scholarly journals Sailors in wonderland: Dutch sperm whaling during the nineteenth century, 1827–1849

2017 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-275
Author(s):  
Joost CA Schokkenbroek

The Dutch engaged in whaling between 1612 and 1964, with intervals of non-activity in the last quarter of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. Under varied circumstances, the Dutch have relied upon the expertise of foreign whalemen. The involvement of Basque whalers in the foundation and organisation of Dutch whaling expeditions during the first half of the seventeenth century is fully documented. Less well known is the collaboration between the Dutch and whaling experts from the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century. This article relates to a number of expeditions undertaken by Dutch and American whalemen, who headed for hunting grounds unfamiliar to the Dutch. It examines the political and economic contexts within which American involvement should be considered, and identifies the results of this involvement.

1996 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert K. Whalen

Philo-Semitism is America's enduring contribution to the long, troubled, often murderous dealings of Christians with Jews. Its origins are English, and it drew continuously on two centuries of British research into biblical prophecy from the seventeenth Century onward. Philo-Semitism was, however, soon “domesticated” and adapted to the political and theological climate of America after independence. As a result, it changed as America changed. In the early national period, religious literature abounded that foresaw the conversion of the Jews and the restoration of Israel as the ordained task of the millennial nation—the United States. This scenario was, allowing for exceptions, socially and theologically optimistic and politically liberal, as befit the ethos of a revolutionary era. By the eve of Civil War, however, countless evangelicals cleaved to a darker vision of Christ's return in blood and upheaval. They disparaged liberal social views and remained loyal to an Augustinian theology that others modified or abandoned.


Author(s):  
Duncan Bell

This chapter focuses on John Robert Seeley (1834–95), the most prominent imperial thinker in late nineteenth-century Britain. It dissects Seeley's understanding of theology and religion, probes his views on the sacred character of nationality, and shows how he attempted to reconcile particularism and universalism in a so-called “cosmopolitan nationalist” vision. It argues that Seeley's most famous book, The Expansion of England (1883) should be understood as an expression of his basic political-theological commitments. The chapter also makes the case that he conceived of Greater Britain as a global federal nation-state, modeled on the United States. It concludes by discussing the role of India and Ireland in his polychronic, stratified conception of world order.


2015 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 357-370
Author(s):  
Precious McKenzie Stearns

Nineteenth-century male European travel writers sometimes romanticize their destinations and dream they have arrived in untouched lands. The Hawaii Isabella Bird visited, however, was not an idyllic land, forgotten by time. Early in the nineteenth century, steamships crossed the Pacific, carrying goods and people from the United States, Australia, New Zealand, China, and Japan. The trade in sandalwood and fur brought many foreign steamships into Hawaii (Kuykendall 15). It was not uncommon for American missionaries to arrive in Hawaii via whaling ships that stopped in Hawaii (Kuykendall 16, 41). Hawaii, with its position between mainland America and Asia, was a valuable and strategic piece of property. Isabella Bird Bishop's 1875 travel memoir The Hawaiian Archipelago: Six months Among the Palm Groves, Coral Reefs, and Volcanoes of the Sandwich Islands comments on the political situation the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) faced in the nineteenth century.


Author(s):  
Kathleen M. Brian

During the final two decades of the nineteenth century, newspapers reported that dozens of “suicide clubs” were operating in the United States. By restoring and pursuing the uncertainty that marked these reports, as well underscoring the ultimate unknowability of the men who became the stories’ main protagonists, this chapter argues that such reports served as mythic pedagogies for naturalizing a quickly consolidating eugenics rationale. The power to mythify entailed not only the bleeding out of biography and history but also the replenishing infusion of politically useful alternatives. In this particular case study, the hemorrhage was necessitated by the political urgency surrounding the labor question and by capitalists’ need for a different story. They needed a different “sense of life” that would reframe material realities, and they did so by ventriloquizing a handful of men who died by suicide.


