The Search for a Permanent Channel: Environmental Transformation of the Dagu Bar, 1897-1928

2020 ◽  
pp. 009614422097612
Author(s):  
Ai Wang

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Haihe Conservancy Commission conducted a series of Western-style engineering projects to create a permanent bar channel in the Chinese city of Tianjin. Driven by modernist and imperialist conceptualizations of environment, these Western-style water projects transformed the Dagu sandbar with a wide scale of human intervention. This article traces historical trajectories of the Dagu Bar and argues that modern imaginations and practices of environmental transformation departed from Chinese imperial mode of water conservancy. Two twentieth-century engineering schemes, with successes and failures, transformed the coastal environment and played a pivotal role in creating a modern city port.

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (5) ◽  
pp. 563-576

The goal of this article is to examine the introduction of plantations into East Sumatra (Indonesia) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Attention is given to the five most important plantation crops, namely tobacco, rubber, oil palm, tea, and fiber. The article analyzes the economic and social transformation of the region as a consequence of the rapid expansion of plantations. Within a short period of time, East Sumatra emerged to become one of the most dynamic economic regions of Southeast Asia. The development of the region and the needs of a source of protection for Dutch planters in face of fierce competition from other Western companies and local resistance encouraged the Dutch colonial government to establish effective authority in East Sumatra. Received 4th June 2020; Revised 15th September 2020; Accepted 26th September 2020


2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 290-303
Author(s):  
Richard Howard

Irish science fiction is a relatively unexplored area for Irish Studies, a situation partially rectified by the publication of Jack Fennell's Irish Science Fiction in 2014. This article aims to continue the conversation begun by Fennell's intervention by analysing the work of Belfast science fiction author Ian McDonald, in particular King of Morning, Queen of Day (1991), the first novel in what McDonald calls his Irish trilogy. The article explores how McDonald's text interrogates the intersection between science, politics, and religion, as well as the cultural movement that was informing a growing sense of a continuous Irish national identity. It draws from the discipline of Science Studies, in particular the work of Nicholas Whyte, who writes of the ways in which science and colonialism interacted in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Ireland.


2007 ◽  
Vol 86 (2) ◽  
pp. 278-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Constable

This article examines the Scottish missionary contribution to a Scottish sense of empire in India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Initially, the article reviews general historiographical interpretations which have in recent years been developed to explain the Scottish relationship with British imperial development in India. Subsequently the article analyses in detail the religious contributions of Scottish Presbyterian missionaries of the Church of Scotland and the Free Church Missions to a Scottish sense of empire with a focus on their interaction with Hindu socioreligious thought in nineteenth-century western India. Previous missionary historiography has tended to focus substantially on the emergence of Scottish evangelical missionary activity in India in the early nineteenth century and most notably on Alexander Duff (1806–78). Relatively little has been written on Scottish Presbyterian missions in India in the later nineteenth century, and even less on the significance of their missionary thought to a Scottish sense of Indian empire. Through an analysis of Scottish Presbyterian missionary critiques in both vernacular Marathi and English, this article outlines the orientalist engagement of Scottish Presbyterian missionary thought with late nineteenth-century popular Hinduism. In conclusion this article demonstrates how this intellectual engagement contributed to and helped define a Scottish missionary sense of empire in India.


Author(s):  
Risto Hilpinen

Medieval philosophers presented Gettier-type objections to the commonly accepted view of knowledge as firmly held true belief, and formulated additional conditions that meet the objections or analyzed knowledge in a way that is immune to the Gettier-type objections. The proposed conditions can be divided into two kinds: backward-looking conditions and forward-looking conditions. The former concern an inquirer’s current belief system and the way the inquirer acquired her beliefs, the latter refer to what the inquirer may come to learn in the future and how she can respond to objections. Some conditions of knowledge proposed in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century epistemology can be regarded as variants of the conditions put forward by medieval authors.


Author(s):  
Jonathan D. Teubner

The ‘Historiographical Interlude’ presents a brief overview of the cultural, social, and political changes that occur between Augustine’s death in 430 CE and Boethius’ earliest theological writings (c.501 CE). When Augustine, Boethius, and Benedict are treated together in one unified analysis, several historiographical challenges emerge. This Interlude addresses several of these challenges and argues that trends within late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholarship established some unfounded interpretive biases. In particular, this section will discuss the contributions of Adolf von Harnack and Henri Irénée Marrou, focusing on how they contributed, in diverse ways, to the neglect of sixth-century Italy as a significant geographical site in the development of the Augustinian tradition.


2020 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 273-297
Author(s):  
Sébastien Plutniak

ArgumentIn the last decades, many changes have occurred in scientific publishing, including online publication, data repositories, file formats and standards. The role played by computers in this process rekindled the argument on forms of technical determinism. This paper addresses this old debate by exploring the case of publishing processes in prehistoric archaeology during the second part of the twentieth century, prior to the wide-scale adoption of computers. It investigates the case of a collective and international attempt to standardize the typological analysis of prehistoric lithic objects, coined typologie analytique by Georges Laplace and developed by a group of French, Italian, and Spanish researchers. The aim of this paper is to: 1) present a general bibliometric scenario of prehistoric archaeology publishing in continental Europe; 2) report on the little-known typologie analytique method in archaeology, using publications, archives, and interviews; 3) show how the publication of scientific production was shaped by social (editorial policies, support networks) and material (typography features and publication formats) constraints; and 4) highlight how actors founded resources to control and counterbalance these effects, namely by changing and improving publishing formats.


2005 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 262-273 ◽  
Author(s):  
MATTHIAS WARSTAT

The concept of festival can help to understand the framework within which political community building took place in Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and the methods employed in doing so. Political communities were established within different kinds of cultural performances such as gatherings, demonstrations, party conventions, and – most frequently – political celebrations, which obtained a festival-like structure. Referring to examples from the labour movement, this article examines different techniques of creating communities and discusses the impact of theatrical strategies and certain types of theatre in this crucial field of modern politics.


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