scholarly journals The Crimea Question in “Western” Projects, Political Treatises, and Correspondence from the mid-sixteenth century to 1783

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 857-877
Author(s):  
Nikita I. Khrapunov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Large Body ◽  
The Black Sea ◽  
The West ◽  
Civilizing Mission ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Crimea ◽  
The Given

Research objective: This paper aims at the revealing and analysing various documents, created in different countries of Europe prior to 1783, which suggested the change of the Crimea’s status and its accession to Russia, and the determination of interactions of these sources and general trends and principles behind discussions of the “Crimea question” in Russian and foreign public opinion. Research materials: This research addresses a large body of sources, created in Russia and the West from the sixteenth to eighteenth century, discussing the future of the Crimea – political treatises, memoranda, historical works, and correspondence. Research novelty and results: For the first time in the scholarship, the whole array of available sources on the planned accession of the Crimea to Russia has been analysed. It has been discovered that there were periods when the “Crimea question” was disputed in the West far more widely than in Russia. This “discussion” continued with the participation of very different authors, including the leading minds of the public discourse such as Voltaire or Francesco Algarotti. The attempts of the western intellectuals to influence the Russian government’s decisions have been demonstrated. Therefore, the accession of the Crimea is a product of not only “Russian imperialism”, as it is often suggested, but to a certain extent also of the Western Europe’s public mindset. Obviously, such a development was considered quite admissible in the West, and many authors viewed it positively both for international relations and for the internal perspectives of the region. The given article has exposed the dynamics in these arguments, with initial counter-Muslim rhetoric underlining the existential opposition of Christianity and Islam and the need for “returning” lands which had formerly belonged to Europe. When the Enlightenment era started, the further reason of Europe’s civilizing mission appeared. This mission was thought to be impeded in the Black Sea by the “backward” Islamic society. In Russia, the discussion of the future of the Crimea became topical in the second and third quarter of the eighteenth century, probably when the elite realized that the conquest of the peninsula had now become a reality.

Harvest of Briars

2019 ◽  
pp. 121-158
Author(s):  
A. Wess Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Cost Effective ◽  
Balkan Peninsula ◽  
The Black Sea ◽  
Second Phase ◽  
Habsburg Monarchy ◽  
The West ◽  
The North ◽  
Third Phase

This chapter examines the competition with the Ottoman Empire and Russia, from the reconquest of Hungary to Joseph II’s final Turkish war. On its southern and eastern frontiers, the Habsburg Monarchy contended with two large land empires: a decaying Ottoman Empire, and a rising Russia determined to extend its influence on the Black Sea littorals and Balkan Peninsula. In balancing these forces, Austria faced two interrelated dangers: the possibility of Russia filling Ottoman power vacuums that Austria itself could not fill, and the potential for crises here, if improperly managed, to fetter Austria’s options for handling graver threats in the west. In dealing with these challenges, Austria deployed a range of tools over the course of the eighteenth century. In the first phase (1690s–1730s), it deployed mobile field armies to alleviate Turkish pressure on the Habsburg heartland before the arrival of significant Russian influence. In the second phase (1740s–70s), Austria used appeasement and militarized borders to ensure quiet in the south while focusing on the life-or-death struggles with Frederick the Great. In the third phase (1770s–90s), it used alliances of restraint to check and keep pace with Russian expansion, and recruit its help in comanaging problems to the north. Together, these techniques provided for a slow but largely effective recessional, in which the House of Austria used cost-effective methods to manage Turkish decline and avoid collisions that would have complicated its more important western struggles.

The Baron de Baye's Antiquities from North-east Russia and Siberia

1923 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-60
Author(s):  
Ellis H. Minns
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Black Sea ◽  
The Black Sea ◽  
North East ◽  
Black Sea Coast ◽  
East Russia ◽  
The Crimea ◽  
Northern Russia ◽  
Sea Coast ◽  
West European

The archaeology of the Black Sea coast quickly attracted attention when the Russians conquered the Crimea at the end of the eighteenth century, and the Scythic barrows of the Steppes began to be carefully excavated almost as soon; but it was not till the fifties and sixties that the less imposing antiquities of northern Russia found any one to study them even among Russians. West European interest naturally came later, the pioneers were first the Finn Aspelin in the seventies and next the Baron de Baye, who about 1890 sought to throw light from the East upon the Merovingian and other Teutonic styles which were his special province.

