The Pasts of a Pāḷaiyakārar: The Ethnohistory of a South Indian Little King

1982 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 655-683 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas B. Dirks
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Cultural Form ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
South Indian ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
Sovereign Authority

This article examines a text containing the late eighteenth-century family history of a line of South Indian “little kings,” or pāḷaiyakārars. The text provides the basis for a discussion of the Maṟavar caste of the Tirunelvēli region in southern Tamil Nāṭu and the notions held by this and other related groups concerning royal appropriateness and sovereign authority, political and social relations, and kingly privileges and gifts. Further, the text is seen as a cultural form of “history” that has an integrity of its own. Indeed, a structural analysis of the text reveals that the text can not be separated into “fanciful” and “historical” sections, and that underlying assumptions about the past are revealed by the form as well as the content of the text. The results of this analysis are seen to have significance not only for understanding how the past is viewed from within, but also for how it must be analyzed from outside the cultural context. Thus, ethnohistory is asserted to be not simply one agenda for “history” but a way of setting the actual agenda of “history.”

‘Other Diplomacies’ and World Order: Historical Insights from Canadian–Asian Relations

2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 351-382 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary M. Young ◽  
Susan J. Henders
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
World Order ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
State Actors ◽  
Second World

This article examines the diplomatic practices of non-state actors in the history of Canadian–Eastern Asian relations in order to theorize and show empirically how diplomacies make and can transform world orders. Analysing examples of trans-Pacific missionary, commercial and labour interactions from the late eighteenth century to the Second World War, the article points to how the diplomatic practices of non-state actors, often in everyday circumstances, enacted Canadian–Asian relations. They, in turn, constituted and challenged the hierarchical social relations of the European imperial world order that was linked with race, class, gender, civilization and culture — hierarchies that conditioned patterns of thought and action, in that order. The analysis uses and further develops the concept of ‘other diplomacies’, as introduced by Beier and Wylie, to highlight the centrality to world orders of practices that have a diplomatic character, even when the actors involved do not represent states.

On the recent history of low vowels in English

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 545-567
Author(s):  
RAYMOND HICKEY
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Horizontal Axis ◽  
Recent History ◽  
Low Back ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Continuous Movement ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries

The development of low vowels in the history of English is one which shows continuous movement, usually upwards along earlier back and later front trajectories. In addition, low vowels have been subject to lengthening processes which have compensated for the loss of earlier instances of long low vowels. Shifts along a horizontal axis, from low front to low back, can also be discerned throughout the history of English. The present study begins by examining the situation in late eighteenth-century English, using the Eighteenth-Century English Phonology Database and the works of various prescriptivist writers, to determine the outset for later developments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It also scrutinises realisations of low vowels in these varieties in order to offer a possible chronology for the overall development of low vowels in the past two centuries.

scholarly journals ‘Constitutions selection’: Darwin, race and medicine

BJHS Themes ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Suman Seth
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Skin Colour ◽  
Race Science ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Race ◽  
Descent Of Man

Abstract In the course of his discussion of the origin of variations in skin colour among humans in the Descent of Man, Charles Darwin suggested that darker skin might be correlated with immunity to certain diseases. To make that suggestion, he drew upon a claim that seemed self-evidently correct in 1871, although it had seemed almost certainly incorrect in the late eighteenth century: that immunity to disease could be understood as a hereditary racial trait. This paper aims to show how fundamental was the idea of ‘constitutions selection’, as Darwin would call it, for his thinking about human races, tracking his (ultimately unsuccessful) attempts to find proof of its operation over a period of more than thirty years. At the same time and more broadly, following Darwin's conceptual resources on this question helps explicate relationships between conceptions of disease and conceptions of race in the nineteenth century. That period saw the birth of a modern, fixist, biologically determinist racism, which increasingly manifested itself in medical writings. The reverse was also true: medicine was a crucial site in which race was forged. The history of what has been called ‘race-science’, it is argued, cannot and should not be written independent of the history of ‘race-medicine’.

Anthology of Goethe Songs

10.31022/n023 ◽  
1994 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Ferruccio Busoni ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
German Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
Voice And Piano

Few poets have had so profound an influence on the history of German art music as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Since the late eighteenth century, over seven hundred of his poems have been set by nearly six hundred composers as lieder for voice and piano. This anthology gathers twenty-two such settings, in a wide variety of styles, by composers ranging from Goethe's friend Carl Zelter to Hans von Bülow, Ferruccio Busoni, and Othmar Schoeck.

