Imperial Reach Versus Institutional Grasp: Superstates of The West and Central African Sudan in Comparative Perspective

2009 ◽  
Vol 13 (6) ◽  
pp. 509-541 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph Austen

AbstractThe history of five states in the African West and Central Sudan—Songhay, Borno, Segu, Samory and the Sokoto Caliphate—is analyzed for a period from ca. 1500 to ca. 1900. Recent scholarship has stressed the non-territorial nature of these “states without maps”, an issue that needs to be dealt in a more nuanced manner, given the efforts by local regimes to control both multiple urban centers of commerce and rural zones of agricultural production as well as maintaining regular systems of taxation. None of these states used writing or salary payments to maintain an effective bureaucracy, basing their power instead upon various combinations of lineages with claims to ruling or aristocratic status, associations of young unmarried male initiates, segregated occupational groups (bards, smiths and fisher folk) and finally, slaves. Warfare was the main occupation of Sudanic empires but despite the introduction of firearms in the late 1500s, weapons and tactics did not undergo a “gunpowder revolution,” continuing instead to center around horses and armor. Sudanic rulers controlled access to these resources more easily than European monarchs and they also proved effective in the major goal of campaigns: not territorial competition with other states but rather raiding for slaves. Islam played an increasing role in general life and politics of Sudanic Africa (the most powerful of these empires, Sokoto, was a nineteenth-century jihadist state). However, the potential that such a scriptural faith offered for transforming administration, law and commercial life was not fully realized by the time the region came under European rule and thus moved from its early modern to modern history.

Traditio ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 73 ◽  
pp. 83-116
Author(s):  
PETER O'HAGAN

Peter Lombard's influential commentary on the Pauline Epistles, theCollectanea in omnes divi Pauli epistolas,has received little extended analysis in scholarly literature, despite its recognized importance both in its own right and as key for the development of hisSentences.This article presents a new approach to studying theCollectaneaby analyzing how Lombard's commentary builds on theGlossa “Ordinaria”on the Pauline Epistles. The article argues for treating theCollectaneaas a “historical act,” focusing on how Lombard engages with the biblical text and with authoritative sources within which he encounters the same biblical text embedded. The article further argues for the necessity of turning to the manuscripts of both theCollectaneaand theGlossa,rather than continuing to rely on inadequate early modern printed editions or thePatrologia Latina.The article then uses Lombard's discussion of faith at Romans 1:17 as a case study, demonstrating the way in which Lombard begins from theGlossa,clarifies its ambiguities, and moves his analysis forward through his use of otherauctoritatesand theologicalquaestiones.A comparison with Lombard's treatment of faith in theSentenceshighlights the close links between Lombard's biblical lectures and this later work. The article concludes by arguing that scholastic biblical exegesis and theology should be treated as primarily a classroom activity, with the glossed Bible as the central focus. Discussion of Lombard's work should draw on much recent scholarship that has begun to uncover the layers of orality within the textual history of scholastic works.


2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 299-317 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shohei Sato

AbstractThis article re-examines our understanding of modern sport. Today, various physical cultures across the world are practised under the name of sport. Almost all of these sports originated in the West and expanded to the rest of the world. However, the history of judo confounds the diffusionist model. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, a Japanese educationalist amalgamated different martial arts and established judo not as a sport but as ‘a way of life’. Today it is practised globally as an Olympic sport. Focusing on the changes in its rules during this period, this article demonstrates that the globalization of judo was accompanied by a constant evolution of its character. The overall ‘sportification’ of judo took place not as a diffusion but as a convergence – a point that is pertinent to the understanding of the global sportification of physical cultures, and also the standardization of cultures in modern times.


2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 135-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Keitt

Abstract This essay examines the discourse on medicine and the Inquisition in nineteenth-century Spain. It traces how liberal reformers selectively appropriated aspects of the history of Spanish medicine in the service of their contemporary political and scientific agendas, and how in doing so they contributed to the formation of new professional and national identities.


