The Social Dynamics of the Mughal Empire: A Brief Introduction

2004 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 292-297 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keyword(s):  
Social Dynamics ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Ancien Regime ◽  
Fundamental Change ◽  
Mughal Empire ◽  
Indian History ◽  
Village Community ◽  
The Social ◽  
Change Of Perspective ◽  
Ancien Régime

AbstractIt is only recently that the study of Indian history since the Muslim conquest, especially the Mughal period (1526-1857), has seen a fundamental change. No longer is this period viewed in the static terms of 'oriental society,' the perennial 'village community' and the unchangeable rigidities of caste and community. Instead full attention is now given to the dynamics of Indian society. Dirk Kolff's work has significantly contributed to this change of perspective. Focussing attention on India's 'armed peasantry' in its various guises of both sedentary 'ryots' and itinerant warriors, Kolff brings out the flexibility and dynamics of the Mughal world that was known to its European contemporaries as the 'flourishing Indies.' Even though traces may still be found in modern India, the price of modernity has been the loss of the flexible dynamics of the ancien régime . Ce n'est que récemment que l'étude de l'histoire de l'Inde depuis la conquête musulmane et particulièrement durant la période de l'empire moghol (1526-1857) a été essentiellement transformée. Au lieu d'utiliser des expressions qui suggèrent des conditions inchangées comme la "société orientale", la sempiternelle "communauté de village," et l'immuable "système des castes", la recherche examine actuellement les aspects dynamiques de la société indienne. A ce changement M. Dirk Kolff a de manière incisive contribué. Focalisant son attention sur la "paysannerie armée", il met en évidence le dynamisme de l'Inde moghole que les contemporains occidentaux appelaient "les Indes florissantes". On en trouve encore des traces dans l'Inde moderne, mais le prix de la modernité a été la perte irréparable de la dynamique flexible de l' ancien régime .

Biblical Criticism and Censorship in Ancien Régime France: the Case of Richard Simon

1985 ◽  
Vol 78 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 149-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick J. Lambe
Keyword(s):  
Church And State ◽  
Political History ◽  
Book Trade ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Ancien Regime ◽  
Louis Xiv ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ancien Régime ◽  
Vital Element

The case of Richard Simon and the suppression of his book, Histoire critique du Vieux Testament in 1678 stands at a point where the interests of both Church and State in maintaining control of the book trade intersected. As such, the case is of interest in two important areas: first, from the point of view of the social and political history of the ancien régime in France, this case exhibits the intense concern for maintenance or extension of the powers of jurisdiction of the authorities which is so characteristic of the reign of Louis XIV. In some instances this preoccupation with autorité and droit led to an unseemly public jockeying for power, and it is interesting to see how the book trade is seen as a vital element in this struggle.

5. The courtier

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Cronk
Keyword(s):  
World History ◽  
Social Hierarchy ◽  
Ancien Regime ◽  
Louis Xiv ◽  
The Social ◽  
French Court ◽  
Ancien Régime

Voltaire worked hard throughout his life to establish and defend his status as an author within the social hierarchy of the ancien régime, with varying degrees of success, but with unflagging determination. ‘The courtier’ charts his time at the French court in 1725 and 1745–6, at the Prussian court of Frederick 1750–3, and his extensive correspondence with Catherine the Great. It describes Voltaire’s role as the Royal Historiographer in 1745 and some of his key works including the opera collaboration with Rameau, Le Temple de la gloire (1745), his historical masterpiece Siècle de Louis XIV (1751), and his world history, Essai sur les mœurs (1756).

scholarly journals Percepciones de la fiesta en la España del siglo XVIII : la mirada ajena

1997 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ramón Maruri Villanueva
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Travel Literature ◽  
Social Reality ◽  
Frame Of Reference ◽  
Ancien Regime ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
The Social ◽  
Marked Preference ◽  
Ancien Régime ◽  
Shed Light

La fiesta en la España Moderna, con acusada preferencia la pública y barroca, tía venido siendo, desde 1980 fundamentalmente, un campo histohográfico bien frecuentado por los investigadores. Enmarcado en él, el presente trabajo se centra en cómo fue percibida por un conjunto de extranjeros que recorrieron la España del siglo XVIII. Sus percepciones, que hemos llamado mirada ajena, nos son conocidas a través de la denominada literatura de viajes y hablan de la fiesta pública y privada, profana y religiosa, civil y política. Dicha literatura, que no había sido utilizada con carácter sistemático en monografías sobre la fiesta, hemos considerado que podía iluminar tanto aspectos de ésta como de la mentalidad de quienes la recrearon en sus diarios y cartas: cuáles llamaron su atención; qué juicios les merecieron; en qué medida algunos de éstos sirvieron para construir, perpetuar o atemperar estereotipos; qué cambios pudieron producirse en los rituales festivos y de qué cambios en la realidad social podían dar cuenta; en qué se desviaba, o no, la percepción de los viajeros de la de españoles de la época o de la imagen recuperada por la investigación histórica contemporánea.Since about 1980 festivities in Spain of the Ancien Régime, with a marked preference for public and baroque festivities, have been a historiographic field frequently studied by researchers. Set in the frame of reference of this field, this work centers on how festivities were perceived by a group of foreigners who traveled around Spain in the eighteenth century. Their perceptions, which we call the foreign perspective, are known to us through what is called travel literature, and speak about various kinds of festivities: public and prívate, secular and religious, civilian and political. We believed that this literature, which had not been used systematically in studies of festivities, could shed light not only on facets of the festivities themselves but also on aspects of the mentality of those that described them in their diaries and letters: which festivities captured their attention; what judgments they made about them; to what extent these judgments served to construct, perpetúate or modérate stereotypes; what changos might have taken place in the festivo rituals and what changos in the social reality they could reveal; in what respects the perception of the travelers differed from that of Spaniards of the time or from the image recovered by contemporary historie research.

