Political Economy for Workers: A. N. Bakh’s Tsar-Golod

Slavic Review ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 768-778 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah L. Pearl

“There’s a tsar in the world, a merciless tsar; / His name is—hunger!” These lines, taken from Nikolai A. Nekrasov’s poem “Zheleznaia doroga” (1864), serve as the epigraph for one of the most popular works of Russian revolutionary propaganda literature of the late nineteenth century, the pamphlet Tsar-golod by Aleksei Nikolaevich Bakh, a People’s Will activist of the early 1880s. Nekrasov’s poem vividly depicts the cost in human suffering of the construction of the Moscow to St. Petersburg railroad. As with other works by Nekrasov, the poem arouses the reader’s sympathy for Russian common folk and outrage at their plight. Bakh, when faced with the task of devising lessons for workers’ propaganda circles, picked up the striking image of Tsar Hunger, driving workers to labor and often to death, and used it as a recurring theme, while he transformed the message. Bakh’s brochure, a dissection and analysis of the capitalist system, leaves behind the world of poetry for that of cold reality. The author’s purpose is not simply to inspire sympathy for the people’s suffering, but also to lead his worker audience to understand the economic system that exploited them and to recognize the urgent need for revolution.

2003 ◽  
Vol 10 (suppl 1) ◽  
pp. 13-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jo Robertson

In the 1800s, humoral understandings of leprosy successively give way to disease models based on morbid anatomy, physiopathology, and bacteriology. Linkages between these disease models were reinforced by the ubiquitous seed/soil metaphor deployed both before and after the identification of M. leprae. While this metaphor provided a continuous link between medical descriptions, Henry Vandyke Carter's On leprosy (1874) marks a convergence of different models of disease. Simultaneously, this metaphor can be traced in popular and medical debates in the late nineteenth century, accompanying fears of a resurgence of leprosy in Europe. Later the mapping of the genome ushers in a new model of disease but, ironically, while leprosy research draws its logic from a view of the world in which a seed and soil metaphor expresses many different aspects of the activity of the disease, the bacillus itself continues to be unreceptive to cultivation.


2009 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 158-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan Carlos Jaramillo Estrada

Born in the late nineteenth century, within the positivist paradigm, psychology has made important developments that have allowed its recognition in academia and labor. However, contextual issues have transformed the way we conceptualize reality, the world and man, perhaps in response to the poor capacity of the inherited paradigm to ensure quality of life and welfare of human beings. This has led to the birth and recognition of new paradigms, including complex epistemology, in various fields of the sphere of knowledge, which include the subjectivity, uncertainty, relativity of knowledge, conflict, the inclusion of "the observed" as an active part of the interventions and the relativity of a single knowable reality to move to co-constructed realities. It is proposed an approach to the identity consequences for a psychology based on complex epistemology, and the possible differences and relations with psychology, traditionally considered.


Author(s):  
Michael R. Cohen

Chapter 6 explores the end of the niche economy. By the late nineteenth century, changes to the cotton industry meant that merchants in the Gulf South were no longer as important as they once were. Structural changes to global capitalism, including the rise of investment banking, changed the nature of credit and lending, as networks of trust, which once provided a competitive advantage for Jews and other minorities, began to lose their importance. Additional global forces also mitigated the Gulf South’s centrality in the cotton industry, as the world’s thirst for cotton pushed European powers to find cheaper places in the world to produce cotton. Localized factors were also marginalizing the Gulf South and its Jewish merchants, as floods and invasive species ravaged cotton crops and a spate of anti-Jewish violence took direct aim at the Jewish niche economy. All of this meant that, in much the same manner that Jewish merchants had once marginalized cotton factors, Jewish merchants themselves became marginalized, and their niche economy came to an end.


2019 ◽  
pp. 38-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Bell

This chapter will explore the similarities and differences between late nineteenth-century debates on the British settler Empire and more recent visions of the Anglosphere. It suggests that the idea of the Anglosphere has deep roots in British political thought. In particular, it traces the debates over both imperial federation and Anglo-American union from the late nineteenth century onwards into the post-Brexit world. I examine three recurrent issues that have shaped arguments about the unity and potential of the ‘English-speaking peoples’: the ideal constitutional structure of the community; the economic model that it should adopt; and the role of the United States within it. I conclude by arguing that the legacy of settler colonialism, and an idealised vision of the ‘English-speaking peoples’, played a pivotal role in shaping Tory Euroscepticism from the late 1990s onwards, furnishing an influential group of politicians and public intellectuals, from Thatcher and Robert Conquest to Boris Johnson and Andrew Roberts, with an alternative non-European vision of Britain’s place in the world.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1123-1160
Author(s):  
Daniel Hedinger ◽  
Moritz von Brescius

