Notes on Commercial Travelers in Eighteenth-Century France

1964 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 346-353 ◽  
Author(s):  
George V. Taylor

It has been widely held that the traveling salesman was a product of the railroad era. In the following paper, Professor Taylor shows that, at least in France, the commis voyageur played a role as early as the second half of the eighteenth century. These findings, important as they are for the history of marketing, pose new questions: Was France ahead of other countries in developing this form of sales organization? If France really led, did the other countries follow suit under French influence? Is it perhaps telling, for instance, that in Germany until late in the nineteenth century the Reisende was still called by its French name?

Itinerario ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 24 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 75-88
Author(s):  
Janet Hunter

Much of the recent work on the economic and social history of Tokugawa Japan (1600–1867) has been driven by a desire to identify what T.C. Smith has called ‘native sources ofJapanese industrialisation’. From the Marxist-influenced historians in the 1920s who sought to explain the pre-industrial roots of the structure of production in interwar Japan, through to contem-poraryJapanese historians' studies of the pattern of Japanese development, a major part of the agenda has been to identify how Japan had got to where it was, in other words, what was the secret of its twentieth century successes and weaknesses. It is not possible to explore the situation of Japan's economy in the century 1750–1850 without benefit of this hindsight, without being aware that while Japan's situation may have been in many ways analogous to that of China and Europe in the mid-eighteenth century, its economic fortunes were by the latter part of the nineteenth century experiencing their own ‘great divergence’ from those of China, India and the other countries of Asia and the near East. To search for the antecedents of this divergence is for economic historians of Japan a parallel exercise o t any search for the sources of the European ‘miracle’. While a focus on the period 1750–1850 as an era of European/Asian divergence means, therefore, that we must highlight the situation inJapan during that century, it must also be accepted that in the case of Japan any comparison with other countries or regions may also suggest the causes of Japan's own divergence some fifty to a hundred years later.


Semiotica ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 2016 (211) ◽  
pp. 45-57
Author(s):  
Mohamed Bernoussi

AbstractMy interest in culinary dates back to approximately fifteen years ago when I collaborated with [Béatrice Fink 1999. The cultural topography of food. Special issue, Eighteenth century life 23(2)] on a special issue of Eighteenth Century Life on food topography. I proposed then a study on the reactions of an English physician to Moroccan food, mainly couscous and tea. I continued working on other studies, and I realized how much a semiotics of food could serve the history of mentalities and private lives. While doing my research, I discovered the works of Jean Louis Flandrin 1986. La distinction par le goût. In Roger Chartier (ed.), Histoire de la vie privée de la Renaissance aux Lumières, vol. 3, 267–309. Paris: Seuil and Flandrin 1992. Chronique de Platine: Pour une gastronomie historique. Paris: Odile Jacob), who had contributed to the same volume directed by Fink and also represented a great inspiration for me. I felt that I was concerned with the study of the relation with the Other, with culture shock or encounter through travelers’ reactions to the food or the culinary, the prepared dish, and the consumed product in ceremonies or in private occasions. While thinking about these points, I asked myself the following questions: in which way does the reaction to food reveal the attitude of the traveler, his prejudices on the culture, the society, the food or the dish in question? In which way would reaction to food reveal his culture? This article explores these and other related issues.


1961 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 54-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph G. Allen

The career of Philip James de Loutherbourg, the Alsatian scene designer, assumes considerable importance in a history of the English theatre. More than anyone else, De Loutherbourg was responsible for freeing stage spectacle from the rigidities of the conventional wing and border system, thus preparing the way for Capon, Planché, Stanfield and the other great romantic designers of the nineteenth century.


Author(s):  
Justin E. H. Smith

This chapter surveys some of the more important developments in the history of the concept of race in eighteenth-century Germany. It reveals an inconsistency between the desire to make taxonomic distinctions and a hesitance to posit any real ontological divisions within the human species. This inconsistency was well represented in the physical-anthropological work of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who was, in many respects, the most important eighteenth-century theorist of human difference. Johann Gottfried Herder, a contemporary of Blumenbach's, was intensely interested in human diversity, but saw this diversity as entirely based in culture rather than biology, and saw cultural difference as an entirely neutral matter, rather than as a continuum of higher and lower. Herder constitutes an important link between early modern universalism, on the one hand, and on the other the ideally value-neutral project of cultural anthropology as it would begin to emerge in the nineteenth century.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
William E Underwood ◽  
David Bamman ◽  
Sabrina Lee

