scholarly journals Subjectship, Citizenship, and the Long History of Immigration Regulation

2001 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 645-653 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert J. Steinfeld

Kunal Parker's “State, Citizenship, and Territory” can be read in at least two ways. Read one way, it tells an important story about how regulation of the poor was driven upward in Massachusetts during the nineteenth century, from the localities to the state. In the seventeenth century, Massachusetts had imposed primary responsibility for care of the poor on its towns. But during the eighteenth century, with the growth of a landless, wandering population, town poor relief budgets came under increasing pressure. The towns responded by lobbying the Massachusetts legislature to pass a series of statutes that made it more and more difficult to acquire a town settlement. People who fell into need in Massachusetts but who had not acquired a town settlement became state paupers for whom the state, rather than any town, was fiscally responsible. As it became more and more difficult to acquire a town settlement, the number of state paupers increased, shifting a portion of the fiscal burden of poor relief from the towns onto the state.

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Ella Sbaraini

Abstract Scholars have explored eighteenth-century suicide letters from a literary perspective, examining issues of performativity and reception. However, it is fruitful to see these letters as material as well as textual objects, which were utterly embedded in people's social lives. Using thirty manuscript letters, in conjunction with other sources, this article explores the contexts in which suicide letters were written and left for others. It looks at how authors used space and other materials to convey meaning, and argues that these letters were epistolary documents usually meant for specific, known persons, rather than the press. Generally written by members of the ‘lower orders’, these letters also provide insight into the emotional writing practices of the poor, and their experiences of emotional distress. Overall, this article proposes that these neglected documents should be used to investigate the emotional and material contexts for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century suicide. It also argues that, at a time when the history of emotions has reached considerable prominence, historians must be more attentive to the experiences of the suicidal.


Itinerario ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
P.J. Marshall

In an essay of extraordinary range and depth, which it is difficult to summarise without distortion, Jacob van Leur is above all making an appeal for the autonomy of Asian history in relation to that of Europe. He was reviewing volume IV by Godée Molsbergen of Geschiedenis van Nederlandsch Indië, which dealt with the eighteenth century. To Molsbergen the activities of the V.O.C. in Asia in the eighteenth century had characteristics distinct from those of the seventeenth-century Company or from what was to follow in Indonesia in the nineteenth century. These characteristics essentially reflected those of the Netherlands during the eighteenth century. Assuming that eighteenth-century European history has unifying characteristics (an assumption that he was inclined to question), Van Leur asked: ‘Is it possible to write the history of Indonesia in the eighteenth century as the history of the Company?’ His answer was a resounding ‘no’. In giving his answer he widened the issue from Indonesia to Asia as a whole. ‘A general view of the whole can only lead to the conclusion that any talk of a European Asia in the eighteenth century is out of the question, that a few European centres of power had been consolidated on a very limited scale, that in general – and here the emphasis should lie – the oriental lands continued to form active factors in the course of events as valid entities, militarily, economically and politically.’ He concluded that diere was an ‘unbroken unity’ of Asian history from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Until well into the nineteenth century Europe and Asia were ‘two equal civilisations developing separately of each other’.


2018 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 467-492 ◽  
Author(s):  
Avinoam Yuval-Naeh

AbstractThe polemic surrounding the 1753 Jewish Naturalization Bill was one of the major public opinion campaigns in Britain in the eighteenth century, as well as the most significant event in the history of Britain's Jews between their seventeenth-century admission and nineteenth-century emancipation. The bill proposed to offer Jews a private act of naturalization without the sacramental test. A costly and cumbersome process, the measure could have had only minor practical impact. Due to its symbolic significance, however, the bill ignited public clamor in hundreds of newspaper columns, pamphlets, and prints. What made it so resonant, and why was the opposition so successful in propagating opposition to the motion? It has been commonly argued that the entire affair was an instance of partisan conflict in which the Jews themselves played an incidental role. This paper throws light on the episode from an alternative perspective, arguing that a central reason for its resonance was that the discussion on the Jews evoked concerns with the expanding financial market and its sociopolitical implications. As Jews had by that time become emblematic of modern finance, they embodied contemporary anxieties about the economy, national identity, and their interrelations.


