scholarly journals The zooming Albanian factor in the nineteenth century, through Western lenses

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
MSc. Arben Salihu

The developments of the nineteenth century were determining for the history of Balkan region as it shaped the future of many generations to come, resulting in (mainly) growing discontents that led to several wars during the last century. It was beginning of the decay of the Ottoman Empire that many longed for, and many nations used every opportunity to take a full advantage of it. The aim of this work is to explore exclusively (only) Western sources in an attempt to provide, as much as possible, an objective and neutral picture. Therefore, the idea behind the decision to examine non-Balkan sources is impartiality, in order to bring the reader as close as possible to the reality of the nineteenth century. A number of nineteenth century books, magazines and newspapers of the time, by respective Western authors, are explored and analysed. Reading and examining a large volume of data and information of this period, offers a unique sense of feeling, similar to that of living the nineteenth century world. Albanians, who have historically populated the heart of Balkans, are focal point of this region (in many of the regional and international sources) for this particular period, vis-à-vis the Ottoman governance as well as relations with other regional neighbours. Their contribution to the history of nations in the region was unquestionably critical, but their conduct in relations to their own cause has produced an unproductive image, portrayed often with confused and incomprehensible deeds. By using authentic sources of the time, the study intends to develop arguments on many points raised, like population and religion. This work also touches briefly the sensitive issue of education in the region and initial Albanian inputs in the history of Balkan education map. Finally the study concludes that Albanians’ altruism and largely visionless focus, produced a relatively expected detrimental outcome.  

Author(s):  
Elizabeth M. Holt

Fictitious Capital is a book that looks to the history of the Arabic novel and reads an untold tale of finance that precedes the familiar narrative of the nation. Beginning in 1859, Khalīl al-Khūrī serializes a novel in his official newspaper Ḥadīqat al-Akhbār. Like many an Arabic novel to come, al-Khūrī’s readers find themselves dreaming of gardens set apart from the rush of the industrializing world, and at the same time, of a future of “material and literary progress.” Textiles are central to this alchemical dream, hinged to the fate of the silkworm, caught between the collapsing Ottoman Empire and the rise of the French in the affairs of Mt. Lebanon. Reading the silkmoth’s serial reapperances in the turn-of-the-century Arabic press and in theories of capital, Novel Material argues that finance capital and its fictions were reconfiguring time itself in an age of hope, fear and speculation.


Author(s):  
Peter Rowley-Conwy

On 9 January 1843, Richard Griffith addressed the Royal Irish Academy (RIA) about some antiquities found in the River Shannon. The river was being dredged to render it navigable, and the artefacts were discovered during the deepening of the old ford at Keelogue. Griffith was the chairman of the Commissioners carrying out the work, and his expertise was in engineering rather than ancient history. He stated that the finds came from a layer of gravel; in its upper part were many bronze swords and spears, while a foot lower were numerous stone axes. Due to the rapidity of the river’s flow there was very little aggradation, so despite the small gap the bronze objects were substantially later than the stone ones. The river formed the border between the ancient kingdoms of Connaught and Leinster. The objects had apparently been lost in two battles for the ford that had taken place at widely differing dates; stressing that he was no expert himself, Mr Griffith wondered whether ancient Irish history might contain records of battles at this spot (Griffith 1844). This was probably the earliest non-funerary stratigraphic support for the Three Age System ever published, but it did not signal the acceptance of the Three Age System. Just as telling as Griffith’s stratigraphic observation was his immediate recourse to ancient history for an explanation; for, as we shall see, ancient history provided the dominant framework for the ancient Irish past until the end of the nineteenth century. The Irish had far more early manuscript sources than the Scots or the English, although wars and invasions had reduced them; the Welsh scholar Edward Lhwyd wrote from Sligo on 12 March 1700 to his colleague Henry Rowlands that ‘the Irish have many more ancient manuscripts than we in Wales; but since the late revolutions they are much lessened. I now and then pick up some very old parchment manuscripts; but they are hard to come by, and they that do anything understand them, value them as their lives’ (in Rowlands 1766: 315). In the seventeenth century various Irish scholars brought together the historical accounts available to them. Geoffrey Keating (Seathrú n Céitinn, in Irish) wrote the influential Foras Feasa ar Éirinn or ‘History of Ireland’ in c.1634, and an English translation was printed in 1723 (Waddell 2005).


