On a Horse

PMLA ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 127 (4) ◽  
pp. 809-819
Author(s):  
Carolyn Steedman
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Deep Structure ◽  
Cereal Crop ◽  
High Court ◽  
Class Society ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Labor Power ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Face

Labor was an analytic category in the long english eighteenth century, but was work equally so? Is there any point in discovering a difference between the two? Lawyers and high-court judges, philosophers, physiologists, and prelates worked hard at the business of defining labor, over many years. Their formulations provided the legal and conceptual underpinnings of a new form of society born of the era of revolutions (political, philosophical, industrial; American, Atlantic, French). Here was a template for social knowledge in an emerging class society. Society was divided into propertied and propertyless; the propertyless were compelled by material need to put their labor at the disposal of the propertied. The labor of the poor was a country's natural resource, like its soil and seas and mines; it fell to the propertied to deploy this resource for the national benefit. British philosophers and physicists analyzed labor as a form of energy, often drawing an analogy between it and another great resource of the nation, its horses. Working men and women and horses were bound together in the deep structure of political thinking about labor and the social order. For eighteenth-century theorists, legislators, and farmers, the horse was the immanent measure of labor power and labor time. A horse was a measure of labor itself. There were perhaps a million horses in England and Wales in the late eighteenth century, about half of them workhorses in farming. The contribution of their dung to cereal-crop yield is attested to by economic and agricultural historians (Wrigley, Continuity 35–46; Gerhold; Turner). Horses were one reason the nation was, by and large, able to feed an increased population out of its own natural resources and sources of labor power, unlike other European countries in the period 1660–1820 (Wrigley, Poverty 44–67). The importance of the horse to agricultural productivity seems assured, though some contemporary economists, in the face of harvest failures in the 1790s and ongoing crises of dearth, complained of too many horses and of the vast amount of grain and labor spent in foddering and caring for them (Crafts; Brooke 1–34).

Confining the Poor to Ignorance? Eighteenth-Century American Experiments with Charity Education

2007 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sharon Braslaw Sundue
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Great Success ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Religious Revivals ◽  
George Whitefield ◽  
Poor Children ◽  
Important Shift

In 1738, the English evangelist George Whitefield traveled to the new colony of Georgia intending to establish “a house for fatherless children.” Inspired by both August Hermann Francke, the German Pietist who had great success educating and maintaining poor orphans in Halle, and by charity schools established in Great Britain, Whitefield's orphan house and charity school, named Bethesda, opened its doors early in 1740. For years, Whitefield devoted himself tirelessly to ensuring the success of the Bethesda school, preaching throughout Britain and North America on its behalf. Whitefield's preaching tour on behalf of his beloved Bethesda is well known for its role in catalyzing the religious revivals known collectively as the Great Awakening. The tour also marked an important shift in the history of education in America. News of the establishment of the orphanage at Bethesda coincided with new efforts to school the poor throughout the colonies. Drawing on both the British and German models of charity schooling that were highly influential for Whitefield, eighteenth-century Americans began or increased commitments to charity schooling for poor children. But the European models were not adopted wholesale. Instead, local administrators of the schooling experiments deviated from these models in a striking way. In America, elites offered some children the opportunity for extensive charity instruction, but not necessarily children at the bottom of the social hierarchy. This article will argue that the execution of these charity schooling programs was contingent upon local social conditions, specifically what appears to have been local elites' desire to maintain a certain social order and ensure a continued supply of cheap labor.

Mechanisms for Unity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel K. Cohn, Jr.
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Black Death ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Church

This chapter investigates changes in mentalities after the Black Death, comparing practices never before analysed in this context—funerary and labour laws and processions to calm God’s anger. While processions were rare or conflictual as in Catania and Messina in 1348, these rituals during later plagues bound communities together in the face of disaster. The chapter then turns to another trend yet to be noticed by historians. Among the multitude of saints and blessed ones canonized from 1348 to the eighteenth century, the Church was deeply reluctant to honour, even name, any of the thousands who sacrificed their lives to succour plague victims, physically or spiritually, especially in 1348: the Church recognized no Black Death martyrs. By the sixteenth century, however, city-wide processions and other communal rituals bound communities together with charity for the poor, works of art, and charitable displays of thanksgiving to long-dead holy men and women.