TWO HUNTERS, A MILKMAID AND THE FRENCH ‘REVOLUTIONARY’ CANON

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
JULIA DOE
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Stage I ◽  
Performance History ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
Printed Music

ABSTRACTLarge-scale programming studies of French Revolutionary theatre confirm that the most frequently staged opera of the 1790s was not one of the politically charged, compositionally progressive works that have come to define the era for posterity, but rather a pastoral comedy from mid-century:Les deux chasseurs et la laitière(1763), with a score by Egidio Duni to a libretto by Louis Anseaume. This article draws upon both musical and archival evidence to establish an extended performance history ofLes deux chasseurs, and a more nuanced explanation for its enduring hold on the French lyric stage. I consider the pragmatic, legal and aesthetic factors contributing to the comedy's widespread adaptability, including its cosmopolitan musical idiom, scenographic simplicity and ready familiarity amongst consumers of printed music. More broadly, I address the advantages and limitations of corpus-based analysis with respect to delineating the operatic canon. In late eighteenth-century Paris, observers were already beginning to identify a chasm between their theatre-going experiences and the reactions of critics: Was a true piece of ‘Revolutionary’ theatre one that was heralded as emblematic of its time, or one, likeLes deux chasseurs, that was so frequently seen that it hardly elicited a mention in the printed record?

Geopolitics of Comparison: World Literature Avant la Lettre

2021 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 255-269
Author(s):  
Waïl S. Hassan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Comparative Literature ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of

Abstract According to a well-known narrative, the concept of Weltliteratur and its academic correlative, the discipline of comparative literature, originated in Germany and France in the early nineteenth century, influenced by the spread of scientism and nationalism. But there is another genesis story that begins in the late eighteenth century in Spain and Italy, countries with histories entangled with the Arab presence in Europe during the medieval period. Emphasizing the role of Arabic in the formation of European literatures, Juan Andrés wrote the first comparative history of “all literature,” before the concepts of Weltliteratur and comparative literature gained currency. The divergence of the two genesis stories is the result of competing geopolitical interests, which determine which literatures enter into the sphere of comparison, on what terms, within which paradigms, and under what ideological and discursive conditions.

Late Novels

2018 ◽  
pp. 67-100
Author(s):  
Hugh Adlington
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Blue Flower ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Romantic Poet ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Ways Of Thinking

This chapter examines the four ‘late’ novels that are the peak of Penelope Fitzgerald’s achievement as a writer: Innocence, The Beginning of Spring, The Gate of Angels, The Blue Flower. Each novel is, at least superficially, a work of historical fiction in that it is set in the past: in 1950s Italy, in revolutionary Russia, in Edwardian England, and in late-eighteenth-century Germany respectively. But history is decidedly not the defining feature of these novels. Rather, as this chapter shows, all four works are characterized by their bold experimentation with narrative form and style, reflecting an intense concern with profound questions of body, mind and spirit that culminates in Fitzgerald’s haunting masterpiece, the story of the idealized yearning of the German Romantic poet Novalis both for Sophie von Kühn, his ‘heart’s heart’, and for revelation. Through close analysis of Fitzgerald’s methods of research, composition and editing, this chapter proposes fresh ways of thinking about the stylistic means by which these late novels create fictional worlds that expand to fill the reader’s imagination, and even appear to possess an existence independent of the novels themselves.

Reading Henry Maundrell’s Sacred Geography in Eighteenth-Century England and Germany

2019 ◽  
pp. 210-226
Author(s):  
Simon Mills
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Holy Land ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Sacred Geography ◽  
History Of

This chapter explains the remarkable popularity of Henry Maundrell’s A Journey from Aleppo to Jerusalem at Easter AD 1697 (1703). It argues that Maundrell’s eye-witness reportage of his travels in the Holy Land provided the book’s readers with a storehouse of geographical observations and descriptions of eastern customs with which they could recreate imaginatively the world of the Scriptures. Tracing the book’s use by editors, commentators, translators, and paraphrasts, it argues that Maundrell was most often put to work in defence of the Bible against attacks on its claims to truth. Yet in the hands of Maundrell’s late eighteenth-century German translator, the naturalist and historicist tendencies inherent in his account were brought into sharper focus; ‘sacred geography’ was transformed into a history of biblical culture.

5. Long Waves and Conjunctures of Democratization

2018 ◽  
pp. 67-81
Author(s):  
Dirk Berg-Schlosser
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Long Waves ◽  
Political Equality ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Long Wave ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of

This chapter focuses on the history of democratization since the late eighteenth century. It introduces the concepts of ‘waves’ (trends) and ‘conjunctures’ (briefer turmoils) and delineates the major developments in this respect. In this way, the major long-term and short-term factors leading to the emergence and breakdowns of democracies are also highlighted. The first long wave occurred during the period 1776–1914, followed by the first positive conjuncture in 1918–19, the second long wave (with some intermittent turbulences) in 1945–88, and the latest conjuncture in 1989–90. The chapter identifies the main ingredients to democratization throughout history, namely: republicanism, representation, and political equality. It concludes by considering some of the current perspectives and dangers for the future of democracy.

The Estuary

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Benjamin Kingsbury
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Environmental Economic ◽  
Bay Of Bengal ◽  
For Profit ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
British Rule ◽  
New Frontier ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
Natural Outcome

A history of environmental, economic, and social change in the Meghna estuary from the late eighteenth century to the 1870s. A new frontier of alluvial land was being created along the edge of the Bay of Bengal, presenting opportunities for profit as well as great risks. The settlement of this frontier was not simply a natural outcome of the availability of new land: it was also encouraged by imperial policy. And just as British rule was not a product of nature, neither were the divisions within Bengali society that helped to determine who would be exposed to disaster.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document