1987 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet Ajzenstat

Philip Resnick argues that Montesquieu is seminal for an understanding of Canadian institutions. We find in nineteenth-century Canada, he says, not Montesquieu's separation of powers doctrine, so influential in the United States, but his teaching about the mixed constitution, that is, government by a combination of monarchic, aristocratic and democratic institutions. He argues that this influence shows in such typical features of our political culture as acceptance of hierarchical patterns, deference to authority and so on; these are reflections of the “disdain for democratic excesses” inherent in the mixed constitution. He then goes on to suggest that we have grown out of the mixed constitution in the twentieth century, but that as a result of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms relations between the political and judicial powers in Canada have so come to resemble the American that we are justified in saying that Canada in this one respect is now characterized by the separation of powers. We have moved from the Montesquieu of the mixed constitution to the Montesquieu of the separation of powers.


Author(s):  
John M. Owen

This chapter considers the second lesson that is relevant to political Islam and secularism today: ideologies are (usually) not monolithic. It first considers the situation in Europe in the early nineteenth century, when European conservatives claimed that the divide between republicanism and constitutional monarchism was a distinction without a difference. It then examines the dilemma faced by the House of Habsburg in Europe during the early seventeenth century: since Protestantism seemed to be polylithic, should they try to exploit divisions among the Protestants? The chapter proceeds by discussing the fault lines separating communists and socialists in the twentieth century before concluding with some reflections on the lessons that can be drawn from Western history for the United States in dealing with Islamists today. It suggests that whether Islamism is monolithic or polylithic is a question that matters, especially for U.S. foreign policy.


2020 ◽  
pp. 35-61
Author(s):  
Boaz Huss

Chapter 2 examines the formation of the concept of Jewish mysticism, the identification of Kabbalah and Hasidism as Jewish forms of mysticism, and the construction of an academic research field dedicated to what was defined as “Jewish mysticism.” It describes the application of the adjective mystical to Kabbalah by Christian scholars since the seventeenth century, the appearance of the term “Jewish mysticism” in the writings of German Romantic theologians in the early nineteenth century, and the adoption of the term by Jewish scholars in Europe and the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century. It further examines the “revelation” of Jewish mysticism by Martin Buber and the establishment of the research field dedicated to Jewish mysticism by Gershom Scholem and his pupils. The chapter discusses the ideological and theological contexts in which the category of mysticism was shaped in the nineteenth century and the processes that led to the establishment of Jewish mysticism—as a category and as an academic research field—in the framework of modern theological-national discourse and as part of the Zionist nation-building endeavor.


2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (02) ◽  
pp. 593-598 ◽  
Author(s):  
DANIEL T. RODGERS

It underplays the significance of James Kloppenberg's monumentally ambitious and massively learned Toward Democracy to call it a big book—though at seven hundred pages of text, a hundred pages of notes and another five hundred pages of additional endnotes online it is surely that. It is, in voice and subject, several books in one. The first is a sweeping narrative account of the struggles for self-rule in England, the United States, and France from the seventeenth century through the middle third of the nineteenth century. The great revolutions stand at this history's center—the Puritan Revolution of the 1640s, the British North Americans’ revolt against monarchy and their construction of an enduring kingless polity in the 1770s and 1780s, and the revolutionary upheaval in France in the years after 1789—their origins, struggles, and dramas etched with a skilled narrative historian's hand.


1955 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 232-261 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fredrick B. Pike

An orderly and almost bloodless movement brought Guatemala independence from Spain in 1821. The tranquil inception of national existence contrasts vividly with the ensuing century and a quarter, a period marked by turbulence and a multitude of factors tending to retard political and economic development. The 1821 Revolution resulted only in the overthrow of Spanish rule; other traditions of colonial times were not so easily cast aside. Politics continued to be the exclusive domain of long-term, personalistic rulers, while economic policy remained under the control of a numerically small land-owning aristocracy. The political chiefs generally allied themselves with the conservative lords of land. Certainly this was true of Rafael Carrera, the uneducated mestizo who dominated the country for nearly twenty years in the mid-nineteenth century. The same pattern existed during the dictatorship of Manuel Estrada Cabrera, 1898–1920. In spite of a few concessions to liberalism, the construction of many roads, and the redistribution of a small amount of land, there is no doubt that the rule of Jorge Ubico, 1930–1944, relied for its main support upon the arch-conservative landed aristocrats.


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