Colonial law in the making

2015 ◽  
Vol 83 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 202-225
Author(s):  
Benoît Henriet
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Territorial Expansion ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Political Sovereignty ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Congo Free State ◽  
Legislative Processes ◽  
Made In

From its creation to the present day, jurists and historians have perceived the Congo Free State (CFS) as a special example of political sovereignty. As a ‘colony without Metropolis’ whose territorial basis was obtained through disputed treaties made in the name of geographical and philanthropic societies with almost no legal existence, it stands out at first sight as an anomaly in nineteenth century colonial State building. Yet, the Free State’s legal existence is largely rooted in other imperial experiences, and shares multiple common features with its colonial rivals. This article intends to show how, from H.M. Stanley’s first expeditions in the mouth of the Congo River (1876) to the creation of Belgian colony (1908), international law and foreign imperial rules were used as the very matrix of the CFS’s legal existence as a sovereign State. The particular history of the CFS’s quest for sovereignty and the creation of its land legislation not only offers a unique example of colonial law making, it also provides interesting outputs on colonial legislative processes, as well as general observations on the West’s territorial expansion in the nineteenth century.


Rethinking sovereignty with reference to history and anthropology

2009 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 315-330 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Wachspress
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
The State ◽  
Historical Case ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Political Sovereignty ◽  
History Of ◽  
Anthropological Literature

While legal practice and scholarship are driven by the use and understanding of complex legal terminology, there has been little effort to incorporate the humanistic scholarship of anthropologists and historians into theoretical or practical accounts of these words and their usages. This paper attempts to historicise and complicate a term that serves as a bridge or meeting point between the legal and the political; sovereignty has been conceptualised since the sixteenth century as both a framing device that produces unity within the state while establishing mutual equality within the interstate order, and as the capacity to make law without being subject to that law. Recent anthropological literature has challenged the personification implicit in political–theoretical definitions of sovereignty, arguing instead for a theory of sovereignty that can be applied to ‘complicated’, post-colonial contexts, where legal orders are plural or overlapping and the state is weak or non-existent. What such critiques cannot explain, however, is how the concept of the ‘sovereign state’ became so central to political discourse on a global scale. This paper draws upon legal historical case-studies concerned with the production of the colonial or post-colonial state or the deployment of ‘sovereignty’ as a justificatory concept in colonial settings. In doing so, this paper argues for understanding sovereignty both as a practice across time and space that organises legal institutions and as a justificatory strategy in the intellectual and social history of those institutions, an approach that allows scholars to draw upon the insights of political theorists, anthropologists and historians. While primarily intended to instigate a broader interdisciplinary conversation, this paper also suggests a preliminary conclusion: sovereignty has historically been deployed as a means of including that which cannot be considered the same, mediating the colonial tension between ‘otherness’ and legal homogeneity.

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.

Perspectives on the European Videogame

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
North American ◽  
Game Development ◽  
Global Impact ◽  
Collective Work ◽  
Philosophical Ground ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Creation ◽  
European Production ◽  
Made In

The history of European videogames has been so far overshadowed by the global impact of the Japanese and North American industries. However, European game development studios have played a major role in videogame history, and prominent videogames in popular culture, such as <i>Grand Theft Auto</i>, <i>Tomb Raider</i> and <i>Alone in the Dark</i> were made in Europe. This book proposes an exploration of European videogames, including both analyses of transnational aspects of European production and close readings of national specificities. It offers a kaleidoscope of European videogame culture, focusing on the analysis of European works and creators but also addressing contextual aspects and placing videogames within a wider sociocultural and philosophical ground. The aim of this collective work is to contribute to the creation of a, so far, almost non-existent yet necessary academic endeavour: a story of the works, authors, styles and cultures of the European videogame.