The View through the Russian Prism, 1760–1805

The Great Sea ◽  
2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Abulafia
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Black Sea ◽  
The Black Sea ◽  
Free Access ◽  
Persian Empire ◽  
Naval Stores ◽  
The Crimea ◽  
One Year ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Baltic

The increasing debility of the Ottoman Empire brought the Mediterranean to the attention of the Russian tsars. From the end of the seventeenth century Russian power spread southwards towards the Sea of Azov and the Caucasus. Peter the Great sliced away at the Persian empire, and the Ottomans, who ruled the Crimea, felt threatened. For the moment, the Russians were distracted by conflict with the Swedes for dominion over the Baltic, but Peter sought free access to the Black Sea as well. These schemes had the flavour of the old Russia Peter had sought to reform, just as much as they had the flavour of the new technocratic Russia he had sought to create. The idea that the tsar was the religious and even political heir to the Byzantine emperor – that Muscovy was the ‘Third Rome’ – had not been swept aside when Peter established his new capital on the Baltic, at St Petersburg. Equally, the Russians could now boast hundreds of vessels capable of challenging Turkish pretensions in the Black Sea, even if they were far from capable of mounting a full naval war, and the ships themselves were badly constructed, notwithstanding Peter the Great’s famous journey to inspect the shipyards of western Europe, under the alias Pyotr Mikhailovich. In sum, this was a fleet that was ‘poor in discipline, training, and morale, unskilful in manoeuvre, and badly administered and equipped’; a contemporary remarked that ‘nothing has been under worse management than the Russian navy’, for the imperial naval stores had run out of hemp, tar and nails. The Russians began to hire Scottish admirals in an attempt to create a modern command structure, and they turned to Britain for naval stores; this relationship was further bolstered by the intense trading relationship between Britain and Russia, which had continued to flourish throughout the eighteenth century while England’s Levant trade withered: in the last third of the eighteenth century a maximum of twenty-seven British ships sailed to the Levant in any one year, while as many as 700 headed for Russia.

Richard Harris, Slave Trader Spokesman

1991 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 439-458 ◽  
Author(s):  
James A. Rawley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
International Market ◽  
Spanish American ◽  
The West ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Record ◽  
American Trade

“So little is known of the separate traders,” lamented the historian of the Royal African Company, K. G. Davies, that he was reduced to perceptive speculation about their activity. The authority, Basil Williams, writing about the period 1714–1760, asserted, “The traffic in negro slaves was carried on mainly by the Royal African Company.…“ In actuality a great deal can be discovered about the separate traders and their activity. The papers of Humphry Morice provide a rich source for a merchant who was perhaps London's and Great Britain's foremost slave trader in the 1720s. The assertion that the traffic in Negro slaves was carried on mainly by the Royal African Company is easily refuted by materials in the Public Record Office. London separate traders dominated the trade for the first three decades of the eighteenth century giving way to Bristol traders in the 1730s, who in turn gave way to Liverpool ascendancy in the 1740s.The English slave trade between 1699 and 1729, energized by the end of monopoly and the booming international market for slaves in America, grew prodigiously. In these years England accounted for nearly one-half of all slaves exported from the west coast of Africa. London alone accounted for two-thirds of all slaves delivered by English ships.Although the period falls half a century and more before the classic exposition of the advantages of free trade over monopoly by Adam Smith, an English free trade doctrine had found expression in Sir Dudley North's pamphlet, Discourses upon Trade (1691), and parlimentary proceedings. Interlopers in the slave trade, smugglers in the lucrative Spanish-American trade who opposed parliamentary restriction on their activity, separate traders whose participation in the trade became legalized in 1698, and a variety of commercial, industrial, and planting interests all contributed in their fashion to an outlook favoring free trade in slaves.

