Rethinking Property and Society in Gondärine Ethiopia

2009 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 89-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Habtamu Mengistie Tegegne

Abstract:The historiographic question that this article asks is: How can historians uncover actual social and economic practices without imposing anachronistic standards and terminologies on the available evidence? The analysis focuses on the relationship between landlords and zégoch—a hitherto unrecognized and socially subservient class of peasants—in the context of social, economic, and cultural realities in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ethiopia. The thesis is that during this period the Ethiopian ruling classes gained their power and income primarily from ownership of rim land—a form of private property—and the labor of zégoch.

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 261-285
Author(s):  
Karen Y. Morrison

Abstract With the social reproduction of slavery in colonial Cuba as its center point, this essay draws on the recent historiographical acknowledgment of the way vassalage mediated the often starkly drawn social distinctions between whites and enslaved people within colonial Spanish America. Inside the region’s emergent, capitalist political economy, feudal vassalage continued to define each social sector’s rights and responsibilities vis-á-vis the Spanish Crown. The rights of enslaved vassals derived from their potential contributions to the Spanish monarchy’s imperial survival, in their capacity to populate the extensive empire with loyal Catholic subjects and potential military defenders. These concerns also justified the Spanish monarchial state’s ability to intervene between its slaveholding vassals and its enslaved vassals, by limiting private property rights over enslaved people and operating in ways that did not fully conform to capitalist profit motives. Awareness of such sovereign-vassal interdependencies challenges historians to broaden their understanding of the relationship between capitalism and slavery to include the remnants of feudal social-political forms, even into the nineteenth century.


2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-169
Author(s):  
Mikołaj Tarkowski

The article illustrates that property rights, including in particular property and the relationship between property rights and the category of freedom in the nineteenth-century Russian Empire, was one of the most important areas of scientific activity of Richard Pipes. For centuries, both the institution of freedom and property were highly politicised. Based on Richard Pipes’ findings, it can be concluded that the relationship between ownership and freedom manifested itself in the feature of relativity or ambivalence, depending on the time and individual parts of the Russian Empire. In the 19th century, the former mainly influenced the development of the monetary economy, while the latter strengthened the idea of samoderzhavyie in the political system. Richard Pipes noticed the sources of the antinomy between the idea of freedom and property in nineteenth-century Russia in the dynamically developing economic life and the “stillness” of the autocratic political power system. Following this concept, the article presents the doubts appearing among the St Petersburg ruling elite as well as provincial officials related to establishing the personal freedom of peasants in Russia, which finally took place in 1861. The system of tsarist autocracy in Russia, which was developing throughout history, noticed significant links between property and freedom. A good example of this process was the confiscation of land property. In this regard, the article mentions political premises, the impact of the phenomenon of “paradox and tragedy,ˮ as well as the socio-economic calculations carried out in the field of confiscating private property in the western governorates of the Russian Empire, after the January Uprising of 1863.


1969 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 387-401 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert J. Knowlton

Among the major sources of conflict between liberals and conservatives in nineteenth-century Latin America was the controversy over the relationship between Church and State and the position of the Church in the newly independent states. Not infrequently the issues occasioned violence and bloodshed and long periods of instability while the conservative defenders of a privileged Church disputed with reforming liberals attempting to enforce their ideas. Such was the case in Colombia and Mexico when liberalism reached its apogee in the middle of the nineteenth century. In both countries there had been many years of conflict between conservatives who were generally pro-clerical and espoused centralist ideas about government and liberals who were anti-clerical and favored federalism. The liberals also believed in legal equality, the sanctity of private property, individualism, laissez faire, and the necessity of limiting the Church to a purely spiritual role in society. Although liberals in both countries had achieved national power prior to the 1850’s, the Mexican Constitution of 1857 and the Colombian Rionegro Constitution of 1863 symbolized the liberals’ victory and enshrined their principles; for years those constitutions provided the rallying point for liberals against the opposition.