This chapter provides an analytical overview of the German and Japanese imperial projects from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of World War II. It shows how Germany and Japan—two imperial latecomers in the late nineteenth century—redefined imperialism and colonialism in the first half of the twentieth century. In order to realize their dreams of a new imperial world order, both countries broke with what had come before, and their violent imperial projects turned out to be radically new and different. While Europe had never seen an empire like Hitler’s, the same is true of East Asia and the so-called Co-Prosperity Sphere during the Second World War. In the end, it was their wars for empire and brutal legacies that not only profoundly shaped their respective national histories, but also undermined the legitimacy of imperialism after 1945. The chapter, which focuses on a series of important moments from a trans-imperial perspective, highlights two points. First, it stresses that the German and Japanese empires had a shared history. Second, it shows that by their emergence as colonial powers, Japan and Germany first fundamentally challenged and later changed the very rules of the “imperial game” and the existing global order. Their histories are central to understand great power competition in the first half of the 20th century as well as the imperial nature of the World Wars.


1977 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 230-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gene Yeager

Students of late nineteenth century history have long dismissed the world industrial expositions as glittering, but not highly significant reflections of the gilded age. What emerges from the literature of the period, however, is a sense of the overriding commercial importance of these exhibitions. Nineteenth-century observers consistently linked the fairs to the general growth of world trade and to the expanding commercial hegemony of the United States. More specifically, contemporaries agreed that the expositions served to develop trade and investment ties with Latin America. Among the Latin American countries represented in the expositions, Mexico was the most important and consistent participant.


1987 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 967-980 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derek Matthews

This article analyzes, with particular reference to Britain, the technological transformation in coal gas manufacture around 1900. The timing of the innovation seems to be explained by the nature of the technology itself, by Rosenberg's “technical complementarity.” The rate of diffusion is analyzed by means of an inter-firm model which points to the importance of technical interrelatedness and the need to scrap old plant and of wage costs, which encouraged some firms to hasten scrapping. Different countries chose between the range of new technologies available largely on the basis of compatibility with existing plant and the cost of raw materials.


1987 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
pp. 551-581 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shin'ichi Yonekawa

In this wide-ranging article, Professor Yonekawa identifies and examines in detail the burst of cotton spinning company formation that occurred in the late nineteenth century among the major cotton-producing nations of the world. His comparative approach allows him to focus on key local factors responsible for the company flotation booms in the areas discussed. He is also able to compare the effects of more general circumstances in the industry, such as trends in the price of raw cotton and the disruption during the American Civil War, on the various locations. Finally, his multinational approach brings to light many intriguing questions and illuminates areas for productive future research.


Urban History ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-237 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roy Hartnell

This paper looks at Joseph Chamberlain's Birmingham and claims that George Dawson's famous ‘civic gospel’ which laid the ground for the municipal reforms was permeated by a consensus view of the moral and civic role of art. It suggests that it was this combination of philosophy in action through art which created the special Birmingham context for a vibrant civic culture which led to the political and artistic achievements of the 1870s and 1880s. For a few brief years, this combination enabled Birmingham to stand above other British cities and lay claim to the titles of ‘the best-governed city in the world’ and ‘perhaps the most artistic town in England’.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-71
Author(s):  
Ragnhild Johnsrud Zorgati

This article explores the encounters between a Polish-Danish painter and an Egyptian princess in the second part of the nineteenth century, at the junction of Orientalism, modernism and Islamic reformism. The painter Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann is known for her Orientalist paintings and autobiographical writings, while Princess Nazli Fadhel was a hostess of influential intellectual salons in Cairo and Tunis and, as such, a contributor to the world of art, literature and politics. Jerichau-Baumann and Nazli Fadhel were both creative and controversial personalities engaged in the cultural and political debates of their time. They were outspoken and well-travelled, which challenged conventional gender roles. Based on Scandinavian, English, French and Arabic sources concerning Jerichau-Baumann and Nazli Fadhel's lives, this article argues that the activities of these two women are testament to the increasing international importance of feminist discourses in the late nineteenth century. Their encounter is emblematic of the rapidly expanding connections across cultural, linguistic, and religious boundaries that characterized the nineteenth-century world. It thus questions the binary constructions – the idea of the West/Europe and the Other – underlying the paradigm of Orientalism.


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