Europeans in the Black Sea Area during the Late Middle Ages: The Genoese Colony of Caffa

Mediaevistik ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 213-234
Author(s):  
Evgeny A. Khvalkov
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Black Sea ◽  
The Black Sea ◽  
The West ◽  
The Public ◽  
Financial Transaction ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Double Entry ◽  
Sea Area

The four brief papers following below continue the line of reports on the archival finds of the Western migrants to the Genoese overseas colony of Caffa from outside Liguria in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, previously published in Archivio Storico Messinese,1 Rassegna Storica Salernitana,2 Studi Piemontesi,3 Studi veneziani,4 and Atti della Società Ligure di Storia Patria.5 The main sources researched for these studies are Caffae Massariae – the public books of accounts of the treasury of the Commune of Caffa drawn by the officers called massarii. These officers were annually rotated and sent from metropolis (Genoa) to its colony (Caffa). Caffae Massariae reflect money transactions and operations of the treasury in the double-entry bookkeeping system. The sources are stored in the archival section of the Bank of Saint George.6 Since Caffae Massariae quote (directly or indirectly) all those city inhabitants, who did with the administration any kind of financial transaction, they reflect the main flows of Latin migration from the West to the overseas Eastern colonies.

scholarly journals Reinterpreting a 'Founding Father': Kossuth Images and Their Contexts, 1848-2009

2010 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iván Zoltán Dénes
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
The Political ◽  
Founding Father ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
The Public ◽  
Political Modernity ◽  
Collective Self ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
The Given

AbstractThe present article reconstructs the ways the public and historiographical image of Lajos Kossuth, the central figure of the 1848–49 revolutionary tradition in Hungary, was negotiated during the last 150 years. Similar to the images of other founding fathers and national heroes in other cultures—such as Garibaldi, Piłsudski, Atatürk, Mazzini, Herzl, Masaryk, Bismarck, or Al. I. Cuza—the competing representations of Lajos Kossuth formed a central part of the political and scientific discourses throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In addition to the most common images of the cultic “father of the nation” and “national Messiah,” one can encounter such different schemes of collective self-projection as the “overly emotive opposition politician,” the “successful gentry,” the nobleman “defending his class privileges,” or the “inconsistent revolutionary.” Arguably, these images to a large extent fit four political languages determining Hungarian public discourse in the given period, such as “conservative realism,” ethno-protectionism, Marxist socialism, and communism. While these political languages were very different from each other, they were strikingly similar in the sense that they were built on strong enemy images. Consequently, analyzing their historical projections we can learn about the traumatic ways their adherents related to political modernity, manifested in visions of a fundamental enemy endangering the future of the community.

Aspects of the Never-Ending Translation Wars in South Korea

2020 ◽  
Vol 49 (5) ◽  
pp. 390-410
Author(s):  
Andreas Schirmer
Keyword(s):  
South Korea ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
General Public ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Korean Population ◽  
The West ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World ◽  
Quality And Reliability

AbstractTranslation has always played a major role in Korea’s often painful process of modernization. But even in this context, the frequent “translation wars” are a striking phenomenon—especially when the zealous battles about mistranslations are fought not only within the limited confines of professional or aficionado circles, but also (as periodically occurs) captivate the general public. The fact that public discourse about the quality and reliability of translations is much more common in South Korea than anywhere in the West is very telling in cultural anthropological terms. This significance has, however, never been considered a matter deserving of academic attention in and of itself. Conspicuously, the public denunciation of translation mistakes, as practiced in Korea, often targets not only the immediate culprits but claims to expose a fundamental (culturally conditioned) mentality among the general Korean population. The implication is that Korean audiences lack self-assurance and tend to accept dubious passages meekly because they are conditioned to suspect themselves of being simply too stupid to understand. Korea’s ongoing translation wars are epitomized by encyclopedic books that present vast collections of detected mistakes and usually receive a great deal of media coverage. One regularly recurring motif of the multifaceted debates on mistranslations is the supposed disgrace and disadvantage sustained by Koreans when they are left with imperfect renderings of insights easily gleaned by those elsewhere in the world, who read, if not the originals, at least perfectly faithful translations.