2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-216
Author(s):  
Sarah Irving-Stonebraker

Through an examination of the extensive papers, manuscripts and correspondence of American physician Benjamin Rush and his friends, this article argues that it is possible to map a network of Scottish-trained physicians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world. These physicians, whose members included Benjamin Rush, John Redman, John Morgan, Adam Kuhn, and others, not only brought the Edinburgh model for medical pedagogy across the Atlantic, but also disseminated Scottish stadial theories of development, which they applied to their study of the natural history and medical practices of Native Americans and slaves. In doing so, these physicians developed theories about the relationship between civilization, historical progress and the practice of medicine. Exploring this network deepens our understanding of the transnational intellectual geography of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century British World. This article develops, in relation to Scotland, a current strand of scholarship that maps the colonial and global contexts of Enlightenment thought.


Romanticism ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-215
Author(s):  
Alex Broadhead

In 2009, Damian Walford Davies called for a counterfactual turn in Romantic studies, a move reflective of a wider growth of critical interest in the relationship between Romanticism and counterfactual historiography. In contrast to these more recent developments, the lives of the Romantics have provided a consistent source of speculation for authors of popular alternate history since the nineteenth century. Yet the aims of alternate history as a genre differ markedly from those of its more scholarly cousin, counterfactual historiography. How, then, might such works fit in to the proposed counterfactual turn? This article makes a case for the critical as well as the creative value of alternate histories featuring the Romantics. By exploring how these narratives differ from works of counterfactual historiography, it seeks to explain why the Romantics continue to inspire authors of alternate history and to illuminate the forking paths that Davies's counterfactual turn might take.


2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-135
Author(s):  
Giles Whiteley

Walter Pater's late-nineteenth-century literary genre of the imaginary portrait has received relatively little critical attention. Conceived of as something of a continuum between his role as an art critic and his fictional pursuits, this essay probes the liminal space of the imaginary portraits, focusing on the role of the parergon, or frame, in his portraits. Guided by Pater's reading of Kant, who distinguishes between the work (ergon) and that which lies outside of the work (the parergon), between inside and outside, and contextualised alongside the analysis of Derrida, who shows how such distinctions have always already deconstructed themselves, I demonstrate a similar operation at work in the portraits. By closely analysing the parerga of two of Pater's portraits, ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’ (1887) and ‘Apollo in Picardy’ (1893), focusing on his partial quotation of Goethe in the former, and his playful autocitation and impersonation of Heine in the latter, I argue that Pater's parerga seek to destabilise the relationship between text and context so that the parerga do not lie outside the text but are implicated throughout in their reading, changing the portraits constitutively. As such, the formal structure of the parergon in Pater's portraits is also a theoretical fulcrum in his aesthetic criticism and marks that space where the limits of, and distinctions between, art and life become blurred.


2013 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-143 ◽  
Author(s):  
David N. Herda ◽  
Stephen A. Reed ◽  
William F. Bowlin

This study explores the Dead Sea Scrolls to demonstrate how Essene socio-religious values shaped their accounting and economic practices during the late Second Temple period (ca. first century BCE to 70 CE). Our primary focus is on the accounting and commercial responsibilities of a leader within their community – the Examiner. We contend that certain sectarian accounting practices may be understood as ritual/religious ceremony and address the performative roles of the Essenes' accounting and business procedures in light of their purity laws and eschatological beliefs. Far from being antithetical to religious beliefs, we find that accounting actually enabled the better practice and monitoring of religious behavior. We add to the literature on the interaction of religion with the structures and practices of accounting and regulation within a society.


Author(s):  
Elaine Auyoung

The conclusion of this book calls attention to the relationship between comprehending realist fiction and Aristotle’s claim that mimetic representation provides a form of aesthetic pleasure distinct from our response to what is represented. It also argues that, by demonstrating how much nineteenth-century novelists depend on the knowledge and abilities that readers bring to a text, cognitive research on reading helps us revisit long-standing theoretical assumptions in literary studies. Because the felt experience of reading is so distinct from the mental acts underlying it, knowing more about the basic architecture of reading can help literary critics refine their claims about what novels can and cannot do to their readers.


Author(s):  
Stefania Tutino

This chapter presents a second case study showing another concrete example of the issues to which probabilism was applied. Like the previous chapter, this chapter puts the theoretical and theological discussions on probabilism into the concrete social, economic, and cultural reality of the post-Reformation Catholic Church. This chapter explores the relationship between Catholic theology and money lending by examining the key role that probabilism played in helping theologians to maintain the traditional Catholic ban on usury while at the same time engaging with the burgeoning money-market economy and with other religious traditions with different doctrinal and social views on money, such as Judaism.


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