scholarly journals FRENCH CROSSINGS: II. LAUGHING OVER BOUNDARIES

2011 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 1-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Jones
Keyword(s):  
Presidential Address ◽  
Ancien Regime ◽  
Lower Body ◽  
French Society ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
Dangerous Object ◽  
Social Elite ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ancien Régime

ABSTRACTUnder the generic title, ‘French Crossings’, this Presidential Address explores the history of laughter in French society, and humour's potential for trangressing boundaries. It focuses on the irreverent and almost entirely unknown book of comic drawings entitledLivre de caricatures tant Bonnes que mauvaises(Book of Caricatures, both Good and Bad), that was composed between the 1740s and the mid-1770s by the luxury Parisian embroiderer and designer, Charles-Germain de Saint-Aubin, and his friends and family. The bawdy laughter that the book seems intended to provoke gave it its nickname of theLivre de culs(Book of Arses). Yet despite the scatological character of many of the drawings, the humour often conjoined lower body functions with rather cerebral and erudite wit. The laughter provoked unsparingly targeted and exposed to ridicule the social elite, cultural celebrities and political leaders of Ancien Régime France. This made it a dangerous object, which was kept strictly secret. Was this humour somehow pre- or proto-Revolutionary? In fact, the work is so embedded in the culture of the Ancien Régime that 1789 was one boundary that the work signally fails to cross.

scholarly journals Le traitement de l’hermaphrodite dans la littérature juridique de l’Ancien Régime Droit, société et idéologie

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arnaud PATURET
Keyword(s):  
Legal System ◽  
Binary Classification ◽  
Birth Certificate ◽  
Ancien Regime ◽  
The West ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Sexual Behaviours ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Ancien Régime

Under the Ancien Régime in France, the individual was inserted into a legal system of binary classification shaped around masculinity and femininity already used in earlier periods. Roman jurists and after them the medieval canonists refuted the proven existence of both male and female sexes in one body and such an orientation continued in the West under the Ancien Régime. During these times, this physiological feature was assimilated to deviant and condemnable sexual behaviours. The study of several trials against hermaphrodites shows the social embarrassment caused by sexual ambivalent. This strange physiognomy was enough to suggest he was a criminal or a debauchee. Nowadays, French legal system is fortunately milder but remains organized around a unique and defined sex as stated in the birth certificate. Therefore it fails to recognize the concept of third gender. A mental revolution has to rise on this point.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-31
Author(s):  
Jon Elster
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social System ◽  
Methodological Individualism ◽  
Ancien Regime ◽  
American Constitution ◽  
System P ◽  
The Social ◽  
Ancien Régime ◽  
Constitution Making

This chapter compares the making of the American constitution in 1787 and the French constitution in 1791. It discusses aspects of the pre-constitutional systems that would prove relevant for the understanding of the constitution-making processes. It also attempts to practice the union of history and psychology, which are the two main pillars of the social sciences. The chapter focuses on the quest for causality and the quest for agency or methodological individualism. It covers the main features of the prodigiously complex social system of the French ancien régime. It also cites many contemporary texts that illuminate the perverse and sometimes pathological effects of the social system.

Reinterpreting Social Status

2013 ◽  
Vol 68 (04) ◽  
pp. 607-613
Author(s):  
Étienne Anheim ◽  
Jean-Yves Grenier ◽  
Antoine Lilti
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Status ◽  
Max Weber ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Central Position ◽  
Ancien Regime ◽  
Social Prestige ◽  
The Social ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Ancien Régime

Social statuses existed before the social sciences. When scholars began to develop this concept in the nineteenth century, they were drawing on the juridical writings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and, more broadly, the vocabulary used by social groups to define themselves across time and space. From this moment forward, social statuses occupied a central position in the work of historians, sociologists, and anthropologists. These scholars were aiming to describe and explain the dynamics of human societies, but they also participated in framing the debates at the heart of the social sciences—as attested by the recurrent disputes between a Marxian notion of class and a Weberian conception of status groups, particularly among readers with tacit political motivations. Max Weber played a fundamental part in the success of the concept, taking the juridical aspect and the idea of society as a body, inherited from the ancien régime, and adding a specifically sociological content relating to the hierarchy of social prestige, which is neither directly inherited (as with castes) nor purely economic (as with classes). In truth, this definition was rarely applied stricto sensu by historians, sociologists, and anthropologists, but it did allow for the elaboration of a concept that could delimit groups of individuals sharing legal and symbolic characteristics within a given society, and that could incorporate the categories used by social actors themselves into historical analysis. Thus, during the 1960s, it was around the notion of status that interpretations of the ancien régime as a society of orders or a society of classes took shape, while anthropologists began to consider notions of emic and etic. From the 1980s, however, the concept of social status receded into the background as the idea of a global interpretation of society by the social sciences was called into question.