2013 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 395-428 ◽  
Author(s):  
Akın Sefer

AbstractThis article introduces a bottom-up perspective to the history of the Revolution of 1908 in the Ottoman Empire by focusing on the experiences of workers in the Imperial Naval Arsenal (Tersâne-i Âmire) in Istanbul. Drawing mainly on primary documents, the article explores, from a class-formation perspective, the struggles and relations of Arsenal workers from the second half of the nineteenth century until the revolution. The Arsenal workers’ involvement in the revolution was rooted in their class solidarity, which was revealed in a number of ways throughout this period. The workers’ immediate embrace of the revolution was spurred by their radicalization against the state; such radicalization stemmed from the state's failure to solve the workers’ persistent economic problems, and its attempts to discharge them and replace them with military labor. The case of the Arsenal workers thus points to the role of working-class discontent in the history of the revolution, a dimension that has thus far been only minimally addressed in Ottoman historiography.


1992 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolyn Anne Hamilton

An important aspect of Julian Cobbing's radical critique of the ‘mfecane’ as the pivotal concept of the history of southern Africa in the nineteenth century is the claim that the image of Shaka-as-monster was an ‘alibi’ invented by Europeans in the 1820s to mask their slaving activities. Reconsideration of this claim reveals that it is based on the misuse of evidence and inadequate periodisation of the earliest representations of Shaka. Examination of the image of Shaka promoted by the Port Natal traders in the 1820s reveals that, with two highly specific exceptions which were not influential at the time, the traders' presentation of Shaka was that of a benign patron. It was only in 1829, after the Zulu king's death, that European representations began to include a range of ‘atrocity’ stories regarding Shaka. These were not invented by whites but drew on images of Shaka already in place amongst the African communities of southern Africa. These contemporary African views of Shaka and the ways in which they gave shape to the European versions are ignored by Cobbing, and this contributes to his failure to come to grips with past myth-making processes in their fullest complexity.


Mathematical and philosophical thought about continuity has changed considerably over the ages. Aristotle insisted that continuous substances are not composed of points, and that they can only be divided into parts potentially; a continuum is a unified whole. The most dominant account today, traced to Cantor and Dedekind, is in stark contrast with this, taking a continuum to be composed of infinitely many points. The opening chapters cover the ancient and medieval worlds: the pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, Alexander, and a recently discovered manuscript by Bradwardine. In the early modern period, mathematicians developed the calculus the rise of infinitesimal techniques, thus transforming the notion of continuity. The main figures treated here include Galileo, Cavalieri, Leibniz, and Kant. In the early party of the nineteenth century, Bolzano was one of the first important mathematicians and philosophers to insist that continua are composed of points, and he made a heroic attempt to come to grips with the underlying issues concerning the infinite. The two figures most responsible for the contemporary hegemony concerning continuity are Cantor and Dedekind. Each is treated, along with precursors and influences in both mathematics and philosophy. The next chapters provide analyses of figures like du Bois-Reymond, Weyl, Brouwer, Peirce, and Whitehead. The final four chapters each focus on a more or less contemporary take on continuity that is outside the Dedekind–Cantor hegemony: a predicative approach, accounts that do not take continua to be composed of points, constructive approaches, and non-Archimedean accounts that make essential use of infinitesimals.


