Narrating Lives: A Mughal Empress, A French Nabob, A Nationalist Muslim Intellectual

1995 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 474-480 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara D. Metcalf

With some exaggeration, one could claim that these three biographies, despite their disparate subjects—a seventeenth-century aristocratic lady of the Mughal court, an eighteenth-century French adventurer, and a twentieth-century Muslim intellectual and political figure—all tell the same story. In each case, a figure is born (as it happens, outside the Indian subcontinent) in relatively humble circumstances and emerges as a singular figure in some combination of the political, economic, intellectual life of the day. Each account proceeds chronologically, with the life presented as an unfolding, linear story, the fruit of “developments” and “influences,” in which the protagonist independently takes action. These accounts fit, in short, the genre of biography or autobiography known to us Americans from Benjamin Franklin to Malcolm X, of rags to riches—and, typically, lessons to impart (Ohmann 1970). Each is an example of the canonical form of male biography and autobiography that emerged in Europe from the eighteenth century.

2009 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 425-444
Author(s):  
ANDREW JAINCHILL

Among the stunning changes in material and intellectual life that transformed eighteenth-century Europe, perhaps none excited as much contemporary consternation as the twin-headed growth of a modern commercial economy and the fiscal–military state. As economies became increasingly based on trade, money, and credit, and states both exploded in size and forged seemingly insoluble ties to the world of finance, intellectuals displayed growing anxiety about just what kind of political, economic, and social order was taking shape before their eyes. Two important new books by Michael Sonenscher and John Shovlin, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution and The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism, and the Origins of the French Revolution, tackle these apprehensions and the roles they played in forging French political and economic writings in the second half of the eighteenth century. Both authors also take the further step of demonstrating the impact of the ideas they study on the origins of the French Revolution.


2009 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-238 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacob Soll

In the 1650s, political administrators across Europe began adopting accounting strategies to manage government. Although the method of double-entry book-keeping emerged during the Middle Ages and spread from Italy during the Renaissance, governments were slow to adopt it. Inspired by the Dutch precedent, however, English, French, German, and Russian rulers and ministers looked to accounting to build new military industrial complexes. This general movement represents a paradigmatic change in the language of politics, away from traditional humanist theory toward a technocratic culture that would later evolve into the political-economic movement of the eighteenth century.


2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-66
Author(s):  
Christine Adams

The relationship of the French king and royal mistress, complementary but unequal, embodied the Gallic singularity; the royal mistress exercised a civilizing manner and the soft power of women on the king’s behalf. However, both her contemporaries and nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians were uncomfortable with the mistress’s political power. Furthermore, paradoxical attitudes about French womanhood have led to analyses of her role that are often contradictory. Royal mistresses have simultaneously been celebrated for their civilizing effect in the realm of culture, chided for their frivolous expenditures on clothing and jewelry, and excoriated for their dangerous meddling in politics. Their increasing visibility in the political realm by the eighteenth century led many to blame Louis XV’s mistresses—along with Queen Marie-Antoinette, who exercised a similar influence over her husband, Louis XVI—for the degradation and eventual fall of the monarchy. This article reexamines the historiography of the royal mistress.


2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-7
Author(s):  
Nick Henry ◽  
Adrian Smith

It was over 25 years ago that European Urban and Regional Studies was launched at a time of epochal change in the composition of the political, economic and social map of Europe. Brexit has been described as an epochal moment – and at such a moment, European Urban and Regional Studies felt it should offer the space for short commentaries on Brexit and its impact on the relationships of place, space and scale across the cultural, economic, social and political maps of the ‘new Europes’. Seeking contributions drawing on the theories, processes and patterns of urban and regional development, the following provides 10 contributions on Europe, the UK and/or their relational geographies in a post-Brexit world. What the drawn-out and highly contested process of Brexit has done for the populace, residents and ex-pats of the UK is to reveal the inordinate ways in which our mental, everyday and legal maps of the regions, nations and places of the UK in Europe are powerful, territorially and rationally inconsistent, downright quirky at times but also intensely unequal. First, as the UK exits the Single Market, the nature of the political imagination needed to create alternatives to the construction of new borders and new divisions, even within a discourse of creating a ‘global Britain’, remains uncertain. European Urban and Regional Studies has always been a journal dedicated to the importance of pan-European scholarly integration and solidarity and we hope that it will continue to intervene in debates over what alternative imaginings to a more closed and introverted future might look like. Second, as the impacts of COVID-19 continue to change in profound ways how we think, work and travel across European space, we will need to find new forms of integration and new forms of engagament in intellectual life and policy development. European Urban and Regional Studies remains commited to forging such forms.