1977 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 287-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
George D. Sussman

The history of the professions in the West since the French Revolution is a success story, a triumph, but not always an easy one. From the beginning of the nineteenth century in continental Europe the professions had a great attraction as careers presumably open to talent, but the demand for professional services developed more slowly than interest in professional careers and more slowly than the schools that supplied the market. Lenore O'Boyle has drawn attention to this discrepancy and the revolutionary potential of the frustrated careerists produced by it.


Author(s):  
David Faflik

Urban Formalism radically reimagines what it meant to “read” a brave new urban world during the transformative middle decades of the nineteenth century. At a time when contemporaries in the twin capitals of modernity in the West, New York and Paris, were learning to make sense of unfamiliar surroundings, city peoples increasingly looked to the experiential patterns, or forms, from their everyday lives in an attempt to translate urban experience into something they could more easily comprehend. Urban Formalism interrogates both the risks and rewards of an interpretive practice that depended on the mutual relation between urbanism and formalism, at a moment when the subjective experience of the city had reached unprecedented levels of complexity. What did it mean to read a city sidewalk as if it were a literary form, like a poem? On what basis might the material form of a burning block of buildings be received as a pleasurable spectacle? How closely aligned were the ideology and choreography of the political form of a revolutionary street protest? And what were the implications of conceiving of the city’s exciting dynamism in the static visual form of a photographic composition? These are the questions that Urban Formalism asks and begins to answer, with the aim of proposing a revisionist semantics of the city. This book not only provides an original cultural history of forms. It posits a new form of urban history, comprised of the representative rituals of interpretation that have helped give meaningful shape to metropolitan life.


2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-23
Author(s):  
MARGARET SANKEY

The first mention of Gonneville’s land occurs in Abbé Jean Paulmier’s Mémoires of 1664 petitioning the Pope to approve a Christian mission to the as yet undiscovered Terres australes. Central to Paulmier’s argument was the extract from a document purporting to be the travel account of a sixteenth-century navigator, Gonneville. The extract details how the unknown land was discovered after the navigator’s ship L’Espoir had lost its way and landed in the fabled Terres australes, south-east of the Cape of Good Hope. His utopian account of the unknown land played an important role in French voyages of discovery during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. After Cook’s refutation of the existence of a Great South Land, Gonneville’s land was identified in the nineteenth century as being in Brazil. Recent scholarship, however, has revealed that Gonneville and his story were probably invented by Paulmier. This article examines how and why the Gonneville story became part of the history of French exploration, then details the elements which led to its being discredited.


Author(s):  
JOHN BOARDMAN

This chapter discusses the interest of the west in the history of Central Asia. It explains that central Asia has been studied by many western scholars and explorers, including British archaeologist Aurel Stein and traveller Sir John de Maundeville. Central Asia figured prominently in the days of political concerns about the safety of British India in the nineteenth century and this generated the interest of scholars. Today, the boom in Central Asian studies is further encouraged by the presence in Britain of those who have worked in this field and the source of many new publications on both prehistoric and historic periods.


Author(s):  
Andrew Denson

This book began with tourism. In the summer of 1994, a friend and I drove from Bloomington, Indiana, where I attended graduate school, to Florida for a short vacation. As we sped along Interstate 75 through northern Georgia, I spotted a brown roadside sign announcing that, at the next exit, we would find New Echota, a state historic site interpreting the history of the Cherokee Nation. For a brief time in the early nineteenth century, New Echota was the Cherokee capital, the seat of the national government created by tribal leaders in the 1820s. The Cherokee National Council met at New Echota in the years prior to removal, and it was the site of the Cherokee Supreme Court. During a time when the United States and the state of Georgia pressured Cherokees to emigrate to the West, the new capital represented the Cherokees’ determination to remain in their homeland. It was also the place where, in late 1835, a small group of tribal leaders signed the treaty under which the United States forced the Cherokee Nation to remove. I had recently become interested in the history of Cherokee sovereignty and nationhood, and I concluded that I should prob ably know about this heritage attraction. We pulled off the highway and followed the signs to the site....


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