scholarly journals The Founding of Singapore and the Chinese Kongsis of West Borneo (ca.1819–1840)

2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-121
Author(s):  
Ying-kit Chan

Abstract Many historians have examined why Singapore failed to be a major trading center before the nineteenth century. This paper revisits the current scholarly literature on the founding of Singapore to make two arguments. First, I argue that we cannot understand the founding of Singapore and its role in the British Second Empire without delineating Singapore’s role as a forest- and marine-goods metropolis in the precolonial Chinese trading networks of Southeast Asia. Second, I try to show how the Chinese kongsis 公司 of West Borneo turned Singapore into a forest- and marine-goods metropolis, formed their own political and social institutions, and collectively functioned as a third autonomous pseudostate power alongside the British and the Dutch. This reconceptualization enables us to see the founding of Singapore as a joint enterprise, and not a solely British achievement.

2002 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-336
Author(s):  
PIOTR DASZKIEWICZ ◽  
MICHEL JEGU

ABSTRACT: This paper discusses some correspondence between Robert Schomburgk (1804–1865) and Adolphe Brongniart (1801–1876). Four letters survive, containing information about the history of Schomburgk's collection of fishes and plants from British Guiana, and his herbarium specimens from Dominican Republic and southeast Asia. A study of these letters has enabled us to confirm that Schomburgk supplied the collection of fishes from Guiana now in the Laboratoire d'Ichtyologie, Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris. The letters of the German naturalist are an interesting source of information concerning the practice of sale and exchange of natural history collections in the nineteenth century in return for honours.


Transfers ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 87-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catharine Coleborne

This article examines the interpretive framework of “mobility” and how it might usefully be extended to the study of the Australasian colonial world of the nineteenth century, suggesting that social institutions reveal glimpses of (im)mobility. As the colonies became destinations for the many thousands of immigrants on the move, different forms of mobility were desired, including migration itself, or loathed, such as the itinerant lifestyles of vagrants. Specifically, the article examines mobility through brief accounts of the curtailed lives of the poor white immigrants of the period. The meanings of mobility were produced by immigrants' insanity, vagrancy, wandering, and their casual movement between, and reliance on, welfare and medical institutions. The regulation of these forms of mobility tells us more about the contemporary paradox of the co-constitution of mobility and stasis, as well as providing a more fluid understanding of mobility as a set of transfers between places and people.


Author(s):  
Émile Zola

Thérèse Raquin is a clinically observed, sinister tale of adultery and murder among the lower orders in nineteenth-century Paris. Zola's dispassionate dissection of the motivations of his characters, mere ‘human beasts’ who kill in order to satisfy their lust, is much more than an atmospheric Second Empire period-piece. Many readers were scandalized by an approach to character-drawing which seemed to undermine not only the moral values of a deeply conservative society, but also the whole code of psychological description on which the realist novel was based. Together with the important ‘Preface to the Second Edition’ in which Zola defended himself against charges of immorality, Thérèse Raquin stands as a key early manifesto of the French Naturalist movement, of which Zola was the founding father. Even today, this novel has lost none of its power to shock. This new translation is based on the second edition of 1868. The Introduction situates the novel in the context of Naturalism, medicine, and the scientific ideas of Zola's day.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Alex Middleton

William Rathbone Greg's name is well known to historians of nineteenth-century Britain, but the content of his political thought is not. This article, based on a comprehensive reading of Greg's prolific published output, has two aims. The first is to pin down his politics. The article positions Greg as a leading spokesman for the rationalistic, antidemocratic strand of mid-Victorian Liberalism. It argues that his thought centered on the idea that politics was a science, and that scientific statesmanship might solve many of the problems of the age. The article's second aim is to show that Greg was a sophisticated thinker on politics overseas. He developed distinctive arguments about the structures of European politics, and especially about France under the Second Empire (1852–70). Greg's writings cast important light on the connections between abstract, domestic, and European issues in less familiar reaches of Liberal thought, and on how Victorian political science grappled with Continental despotism.