Author(s):  
John M. Chenoweth

This introductory chapter sketches the questions and goals of the overall project and the needed background information about Quakerism. It introduces the Tortola Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (“Quakers”) which formed in the British Virgin Islands about 1740 and addresses how archaeology can approach the study of religion and religious communities. This chapter also serves as an introduction to Quakerism itself, including its ideology based on individual, un-mediated communion with God, and a brief history of the group from its foundation in the political and economic turmoil of mid-seventeenth-century England, to the “Quietism” of wealthy “Quaker Grandees” in Philadelphia, to a nineteenth and twentieth century history of schism and reunion around pacifism. The Quaker structure of Monthly, Quarterly, and Yearly meetings is introduced, and connected to both community oversight and support structures. Finally, this chapter introduces three main Quaker ideals—simplicity, equality, and peace—which will be interrogated throughout the work as they change in their interactions with Caribbean slavery and geography.


Author(s):  
Stephen Menn ◽  
Justin E. H. Smith

The life of Anton Wilhelm Amo is summarized, with close attention to the archival documents that establish key moments in his biography. Next the history of Amo’s reception is considered, from the first summaries of his work in German periodicals during his lifetime, through his legacy in African nationalist thought in the twentieth century. Then the political and intellectual context at Halle is addressed, considering the likely influence on Amo’s work of Halle Pietism, of the local currents of medical philosophy as represented by Friedrich Hoffmann, and of legal thought as represented by Christian Thomasius. The legacy of major early modern philosophers, such as René Descartes and G. W. Leibniz, is also considered, in the aim of understanding how Amo himself might have understood them and how they might have shaped his work. Next a detailed analysis of the conventions of academic dissertations and disputations in early eighteenth-century Germany is provided, in order to better understand how these conventions give shape to Amo’s published works. Finally, ancient and modern debates on action and passion and on sensation are investigated, providing key context for the summary of the principal arguments of Amo’s two treatises, which are summarized in the final section of the introduction.


Author(s):  
James R. Otteson

Markets are often criticized for being amoral, if not immoral. The core of the “political economy” that arose in the eighteenth century, however, envisioned the exchanges that take place in commercial society as neither amoral nor immoral but indeed deeply humane. The claim of the early political economists was that transactions in markets fulfilled two separate but related moral mandates: they lead to increasing prosperity, which addressed their primary “economic” concern of raising the estates of the poor; and they model proper relations among people, which addressed their primary “moral” concern of granting a respect to all, including the least among us. They attempted to capture a vision of human dignity within political-economic institutions that enabled people to improve their stations. Their arguments thus did not bracket out judgments of value: they integrated judgments of value into their foundations and built their political economy on that basis.


Author(s):  
Andrew McFarland

This chapter explores how sport became intertwined with identity, politics, consumerism, and culture in Southern Europe to the extent that it is difficult to imagine modern Spain, Italy, Portugal, or Greece without it. The region houses some of the world’s most legendary football clubs and leagues, which have deep-rooted connections to the political, economic, and social histories of their cities, regions, and nations. Sports groups forged this audience within the region’s well-established cultures by connecting the activity to national, regional, and civic identities, often with the support of (or in opposition to) dictatorial or Fascist regimes. The region also boasts consistent involvement in international competitions, such as hosting six Olympic Games, highlighted by Greece’s Olympic heritage. Southern Europe’s sporting world continued to change in the last third of the twentieth century with the rise of Spanish sport and the growth of basketball throughout the region.


PMLA ◽  
1960 ◽  
Vol 75 (5) ◽  
pp. 577-582
Author(s):  
Harry Modean Campbell

In his discerning book entitled Emerson's Angle of Vision, Sherman Paul has pointed out two fundamental ways in which Whitehead, in spite of some obvious differences, is like Emerson. Both Emerson and Whitehead, says Paul, exalted the moral, ethical, and imaginative science of the seventeenth century over the analytical rationalism of the eighteenth century, and, as a logical consequence of this emphasis, both condemned Lockean sensationalism in the same way. Following Professor Paul's suggestion, the purpose of this study is to explore in some detail the basic views of Emerson and Whitehead about religion—man's relation to Nature and God. The remarkable similarities between the views of Emerson and those of Whitehead on this subject may not indicate much, if any, indebtedness of the twentieth-century philosopher to his nineteenth-century predecessor, but if these parallels are extensive and important enough, they may well indicate that Whitehead's total achievement in the philosophy of religion is like that of Emerson—that, religiously, Whitehead may be said to be a kind of twentieth-century Emerson, in one important way, as may appear, more of a transcendentalist than Emerson. Indeed, though the obscurity of his style will prevent him from being as popular as his predecessor, Whitehead's influence as a leader in the religious revolt against the “philosophy of logical analysis” and the other philosophies that make ours an “age of analysis” may in time be as great as that of Emerson in the similar romantic-transcendentalist revolt against the analytical rationalism of the age of “Enlightenment.” More of this later, but first let us examine the evidence.


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