scholarly journals Review of Nomad’s land: Pastoralism and French environmental policy in the nineteenth-century Mediterranean world by Andrea E. Duffy

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Guerin

Book detailsAndrea E. Duffy, Nomad’s Land: Pastoralism and French Environmental Policy in the Nineteenth-Century Mediterranean World (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2019). 191 pages + notes, index and bibliography ISBN: 9780803290976

2018 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-60
Author(s):  
G. Geltner

Historians tend to view public health as a quintessentially modern phenomenon, enabled by the emergence of representative democracies, centralised bureaucracies and advanced biomedicine. While social, urban and religious historians have begun chipping away at the entrenched dichotomy between pre/modernity that this view implies, evidence for community prophylactics in earlier eras also emerges from a group of somewhat unexpected sources, namely military manuals. Texts composed for (and often by) army leaders in medieval Latin Europe, East Rome (Byzantium) and other premodern civilisations reflect the topicality of population-level preventative healthcare well before the nineteenth century, thereby broadening the path for historicising public health from a transregional and even global perspective. Moreover, at least throughout the Mediterranean world, military manuals also attest the enduring appeal of Hippocratic and Galenic prophylactics and how that medical tradition continued for centuries to shape the routines and material culture of vulnerable communities such as armies.


Author(s):  
Joanna Innes

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw attempts around the Mediterranean world to replace an old order of privilege and delegated power with one in which all subjects were equal before the state. Across southern Europe, revolutionary France provided the model: under French and subsequently liberal regimes, privilege in state, church, and economy was cut back; there were analogous changes in the Ottoman world. Legal change did not always translate into substantive social change. Nonetheless, new conceptions of a largely autonomous ‘society’ developed, and new protocols were invented to relate state to ‘society’, often entailing use of tax status as a reference point for the allocation of rights and duties. The French Doctrinaires argued that the abolition of privilege made society ‘democratic’, posing the question, how was such a society best governed? By the middle of the nineteenth century, this conception was widely endorsed across southern Europe.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guy Geltner

Historians tend to view public health as a quintessentially modern phenomenon, enabled by the emergence of representative democracies, centralized bureaucracies and advanced biomedicine. While social, urban and religious historians have begun chipping away at the entrenched dichotomy between pre/modernity that this view implies, evidence for community prophylactics in earlier eras also emerges from a group of somewhat unexpected sources, namely military manuals. Texts composed for (and often by) army leaders in medieval Latin Europe, East Rome (Byzantium) and other premodern civilizations reflect the topicality of population-level preventative healthcare well before the nineteenth century, thereby broadening the path for historicizing public health from a transregional and even global perspective. Moreover, at least throughout the Mediterranean World, military manuals also attest the enduring appeal of Hippocratic and Galenic prophylactics and how that medical tradition continued for centuries to shape the routines and material culture of vulnerable communities such as armies.


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