The Missionary Impulse

Author(s):  
Albert Monshan Wu

This chapter investigates the broader global context that generated the nineteenth-century missionary revival, which laid the foundation for missionary organizations like the Protestant Berlin Missionary Society (BMS) and the Catholic Society of the Divine Word (SVD). Witnessing the rise of revolutionary anti-clerical forces swell in the late eighteenth century, the founders of both missionary societies lived during a period of deep anxiety about the fate of Christianity. Missionary leaders channeled these anxieties. They recruited pious young men and sent them across the globe with the hopes of winning new converts as a way to combat the forces of secularism. This chapter argues that anxiety and optimism formed the dual pillars that propped up the nineteenth- century German missionary mind.

Author(s):  
Will Smiley

This chapter explores captives’ fates after their capture, all along the Ottoman land and maritime frontiers, arguing that this was largely determined by individuals’ value for ransom or sale. First this was a matter of localized customary law; then it became a matter of inter-imperial rules, the “Law of Ransom.” The chapter discusses the nature of slavery in the Ottoman Empire, emphasizing the role of elite households, and the varying prices for captives based on their individual characteristics. It shows that the Ottoman state participated in ransoming, buying, exploiting, and sometimes selling both female and male captives. The state particularly needed young men to row on its galleys, but this changed in the late eighteenth century as the fleet moved from oars to sails. The chapter then turns to ransom, showing that a captive’s ability to be ransomed, and value, depended on a variety of individualized factors.


BJHS Themes ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Suman Seth

Abstract In the course of his discussion of the origin of variations in skin colour among humans in the Descent of Man, Charles Darwin suggested that darker skin might be correlated with immunity to certain diseases. To make that suggestion, he drew upon a claim that seemed self-evidently correct in 1871, although it had seemed almost certainly incorrect in the late eighteenth century: that immunity to disease could be understood as a hereditary racial trait. This paper aims to show how fundamental was the idea of ‘constitutions selection’, as Darwin would call it, for his thinking about human races, tracking his (ultimately unsuccessful) attempts to find proof of its operation over a period of more than thirty years. At the same time and more broadly, following Darwin's conceptual resources on this question helps explicate relationships between conceptions of disease and conceptions of race in the nineteenth century. That period saw the birth of a modern, fixist, biologically determinist racism, which increasingly manifested itself in medical writings. The reverse was also true: medicine was a crucial site in which race was forged. The history of what has been called ‘race-science’, it is argued, cannot and should not be written independent of the history of ‘race-medicine’.


2021 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 255-269
Author(s):  
Waïl S. Hassan

Abstract According to a well-known narrative, the concept of Weltliteratur and its academic correlative, the discipline of comparative literature, originated in Germany and France in the early nineteenth century, influenced by the spread of scientism and nationalism. But there is another genesis story that begins in the late eighteenth century in Spain and Italy, countries with histories entangled with the Arab presence in Europe during the medieval period. Emphasizing the role of Arabic in the formation of European literatures, Juan Andrés wrote the first comparative history of “all literature,” before the concepts of Weltliteratur and comparative literature gained currency. The divergence of the two genesis stories is the result of competing geopolitical interests, which determine which literatures enter into the sphere of comparison, on what terms, within which paradigms, and under what ideological and discursive conditions.


Jazz in China ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 14-20
Author(s):  
Eugene Marlow

In the late 1910s, 1920s, and even into the 1930s, “jazz” was the music of the age in the Republic of China, especially and primarily in Shanghai on China's east coast. It was enjoyed equally by sophisticated Chinese gentry and upper-class people in the many dance halls dotting various parts of Shanghai, and by the many Europeans, Russians, and Americans living and working in the so-called “Paris of the East.” These same foreigners also owned pieces of Shanghai, literally. This chapter asks how several foreign nations came to own sections of Shanghai, and have unrestricted access to numerous key ports throughout China's eastern coast? The answer to these questions can be found in a conflict initially between the British (and ultimately the French, Russians, and Americans) and the Chinese in the mid-nineteenth century: the Opium Wars, two wars that had roots in late eighteenth-century China.


2021 ◽  
pp. 19-39
Author(s):  
Peter Anderson

While we know much about the cult of childhood, historians have spent less time analysing the ways in which certain parents became demonized from the late eighteenth century. This chapter traces growing criticisms across nations of parents who were felt to have endangered their offspring and to have deprived the nation of a future robust population. Industrialization and urbanization lent a growing shrillness to the debate. Doctors, opponents of child labour and slavery, and criminologists all began to denounce parents and especially those from the left who they identified as a threat to their offspring and society. As the nineteenth century progressed and competition between nations increased, the growth of eugenic thought gave extra virulence to these denunciations. This set the stage for demands for ‘dangerous’ parents to be stripped of their guardianship.


Author(s):  
Simon Coffey

Wanostrochts’s Practical Grammar was first published in London in 1780, then in the US from 1805.1 It was one of the most successful pedagogical grammars of its time, appearing in revised forms for almost a century. It was probably the first grammar to include ‘exercises’ in the same volume and represents a prototype of what would become known as the ‘grammar-translation’ manual that provided a template for most language schoolbooks throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. The analysis in this chapter considers the content of Wanostrocht’s primer as an example of late eighteenth-century language epistemology, and provides broader background detail to help better understand the context of the publication, its intended purpose, and the reasons for its enduring popularity.


Author(s):  
Aaron Sheehan-Dean

Over the course of the mid-nineteenth-century wars, the dominant powers (Britain, the U.S., Russia, and Qing China) came to espouse a surprisingly similar orientation toward legitimate statehood. While the liberation wars of the late-eighteenth century witnessed the creation of many new republics, by midcentury those republics and the empires that had survived pursued greater central authority. Although sometimes at odds with liberal rhetoric of the age (especially among reforming Republicans in the U.S.), these actors recognized the importance of coercion of violence to maintaining their states. The victory of centralized authority, whether it took the form of empires or republics, reinforced the power of established states and of organized, aggressive defense of that order.


Author(s):  
Ellen T. Harris

In the late eighteenth century, The Academy of Ancient Music prepared a modern adaptation of Dido and Aeneas that was performed into the nineteenth century. The score was brought “up-to-date” by means of alterations to rhythmic flow and cadential patterns, and the temporal separation of individual movements from one another. Scenic demarcations were revised to indicate entrances and exits rather than stage set, and cuts were taken throughout the score. The vocal ranges of the soloists were altered to cover the standard vocal range: soprano (Dido), alto (Belinda), tenor (Aeneas), bass (Sorceress). Some of the surviving sources for these performances offer the names of specific singers who played the major roles.


2014 ◽  
Vol 45 ◽  
pp. 115-133 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Ottner

During the nineteenth century, history developed into an independent discipline with important cultural and intellectual functions in both the academic world, as well as in society at large. Specific circumstances contributed to the rise in importance of this discipline: On the one hand, the emergence of an educated bourgeoisie and rising nationalist movements influenced the study of history; whereas on the other hand, public demands for assurances of continuity, as well as conservative efforts for restoration, also played an important role in history's growth in importance. Historicism, which began to establish itself in late-eighteenth-century Germany, had its forerunners in research approaches that grew out of the late Enlightenment. Concepts of cultural science [Kulturwissenschaft] developed by scholars of the late Enlightenment paved the way for the rise of the historical discipline during the first half of the nineteenth century.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document