Britain’s European Island-Empire, 1793–1815

2021 ◽  
pp. 35-54
Author(s):  
James Davey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Trade ◽  
Rendezvous Point ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
War Aims ◽  
Crucial Part

This chapter explores the creation and maintenance of Britain’s European island empire during the wars against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France. It traces the initial establishment of island bases in the Mediterranean, North and Baltic Seas, outlining their importance to British trade and strategy. It explains how and why British war aims came to rely on these imperial possessions. Across the Mediterranean, the war came to be defined by the extension of island empires. British victory in 1814 owed much to these islands, lynchpins of its wider European strategy. In northern waters, the island of Heligoland acted as a rendezvous point for trade with the continent, and was a key site from which Napoleon’s ‘Continental System’ could be undermined. Britain’s European island empire proved itself to be a crucial part of Britain’s wider imperial network, and its significance would continue into the nineteenth century and the era of Pax Britannica.

The Gospels as Imperialized Sites of Memory in Late Ancient Christianity

2012 ◽  
Vol 6 (1-3) ◽  
pp. 291-307
Author(s):  
Jason T. Larson
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Divine Power ◽  
Cultural Objects ◽  
Invented Tradition ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
Material Things ◽  
A Site ◽  
Ancient Christianity

This article considers the intersection of Christian and imperial memory in the physical Gospel book. Besides describing the function of gospel books in the post-Constantine Roman Empire, it examines the connection between the Roman construction and production of sites of memory that established Roman imperium in the Mediterranean and the development of the Christian Gospel codex as a site of memory within Christianity. It also explores the related issues of imperial and divine power as manifest through material things, the rhetoric of seeing and iconicity, and the invented tradition of Christian orthodoxy. The article shows that the Christian Gospels and Roman sites of memory, despite a vast difference in their intended functions and original uses, both established imperium. It maintains that the creation of the Gospels' imperial iconicity was not based on their function as texts of spiritual enlightenment in late ancient Christianity, but on the fact that the production of Gospels as material cultural objects depended on Roman cultural exemplars and ideological rhetoric.

Migration trajectories of seafarers during the transition from sail to steam: Change and continuity in Antwerp, 1850-1900

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 616-635
Author(s):  
Kristof Loockx
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Skilled Labour ◽  
The Creation

This article examines the migration trajectories of seafarers who worked on Belgian merchant vessels departing from the port of Antwerp during the second half of the nineteenth century. Based on the Antwerp seamen’s registry, which recorded information on voyages of seafarers on Belgian merchant vessels departing from Belgium’s main commercial port, this article shows that Antwerp’s maritime recruitment area vastly expanded with the advent of steam. The proportion of low-skilled seafarers who originated from inland areas increased as a result of the creation of new departments aboard ship and the emergence of ocean liners. However, established migration fields remained important for the supply of skilled labour in deck departments, which indicates that there was also continuity. The findings suggest that each department had its own dynamics and therefore old and new patterns co-evolved during a period of transition.

scholarly journals ‘Epidemics in a Mist’: Medical Climatology and Cholera in Victorian Visual Culture

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 492-511
Author(s):  
Amanda Sciampacone
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Mortality Rates ◽  
Tropical Environment ◽  
Atmospheric Conditions ◽  
Vital Force ◽  
Real Material ◽  
Climate And Health ◽  
Crucial Part ◽  
Epidemic Diseases

Abstract The article explores how Victorian visual culture was a vital force in the construction and dissemination of medical theories on the connection between climate and health. During the nineteenth century, the seemingly inexplicable and deadly nature of many epidemic diseases compelled British medics to investigate all possible reasons for their spread. Focusing on cholera, the article will examine how, in an effort to understand what was seen at the time as a mysterious disease, Victorian medics increasingly concentrated on the climate of India and unusual weather in Britain as propagators of the malady. Supplementing the dominant miasma theory, medics explained how the seemingly airborne sources of cholera resulted from a state of England’s air that resembled the tropical environment of the subcontinent. In an effort to highlight the correlation between cholera and the atmosphere, they produced medical climatology reports containing diagrams that juxtaposed the data on the disease’s mortality rates with measurements of meteorological phenomena. These images, rather than serving simply as illustrations, became a crucial part of medical arguments. As the article will demonstrate, in attempting to visualize the medical climatology of cholera, the diagrams mapped the disease to certain atmospheric conditions, suggesting that cholera could be quantified and controlled. Yet, in doing so, the images also implied that cholera had a real material presence in the air of Britain, powerfully evoking visual tropes of the disease as a substance that had the potential to contaminate the very landscape of the nation.

scholarly journals Mass Petitioning, Education Reform, and the Development of Political Culture in Madras, 1839–1842

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Scott Travanion Connors
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Education Reform ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
The Creation

Abstract This article explores the emergence of reformist sentiment and political culture in Madras in the mid-nineteenth century. Moreover, it contributes to, and expands upon, the growing body of literature on colonial petitioning through a case-study of a mass petition demanding education reform. Signed in 1839 by 70,000 subjects from across the Madras presidency, the petition demanded the creation of a university that would qualify western-educated Indians to gain employment in the high public offices of the East India Company. Through an analysis of the lifecycle of this education petition, from its creation to its reception and the subsequent adoption of its demands by the Company government at Fort St George, this article charts the process by which an emergent, politicized public engaged with, and critiqued, the colonial state. Finally, it examines the transformative effect that the practice of mass petitioning had on established modes of political activism and communication between an authoritarian colonial state and the society it governed.

