scholarly journals Investor Letters and the Everyday Practice of Finance in Nineteenth-Century France

2021 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 279-305
Author(s):  
Alexia Yates
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Financial Markets ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Global Capital ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The World ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
Article Analyse

Abstract In the last decades of the nineteenth century the Paris Exchange was the second largest in the world, and engagement in financial markets had become popular on a previously unknown scale. How ordinary people encountered, thought about, and navigated this new financial landscape has nevertheless proved elusive. This article analyzes everyday financial practice in the first age of global capital from the vantage of letters written by ordinary individuals concerning their investments. As the numbers of investors and bondholders in France grew, “investor letters”—missives to financial, legal, and governmental authorities—proliferated. Their existence and concerns offer rich insights into how and with what effect France's financial markets were evolving at the end of the nineteenth century. These letters prompt us to reconsider the place of routine business correspondence in our studies of epistolary culture and allow reflection on economic life as modest investors “wrote upwards” and across the wealth gap of late nineteenth-century France. Vers la fin du dix-neuvième siècle, la Bourse de Paris était la deuxième place financière la plus importante au monde, et ses marchés étaient devenus « populaires » à une échelle sans précédent. La manière dont les gens ordinaires ont réussi à s'orienter dans ce nouveau paysage se révèle difficile à saisir. Cet article analyse la pratique financière quotidienne de l’âge d'or de la globalisation du capital selon les particuliers écrivant à propos de leurs investissements. A mesure que le nombre d'investisseurs et d'obligataires a augmenté, ces « lettres d'investisseurs » adressées aux autorités financières, juridiques et gouvernementales se sont multipliées. Leur existence et leurs sujets de préoccupation offrent de riches informations sur l’évolution des marchés financiers français de la fin du dix-neuvième siècle. Ces lettres nous incitent à reconsidérer la place de la correspondance commerciale dans la culture épistolaire, et en nous montrant comment de modestes investisseurs écrivent « vers le haut » de la hiérarchie économique et sociale, nous permettent d'accéder à des aspects méconnus de la vie économique de la fin du dix-neuvième siècle français.

The National and the Universal

2020 ◽  
pp. 368-386
Author(s):  
Sarah Collins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Johann Gottfried Herder ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Respective Treatment ◽  
History Of

This chapter examines the continuities between the categories of the “national” and the “universal” in the nineteenth century. It construes these categories as interrelated efforts to create a “world” on various scales. The chapter explores the perceived role of music as a world-making medium within these discourses. It argues that the increased exposure to cultural difference and the interpretation of that cultural difference as distant in time and space shaped a conception of “humanity” in terms of a universal history of world cultures. The chapter reexamines those early nineteenth-century thinkers whose work became inextricably linked with the rise of exclusivist notions of nationalism in the late nineteenth century, such as Johann Gottfried Herder and John Stuart Mill. It draws from their respective treatment of music to recover their early commitment to universalizable principles and their view that the “world” is something that must be actively created rather than empirically observed.

Debt, Trust, and Reputation

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian Schwecke
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Financial Markets ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Trust And Reputation ◽  
Active Interest ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Starting in the late nineteenth century, colonial rule in India took an active interest in regulating financial markets beyond the bridgeheads of European capital in intercontinental trade. Regulatory efforts were part of a modernizing project seeking to produce alignments between British and Indian business procedures, and to create the financial basis for incipient industrialization in India. For vast sections of Indian society, however, they pushed credit/debt relations into the realm of extra-legality, while the new, regulated agents of finance remained incapable (and unwilling) of serving their needs. Combining historical and ethnographic approaches, the book questions underlying assumptions of modernization in finance that continue to prevail in postcolonial India, and delineates the socioeconomic responses they produced, and studies the reputational economies of debt that have emerged instead – extra-legal markets embedded into communication flows on trust and reputation that have turned out to be significantly more exploitative than their colonial predecessors.

scholarly journals Leprosy and the elusive M. leprae: colonial and imperial medical exchanges in the nineteenth century

