that this representation is a phenomenon shared by secular, secularizing, and deeply religious societies. It shows that a Western understanding of secularization has guided dominant RE visions and practices, informed by a particular mode of representation. As an illustration of how education in and representation of religion merges in RE, the article analyses the South African policy document for religion education. While the policy promotes RE as an educational practice, it also makes room for a representation of religion. This article urges that various forms of the representation of religion should be more carefully examined in other contexts, particularly by those who want to promote a non-confessional and pluralistic approach to RE.


2021 ◽  
pp. 54-65
Author(s):  
Liliia Didun ◽  
◽  
Zinaїda Kozyrieva ◽  

This paper offers an overview of dictionaries of Ukrainian complied by lexicographers of the Institute of the Ukrainian Language of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine since the Institute’s foundation; it is devoted to the Institute’s thirtieth anniversary. The article addresses a question as to whether modern Ukrainian academic lexicography is ready to meet the public life needs in independent Ukraine testifying to the devotion to tradition. The Slovnyk Ukraїnsʹkoї Movy (Ukrainian Dictionary, 1970—1980) in 11 volumes served as the basis for both the Slovnyk Ukraїns’koї Movy (Ukrainian Dictionary, 2012) and Slovnyk Ukraїnsʹkoї Movy v 11 Tomakh: Dodatkovyi Tom (Ukrainian Dictionary in 11 Volumes: Additional Volume, 2017) in 2 books, which reflects continuation of tradition of the academic explanatory lexicography. In 1999—2000, the academic edition of the Slovnyk Synonimiv Ukraїnsʹkoї Movy (Ukrainian Dictionary of Synonyms) in 2 volumes was published. It became a valuable reference publication in the national monolingual lexicography. In phraseography, the latest achievements are represented notably by the Frazeolohichnyi Slovnyk Ukraїns’koї Movy in 2 volumes (Ukrainian Phraseological Dictionary, 1993) and the Slovnyk Frazeolohizmiv Ukraїnsʹkoї Movy (Ukrainian Dictionary of Phraseologisms, 2003). The neographic direction is represented by dictionary materials Novi i Aktualizovani Slova ta Znachennia (New and Updated Words and Meanings, 2002-2010), whereas the Rosiisʹko-Ukraїnsʹkyi Slovnyk (Russian-Ukrainian Dictionary, 2011—2014) in 4 volumes covers the field of the translated academic lexicography. The two dictionaries are of great importance to the Ukrainian academic lexicography in general, namely the combined dictionary of the Ukraїnsʹkyi Leksykon Kintsia XVIII — Pochatku XXI Stolittia (Ukrainian Lexicon of the Late 18th — Early 21st Century: Dictionary-Index, 2017) in 3 volumes and Slovnyk Movy Tvorchoї Osobystosti XX — pochatku ХХІ Stolittia (Dictionary of the Language of Creative Personality in 20th — early 21st Century). The latter contains references significant for reflecting the lexical and phraseological structure of Standard Ukrainian. Finally, reestablished in 2003 the annual Lek sy ko hrafichnyi Biuletenʹ (Lexicographic Bulletin) covers issues related to the history of lexicography, making of dictionaries of different types, and the Ukrainian vocabulary, lexicology, and phraseology. Keywords: explanatory lexicography, source basis of lexicography, synonym dictionary, phraseological dictionary, combined dictionary, author’s lexicography, neography, linguopersonology.


Author(s):  
Dominic Thomas

Control and selection have been implicit dimensions of the history of immigration in France, shaping and defining the parameters of national identity over centuries. The year 1996 was a turning point when several hundred African sans-papiers sought refuge in the Saint-Bernard de la Chapelle church in the 18th arrondissement of Paris while awaiting a decision on their petition for amnesty and legalization. The church was later stormed by heavily armed police officers, and although there was widespread support for government policies intended to encourage legal paths to immigration, the police raids provoked outrage. This provided the impetus for social mobilization and the sans-papiers behaved contrary to expectations and decided to deliberately enter the public domain in order to shed light on their conditions. Emerging in this way from the dubious safety of legal invisibility, claims were made for more direct public representation and ultimately for regularization, while also countering popular misconceptions and stereotypes concerning their presence and role in French society. The sans-papiers movement is inspired by a shared memory of resistance and political representation that helps define a lieu de mémoire, a space which is, from a broadly postcolonial perspective, very much inscribed in collective memory.


2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-101
Author(s):  
Dina I. Waked

This article proposes the use of antitrust law to reduce poverty and address inequality. It argues that the antitrust laws are sufficiently malleable to achieve such goals. The current focus of antitrust on the efficiency-only goals does not only lead to increasing inequality further but is also inconsistent with the history of antitrust. This history is presented through the lens of the public interest that emerges into the balance between private property and competition policy. Tracing the public interest at different historical moments, we get to see how it has been broad enough to encompass social welfare concerns. Over time, the public interest concern of antitrust was narrowed to exclusively cover consumer welfare and its allocative efficiency. Once we frame antitrust as public interest law, in its broadest sense, we are empowered to use it to address inequality. A proposal to do so is exposed in this article.