Who Was This Man?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mitch Kachun
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Life Experiences ◽  
Broad Context ◽  
Military Power ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Revolution

Chapter 1 introduces the broad context of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world in which Crispus Attucks lived, describes the events of the Boston Massacre, and assesses what we know about Attucks’s life. It also addresses some of the most widely known speculations and unsupported stories about Attucks’s life, experiences, and family. Much of what is assumed about Attucks today is drawn from a fictionalized juvenile biography from 1965, which was based largely on research in nineteenth-century sources. Attucks’s characterization as an unsavory outsider and a threat to the social order emerged during the soldiers’ trial. Subsequently, American Revolutionaries in Boston began the construction of a heroic Attucks as they used the memory of the massacre and all its victims to serve their own political agendas during the Revolution by portraying the victims as respectable, innocent citizens struck down by a tyrannical military power.

The Eighteenth-Century Social Order in Surat: A Reply and an Excursus on the Riots of 1788 and 1795

1991 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 321-365 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lakshmi Subramanian
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Recent Article ◽  
Alternative Explanation ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
The Social

The Banias of eighteenth-century Surat, whom Michelguglielmo Torri earlier treated with indifference if not innocence, have invited his wrath since they were brought into focus by the publication of my essay on the Banias and the Surat riot of 1795. In his ‘rejoinder’ to my article, he seeks to wish away their existence altogether (to him there was no specific Bania community, the term merely signifying traders of all communities engaged in the profession of brokerage), and seeks to provide what he regards as an ‘alternative’ explanation of the Muslim–Bania riot of 1795. the Muslim-Bania riot of 1795. It shall be my purpose in this reply to show that his alternative explanation is neither an alternative nor even an explanation, and is based on a basic confusion in his mind about the Banias as well as the principal sources of tension in the social structure of Surat. I shall treat two main subjects in this reply to his misdirected criticisms. First, I shall present some original indigenous material as well as European documentation to further clarify the identity, position and role of the Banias, whom Irfan Habib in a recent article has identified as the most important trading group in the trading world of seventeenth and eighteenth-century India. It is also my purpose to show how the social order of Surat operated under stress by presenting some archival material, the existence of which Torri seems to be completely unaware of, on the Parsi-Muslim riot of 1788.

Making a Difference: Sartorial Practices and Social Order in Eighteenth-Century Sweden

Costume ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mikael Alm
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Social Hierarchies ◽  
Advantages And Disadvantages ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
Making A Difference ◽  
Primary Means

This article focuses on the seventy-three essays that were submitted to the Swedish Royal Patriotic Society in 1773, in response to a competition for the best essay on the advantages and disadvantages of a national dress. When presenting their thoughts on the design and realization of a national dress, the authors came to reflect on deeper issues of social order and sartorial culture, describing their views on society and its constituent parts, as well as the trappings of visual appearances. Clothes were an intricate part of the visual culture surrounding early modern social hierarchies; differentiation between groups and individuals were readily visualized through dress. Focusing on the three primary means for visual differentiation identified in the essays — colour, fabrics and forms — this article explores the governing notions of hierarchies in regards to sartorial appearance, and the sartorial practices for making the social order legible in late eighteenth-century Sweden.

The Second Great Awakening and the New England Social Order

1970 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 345-364 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard D. Birdsall
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Social Order ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Second Great Awakening ◽  
Henry Adams ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Social

“Only the shell of orthodoxy was left.” Such was the considered judgment of Henry Adams on the condition of the inherited socioreligious order of New England by the year 1800.1 The image of the shell of a gourd with loose seeds rattling within is a good one to convey the dissociation between the purposes of the society and the real beliefs of individuals that had come to pass by the end of the eighteenth century. And it presents a notable contrast to the close congruence of individual belief and the social aims of the first generation of New England Puritans.