2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-56
Author(s):  
Leander Seah (謝枝嶙)

Global port cities have played important roles in the migration of ethnic Chinese worldwide. This article argues that the scholarship on Chinese migration between port cities in East Asia and Southeast Asia has overemphasized business and trading networks. It suggests instead that other topics should be examined since Chinese migration has been complex and multi-faceted. This article does so through analyzing the history of Nanyang studies, a Chinese-language scholarly field that is renowned among Chinese intellectuals in East Asia and Southeast Asia. Nanyang studies began with the establishment of the Nanyang Cultural Affairs Bureau at Jinan University, the first school in China for Chinese migrants, because the Bureau was the first systematic attempt by China-based scholars to study the Nanyang (Southeast Asia). This article analyzes the history of Nanyang studies from the Bureau’s founding in 1927 to 1940, when the center for Nanyang studies shifted to Singapore in the Nanyang. 全球港口城市和全球華人移民已有密切關係。本文認為,關於東亞和東南亞的港口城市之間華人移民的學術著作過度注重商業貿易網絡。它建議由於華人移民是複雜的,多方面的,所以其他議題也有重要性。因此,本文將通過南洋研究的歷史而分析華人移民。南洋研究在東亞和東南亞是個著名的學術領域。它的起源於南洋文化教育事業部之暨南大學的創辦。這是因為暨南是中國第一所華僑華人學府,而南洋文化教育事業部是中國學者第一個正式研究南洋(東南亞)的機構。本文將分析南洋研究的歷史,從成立於1927年到1940年轉移到南洋之中的新加坡為止。 (This article is in English).


2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 50-74
Author(s):  
Jason Redden

This paper addresses the academic conversation on Protestant missions to the Indigenous peoples of coastal British Columbia during the second half of the nineteenth century through a consideration of the role of revivalist piety in the conversion of some of the better known Indigenous Methodist evangelists identified in the scholarly literature. The paper introduces the work of existing scholars critically illuminating the reasons (religious convergence and/or the want of symbolic and material resources) typically given for Indigenous, namely, Ts’msyen, conversion. It also introduces Methodist revivalist piety and its instantiation in British Columbia. And, finally, it offers a critical exploration of revivalist piety and its role in conversion as set within a broader theoretical inquiry into the academic study of ritual and religion.


2015 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-280
Author(s):  
Terra Walston Joseph

As Cambridge historian J. R. Seeley writes inThe Expansion of England (1883), the fear of colonial secession, inspired by that of the United States, haunted Britons’ perception of their “second Empire” throughout the nineteenth century, effectively working against a sense of shared national destiny with the white settlers of Canada, New Zealand, and Australia (14–15). One important way Victorian writers combatted the “optimistic fatalism” Seeley observed in his fellow Britons was through an imperial economy of affect, which circulated sentiment and stressed emotional identification between settlers and metropolitan Britons (15). If mid-nineteenth-century British literature can be said to negotiate the tensions of Britain's empire through representations of racial, cultural, and linguistic difference, then narratives of sameness – of British families across the oceans – offer models for cohering the British settler empire. In such a model, techniques designed to reinforce the sentimental bonds of settlers to their families might also reinforce the social, political, and affective connections of the settlers to the metaphorical “mother country.”


1972 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Northrup

The peoples of south-eastern Nigeria have been involved in trade for as long as there are any records. The archaeological sites at Igbo-Ukwu and other evidence reveal long distance trade in metal and beads, as well as regional trade in salt, cloth, and beads at an early date. The lower Niger River and its Delta featured prominently in this early trade, and evidence is offered to suggest a continuity in the basic modes of trade on the lower Niger from c. A.D. 1500 to the mid-nineteenth century. An attempt to sketch the basic economic institutions of the Igbo hinterland before the height of the slave trade stresses regional trading networks in salt, cloth, and metal, the use of currencies, and a nexus of religious and economic institutions and persons. It is argued that while the growth of the slave trade appears to have been handled without major changes in the overall patterns of trade along the lower Niger, in the Igbo hinterland a new marketing ‘grid’, dominated by the Arochuku traders, was created using the pre-existent regional trading networks and religious values as a base.


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