Robert Livingston (1654-1728): Businessman of Colonial New York

1956 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence H. Leder ◽  
Vincent P. Carosso
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Business Enterprise ◽  
Business Organization ◽  
Manufacturing Enterprises ◽  
Social Prestige ◽  
The Social ◽  
Business Functions

Robert Livingston's career provides the first opportunity to consider in detail the emergence of an early New York businessman. Trained in business in Rotterdam, he brought to the New World the experience, knowledge, and techniques of one of the most advanced commercial centers of his day. On the Albany frontier he applied the Old World's business methods to advantage and gradually emerged as a dominant figure in colonial New York. His records and business correspondence leave no doubt that Livingston belonged to that class of businessmen often referred to as sedentary or resident merchants, though he did not employ as many agents and partners as his later, more mature counterparts. Neither did he engage in as many ventures or perform as many functions as the Browns, Hancocks, and other late eighteenth-century merchants, nor did he create an impressive business organization at home or abroad as was customary among certain European contemporaries. Still, as a wholesaler and retailer, importer and exporter, shipowner and land speculator, Livingston was an early New York practitioner of diversified business functions and investments. His extensive land dealings, no doubt motivated in part by the social prestige attached to real estate, were undertaken primarily as a source of credit and revenue. Livingston Manor was operated as a business enterprise: some of it was cultivated on Livingston's behalf, parts were leased to tenants who provided for the Lord of the Manor not only rents but a steady market for the goods he obtained in overseas trading ventures, and other sections were devoted to various manufacturing enterprises. Livingston's political life was an integral and necessary part of his business ventures, which reflected at all points the total instability of most colonial institutions. From the details of Livingstons many-sided commercial life emerges a rare picture of an embryonic business society in which the means were sorely taxed to achieve the ends conceived by ambitious men.

The Poles as an Integrating and Disintegrating Factor

1967 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 287-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henryk Wereszycki
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Habsburg Monarchy ◽  
Political Transformations ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

The question of whether the Poles were an integrating or a disintegrating factor within the Habsburg monarchy has yet to be fully studied by Polish historians. Up to now they have concerned themselves mainly with the part played by the Austrian empire in the history of the Polish nation after the eighteenth century partitions and have overlooked the role of the Poles in the Austrian empire. They have concentrated their attention on the fate of the territories of the historic Polish state which fell under Habsburg rule and have studied the social, cultural, and political transformations which affected Galicia during the century and a half of Austrian domination. Polish historians have even studied the contributions made by former Habsburg subjects to the reconstruction of the Polish state after the dissolution of the monarchy, but they have rarely discussed the part which the Poles took in the political life of the multinational empire.

scholarly journals The Russian-Jewish New York, the Balfour Declaration and the Revolution in Russia in Leon Kobrin's Play Back to Your People!

2018 ◽  
pp. 25-43
Author(s):  
Galina Eliasberg
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Cultural Models ◽  
Political Life ◽  
American University ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Political Views ◽  
The Social ◽  
Jewish Immigrants ◽  
American Society ◽  
Generational Conflicts

The article analyzes Kobrin’s play Back to Your People! and the Yiddish press reviews of its performances in New York at Boris Thomashevsky’s Peoples Theater in December 1917 by A. Cahan, I. Vartsman, B. Gorin and others. Critics defined the genre of Kobrin’s play variously as “national drama”, “sentimental melodrama”, “modern sketch” and “tendentious drama” but unanimously noted that it was a direct response to the landmark events of 1917, including the Russian Revolution and the Balfour Declaration. These events triggered nationalist feelings and had a significant impact on Jewish socialists like Kobrin, whose writing and political views were strongly influenced by Russian populism. The play depicted a dramatic clash between two cultural models: an American banker as a “self-made man” and the Russian-Jewish intellectual and Zionist leader. It reflected the issues of inter-generational conflicts, Jewish assimilation and anti-Semitism in America. Kobrin portrayed representatives of conservative and liberal circles in American society and demonstrated different attitudes towards the tragedy experienced by European Jewry during the First World War. The depiction of the younger generation allowed Kobrin to show the American university milieu, the work of the settlement house movement and the educational institutions for the Jewish immigrants. The play touched upon the social, intellectual and political life on the Lower East Side.

scholarly journals Commenting on Culture-Bound Elements in Fiction: Overcoming Social and Political Bias in M. Bulgakov’s “A Dog’s Heart”

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 166-180
Author(s):  
A. S. Izvolenskaya
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Cultural Bias ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Translation Process ◽  
Academic Knowledge ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
The Social ◽  
Grove Press

