‘Fishers of Men’: religion and political economy among colonized Tabwa

Africa ◽  
1984 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 49-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allen F. Roberts

Opening ParagraphIn the late nineteenth century, Catholic missionaries among Tabwa southwest of Lake Tanganyika (now Zaire) sought to create a cohesive community of African Christians. The priests prohibited communal practice of Tabwa religion in the vicinity of their churches (established at points of densest population) and appropriated important means of food production like river-fishing grounds, for their own exploitation or to reward those loyal to them. As they enhanced their own economic and political influence, they contributed to Tabwa anomie, rather than community.

Author(s):  
Eagle Glassheim

Although fascism has often been considered a plebeian, even radically egalitarian ideology, many of its outspoken proponents were members of the old European elite: nobles, clericalists and representatives of the haute bourgeoisie. Historians of Nazi Germany have puzzled over the affinity of German conservatives such as Paul von Hindenburg and Franz von Papen to Adolf Hitler's National Socialist version of fascism. A small but extremely wealthy noble elite struggled to maintain its long-standing social, economic and political influence in Bohemia. By the late nineteenth century, the Bohemian nobility was a self-consciously traditional social group with a decidedly modern economic relationship to agrarian and industrial capitalism. This chapter examines the response of the Bohemian aristocracy to the new state of Czechoslovakia. This restricted caste of cosmopolitan latifundist families was more German than Czech in sentiment, and further alienated by land reform. The aristocrats entertained divergent assessments of Nazism and responded in different ways to the crisis of the state by 1938.


2021 ◽  
pp. 273-298
Author(s):  
Jon D. Wisman

Following the rise of the state, religion served to legitimate societies’ institutions, practices, and unequal distributions of income, wealth, and privilege. However, emerging capitalism and its expanding bourgeoisie in Western Europe challenged the Catholic Church’s monopoly on truth and meaning, opening space for secular legitimation. The science of political economy increasingly evolved as a principal body of social thought legitimating inequality. This transfer from religion to political economy begins with the mercantilists and is mostly complete by the end of the nineteenth century. Political economy’s principal inequality-legitimating doctrines include the utility of poverty, the justice of the invisible hand, the Malthusian population doctrine, the wages-fund doctrine, and the trickle-down thesis. Most of these doctrines take on more of a patina of “natural” science in the late nineteenth century when the neoclassical revolution in economics attempted to sever economic science from morality and politics and express itself technically with calculus.


1996 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 291-309 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles W. Calhoun

The nature of party contention and public discourse in the late nineteenth century is one of the least understood and most elusive subjects in American history and historiography. In the period itself many critics condemned the intense partisanship of the two major parties as a sham battle, aimed more at filling offices than fulfilling ideals, and all too often tainted with corrupt motives and methods. In the classic formulation of Englishman James Bryce, “neither party has any principles…. [P]oints of political doctrine … have all but vanished …. All has been lost except office or the hope of it.”


1983 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 563-590 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pamela G. Price

The aim of this paper is to interpret the life experience of a south Indian landholder at the end of the nineteenth century. The basis for interpretation comes from the author's analysis of the values of political economy among, chiefly, warrior castes as they adjusted to constraints of imperial rule from 1800 in Madras Presidency. The method of exposition is, for the most part, descriptive and narrative, with the intention of highlighting and contextualizing major concepts governing the man's thoughts and actions. Because the subject, a wealthy Tamil zamindar, kept English-language diaries, problems of cultural anachronism in the prose below are mitigated. Having the English vocabulary—or a small part of it—of our subject subverts the bugbear of ethnosociology, the cultural distortions inherent in using an alien language as one discusses the values of a social group. Contemporary newspaper commentary in English also lends cultural accuracy to the narrative. Memories of the subject linger still in Madurai Town, scene of many of his activities. I wrote the major part of the piece in Madurai and was honoured with a request to read it to the membership of the local Historical Society. That membership gave me paradoxical relief in saying of this cultural account, ‘She has told us nothing new about Baskara Setupati.’


2002 ◽  
Vol 33 (130) ◽  
pp. 191-208 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fintan Lane

In the late nineteenth century Irish rural labourers had few consistent advocates willing to pursue their social and economic claims at a national level. Those that did exist, such as P.F. Johnson of Kanturk, have generally managed to elude the scrutiny of historians. A number of studies on the Irish land question have referred to Johnson, but he has remained a shadowy figure despite his role as the leading labourers’ advocate between 1869 and 1882. Rural agitation during this period is most often associated with tenant farmers and their perturbations with regard to the prevailing land-tenure system and its administration. The rural working class, especially before 1885, had limited political influence, and neither the British government nor the Irish Parliamentary Party treated its claims with the seriousness that they accorded to the perceived needs of tenant farmers. Nonetheless, many commentators remarked on the wretched condition of the rural labouring population in Ireland, and it was undoubtedly the greatest demographic and socio-economic casualty of the Famine. Wages, working conditions, unemployment and underemployment, housing and access to land were all issues that agitated labourers in the late nineteenth century.


Author(s):  
Brandi Hughes

This chapter explores how missionary work that began as evangelical outreach developed into a system of shared grievances when African Americans began to see the meaningful parallels and symmetries between their own limited political influence in the Reconstruction South and African communities affected by colonialism. Drawing on the minutes of the annual meeting and publication records of the Mission Herald, the National Baptist Convention's monthly newsletter, the chapter traces African American engagement with Africa in the late nineteenth century through the transformation of a historically decentralized religious denomination into a collective space for civic mobilization, shaped by diasporic identification and linked social circumstances.


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