Opéra-comique on the Eve of Revolution: Dalayrac's Sargines and the Development of “Heroic” Comedy

2015 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 317-374 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Doe
Keyword(s):  
Social Status ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Ancien Regime ◽  
Generic Status ◽  
The Social ◽  
Previous Decade ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Revolutionary Art ◽  
Ancien Régime ◽  
Comedie Italienne

This article draws upon archival evidence to trace the development of opéra-comique—and its broader political import—in the final years of the ancien régime. It focuses in particular on the opening of the Salle Favart, the first new and custom-built theater for the Comédie-Italienne, in 1783. This change in venue attracted elite crowds to France's second lyric stage, solidifying a prominent rift between the generic status of opéra-comique and the social status of its audiences. The patronage of wealthy Parisians, in turn, enabled the company to augment its staging resources and present works on an increasingly expansive scale. On the eve of the Revolution, the theater's programming committee supported the production of operas on heroic, historical subjects. Not only did such patriotic tales inspire fantastical scenery and effects, but they also enhanced the prestige of opéra-comique, which came to challenge its tragic counterpart as a legitimate, and legitimately national, lyric form. An examination of Sargines (1788), by Nicolas-Marie Dalayrac and Jacques-Marie Boutet (known as Monvel), demonstrates how such “heroic” works played into disputes over the traditional limitations of the genre. It also underscores how the aesthetic we now associate with the turbulent 1790s was, in many cases, created out of materials developed in the previous decade, shedding light on the complex relationship between ancien-régime culture and revolutionary art.

scholarly journals El vestido y la moda en la Castilla moderna. Examen simbólicoA Symbolic Examination of Dress and Fashion in Modern Era Castile

2017 ◽  
pp. 135
Author(s):  
Máximo García Fernández
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Rural Populations ◽  
Ancien Regime ◽  
The Social ◽  
Family Consumption ◽  
Ancien Régime ◽  
Modern Era

Las vestimentas y la cultura de la moda asociada a su porte evolucionaron durante la Edad Moderna, constituyéndose en iconos capitales para comprender los cambios sociales y de civilización experimentados en la Castilla interior. El examen de los tradicionalismos simbólicos y/o de los intensos debates críticos ilustrados sobre el uso de los atuendos permite valorar mucho mejor la trascendencia que el vestido representaba en el universo mental de las poblaciones urbanas y rurales de Antiguo Régimen. Cuestiones como el lujo y la apariencia, el reconocimiento externo o la uniformización indumentaria resultan fundamentales a este respecto, tanto desde un enfoque de vida cotidiana, de cultura material o de consumo familiar.PALABRAS CLAVE: Castilla, vestimenta, moda, apariencias, modernidad.ABSTRACTClothing and fashion culture associated with good appearance evolved during Modernity to become capital icons of the social and civilization changes present in the interior of Castile and vital to their understanding. The examination of symbolic traditionalisms and/or the intense and enlightened critical debates on the use of attire allows for a better assessment of the transcendence that clothing represented in the mental universe of the urban and rural populations of the ancien régime. Issues such as luxury and appearance, external recognition and uniformization are critical in this regard from everyday life, material culture or family consumption perspectives.KEY WORDS: Castile, clothing, fashion, appearances, modernity.

French insurance from the ancien régime to 1946: shifting frontiers between state and market

2003 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-200 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHÈLE RUFFAT
Keyword(s):  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Universal Coverage ◽  
Financial Resources ◽  
Social Benefits ◽  
Regulatory Environment ◽  
Ancien Regime ◽  
The Social ◽  
State And Market ◽  
Post War ◽  
Ancien Régime

This article considers the changing regulatory environment in which French insurance operated between the ancien régime and the post-war years. At first treated with suspicion, the state came to recognise the social benefits of insurance during the industrial revolution. The extension of regulation over different products and companies – life, marine, general – needs to be understood as a historical process in which first the benefits and then the possibilities for access to substantial financial resources came to be understood. A dual tradition of mistrust and fascination has prevailed in the French attitudes towards insurance, and this paper explores this relationship in a variety of contexts. It is suggested that the eventual nationalisation of much of the industry in 1946 was a signal of both increasing respectability and of the state's desire to offer universal coverage. The opportunity to mobilise and direct investment flows was also attractive.

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