Unifying without Integrating: The East German Collapse and German Unity

2010 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 484-507 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan R. Zatlin
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
East Germany ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
Political Sovereignty ◽  
New States ◽  
History Of ◽  
East German ◽  
Cultural Attachment

The demise of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) came as a surprise to most western observers. For historians of modern Europe, its disappearance remains remarkable for at least two reasons. First, East Germany has ceased to exist in an era when new states are constantly being born. Since the French Revolution unleashed the power of national self-determination as an ordering principle more than 200 years ago, new sovereign states have continued to emerge across the globe, whether through the breakup of multiethnic and colonial empires or the dissolution of pan-Slavic states in eastern Europe. Illiberal governments have been swept aside, often with the result that new states have been cast out of imperial entities by the centrifugal force of cultural attachment. In the history of European political sovereignty during the twentieth century, the particular has triumphed over the universal. Except in the case of the GDR. Against the tide of European history, the GDR has gone from sovereign state (East Germany) to regional designation (eastern Germany). In this sense, the story of the GDR's absorption by a larger polity is a tale of modern state-building told in reverse.

scholarly journals An Overview of Public History in Italy: No Longer A Field Without a Name

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Serge Noiret
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Public History ◽  
Public Archaeology ◽  
Italian Association ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Post War ◽  
New Millennium

AbstractThis article traces the origins and development of public history in Italy, a field not anymore without this name today. Public history in Italy has its roots in historical institutions born in the nineteenth century and in the post WW2 first Italian Republic. The concept of “public use of history” (1993), the important role played by memory issues in post-war society, local and national identity issues, the birth of public archaeology (2015) before public history, the emergence of history festivals in the new millennium are all important moments shaping the history of the field and described in this essay. The foundation of the “Italian Association of Public History” (AIPH) in 2016/2017, and the promotion of an Italian Public History Manifesto (2018) together with the creation of Public History masters in universities, are all concrete signs of a vital development of the field in the Peninsula.

scholarly journals COLLABORATORS, COLLABORATION, AND THE PROBLEMS OF EMPIRE IN NAPOLEONIC ITALY, THE OPPIZZONI AFFAIR, 1805–1807

2016 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 385-407 ◽  
Author(s):  
AMBROGIO A. CAIANI
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Active Agent ◽  
Local History ◽  
The Other ◽  
Direct Control ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fine Line ◽  
History Of ◽  
Made In ◽  
Going Native

ABSTRACTThe recent bicentennial commemorations of the Napoleonic empire have witnessed a proliferation of new studies. Scholars now possess much more sophisticated conceptual tools than in past decades with which to gauge the problems faced by French imperial administrators throughout Europe. Well-trodden concepts, like centre/periphery or collaboration/resistance, have been reinvigorated by more sophisticated understandings of how rulers and ruled interacted in the early nineteenth century. This article argues that, while much progress has been made in understanding problems of ‘resistance’, there is more to be said about the other side of the same coin, namely: ‘collaboration’. Using the micro/local history of a scandal in Napoleonic Bologna, this article wishes to reaffirm that collaboration was an active agent that shaped, and often shook, the French imperial project. The biggest problem remained that, despite ‘good intentions’, collaborators sometimes simply did not collaborate with each other. After all, imperial clients were determined to benefit from the experience of empire. The centre was often submerged by local petty squabbles. This article will use a specific micro-history in Bologna to highlight the extent to which Napoleonic empire builders had to thread a fine line between the impracticalities of direct control and the dangers of ‘going native’.

““Das verlassene Määgdlein””: Grief Partaken

2009 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-192
Author(s):  
Karen M. Bottge
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sustained Attention ◽  
Musical Settings ◽  
Musical History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Insight Into

Abstract Perhaps the most influential abandoned woman to surface in the musical history of the nineteenth century was that conceived by Biedermeier poet Eduard Möörike. Since its initial publication in 1832, his ““Das verlassene Määgdlein”” has engaged the sustained attention of composers, performers, and even music analysts and critics. Not only did his Määgdlein prompt the creation of numerous nineteenth-century volkstüümliche varianten throughout Germany and Austria, but she also inspired 130 musical settings dating between 1832 and 1985. Yet, although Möörike is just one of many figures within a long tradition of male poets writing on female abandonment, there seems to be something to this particular poem, that is, to Möörike's Määgdlein, that has compelled composers to retell her tale again and again in song. My discussion begins by first revisiting the poem's original novelistic context, Maler Nolten: Novelle in zwei Theilen (1832). Thereafter I follow Möörike's Määgdlein from her poetic beginnings to two of her best-known musical reappearances: Robert Schumann's ““Das verlassne Määgdelein”” (op. 64, no. 2) of 1847 and the work it inspired forty years later, Hugo Wolf's 1888 ““Das verlassene Määgdlein”” (also op. 64, no. 2), perhaps the most renowned setting of them all. Through the juxtaposition of these two settings we may not only uncover their potential textual and musical interconnections, but also gain insight into the tacit cultural understandings and ideologies surrounding those who take up the voice of the abandoned.