This essay explores the changing significance of gender in fiction, asking especially whether its prominence in characterization has varied from the end of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first. We have reached two conclusions, which may seem in tension with each other. The first is that gender divisions between characters have become less sharply marked over the last 170 years. In the middle of the nineteenth century, very different language is used to describe fictional men and women. But that difference weakens steadily as we move forward to the present; the actions and attributes of characters are less clearly sorted into gender categories. On the other hand, we haven't found the same progressive story in the history of authorship. In fact, there is an eye-opening, under-discussed decline in the proportion of fiction actually written by women, which drops by half (from roughly 50% of titles to roughly 25%) as we move from 1850 to 1950. The number of characters who are women or girls also drops. We are confronted with a paradoxical pattern. While gender roles were becoming more flexible, the space actually allotted to (real, and fictional) women on the shelves of libraries was contracting sharply. We explore the evidence for this paradox and suggest a few explanations.


Author(s):  
Anh Q. Tran

The Introduction gives the background of the significance of translating and study of the text Errors of the Three Religions. The history of the development of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism in Vietnam from their beginning until the eighteenth century is narrated. Particular attention is given to the different manners in which the Three Religions were taken up by nobles and literati, on the one hand, and commoners, on the other. The chapter also presents the pragmatic approach to religion taken by the Vietnamese, which was in part responsible for the receptivity of the Vietnamese to Christianity. The significance of the discovery of Errors and its impact on Vietnamese studies are also discussed.


Author(s):  
Linford D. Fisher

Although racial lines eventually hardened on both sides, in the opening decades of colonization European and native ideas about differences between themselves and the other were fluid and dynamic, changing on the ground in response to local developments and experiences. Over time, perceived differences were understood to be rooted in more than just environment and culture. In the eighteenth century, bodily differences became the basis for a wider range of deeper, more innate distinctions that, by the nineteenth century, hardened into what we might now understand to be racialized differences in the modern sense. Despite several centuries of dispossession, disease, warfare, and enslavement at the hands of Europeans, native peoples in the Americans almost universally believed the opposite to be true. The more indigenous Americans were exposed to Europeans, the more they believed in the vitality and superiority of their own cultures.


Author(s):  
Mark Migotti

In this chapter, the author attempts to establish what is philosophically living and what is philosophically dead in Schopenhauer’s pessimism. Against the background of the intriguing the history of the terms “optimism” and “pessimism”—in debates about Leibniz’s theodicy in the early eighteenth century and the popularity of Schopenhauer in the late nineteenth century, respectively—the author points up the distinction between affirming life, which all living beings do naturally, and subscribing to philosophical optimism (or pessimism), which is possible only for reflective beings like us. Next, the author notes the significance of Schopenhauer’s claim that optimism is a necessary condition of theism and explains its bearing on his pessimistic argument for the moral unacceptability of suicide. The chapter concludes that Schopenhauer’s case for pessimism is not conclusive, but instructive; his dim view of the prospects for leading a truly rewarding, worthwhile human life draws vivid attention to important questions about how and to what degree an atheistic world can nevertheless be conducive to human flourishing.


BJHS Themes ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Suman Seth

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’.


2014 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 755-771 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard A. Kaye

Much of the critical writingon Queer Theory and Sexuality Studies in a Victorian context over the last decade or so has been absorbing, exploring, complicating, and working under the burden of the influence of Michel Foucault's theoretical writings on erotic relations and identity. The first volume of Foucault'sThe History of Sexuality(1978), in fact, had begun with a gauntlet thrown down before Victorian Studies, a chapter-long critique of Steven Marcus'sThe Other Victorians(1966), a work that had offered an entirely new and at the time, quite bold avenue of exploring nineteenth-century culture – namely, through the pornographic imagination that Marcus taxonomized with precise, clinical flair as a “pornotopia” in which “all men . . . are always infinitely potent; all women fecundate with lust and flow inexhaustibly with sap or both. Everyone is always ready for everything” (276). In Foucault's telling, however, Marcus demonstrated a theoretically impoverished faith in Freudian models of “repression” in Marcus's examination of “underground” Victorian sexualities. It was Marcus's reliance on the “repressive fallacy,” his conviction that there existed a demarcated spatial and psychic Victorian counter-world thatThe History of Sexualityhad so forcefully undermined.


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