The Colonial Economy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Flavio Versiani
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Labor Market ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Political Influence ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Slave Labor ◽  
Private Initiative ◽  
Colonial Economy ◽  
Colonial Government ◽  
Productivity Gains

The chapter deals with characteristics of the Brazilian colonial period (from 1500 to independence from Portugal in 1822) that have exercised a significant influence on later developments. Three aspects of the institutional framework of Portuguese colonization are emphasized: the relations between the colonial government and the private sector; the pattern of access to land by colonists; and the widespread use of slave labor. It is argued that colonial policies were detrimental to private initiative, hampering access to productivity gains from industrialization in the eighteenth century. Distribution of land, in large tracts, to privileged individuals was instrumental in establishing a pattern of inequality in wealth, power, and political influence; the landless majority helped to bring about an elastic supply of labor in later periods. Slavery, which dominated the labor market from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth, was an element of the inequality in income distribution that persists to the present.

Sixteenth-Century Reading in the Indies

1957 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
José Torre Revello
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Spanish Empire ◽  
American Continent ◽  
The People ◽  
The Many ◽  
The One

Among the many books destined for children, the one preferred in America during the colonial period was the Fables attributed to the Phrygian slave, Aesop. Translated into Spanish, it was found in the hands of travelers and colonists throughout the Spanish empire. The simplicity of the tales and the morals which they point out made them the delight not only of children but also of adults, who explained the precepts with purposeful wit.Aesop was one of the authors most read in the New World, according to what we can deduce by consulting the numerous lists of books which were sent to various parts of the American continent. His fables were also circulated in Latin and Greek, surely for pedagogical purposes. In Spain there was no lack of poets who devoted part of their work to fables, such as the Archpriest of Hita with his Enxiemplos, up to the culmination in the eighteenth century with Félix María Samaniego and Tomás de Iriarte, whose works it is logical to suppose were brought to the New World with many others of various kinds. By that time the shores of America were being swept by other ideas, distinct from those of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which brought unrest to the minds of the people, ideas foreign to the calm and well-being of the two previous centuries.

First grammar books in the Habsburg Monarchy: individual initiative and regulatory interference by the state (1760s–1770s)

2020 ◽  
Vol 2019 (2 (11)) ◽  
pp. 137-157
Author(s):  
Olga V. Khavanova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
State Policy ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Linguistic Diversity ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
German Language ◽  
Habsburg Monarchy ◽  
Private Initiative ◽  
The One

The second half of the eighteenth century in the lands under the sceptre of the House of Austria was a period of development of a language policy addressing the ethno-linguistic diversity of the monarchy’s subjects. On the one hand, the sphere of use of the German language was becoming wider, embracing more and more segments of administration, education, and culture. On the other hand, the authorities were perfectly aware of the fact that communication in the languages and vernaculars of the nationalities living in the Austrian Monarchy was one of the principal instruments of spreading decrees and announcements from the central and local authorities to the less-educated strata of the population. Consequently, a large-scale reform of primary education was launched, aimed at making the whole population literate, regardless of social status, nationality (mother tongue), or confession. In parallel with the centrally coordinated state policy of education and language-use, subjects-both language experts and amateur polyglots-joined the process of writing grammar books, which were intended to ease communication between the different nationalities of the Habsburg lands. This article considers some examples of such editions with primary attention given to the correlation between private initiative and governmental policies, mechanisms of verifying the textbooks to be published, their content, and their potential readers. This paper demonstrates that for grammar-book authors, it was very important to be integrated into the patronage networks at the court and in administrative bodies and stresses that the Vienna court controlled the process of selection and financing of grammar books to be published depending on their quality and ability to satisfy the aims and goals of state policy.

The Musical Topic of the Mass in B Minor

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel R. Melamed
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Church Music ◽  
Sacred Music ◽  
The Other ◽  
Entire Spectrum ◽  
Giovanni Pierluigi Da Palestrina ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

If there is a fundamental musical subject of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Mass in B Minor, a compositional problem the work explores, it is the tension between two styles cultivated in church music of Bach’s time. One style was modern and drew on up-to-date music such as the instrumental concerto and the opera aria. The other was old-fashioned and fundamentally vocal, borrowing and adapting the style of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, his sixteenth-century contemporaries, and his seventeenth-century imitators. The movements that make up Bach’s Mass can be read as exploring the entire spectrum of possibilities offered by these two styles (the modern and the antique), ranging from movements purely in one or the other to a dazzling variety of ways of combining the two. The work illustrates a fundamental opposition in early-eighteenth-century sacred music that Bach confronts and explores in the Mass.

Mechanisms for Unity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel K. Cohn, Jr.
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Black Death ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Church

This chapter investigates changes in mentalities after the Black Death, comparing practices never before analysed in this context—funerary and labour laws and processions to calm God’s anger. While processions were rare or conflictual as in Catania and Messina in 1348, these rituals during later plagues bound communities together in the face of disaster. The chapter then turns to another trend yet to be noticed by historians. Among the multitude of saints and blessed ones canonized from 1348 to the eighteenth century, the Church was deeply reluctant to honour, even name, any of the thousands who sacrificed their lives to succour plague victims, physically or spiritually, especially in 1348: the Church recognized no Black Death martyrs. By the sixteenth century, however, city-wide processions and other communal rituals bound communities together with charity for the poor, works of art, and charitable displays of thanksgiving to long-dead holy men and women.

