“No Deceit Safe in Its Hiding Place”: The Criminal Trial in Eighteenth-Century Spain

2002 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 449-478
Author(s):  
Fabio López-Lázaro

The least understood aspect of the punishment of crime in pre-nineteenth-century Spanish society is trial procedure. This is not surprising. Our misapprehensions and misinterpretations of the past are principally the product of eighteenth-century reality being sieved through an uncritical acceptance of nineteenth-century political criticism. The West inherits much of its modern paradigm from the Spain of 1808 to 1834, from Romantic images of Goya as the enlightened individual fighting obscurantism to portrayals of heroic guerrilla patriots seeking to wrest political reform from a reactionary central government. It also inherits, although less consciously, the political rubrics of liberal and conservative (and absolutist) from nationalist polemics during the 1808–1814 French occupation. When looking back half a century later, Spaniards wanted to distinguish themselves clearly from the past.

2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 64-84
Author(s):  
Ana Isabel González Manso

This article investigates how the perception of living in novel times influenced Spanish intellectuals from the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century when they wrote or thought about history. The perception of time would influence the way in which history was written, and in turn this would reflect the model of society that Spanish intellectuals aspired to when they turned to the past for the political and social features they wanted for their present and future. At that time, different time perceptions coexisted and combined in a very complex fashion; the present article, however, is focused on the perception of time mainly as an opportunity, with its advances and retreats, doubts and problems. The article will show how those intellectuals thought about history and the various solutions they put forward for society’s problems.


Author(s):  
Piero Ignazi

Chapter 1 introduces the long and difficult process of the theoretical legitimation of the political party as such. The analysis of the meaning and acceptance of ‘parties’ as tools of expressing contrasting visions moves forward from ancient Greece and Rome where (democratic) politics had first become a matter of speculation and practice, and ends up with the first cautious acceptance of parties by eighteenth-century British thinkers. The chapter explores how parties or factions have been constantly considered tools of division of the ‘common wealth’ and the ‘good society’. The holist and monist vision of a harmonious and compounded society, stigmatized parties and factions as an ultimate danger for the political community. Only when a new way of thinking, that is liberalism, emerged, was room for the acceptance of parties set.


Author(s):  
Nurit Yaari

This chapter examines the lack of continuous tradition of the art of the theatre in the history of Jewish culture. Theatre as art and institution was forbidden for Jews during most of their history, and although there were plays written in different times and places during the past centuries, no tradition of theatre evolved in Jewish culture until the middle of the nineteenth century. In view of this absence, the author discusses the genesis of Jewish theatre in Eastern Europe and in Eretz-Yisrael (The Land of Israel) since the late nineteenth century, encouraged by the Jewish Enlightenment movement, the emergence of Jewish nationalism, and the rebirth of Hebrew as a language of everyday life. Finally, the chapter traces the development of parallel strands of theatre that preceded the Israeli theatre and shadowed the emergence of the political infrastructure of the future State of Israel.


Author(s):  
Edward Bellamy

‘No person can be blamed for refusing to read another word of what promises to be a mere imposition upon his credulity.’ Julian West, a feckless aristocrat living in fin-de-siècle Boston, plunges into a deep hypnotic sleep in 1887 and wakes up in the year 2000. America has been turned into a rigorously centralized democratic society in which everything is controlled by a humane and efficient state. In little more than a hundred years the horrors of nineteenth-century capitalism have been all but forgotten. The squalid slums of Boston have been replaced by broad streets, and technological inventions have transformed people’s everyday lives. Exiled from the past, West excitedly settles into the ideal society of the future, while still fearing that he has dreamt up his experiences as a time traveller. Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) is a thunderous indictment of industrial capitalism and a resplendent vision of life in a socialist utopia. Matthew Beaumont’s lively edition explores the political and psychological peculiarities of this celebrated utopian fiction.


1989 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 787-797 ◽  
Author(s):  
Akhil Gupta

Economists and political scientists have become increasingly interested in the political economy of India during the past decade and particularly during the past three or four years. The titles under review will be valuable not only to India specialists but also to comparative scholars because of the intriguing mix of conditions found in India. More like a continent than a country in its diversity, India is in some ways very similar to densely populated, predominantly rural and agricultural China, differing most perhaps in the obstinacy and depth of its poverty. In the predominant role played by the state within an essentially capitalist economy, it is closer to the model of Western social democracies than it is to either prominently ideological capitalist or socialist nation-states; like other countries in the “third world,” the state in India plays a highly interventionist developmental role. Finally, since Independence it has pursued, more successfully than most nation-states in Latin America and Asia, policies of importsubstituting industrialization and relative autarchy. In terms of its political structures, India differs from most newly industrialized countries (NICs) in that it generally continues to function as a parliamentary democracy. The federal political system creates an intriguing balance of forces between central and the regional state governments, which are often ruled by opposition parties with agendas, ideologies, and organizational structures quite different from those of the central government.