A Failure of Modernization: Police Reform, The “Common Good,” and Serfdom In Eighteenth-Century Russia

2015 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 249-271
Author(s):  
Hugh D. Hudson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Max Weber ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Creation

For Russian subjects not locked away in their villages and thereby subject almost exclusively to landlord control, administration in the eighteenth century increasingly took the form of the police. And as part of the bureaucracy of governance, the police existed within the constructions of the social order—as part of social relations and their manifestations through political control. This article investigates the social and mental structures—the habitus—in which the actions of policing took place to provide a better appreciation of the difficulties of reform and modernization. Eighteenth-century Russia shared in the European discourse on the common good, the police, and social order. But whereas Michel Foucault and Michael Ignatieff see police development in Europe with its concern to surveil and discipline emerging from incipient capitalism and thus a product of new, post-Enlightenment social forces, the Russian example demonstrates the power of the past, of a habitus rooted in Muscovy. Despite Peter’s and especially Catherine’s well-intended efforts, Russia could not succeed in modernization, for police reforms left the enserfed part of the population subject to the whims of landlord violence, a reflection, in part, of Russia having yet to make the transition from the feudal manorial economy based on extra-economic compulsion to the capitalist hired-labor estate economy. The creation of true centralized political organization—the creation of the modern state as defined by Max Weber—would require the state’s domination over patrimonial jurisdiction and landlord control over the police. That necessitated the reforms of Alexander II.

William Fremantle, Samuel Barnett and the Broad Church Origins of Toynbee Hall

1982 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 564-579 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. E. Nettleship
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Economic System ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Economic Success ◽  
The Poor ◽  
New Concepts ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Individual

Contemporaries and historians alike have regarded the 1880s as a watershed in Victorian thought. They have argued that before the 1880s the well-to-do held firmly to a belief in Political Economy and attributed economic success to the high moral character and hard work of the individual. By the 1880s these beliefs had begun to waver, and many who had themselves prospered from the new economic system began to question its assumptions and develop a sense of responsibility toward those beneath them in the social order. One institution which seems to represent this change is Toynbee Hall, the first English settlement house, founded in 1884. Headed by a middle-class clergyman, Samuel Barnett, staffed by well-educated and well-to-do volunteers and dedicated to bringing education and culture to the poor, it seems to be an example, par excellence, of the newly heightened middle-class social conscience typical of the 1880s.2 But close examination reveals that the origins of Toynbee Hall date back to the 1870s, to the broad church orientation and parish practices of Samuel Barnett. Rooted in his modest day-to-day pastoral work rather than in new concepts of social justice, Toynbee Hall raises the question of whether in fact the 1880s constitute a great divide in Victorian thought or a period of continuation, expansion and institutionalisation of earlier ideas and practices.

‘Freethinking’ and ‘Freedom of Thought’ in eighteenth-century Britain

1993 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 599-617 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter N. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Moral Order ◽  
Political Society ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual Inquiry ◽  
The Social ◽  
Freedom Of Thought

ABSTRACTIn early modern Europe, religious heterodoxy and intellectual inquiry posed serious challenges to the authority of centralizing forces both secular and ecclesiastical. At the same time, however, these dangerous developments had been driven by those individuals whom eighteenth-century writers had adopted as ‘culture heroes’ for an age increasingly self-conscious of its own enlightened status. In Britain, the newly established order defended itself against the scepticism and moral determinism of ‘freethinkers’ by upholding a religious and moral order based on liberty. But ‘freethinkers’ such as Anthony Collins were themselves the inheritors of, and propagandists for, the seventeenth-century revolution in science which underpinned the ideology being wielded against them. Their challenge elicited from Edmund Law an argument which co-opted their epistemology to ground the familiar metaphysics of liberty associated with the Newtonian position of Samuel Clarke. Where ‘freethinking’ had been perceived as a dangerous solvent of the social order, ‘freedom of thought’, within limits that were themselves a leading subject of debate in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, could be upheld as consistent with the demands of political society.

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