Schools of Empiricism

2021 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 261-289
Author(s):  
Andreas Friedolin Lingg
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Personal Experience ◽  
Economic Transformation ◽  
Mining District ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Scientific Observation ◽  
Useful Knowledge ◽  
Mining Town ◽  
Forms Of Knowledge

Abstract Recent research emphasizes that empiricist approaches already emerged long before the seventeenth and eighteenth century. While many of these contributions focus on specific professions, it is the aim of this article to supplement this discourse by describing certain social spaces that fostered empiricist attitudes. A particularly interesting example in this respect is the mining region of the Erzgebirge (Saxony) in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. The following article will use this mining district as a kind of historical laboratory, as a space not only for scientific observation but also as a structure within which specific forms of knowledge were socially tested, to show how the economic transformation of this region supported the rise of characteristic elements of empiricist thinking. It is common practice to link the appraisal of useful knowledge, (personal) experience and the distrust towards (scholastic) authorities in those days with only small minorities. By addressing not only the struggles of the commercial elites but also the challenges faced by the average resident of a mining town, this paper tries to add to this view by demonstrating how entire masses of people inhabiting the late medieval Erzgebirge were affected by and schooled to think in empiricist ways.

‘Insolence and pride’: problems with the representation of the South-East Asian Portuguese communities in Alexander Hamilton's ‘A New Account of the East Indies’ (1727)

2009 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-235
Author(s):  
STEFAN HALIKOWSKI-SMITH
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
East Asia ◽  
East Asian ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
Northern Europe ◽  
South East Asia ◽  
East Indies ◽  
Historical Developments ◽  
Rhetorical Tropes

AbstractOne of the most influential European printed sources on South-East Asia at the turn of the eighteenth century was the Scottish sea-captain Alexander Hamilton's memoirs. The picture he paints of the Portuguese communities that had existed since the period of Portuguese ascendancy in the sixteenth century is overwhelmingly negative. But a close textual and empirical analysis of his text shows that not only was he frequently misinformed in terms of the historical developments relating to that community, but that he merely conforms to a set of standard rhetorical tropes we can associate with the Black Legend, which had grown up in Protestant countries of northern Europe since the 16th century to denigrate Portugal and her achievements. This article urges that this key text consequently be used with far greater circumspection than has hitherto been the case.

TWO RENAISSANCES: URBAN POLITICAL CULTURE IN POST-REFORMATION ENGLAND RECONSIDERED

2001 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 239-267 ◽  
Author(s):  
PHILIP WITHINGTON
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Urban Renaissance ◽  
The Social ◽  
Reformation England ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Historiography

This review reconsiders the place and importance of urban political culture in England between c. 1550 and c. 1750. Relating recent work on urban political culture to trends in political, social, and cultural historiography, it argues that England's towns and boroughs underwent two ‘renaissances’ over the course of the period: a ‘civic renaissance’ and the better-known ‘urban renaissance’. The former was fashioned in the sixteenth century; however, its legacy continued to inform political thought and practice over 150 years later. Similarly, although the latter is generally associated with ‘the long eighteenth century’, its attributes can be traced to at least the Elizabethan era. While central to broader transitions in post-Reformation political culture, these ‘renaissances’ were crucial in restructuring the social relations and social identity of townsmen and women. They also constituted an important but generally neglected dynamic of England's seventeenth-century ‘troubles’.

Confessions

2018 ◽  
pp. 18-41
Author(s):  
Matthew D. O'Hara
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Religion And Spirituality ◽  
The Future

This chapter discusses the conceptual and practical tools of Catholicism that many colonial subjects used to shape their futures. Christianity came with a host of ideas and practices that influenced one's relationship to the future, even the future of eternity in the form of salvation or damnation. Introduced through European missionaries in the sixteenth century, such concepts as free will and sin demanded new ways not only of thinking about religion and spirituality but also of living and relating to time. The chapter draws on a rich body of scholarship related to these themes but also delves into a unique set of primary sources, especially the intriguing genre of confession manuals. When examined over the arc of the colonial period, these sources reveal an evolving sense of individual futuremaking through the tools of Catholicism.

English Foundations of American Law, 1500s–1776

2018 ◽  
pp. 48-74
Author(s):  
John B. Nann ◽  
Morris L. Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Case Law ◽  
Case Finding ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Legal Issue ◽  
Good Case ◽  
American Law ◽  
English Law ◽  
The Law

This chapter describes current sources and techniques useful for finding seventeenth- and eighteenth-century laws of England and introduces some methods an attorney in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries might have used. Before researchers can find the law, they must know what was considered to be the source of law in the period being investigated. Reporting, publishing, and finding cases has been important in English law for centuries. Parliamentary enactments during the colonial period also play an important part in the framework surrounding any particular legal issue. Meanwhile, English law is built on a foundation of common law, which is built on case law. As such, finding cases that relate to a particular topic is critical in research. A good case-finding option is a digest of cases; these have been written over the centuries, as have abridgments and treatises on particular areas of law.

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