2003 ◽  
Vol 10 (suppl 1) ◽  
pp. 13-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jo Robertson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Disease Models ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Model ◽  
The World ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Morbid Anatomy ◽  
Models Of Disease

In the 1800s, humoral understandings of leprosy successively give way to disease models based on morbid anatomy, physiopathology, and bacteriology. Linkages between these disease models were reinforced by the ubiquitous seed/soil metaphor deployed both before and after the identification of M. leprae. While this metaphor provided a continuous link between medical descriptions, Henry Vandyke Carter's On leprosy (1874) marks a convergence of different models of disease. Simultaneously, this metaphor can be traced in popular and medical debates in the late nineteenth century, accompanying fears of a resurgence of leprosy in Europe. Later the mapping of the genome ushers in a new model of disease but, ironically, while leprosy research draws its logic from a view of the world in which a seed and soil metaphor expresses many different aspects of the activity of the disease, the bacillus itself continues to be unreceptive to cultivation.

scholarly journals Identity considerations for a psychology based on a complex epistemology

2009 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 158-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan Carlos Jaramillo Estrada
Keyword(s):  
Quality Of Life ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Active Part ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Way

Born in the late nineteenth century, within the positivist paradigm, psychology has made important developments that have allowed its recognition in academia and labor. However, contextual issues have transformed the way we conceptualize reality, the world and man, perhaps in response to the poor capacity of the inherited paradigm to ensure quality of life and welfare of human beings. This has led to the birth and recognition of new paradigms, including complex epistemology, in various fields of the sphere of knowledge, which include the subjectivity, uncertainty, relativity of knowledge, conflict, the inclusion of "the observed" as an active part of the interventions and the relativity of a single knowable reality to move to co-constructed realities. It is proposed an approach to the identity consequences for a psychology based on complex epistemology, and the possible differences and relations with psychology, traditionally considered.

The Age of Mass Child Removal in Spain

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Juvenile Court ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Juvenile Courts ◽  
Efficient System ◽  
Parents And Children ◽  
Democratic Regimes ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Rich

This book analyses the ideas and practices that underpinned the age of mass child removal. This era emerged from growing criticisms across the world of ‘dangerous’ parents and the developing belief in the nineteenth century that the state could provide superior guardianship to ‘unfit’ parents. In the late nineteenth century, the juvenile court movement led the way in forging a new and more efficient system of child removal that severely curtailed the previously highly protected sovereignty of guardians deemed dangerous. This transnational movement rapidly established courts across the world and used them to train the personnel and create the systems that frequently lay behind mass child removal. Spaniards formed a significant part of this transnational movement and the country’s juvenile courts became involved in the three main areas of removal that characterize the age: the taking of children from poor families, from families displaced by war, and from political opponents. The study of Spanish case files reveals much about how the removal process worked in practice across time and across democratic regimes and dictatorships. It also affords an insight into the rich array of child-removal practices that lay between the poles of coercion and victimhood. Accordingly, the book further offers a history of some of most marginalized parents and children and recaptures their voice, agency, and experience. It also analyses the removal of tens of thousands of children from General Franco’s political opponents, sometimes referred to as the lost children of Francoism, through the history and practice of the juvenile courts.

Reading Rooms for Travelling Cultures: English-Language Reading Rooms in Late Nineteenth-Century France

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 186-206
Author(s):  
Colette Colligan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Environments ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Transit Routes

This essay focuses on British and American reading rooms at the end of the nineteenth century in French travel centres such as Boulogne-sur-Mer, Cannes, and Paris. These reading rooms were sites of transit that reveal the travelling cultures of Britons and Americans. They set in motion certain travel sociabilities and practices, suggested various transit routes and itineraries, promoted different cultural and national affiliations and identities, and collected, represented, and displayed anglophone cultures. They operated as microcosms of British and American cultures, offering essentialized experiences and connections with people, behaviour, and things affiliated with home, but this essay shows how they were also social environments that not only reinforced, but also reshaped and interrogated anglophone cultures on the move in British, American, and French cultural territories.

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