Scribal elites in Sultanate and Mughal Bengal

2010 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 445-472 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kumkum Chatterjee

This article studies the importance of scribal skills in sustaining political regimes and the function of scribal careers in shaping and creating social and ritual status with particular reference to Bengal from the thirteenth till the eighteenth centuries. Based on histories of landed families, middle period Bengali literature and the large genealogical corpus (kulagranthas) of this region, the article surveys the social geography of literate–scribal communities and their long association with a number of Indo–Islamic regimes which ruled over Bengal during these centuries. The article explores the social and cultural implications of scribal careers as well as the educational and linguistic proficiencies which undergirded them. Finally, the article notes the role played by polities in regulating jati hierarchies and boundaries and comments on its implications for the period studied here as also for the colonial/modern period.

Author(s):  
Irene Fosi

AbstractThe article examines the topics relating to the early modern period covered by the journal „Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken“ in the hundred volumes since its first publication. Thanks to the index (1898–1995), published in 1997 and the availability online on the website perpectivia.net (since 1958), it is possible to identify constants and changes in historiographical interests. Initially, the focus was on the publication of sources in the Vatican Secret Archive (now the Vatican Apostolic Archive) relating to the history of Germany. The topics covered later gradually broadened to include the history of the Papacy, the social composition of the Curia and the Papal court and Papal diplomacy with a specific focus on nunciatures, among others. Within a lively historiographical context, connected to historical events in Germany in the 20th century, attention to themes and sources relating to the Middle Ages continues to predominate with respect to topics connected to the early modern period.


Author(s):  
Barry Sandywell ◽  
David Beer

This article is a series of notes concerned with tracking the social and cultural implications of the digitisation of music. In this piece we explore a number of emerging questions and phenomena with the explicit intention of opening new sets of questions and creating opportunities for further reflections and more detailed empirical case studies. This article, therefore, is not intended as a final word or a definitive statement on the phenomenon of cultural morphing, but rather it represents an attempt to experiment, to develop, and to explore the field of hybridisation and popular cultural change. It is hoped that these exploratory notes will illuminate some of the cultural transformations resulting from the proliferation and appropriation of a wide range of digital music technologies.


Ethnohistory ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-268
Author(s):  
Morgan Ritchie ◽  
Bruce Granville Miller

Abstract During the socially transformative mid-nineteenth century in the Salish Sea region of the Northwest Coast, a number of influential leaders emerged within Indigenous tribal groups. They played a significant role in reshaping the social geography of the region, blending emergent religious, commercial, and military bases for authority with more conventional Coast Salish strategies of patronage and generosity. The authors examine the lives and social connections of three Coast Salish leaders to illustrate how they were able to establish and maintain social networks across the region for their advantage and for the advantage of followers who had gravitated to them from surrounding shattered communities.


2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (3) ◽  
pp. 617-638 ◽  
Author(s):  
GEMMA ALLEN

AbstractThis article reveals how the ambassadress became an important part of early modern diplomatic culture, from the invention of the role in the early sixteenth century. As resident embassies became common across the early modern period, wives increasingly accompanied these diplomatic postings. Such a development has, however, received almost no scholarly attention to date, despite recent intense engagement with the social and cultural dimensions of early modern diplomacy. By considering the activities of English ambassadresses from the 1530s to 1700, accompanying embassies both inside and outside of Europe, it is possible not only to integrate them into narratives of diplomacy, but also to place their activities within broader global and political histories of the period. The presence of the ambassadress changed early modern diplomatic culture, through the creation of gendered diplomatic courtesies, gendered gift-giving practices, and gendered intelligence-gathering networks. Through female sociability networks at their host court, ambassadresses were able to access diplomatic intelligence otherwise restricted from their husbands. This was never more true than for those ambassadresses who held bonds of friendship with politically influential women at their host or home court, allowing them to influence political decision-making central to the success of the diplomatic mission.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah Goodbrand

This paper explores the regionalization of immigrant settlement in Canada’s smaller cities which has not been sufficiently addressed in Canada’s largest province, Ontario. The paper investigates this through a comprehensive review of the existing Canadian literature and research into the changing volume of immigrant settlement and the social geography of Ontario’s smaller cities from 1996 to 2015. This research is conducted through the development of a categorization system which orders Ontario’s CMAs into tiers based on total immigrant population. Two tiers are then compared to reveal any general trends or anomalies which could contribute to the understanding of regionalization in Ontario. A lack of evidence for significant regionalization was found, however, growth in the visible minority populations of some CMAs suggested the development of new international migration pathways. The findings of this paper reaffirm the need for further research in immigrant settlement in smaller Canadian cities.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document