1947 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-204
Author(s):  
Frank O'Malley

The question is: how can you put a prophet in his place when, by the very character of prophecy, he is eternally slipping out of place? William Blake was not an eighteenth century or nineteenth century mind or a typically modern mind at all. What I mean to say, right at the start, is that, although well aware of his time and of time altogether, he was not in tune with the main tendencies of his or our own time. Indeed time was a barrier he was forever crashing against. Blake's talent raved through the world into the fastnesses of die past and dramatically confronted the abysses of the future. His age did not confine him. As a poet he does not seem finally to have had real spiritual or artistic rinship with any of the rationalist or romantic writers of England. As a thinker he came to despise the inadequacy of the limited revolutionary effort of the political rebels of the Romantic Revolution. Blake's name is not to be seen mounted first with that of Paine or Godwin, of Rousseau or Voltaire, of Wordsworth or Shelley or Byron or Keats. With these he has, ultimately, little or nothing in common. At any rate, his voice and mood and impact are thoroughly different from the more publicly successful voices of the period of his life, older and younger generations alike.


1987 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 357-375 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Ross

During the first quarter of the eighteenth century, European merchants bought more slaves in the Bight of Benin than on any other part of the West African coast. From c. 1720 until 1727 much of their buying was concentrated in Savi, the capital of a small Aja state called Whydah. When the Dahomeans overran Savi in 1727 they stopped the inland slave suppliers from travelling to the coast, prevented the local Hueda from going inland to collect slaves, and insisted that the Europeans bought slaves only from Dahomean dealers. In an attempt to make sure that the Europeans had nothing more to do with their former trading partners the Dahomeans burned the factories in Savi and forced their European occupants to retire to Grehue, Savi's port, a spot on the coast where the Europeans maintained a number of fortified warehouses.The middleman policy did not at first operate satisfactorily. There were two reasons for this. The first was that the Dahomeans were, in practice, unable to prevent the Europeans from continuing to trade with the Hueda. The second was that the inland suppliers refused to sell slaves to Savi's conquerors. The Dahomeans solved their ‘coastal’ problem in the 1740S by placing a garrison in Grehue. This garrison kept the exiled Hueda at bay and held the Europeans in what amounted to open captivity. The Dahomeans were never able completely to solve their ‘supply’ problem. In the 1730s and 1740S the inland merchants took their slaves to ports which opened up on the Bight to the east of Grehue. Only in the 1750s and 1760s did they channel substantial numbers of slaves through Dahomey. In the last decades of the century they again boycotted the Dahomean market. Dahomey therefore prospered as a middleman state only between c. 1748 and c. 1770.An examination of their eighteenth century trading suggests that the Dahomeans were a slave-raiding community whose members realised in 1727 that they would soon run out of fresh raiding grounds. They appear to have introduced their middleman policy in an attempt to ensure that they would continue to profit from slave trading even after they had ceased to be able to take large numbers of captives themselves. Although the policy was by no means a complete success, it was important in that it seems to have led the Dahomeans to begin placing garrisons in the territories they ravaged. It appears, in fact, to have been the pursuit of their middleman goals that led them to begin creating the often described nineteenth century ‘greater’ Dahomean state. The middleman programme ceased to be of much importance after c. 1818, when the fall of Oyo enabled the Dahomeans to resume raiding widely in unexploited territory.


Author(s):  
Alice Soares Guimarães

This chapter examines transformations of state–society relations in eighteenth-century Portugal in relation to Enlightened political debates of the time. It also explores how these transformations shaped the relations between Portugal and Brazil in the nineteenth century, the debate about the political form of independent Brazil, and the intra-Brazilian struggles over this form before and after independence. More importantly, it challenges the notion that the Enlightenment was absent from the Portuguese Empire as a result of the rejection of modern ideas by conservative world views and projects. It argues that there was a Luso-Brazilian Enlightenment that was plural and eclectic, supporting both critiques and defences of the absolute power of the king, endorsing simultaneously a secularisation process, the promotion of reason and Roman Catholicism, and fostering not only revolutionary projects but also conservative state reforms.


Author(s):  
T. C. Smout

This book presents an overview of the first six decades of the Union of the Crowns. It also provides a picture of the uses to which judicial torture was put after 1660 and a summary of the straits in which Scotland found itself in the opening years of the eighteenth century. It then explores the problems which union posed to maritime lawyers of both nations, the dark reception that the Scots received in eighteenth-century England, and the way Enlightenment Scotland viewed the British unions. It examines the ambitions of Scottish élites in India, the frame for radical cooperation in the age of the Friends of the People and later, and the background for the sojourn of Thomas and Jane Carlyle in London. It finally outlined the Anglo-Scottish relations on the political scene in the nineteenth century. The parliamentary union did little in the short run for Anglo-Scottish relations. It is shown that Scots are indeed worried and worry a lot about Anglo-Scottish relations, but the English worried and worry about them hardly at all, except in times of exceptional crisis, as in 1638–54, 1703–7, 1745–7 and perhaps much later in the 1970s after oil had been discovered.


2020 ◽  
pp. 273-302
Author(s):  
Tim Rudbøg

This chapter explores why the Theosophical objective “to form a nucleus of the universal brotherhood of humanity without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste, or colour” became important to the Theosophical Society. The chapter identifies and analyzes the intellectual contexts that informed the development of the idea as it entered the Theosophical Society, such as the great Enlightenment ideals of the eighteenth century, spiritualistic reform movements, and freemasonry in the nineteenth century, and argues that the idea became central to the relocation of the Theosophical headquarters from New York to India (1879–82).


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