scholarly journals When natives became Africans: A historical sociolinguistic study of semantic change in colonial discourse

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Susan Fitzmaurice

AbstractThe word native is a key term in nineteenth-century British colonial administrative vocabulary. The question is how it comes to be central to the classification of indigenous subjects in Britain’s southern African possessions in the early twentieth century, and how the word is appropriated by colonial citizens to designate the race of indigenous subjects. To answer the question, I construct a semasiological history of native as a word that has to do with the identification of a person with a place by birth, by residence or by citizenship. I track the manner in which speakers invest old words with new meanings in specific settings and differentiate among them in different domains. In the case of native, a signal keyword is recruited to do particular work in several contemporaneous discourses which take different ideological directions as the nature of the involvement of their speakers changes. The result is a particularly complicated word history, and one which offers a clue to the ways in which colonial rhetoric is domesticated in specific settings at the very same time as the colonising power eschews it in the process of divesting itself of its colonies.

Love, Inc. ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 83-112
Author(s):  
Laurie Essig

Getting engaged now requires more emotional and financial resources than ever before. Here Essig traces the history of engagements from the birth of companionate marriages in the nineteenth century to the invention of rituals like the bended knee and fetish items like the diamond ring in the early twentieth century. But the real change happened at the beginning of the twenty-first century, as engagements became “spectacular,” requiring not just highly staged events but also highly produced videos and images that could then be disseminated to the larger world.


1966 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wyatt Macgaffey

Recent accounts of the proto-history of Africa use data from physical anthropology, but also concepts of race which physical anthropologists in general have abandoned as unsatisfactory; the paper seeks to explain this phenomenon sociologically. Late nineteenth-century political and sociological trends helped to produce patterns of thought which can no longer be regarded as affording adequate explanations of social processes. These patterns combined idealism, or the method of contrasting ideal types, with pseudo-Darwinism, which sought the origins of political development in the interaction of differently endowed groups. In African ethnography of the early twentieth century such concepts led to the view that the continent was inhabited by two groups, Caucasoids and Negroids, and by mixtures of the two which remained mixtures, to be analysed as such. The Caucasoid and Negroid types were regarded as absolute and universal, represented equally in the biological, linguistic, cultural and political aspects of man.


2021 ◽  
pp. 25-36
Author(s):  
David Lloyd Dusenbury

In the late 1920s an Austrian historian of religion, Robert Eisler, introduced a riveting new theory about the trial and death of Jesus. On the strength of a dossier of Old Russian manuscripts, Eisler became convinced that Jesus went to Jerusalem shortly before his death with a cohort of “secretly armed” disciples. Once in the holy city, Eisler conjectured, Jesus and his cohort of fighters must have gained control of “the strongly fortified Temple”. It is this action which must have led to Jesus’ arrest and death. Eisler’s most momentous claim, however, is that Pilate’s notes on Jesus’ trial were rediscovered the nineteenth century and published in the early twentieth century. This chapter examines some of Eisler’s sources, and his place in the reception-history of Jesus’ Roman trial. Eisler is unique for his stress on the fascinating question of what Pilate wrote.


2015 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOSHUA BENNETT

“Rationalism” became the subject of intense debate in nineteenth-century Britain. This article asks why this was so, by focusing on the usage and implications of the term in contemporary argument. Rationalism was successively defined and redefined in ways that reached to the heart of Victorian epistemological and religious discussion. By treating rationalism as a contextually specific term, and examining how its implications changed between the 1820s and the early twentieth century, the article brings new perspectives to bear on the development of nineteenth-century freethought and countervailing religious apologetic. It underlines the importance of history, and constructions of intellectual lineage, as ways of establishing the relationship between rationality and religion in a progressively wider-ranging Victorian debate about the sources of knowledge and value.


Author(s):  
A. C. S. PEACOCK

Stretching across Europe, Asia and Africa for half a millennium bridging the end of the Middle Ages and the early twentieth century, the Ottoman Empire was one of the major forces that forged the modern world. The chapters in this book focus on four key themes: frontier fortifications, the administration of the frontier, frontier society and relations between rulers and ruled, and the economy of the frontier. Through snapshots of aspects of Ottoman frontier policies in such diverse times and places as fifteenth-century Anatolia, seventeenth-century Hungary, nineteenth-century Iraq or twentieth-century Jordan, the book provides a richer picture than hitherto available of how this complex empire coped with the challenge of administering and defending disparate territories in an age of comparatively primitive communications. By way of introduction, this chapter seeks to provide an overview of these four themes in the history of Ottoman frontiers.


2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heli Rantala

This article contributes to the discussion on the European roots of cultural history by exploring the nineteenth-century understanding of cultural history from a Finnish perspective. The article argues that the Finnish case opens a fresh perspective to the history of cultural history by connecting it with the French historiography instead of German Kulturgeschichte. In Finland there is a special tradition of cultural history dating back to the early twentieth century, inspired by the German tradition of Kulturgeschichte. This article focuses on the earlier period, on the mid-nineteenth-century discussion concerning the scope of history and the ways the works of several European historians were reviewed in Finland. In this discussion the orientation was not so much in the German tradition but towards the French way of writing history. An important element in the Finnish discussion was the separation of political or official history from the so called inner history of the people, which was considered as more fundamental and comprehensive than political history. This orientation towards the history of the people was considered as cultural history. The article explores the question of ‘cultural history’ in Finland by drawing on the writings of influential Finnish thinker Johan Vilhelm Snellman (1806–1881).


Author(s):  
Mario J. Rizzo

This chapter draws on the history of economic thought to elucidate the foundations of the Austrian economics conception of rationality. First, it shows how Austrian subjectivism was originally differentiated from nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century psychologically based economics. Then it shows how the Austrians differentiated themselves from the behaviorist approach that began to affect economics as early as the 1910s but mainly from the 1920s to the 1950s. Finally, drawing on the work of Friedrich Hayek and Alfred Schutz, it shows that the Austrian conception of rationality is not based on introspection and illustrates the differences between an Austrian approach and that of today’s new behavioral economics.


Author(s):  
Katarzyna Garczewska-Semka

Abstract The National Library of Poland holds three historical collections with a unified visual form. The arrangement of the Wilanów collection was carried out in the first half of the nineteenth century, whereas the Krasiński collection was arranged in the early twentieth century respectively the 1950’s or 1960’s in the case of drawings by Norwid. This contribution describes the structure of mountings found in these collections, as well as the historical context in which they were created. It serves as a starting point to provide an outline of the history of conservation methods and preservation of prints’ and drawings’ collections in Poland.


2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Kopley

In 1940, Virginia Woolf blamed the printing press for killing the oral tradition that had promoted authorial anonymity: “Anon is dead,” she pronounced. Scholarship on the printed word has abundantly recognized that, far from being dead, Anon remained very much alive in Britain through the end of the nineteenth century. Even in the twentieth century, Anon lived on, among particular groups and particular genres, yet little scholarship has addressed this endurance. Here, after defining anonymity and sketching its history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, I offer three findings. First, women had less need for anonymity as they gained civil protections elsewhere, but anonymity still appealed to writers made vulnerable by their marginalized identities or risky views. Second, in the early twentieth century the genre most likely to go unsigned was autobiography, in all its forms. Third, on rare occasions, which I enumerate, strict anonymity achieves what pseudonymity cannot. I conclude by suggesting that among British modernist authors, the decline of practiced anonymity stimulated desired anonymity and the prizing of anonymity as an aesthetic ideal.


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