Elise Reimarus

2021 ◽  
pp. 110-134
Author(s):  
Reed Winegar
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Free Speech ◽  
Public Reason ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Public Disclosure ◽  
The Public

This chapter examines Elise Reimarus’s role in two of eighteenth-century Germany’s most heated intellectual controversies: the Fragment and Pantheism Controversies. In particular, the chapter considers how Reimarus’s Enlightenment views (including her own freethinking, deistic beliefs) informed her participation in the two controversies but also raise a puzzle—namely, why does Reimarus, a staunch defender of public reason and free speech, seem to have balked at the public disclosure of key information in both controversies? In response to this puzzle, the chapter argues that Reimarus’s reticence was motivated in large part by her prudential outlook regarding public discourse—specifically, by her worry that personal polemics and heated disputes threatened to corrupt the rational, public discourse required for Enlightenment progress.

Reading, in a Digital Archive of One's Own

PMLA ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 128 (1) ◽  
pp. 207-212 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jim Collins
Keyword(s):  
Public Discourse ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
First Century ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
Portable Devices ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Future ◽  
Reading Culture ◽  
Digital Cultures

WHAT ARE WE REALLY TALKING ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT THE STATE OF READING? AND WHAT DO WE HOPE TO LEARN FROM THE Answers to that question? Confirmation of deeply held prejudices, or a better understanding of what reading means in digital cultures? We need to pose those questions right up front because the debate about the state of reading has been precipitated by the increasing ubiquity of the e-book, even though reading culture has been undergoing massive infrastructural changes for over a decade in the United States. The public discourse on the state of reading and on whether it has a viable future has focused on the future of the book and of literary reading now that e-books have apparently changed everything. The state of reading, as such, is not at stake because it doesn't seem likely that firemen from Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 will be swinging by your place anytime soon to torch your books and replace them with a well-appointed wall screen, eliminating reading forever in favor of mindless viewing. People will keep reading, if only to take in the endless text that comes at them on their various screens, from the ones on the wall to the ones they carry around with them everywhere on their portable devices. Try looking at those screens without reading. No, it's clear from the assumptions that underpin the end-is-near pronouncements about the e-book that there's reading and then there's reading and that when people talk about the future of reading, they're worried about whether readers worthy of the name will continue reading literary fiction in the twenty-first century. But that isn't a very interesting question because it imagines the act of reading in such an ahistorical manner, curled up in a well-upholstered time warp, far from the unruliness of contemporary reading cultures.

The Operatic Voice of Leoni the Jew: Between the Synagogue and the Theater in Late Georgian Britain

2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 295-321
Author(s):  
Uri Erman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Public ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Musical Works ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Anti Jewish

AbstractMichael Leoni, a leading singer in late eighteenth-century London, became famous for his role in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's anti-Jewish operaThe Duenna. He was discovered, however, at the Jewish synagogue, where his singing enthralled non-Jews in the early 1770s. Tracing Leoni's public reception, this article argues that the performative effect of his singing had a multifaceted relation to his audience's psychology of prejudice, serving to both reiterate and reconfigure a variety of preconceptions regarding the Jews. Leoni's intervention through operatic singing was particularly significant––a powerful, bodily manifestation that was capable of transforming listeners while exhibiting the deep acculturation of the singer himself. The ambivalence triggered by his performances would go on to define the public reception of other Jewish singers, particularly that of Leoni's protégé, John Braham, Britain's leading tenor in the early nineteenth century. Ultimately, the experience of these Jews' performances could not be easily deconstructed, as the Jewish performers' voices were emanating from within written, sometimes canonical, musical works. This representational impasse gave rise to a public discourse intent on deciphering their Jewishness, raising questions of interpretation, intention, and confession.

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