Russia, Iran, and the 'Eastern Question' in the 1850s–1870s (Россия, Иран и «Восточный вопрос» в 1850-х–1870-х гг.)

2016 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-212
Author(s):  
O.A. Gokov

This article examines Russian-Iranian relations in the context of the “Eastern Question” in the years 1850–1870. During the Crimean War (1853–1856) and the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, each side tried to exploit the other to their own advantage, though in general relations in the first half of the nineteenth century saw both countries finding good cause to cooperate with each other on issues of comment interest in the region. This article, however, identifies a sharp reduction in the role of Iran in the “Eastern Question” in the second half of the century as compared to the first half of the century, a decline the author attributes to the progressive decline of Iran as a regional diplomatic and military power.

This book addresses the sounds of the Crimean War, along with the many ways nineteenth-century wartime is aurally constructed. It examines wide-ranging experiences of listeners in Britain, France, Turkey, Russia, Italy, Poland, Latvia, Daghestan, Chechnya, and Crimea, illustrating the close interplay between nineteenth-century geographies of empire and the modes by which wartime sound was archived and heard. This book covers topics including music in and around war zones, the mediation of wartime sound, the relationship between sound and violence, and the historiography of listening. Individual chapters concern sound in Leo Tolstoy’s wartime writings, and his place within cosmopolitan sensibilities; the role of the telegraph in constructing sonic imaginations in London and the Black Sea region; the absence of archives for the sounds of particular ethnic groups, and how songs preserve memories for both Crimean Tatars and Polish nationalists; the ways in which perceptions of voice rearranged the mental geographies of Baltic Russia, and undermined aspirations to national unity in Italy; Italian opera as a means of conditioning elite perceptions of Crimean battlefields; and historical frames through which to understand the diffusion of violent sounds amid everyday life. The volume engages the academic fields of musicology, ethnomusicology, history, literary studies, sound studies, and the history of the senses.


Author(s):  
Anders Lundgren

The reception of Mendeleev’s periodic system in Sweden was not a dramatic episode. The system was accepted almost without discussion, but at the same time with no exclamation marks or any other outbursts of enthusiasm. There are but a few weak short-lived critical remarks. That was all. I will argue that the acceptance of the system had no overwhelming effect on chemical practice in Sweden. At most, it strengthened its characteristics. It is actually possible to argue that chemistry in Sweden was more essential for the periodic system than the other way around. My results might therefore suggest that we perhaps have to reevaluate the role of Mendeleev’s system in the history of chemistry. Chemistry in Sweden at the end of the nineteenth century can be characterized as a classifying science, with chemists very skilled in analysis, and as mainly an atheoretical science, which treated theories at most only as hypothesis—the slogan of many chemists being “facts persist, theories vanish.” Thanks to these characteristics, by the end of the nineteenth century, chemistry in Sweden had developed into, it must be said, a rather boring chemistry. This is obviously not to say that it is boring to study such a chemistry. Rather, it gives us an example of how everyday science, a part of science too often neglected but a part that constitutes the bulk of all science done, is carried out. One purpose of this study is to see how a theory, considered to be important in the history of chemistry, influenced everyday science. One might ask what happened when a daring chemistry met a boring chemistry. What happened when a theory, which had been created by a chemist who has been described as “not a laboratory chemist,” met an atheoretical experimental science of hard laboratory work and, as was said, the establishment of facts? Furthermore, could we learn something about the role of the periodic system per se from the study of such a meeting? Mendeleev’s system has often been considered important for teaching, and his attempts to write a textbook are often taken as the initial step in the chain of thoughts that led to the periodic system.


1966 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 95-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
William O. Aydelotte

It has never been established how far, in the early Victorian House of Commons, voting on issues followed party lines. It might in general seem plausible to assume — what political oratory generally contrives to suggest — that there are ideological disagreements between parties and that it makes a difference which of two major opposing parties is in control of the Government. This is, indeed, the line taken by some students of politics. A number of historians and political observers have, however, inclined to the contrary opinion and have, for various reasons, tended to play down the role of issues in party disputes. Much of what has been written on political history and, in particular, on the history of Parliament has had a distinct anti-ideological flavor.One line of argument is that issues on which disagreement exists are not always party questions. Robert Trelford McKenzie begins his study of British parties by pointing out that Parliament just before 1830 was “divided on a great issue of principle, namely Catholic emancipation,” and just after 1830, on another, parliamentary reform. He continues: “But on neither issue was there a clear division along strict party lines.” The distinguished administration of Sir Robert Peel in the 1840s was based, according to Norman Gash, on a party “deeply divided both on policy and personalities.” The other side of the House at that time is usually thought to have been even more disunited. It has even been suggested that, in the confused politics of the mid-nineteenth century, the wordsconservativeandradicaleach meant so many different things that they cannot be defined in terms of programs and objectives and that these polarities may more usefully be considered in terms of tempers and approaches.


Author(s):  
Robert Garner

This chapter explains why the state and sovereignty are relevant to the study of politics. It first provides an empirical typology of the state, ranging from the minimalist night-watchman state, approximated to by nineteenth-century capitalist regimes at one end of the spectrum, to the totalitarian state of the twentieth century at the other. It then examines the distribution of power in the state by focusing on three major theories of the state: pluralism, elitism, Marxism, as well as New Right theory. The chapter seeks to demonstrate that the theories of the state identified can also be critiqued normatively, so that pluralism, for instance, can be challenged for its divisive character, as exemplified by identity politics. It then goes on to review different views about what the role of the state ought to be, from the minimalist state recommended by adherents of classical liberalism, to the pursuit of distinctive social objectives as recommended, in particular, by proponents of communitarianism. Finally, it discusses empirical and normative challenges to the state and asks whether the state’s days are numbered.