1970 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 57-62

The public life of Stanley Melbourne Bruce, Prime Minister of Australia, a Viscount of the United Kingdom, a Fellow of the Royal Society, was one of the most paradoxical in the history of his native country. Bruce was born in Melbourne on 15 April 1883, of a well-to-do mercantile family. 1893 saw the collapse of a great land boom, the failure of some banks and an acute general depression. The family business, Paterson, Laing and Bruce, was in difficulties. Stanley Bruce’s father sold his mansion in the fashionable suburb of Toorak. Stanley himself had to leave his preparatory school—the fees were not available. His father, who appears to have been a singularly determined man, then proceeded to restore the fortunes of the business. In 1896 the young Stanley went to the well-known Melbourne Grammar School, where he was a most successful all-round student. It has been given to few boys at a great school to be not only captain of football, of cricket, of athletics, and of rowing, but also Senior Prefect (i.e. Captain) of the School.


2015 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 797-821 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Harvey

AbstractThis essay explores changes in eighteenth-century male clothing in the context of the history of sexual difference, gender roles, and masculinity. The essay contributes to a history of dress by reconstructing a range of meanings and social practices through which men's clothing was understood by its consumers. Furthermore, critically engaging with work on the “great male renunciation,” the essay argues that the public authority that accrued to men through their clothing was based not on a new image of a rational disembodied man but instead on an emphasis on the male anatomy and masculinity as intrinsically embodied. Drawing on findings from the material objects of eighteenth-century clothing, visual representations, and evidence from the archival records of male consumers, the essay adopts an interdisciplinary approach that allows historians to study sex and gender as embodied, rather than simply performed. In so doing, the essay not only treats “embodiment” as an historical category but also responds to recent shifts in the historical discipline and the wider academy towards a more corporealist approach to the body.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Pasquale Orchard

<p>As a young singer, it is inevitable that one is bombarded with the history of singing. ​Not only are we asked to listen to vocalists of previous ages, but we are also encouraged to analyse their methods and scrutinise their seminal performances in order to better identify the strengths of each singer​. Curious about the extent to which the lauded seventeenth and eighteenth-century ​bel canto vocal techniques hold relevance to contemporary classical singing and newer compositions, my research focused on whether these well-tried techniques are transferable. While the application of ​bel canto principles to the ​bel canto repertoire are clearly pertinent, my investigation concentrated on the feasibility and applicability of transferring these vocal techniques to modern repertoire, specifically songs and arias written in English, my mother tongue. This exegesis details my exploration of the application of such techniques to these two different sets of repertoire, and aims to shed light on the experience of the process of applying the ​bel canto ​principles to such works, and the potential benefits afforded by the practice of them.</p>


Author(s):  
Brian Cowan

The two most influential works for the study of eighteenth-century literary culture in the last half-century must surely be Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957) and Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962). This essay discusses the influence of both Watt and Habermas on studies of the novel and the public sphere, and it explores the reasons for the endurance of their arguments despite decades of substantial criticism devoted to their interpretative shortcomings. It also explains the emergence of a post-Habermasian approach to the history of public-making in response to these criticisms. It concludes by discussing how recent post-Habermasian studies of news culture and political partisanship may illuminate the history of the origins of the English novel.


Author(s):  
Aryeh Neier

This chapter traces the history of the international human rights movement back to the anti-slavery movement that took hold in England in the second half of the eighteenth century. It details how the anti-slavery movement was instrumental in securing the abolition of slavery in many countries. It also reviews ways in which the human rights cause became an important force in world affairs in the mid-to-late 1970s. The chapter looks into the favorable development in the recent years for human rights, such as the readiness of a number of leading business corporations to take stands on human rights issues. It also suggests that the progress in the human rights movement is to keep building the public constituency for rights, until the dynamic that resulted in significant improvements that that took place in the 1980s and 1990s is re-created.


AI Narratives ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 119-143 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie Park

What might the eighteenth-century history of automata tell us about the relationships between voice, the human, machines and fiction? Given the rise in our daily lives of voice-operated ‘intelligent assistants’ at this time, the question is especially pertinent. By examining the eighteenth-century case of the speaking doll and the cultural values and desires that its representation in a 1784 pamphlet entitled The Speaking Figure, and the Automaton Chess-Player, Exposed and Detected reveals, this chapter will provide a historical framework for probing how the experiences and possibilities of artificial voice shed light on our deep investments in the notion of voice as a vital sign of being ‘real’ as humans.


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