scholarly journals CYCLICAL HISTORY IN THE GAMBIA/CASAMANCE BORDERLANDS: REFUGE, SETTLEMENT AND ISLAM FROM c. 1880 TO THE PRESENT

2007 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
PAUL NUGENT
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Gambia ◽  
Hard Work ◽  
Border Zone ◽  
The Creation

ABSTRACTThis article begins with a quotation from a local informant highlighting a perception in the Gambia/Casamance borderlands that there is a pattern linking the violence of the later nineteenth century with more recent troubles. It argues that there is some merit in this thesis, which is encapsulated in a concatenation of events: systematic raiding by Fodé Sylla led to the creation of a relatively depopulated colonial border zone which was later filled by Jola immigrants from Buluf to the southeast. In the perception of some, it is these immigrants who attracted the MFDC rebels. Mandinkas and Jolas of Fogny Jabankunda and Narang, and Karoninkas from the islands of Karone have therefore been largely unreceptive to appeals to Casamance nationalism. The article also argues that there are more twisted historical connections. Whereas in the later nineteenth century, the Jolas associated Islam with violent enslavement, they later converted en masse. Their attitude towards Fodé Sylla remained negative, whilst the Mauritanian marabout, Cheikh Mahfoudz, was credited with the introduction of a pacific form of Islam that valorized hard work and legitimated physical migration. This legacy has posed a further barrier to militant nationalism. Islam and violence remain linked, but the signs have been reversed.

scholarly journals THE MERCURIO GUNFLINTS: A TECHNO-TYPOLOGICAL AND CULTURAL ASSESSMENT

2016 ◽  
Vol 96 ◽  
pp. 363-389 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paolo Biagi ◽  
Elisabetta Starnini ◽  
Carlo Beltrame
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Northern Italy ◽  
Size And Shape ◽  
Manufacturing Technique ◽  
The North ◽  
Major Significance ◽  
Cultural Assessment ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
Napoleonic Era ◽  
Small Finds

The discovery of the wreck of the brig Mercurio, which sank in 1812 in the waters of the north Adriatic, is of major significance for the study of Italic Kingdom vessels from the Napoleonic era. The underwater excavations carried out in 2004–11 led to the recovery of many small finds, among which are several gunflints of different size and shape. The Mercurio gunflints were produced mainly from blades using a technique in use in Britain and France, but also in the workshops of the Lessini Hills around Ceredo (Verona province, northern Italy). We suggest that the flint employed for their manufacture probably came from Monte Baldo, in the Trentino, or perhaps from the River Tagliamento, in Friuli. We can exclude the possibility that the specimens recovered from the shipwreck were made from French flint because of the typically north Italian manufacturing technique and the character of the grey Treveti-derived flint. Given the complexity of the period during which the Grado (or Pirano) battle took place, the study of even such small items can contribute to a better interpretation of the dramatic events that characterised the beginning of the nineteenth century in that part of the Mediterranean.

Surgeon Captain Sheldon F Dudley and the person to person spread of brucellosis by inhalation

2010 ◽  
Vol 96 (3) ◽  
pp. 185-187
Author(s):  
H V Wyatt
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Confined Spaces ◽  
The Mediterranean

AbstractAnalysis of brucellosis epidemics in ships of the Mediterranean fleet in the nineteenth century are most easily explained by aerosol transmission in grossly overcrowded, hot and humid confined spaces.

‘She will wear the britsch’: Masculinity and the iconography of Prince Albert

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 199-222
Author(s):  
Hannah Bradshaw
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Art History ◽  
Male Body ◽  
Masculine Ideology ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Female Rule ◽  
And Performance

This article examines the early representations of Prince Albert that either satirize or attempt to reconcile the hierarchical ambiguities and issue of threatened masculinity that resulted from unconventional male consortship and female rule. It concludes that the latter was achieved through the development of a suitable and legible iconography for a nineteenth-century male consort in adherence with British iconographic tradition and values. Drawing from methods in nineteenth-century art history as well as gender and performance studies and anthropology, it argues that images of the male body play a fundamental role in the construction and perpetuation of masculine ideology and subjectivity through the creation of the semblance of an innate and axiomatic masculine archetype. In doing so, this article problematizes and historicizes masculinity by illuminating the plurality of expressions of masculinity and rejecting the essentialist narrative of masculinity as something measurable or quantifiable, as well as ahistorical, atemporal, apolitical and heteronormative.

scholarly journals A Vigorous Affirmation of Life: Slaves in the Face of Dehumanization

Elements ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Danielle Nista
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
American South ◽  
Musical Instruments ◽  
Power Struggle ◽  
True Nature ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
Affirmation Of Life ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The American South

For a slave living under the system of chattel slavery in the American South during the nineteenth century, avenues of self-expression were extremely limited. One of the few ways slaves could exert control over their own lives was through singing and dancing. These arts gave slaves a chance to relieve stress and establish a culture through the creation of musical instruments, songs, and dances. All of these contained hints at the true nature of slaves’ feelings towards the system that oppressed them, feelings that they had to frequently repress. However, despite slaves’ efforts to make this culture entirely their own, masters tried to find ways to use it to their advantage instead of to the slaves’ benefit. The resulting covert power struggle sometimes ended in favor of the masters, taking the form of regulations on slaves’ dances, requirement of the performance of songs and dances for the masters’ entertainment, and even abuse of slaves by using their own arts. Ultimately, however, slaves emerged victorious because of the hidden messages in their songs and dances. Though this method of coping could not erase all the masters did, it was at least one glimmer of hope.

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