Derrida Today ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 269-294
Author(s):  
H. Peter Steeves
Keyword(s):  
To Come ◽  

The long history of the overlap of science and philosophy finds a focal point in cosmology. In an effort to examine what happens when science and deconstruction encounter, this essay thus begins with, and follows the path of, cosmology. I start by suggesting a new solution to the oldest question in cosmology: why is there something rather than nothing? From this, I attempt to outline the way in which necessity is thought to operate by means of natural laws, tracing the sense in which science's demand for falsifiable claims creates an aporia in which its truths are not ultimately truthful and its necessity is not necessary. Focusing on the ways in which différance and the autoimmune can help us open up the work of science, I come to suggest two new tropes, that of apoptosis and the remainder, arguing that the inherent openness of science can be one of its strengths, especially if we ask the question of what remains to be asked once science has answered a question.


2021 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 155-183
Author(s):  
Youssef Ben Ismail

Abstract The history of the Ottoman fez is usually told with the nineteenth century as a point of departure. In the 1820s and 1830s, the reforms initiated by Sultan Mahmud II (r. 1808–39) elevated the red felt cap to the rank of official headgear of the Ottoman empire. But little is known about its history prior to its adoption by the state: where did the fez come from and how did it become so prevalent in the Ottoman empire? This essay examines the global history of the fez in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Taking Mahmud II’s reforms as an endpoint, it examines the process by which the headgear first came to be both culturally visible and commercially available in the Ottoman realm. Three aspects of this history are considered: the trans-imperial history of the fez as a commercial commodity, its cultural reception in the Ottoman world, and the establishment of a community of Tunisian fez merchants in early modern Istanbul.


PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (3) ◽  
pp. 735-742 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Brickhouse

Among The Many Significant Contributions of Raúl Coronado's A World Not to Come: A History Of Latino Writing and Print Culture is its vivid account of a lost Latino public sphere, a little-known milieu of hispanophone intellectual culture dating back to the early nineteenth century and formed in the historical interstices of Spanish American colonies, emergent Latin American nations, and the early imperial interests of the United States. In this respect, the book builds on the foundational work of Kirsten Silva Gruesz's Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing, which gave definitive shape to the field of early Latino studies by addressing what were then (and in some ways still are) the “methodological problems of proposing to locate the ‘origins’ of Latino writing in the nineteenth century.” Gruesz unfolded a vast panorama of forgotten Spanish-language print culture throughout the United States, from Philadelphia and New York to New Orleans and California, in which letters, stories, essays, and above all poetry bequeathed what she showed convincingly were “important, even crucial, ways of understanding the world” that had been largely lost to history (x). Coronado's book carries forward this project of recovery, exploring a particular scene of early Latino writing centered in Texas during its last revolutionary decades as one of the Interior Provinces of New Spain, its abrupt transition to an independent republic, and its eventual annexation by the United States. As a “history of textuality” rather than a study of literary culture per se (28), the book tells the story of the first printing presses in Texas but also evinces the importance of manuscript circulation as well as private and sometimes unfinished texts. A World Not to Come concerns both print culture and origins but refuses to fetishize either, attending to the past not to “the degree that it is a measure of the future,” as Rosaura Sánchez once put it, but for the very opposite reason: because it portended a future that was never realized (qtd. in Gruesz, Ambassadors xi).


Folklorica ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 1-42
Author(s):  
Dorian Jurić

This article presents three short passages describing coffee and coffeehouse culture among Bosnian and Herzegovinian Muslims in the late nineteenth century. These texts are drawn from manuscripts collected by lay, Croatian folklore and folklife collectors who submitted them to two early collecting projects in Zagreb. The pieces are translated here for the first time into English and placed into historical and cultural context regarding the history of coffee culture in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the wider Ottoman Empire as well as the politics of folklore collection at the time. By using the Pan-Ottoman concept of ćeif as a theoretical lens, I argue that these early folklorists produced impressive folklife accounts of Bosniak foodways, but that these depictions inevitably enfolded both genuine interest and negative by-products of the wider politics of their era.


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