1991 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anrian Shubert

When the English cleric Joseph Townsend visited Spain at the end of the eighteenth century, he was impressed by the apparent tolerance with which beggars were treated and by what he called the “excessively generous” way in which charity was distributed. He cited, with both surprise and disapproval, the Bishop of Cordoba, who daily fed some 7,000 people by distributing 1,000 kilograms of bread.1 This image of Spain as a paradise for the poor persisted until well into the nineteenth century. George Borrow, who travelled through the country in the 1830s trying to sell Bibles without much luck, remarked approvingly that poverty was not despised in Spain as it was in other countries:Yet to the honour of Spain be it spoken, it is one of the few countries in Europe where poverty is never insulted nor looked upon with contempt.…In Spain the very beggar does not feel himself a degraded being for he kisses no one's feet and knows not what it is to be cuffed or spitten upon.


2013 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 304-315
Author(s):  
Henry Heller

AbstractIn this panoramic survey Guy Lemarchand undertakes to outline the history of the feudal system which persisted across the European continent from the sixteenth until the second half of the nineteenth century. In the crisis of the seventeenth century, seigneurial reaction backed by the absolutist state enabled this feudal mode to reconsolidate and extend itself eastward. The eighteenth century represented the system’s apogee based on high food prices, increased rents and state support. Feudalism’s dissolution beginning with the French Revolution and continuing until the emancipation of the Russian serfs came about as a result of revolution from below and from above under the increasing influence of capitalism and liberalism. Offering an enormous comparative perspective on this long-lived mode of production, Lemarchand’s work fails to articulate theoretically the relationship between this enduring mode and the concurrent rise of capitalism.


Author(s):  
Tirtsah Levie Bernfeld

This chapter presents a demographic outline of poverty in the Portuguese Jewish community in early modern Amsterdam. It has become clear from examining records of the numbers of people on poor relief that at times the community was larger than used to be assumed. Behind the beautiful façade of prosperity and grandeza that the community liked to show to the outside world, the kahal had to wrestle with the ever more pressing dilemma of having to look after paupers, who had flocked to Amsterdam expecting to find there a safe and sheltered life, free of persecution, war, and economic depression. By the end of the seventeenth century, a third of all Portuguese Jews were drawing permanent poor relief and almost half were drawing either permanent or temporary poor relief. Portuguese on welfare were often found in small families, mostly headed by women; larger families tended to be headed by men. In the eighteenth century, the character of Portuguese poverty changed. From then on—with the exception of single women—the poor were dominated by men trying to support their families through the economic slump with financial help from the Portuguese community.


2002 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 255-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
MATTHEW R. GOODRUM

Historians of archaeology have noted that prehistoric stone artefacts were first identified as such during the seventeenth century, and a great deal has been written about the formulation of the idea of a Stone Age in the nineteenth century. Much less attention has been devoted to the study of prehistoric artefacts during the eighteenth century. Yet it was during this time that researchers first began systematically to collect, classify and interpret the cultural and historical meaning of these objects as archaeological specimens rather than geological specimens. These investigations were conducted within the broader context of eighteenth-century antiquarianism and natural history. As a result, they offer an opportunity to trace the interrelationships that existed between the natural sciences and the science of prehistoric archaeology, which demonstrates that geological theories of the history of the earth, ethnographic observations of ‘savage peoples’ and natural history museums all played important roles in the interpretation of prehistoric stone implements during the eighteenth century.


Author(s):  
Heather A. Haveman

This chapter looks at the history of American magazines during the period 1741–1860. It first traces the origins of magazines in Europe, where magazine publishing began in the late seventeenth century as printing presses became widespread. Among the early English-language magazines in this period were the Philosophical Transactions, A Review of the Affairs of France and of all Europe, and Gentleman's Magazine. The chapter proceeds by discussing the growth of the magazine industry in America from 1741 to 1860 as well as the evolving nature of magazine distribution in terms of audience, content, format, and genre variety, as well as publishing and readership geography. The chapter highlights the sharp distinction between the short-lived, small-circulation magazines of the mid-eighteenth century and the often long-lived, mass-circulation periodicals of the mid-nineteenth century.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 180-190
Author(s):  
Rajkumar Bind

This paper examines the development of modern vaccination programme of Cooch Behar state, a district of West Bengal of India during the nineteenth century. The study has critically analysed the modern vaccination system, which was the only preventive method against various diseases like small pox, cholera but due to neglect, superstation and religious obstacles the people of Cooch Behar state were not interested about modern vaccination. It also examines the sex wise and castes wise vaccinators of the state during the study period. The study will help us to growing conciseness about modern vaccination among the peoples of Cooch Behar district.   


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