The Moghia Menace, or the Watch Over Watchmen In British India

2012 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 751-779 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANASTASIA PILIAVSKY
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Systemic Change ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
British India ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Indigenous Governance

AbstractThis paper contributes to the history of ‘criminal tribes’, policing and governance in British India. It focuses on one colonial experiment—the policing of Moghias, declared by British authorities to be ‘robbers by hereditary profession’—which was the immediate precursor of the first Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, but which so far altogether has passed under historians’ radar. I argue that at stake in the Moghia operations, as in most other colonial ‘criminal tribe’ initiatives, was neither the control of crime (as colonial officials claimed) nor the management of India's itinerant groups (as most historians argue), but the uprooting of the indigenous policing system. British presence on the subcontinent was punctuated with periodic panics over ‘extraordinary crime’, through which colonial authorities advanced their policing practices and propagated their way of governance. The leading crusader against this ‘crisis’ was the Thuggee and Dacoity Department, which was as instrumental in the ‘discovery’ of the ‘Moghia menace’ and ‘criminal tribes’ in the late nineteenth century as in the earlier suppression of the ‘cult of Thuggee’. As a policing initiative, the Moghia campaign failed consistently for more than two decades. Its failures, however, reveal that behind the façade-anxieties over ‘criminal castes’ and ‘crises of crime’ stood attempts at a systemic change of indigenous governance. The diplomatic slippages of the campaign also expose the fact that the indigenous rule by patronage persisted—and that the consolidation of the colonial state was far from complete—well into the late nineteenth century.

scholarly journals The professionalization of Brazilian nursing in the written media of the end of the nineteenth century: a gender analysis

2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (5) ◽  
pp. 1265-1271 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tiago Braga do Espírito Santo ◽  
Taka Oguisso ◽  
Rosa Maria Godoy Serpa da Fonseca
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Professional School ◽  
Gender Analysis ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Relationship

The object is the relationship between the professionalization of Brazilian nursing and women, in the broadcasting of news about the creation of the Professional School of Nurses, in the light of gender. Aims: to discuss the linkage of women to the beginning of the professionalization of Brazilian nursing following the circumstances and evidence of the creation of the Professional School of Nurses analyzed from the perspective of gender. The news articles were analyzed from the viewpoint of Cultural History, founded in the gender concept of Joan Scott and in the History of Women. The creation of the School and the priority given in the media to women consolidate the vocational ideal of the woman for nursing in a profession subjugated to the physician but also representing the conquest of a space in the world of education and work, reconfiguring the social position of nursing and of woman in Brazil.

The Separate Personality of Money

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Kenneth Galbraith
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
Precipitating Factors ◽  
History Of ◽  
Money Creation ◽  
The Creation

This chapter examines the role of money and its management, the origins of what is known today as monetarism. It first provides a brief history of money, focusing on the steps that accorded money its separate and distinctive personality, including the establishment of banks; borrowing and the resulting act of money creation; and the realization by kings, princes and parliaments that the creation of money could be used as a substitute for taxes or as an alternative to borrowing from financiers. It then considers the significance of the institutions and experience surrounding money, along with the economic thought and controversy that money has evoked. In particular, it looks at precipitating factors that shaped American attitudes on money in the nineteenth century, including the Greenbacks and silver. Finally, it describes the role of money in facilitating exchange by taking into account the equation of exchange introduced by American economist Irving Fisher.

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