This paper is focused on the analysis of translator’s notes and commentary, represented by meta- and paratexts, as an integral part of translation process. These are essential to help the foreign reader overcome the cultural bias in general, guiding them through its intricate culture-bound elements, and the space and temporal distance separating them from the source text, in particular. Our source text is M. Bulgakov’s satirical novella “A Dog’s Heart” (translated also as “A Heart of a Dog”) written at the very beginning of the Soviet social project. As no piece of satire can be fully grasped - neither in source nor in target language - without making sense of the social conflict described in it, we view comprehension and explanation as the basis for cognition; they constitute two main working procedures of our approach. This means that our attention is focused on the way culture-bound words relating to the facts of social and political life appearing in this tale are conveyed in translations and interpreted in meta- and paratexts. So, author’s in-tention is deemed crucial in text interpretation. And the unity of explanation and understanding is considered to be the basis of academic knowledge To establish what metatext relating to Bulgakov’s story should be like in accordance with an academic approach, we’ve attempted to identify the presuppositions necessary for its adequate perception by the readership. To this end, we have studied the following metatexts: 1) J. Meek’s Introduction to Bromfield’s translation; 2) Bromfield’s A Note on the Text to his own translation (pub. by Penguin Books, 2007); 3) Introduction to M. Glenny’s translation by the Ukrainian writer A. Kurkov (pub. by Vintage Books, 2009); 4) Note by M. P. V. Salgado to the translation by A. Bouis (pub. by KARO, 2020). We also added our brief research-informed notes to some concepts of the novella English versions made by: M. Ginsburg (pub. by New-York Grove Press with no preface provided), Glenny, Bromfield and Bouis. Our major conclusion is that commenting on the translation should become more text-oriented to enhance its academic and didactic quality. More importantly, the paper is to exemplify the kind of methodology that should underlie the research leading to creation of helpful translator’s notes. Pertinent academic notes should help foreign reader to understand his or her bias and to discover the relevant cultural background of the text without which it would seem commonplace and unremarkable.

Going Local and Global: Internal and Transatlantic Migration in Eighteenth-Century Spain

2021 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-223
Author(s):  
Hillel Eyal
Keyword(s):  
Social Capital ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Iberian Peninsula ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
New World ◽  
Direct Result ◽  
Spanish Society ◽  
The Social ◽  
Internal Migrants

Abstract Evidence from eighteenth-century marriage applications in Mexico City and Cadiz reveals that migration from Spain to the New World was primarily an extension of domestic movements from rural to urban areas, not the direct result of transatlantic networks. The migratory dynamism that pervaded Spanish society fueled Spain’s fledgling urbanization in the era of commercial capitalism, as peasants increasingly moved to towns and cities, especially to Cadiz. Many of these internal migrants subsequently used the social capital and other resources that they had accumulated in Cadiz and elsewhere on the Iberian Peninsula to facilitate migration to the New World.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joyce D. Goodfriend
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Social Hierarchy ◽  
Cultural Authority ◽  
Cultural Norms ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Social

This book examines the dynamics of power relations in eighteenth-century New York City by focusing on sites where the elite's cultural authority came under siege. Drawing on multiple strands of evidence and taking into account the perspectives of actors outside polite circles, the book looks at the efforts of gentlemen to set and enforce cultural norms and the responses they encountered from persons of lesser rank such as religiously inspired artisans, wives, servants, the poor, and the enslaved. It shows how gentlemen at the top of the social hierarchy sought to certify their status as persons of distinction qualified to dictate cultural norms. New York's pan-ethnic elite, it suggests, inhabited an exclusive universe where their families put into practice the precepts of politeness delineated by the English gentry.

scholarly journals A Note on Priestley in America

1952 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-59
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
The Political ◽  
Mob Violence ◽  
The Public ◽  
Joseph Priestley ◽  
Public Disorder ◽  
The One ◽  
Political Persecution

BY a coincidence, superficially remarkable but really arising from the same or, at least, similar causes, the two great antagonists in eighteenth century chemistry, Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) and Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794), were each, in an age that prided itself on a culture and enlightenment considered to be nowhere so advanced as among the nations to which these two men of science severally belonged, the victims of a violent political persecution that drove the one into voluntary exile and cost the other his life. The coincidence is, indeed, extraordinarily close : for, when Lavoisier’s head rolled from the scaffold on 8 May 1794, Priestley was in mid-Atlantic on his way to America, fortunate to have escaped with his hfe. An account of the political trial, in which Lavoisier was condemned to death for alleged counter-revolutionary conspiracy, has already been given in this journal.1 Priestley, accompanied by his wife, arrived at Sandy Hook on 1 June and reached New York on 4 June 1794. The mob-violence and the public disorder of the Birmingham riots of 1791 were far behind ; but, after 1791, life had still been very uncomfortable for Priestley even in London, and even among his colleagues in the Royal Society ; and he looked forward to better days in the New World. His hopes were not completely realized and he found peace only in the last years of his life. Priestley loved his country and was torn with indecision at the idea of leaving it ; but life in England had become intolerable for Mrs Priestley and also for two of their sons, who had already gone to America ; and it was not fear, but pressing family anxieties of this kind, that eventually led him to decide on emigration as the only solution. There were a number of farewell presents and messages.

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