Topoi ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriella Mazzon

AbstractIn the ideological construction of colonialism and, more widely, of any hierarchy of human communities, a crucial role is played by discourse on language. English nationalism and imperialism, in particular, developed extensive argumentations on language as an interpretation of the encounter with the other, on the basis of internal cultural developments that assigned to language the role of social discriminator. The paper investigates a strand of such argumentations during the period from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century: the concept of “primitive” languages, described in a positive or, more often, in a negative light. The former arguments employ tones related to the idea of the “good savage” and stand in connection with narratives on the “language of Adam” and of the “Welsh Indians”, the latter uses a rhetoric extolling “progress” and “civilization” against the “immaturity” and “backwardness” of primitive languages, a perspective that was later to influence Darwinism.


Aspasia ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-56
Author(s):  
Nicoleta Roman

This article explores the role of foreign governesses in the early nineteenth century in the province of Wallachia, a principality in the southeastern part of present-day Romania and a peripheral territory at the intersection of the Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman empires. It focuses on the professional integration of governesses into Romanian society, exploring their complementary routes of activity, both in private educational networks for the elite and in the emerging educational institutions for girls. Their cultural identities as transnational teachers sometimes collided with local perceptions and employers’ ambitions, and the study sheds light on the different categories of governesses and how they succeeded in keeping up with a certain model for governesses that prevailed in this period.


2019 ◽  
pp. 3-23
Author(s):  
Dina Gusejnova

Gusejnova’s chapter offers a wide-ranging assessment of cosmopolitan interpretations of war in the European sentimental tradition. Taking impetus from Tolstoy’s reporting on the Crimean war, Gusejnova turns to the Russian formalists’ interpretation of his technique to reconstruct Tolstoy’s use of literary montage, later adapted to film by Sergei Eisenstein. The chapter then contextualizes the history of this technique within genealogies of cosmopolitan thought on the one hand, and literary sentimentalism on the other. Drawing on works by Adam Smith and Stendhal, Gusejnova surveys some of the intellectual and literary techniques through which cosmopolitan sentiments became widespread in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. She argues that Tolstoy’s reproduction of multi-sensory experiences through montage is a statement of his political thought, reflecting his intent to increase the human capacity for compassion in light of cosmopolitan ideals. The chapter proposes that greater understanding between people was driven by the literary, visual, and sonic mediation of violent wartime encounters.


2016 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-209 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philippe Poinsot

The emergence of railroads in France in the nineteenth century raised new debates on analytical issues. The issue lies in the fact that they are natural monopolies. In this paper, I focus on Jules Dupuit’s work on the operations of the railroads. Curiously, he seemed to have defended two contrasting positions: on the one hand, he claimed that unlimited competition is the most efficient way to operate in the railroads; on the other, he stated that State management was the best way to run them. I aim to restore the consistency of Dupuit’s positions. I show that, for him, unlimited competition is not possible in the railroads and that it is not necessarily good for the welfare of society. Therefore, the State should regulate this sector. Then, I specify the conditions under which Dupuit believed the State should manage the railroads instead of offering concessions to private companies.


2003 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 230-258 ◽  
Author(s):  
HAZEL HUTCHISON

ABSTRACT Hazel Hutchison, ““The Other Lambert Strether: Henry James's The Ambassadors, Balzac's Louis Lambert, and J.H. Lambert”” (pp.230––258) We think we know Lambert Strether. Henry James names the unlikely hero of The Ambassadors (1903) after Honoréé de Balzac's unlikely novel Louis Lambert (1832––33)——or so he says. In this essay I argue that James's choice is also influenced by his knowledge of the eighteenth-century Alsace philosopher J. H. Lambert. Now obscure, Lambert was, in his day and in the nineteenth century, a major figure in European science and philosophy, one deeply influential on the formation of phenomenology and pragmatism, disciplines closely associated with James's brother William James. Lambert's fascination with the problem of appearances also offers connections with Strether's experience in Paris and invites an exploration of the role of visual art in James's novel, including Hans Holbein's masterpiece with which it shares a name. In this study I argue that the name of Lambert, far from offering an easy clue to Strether's identity, offers him a variety of possible natures and possible ways of viewing reality.


2020 ◽  
pp. 163-200
Author(s):  
Chelsea Stieber

This chapter analyzes two concepts of “civilization”—the Western, dominant notion and its critique—at work and in tension between imperial Haiti and the republic-in-exile. Among exiled republicans, a refined, nonviolent notion of “civilization” and “culture” sought to cultivate and rehabilitate Haiti’s image in France. In imperial Haiti, on the other hand, Soulouque staked a challenge to the exclusionary, racialized notion of “civilization” itself through an active cultivation of popular religion and culture. A first section analyzes the role of visual and popular culture in Soulouque’s empire as part of the Dessalinean heritage of citation, iteration, and critique of the concept of Western civilization or “modernity.” Next, it consider the parallel—but opposite—effort among exiled republicans to allegorize and retell the story of the founding of the Haitian republic precisely according to the dominant norm of Western civilization, establishing Haiti’s parentage with the French Revolution and the liberal Enlightenment values of 1789. Ultimately, the chapter reveals that the form of the Haitian state and the heritage of 1804 were still highly contested well into the mid-nineteenth century.


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