Champagne Capitalism

2021 ◽  
pp. 123-174
Author(s):  
David Todd
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Special Kind ◽  
Economic Success ◽  
French Empire ◽  
Imperial Expansion

This chapter highlights the extent of French economic success in the mid-nineteenth century, providing a deeper understanding of the sources of French imperial expansion. The French empire of taste was not a purely capitalistic enterprise. It pursued profit, but also power and prestige. The chapter explores the cultural, political, and economic origins of French specialization in the provision of luxury and semi-luxury commodities, in order to understand how it helped France regain imperial status after 1815. By reconciling economic modernity with the preservation of firm hierarchies, French conspicuous commodities exercised a special kind of fascination on foreign elites and facilitated collaboration with other imperial and indigenous powers. The act of turning economic gains into global political advantages was especially overt during the Second Napoleonic Empire, and the latter's downfall contributed to the eventual decline of the empire of taste after 1870.

An Imperial Nation-State

2021 ◽  
pp. 941-963
Author(s):  
David Todd
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Continuous Process ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Nation State ◽  
French Empire ◽  
French Experience ◽  
Informal Empire ◽  
Imperial Power ◽  
Imperial Expansion ◽  
The Ideal

Rather than as a continuous process, French imperial expansion is better understood as a succession of four distinct empires: a Bourbon mercantilist empire until 1789, a messianic European empire in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic era, a global informal empire in the nineteenth century, and a republican territorial empire after 1880. In each of these empires, the ideal of assimilation, in its Catholic, Napoleonic, or republican variants, was much trumpeted by French empire-builders. But historical research has shown that, in practice, French imperial power chiefly relied on pragmatic collaboration with imperial subjects and auxiliaries. Successive waves of imperial expansion rarely resulted in extensive “Frenchification,” although universalist rhetoric often inadvertently contributed to the outbreak of violent and successful rebellions against imperial rule as in Haiti, Napoleonic Europe, or Algeria. Despite such moments of dislocation, the French experience illustrates well the potential and resilience of the nation-state as a powerbase for imperial expansion.

“To Make the World One in Christ Jesus”

2018 ◽  
Vol 87 (4) ◽  
pp. 575-592
Author(s):  
Gavin James Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
East Asian ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
Transnational Community ◽  
The World ◽  
Imperial Expansion ◽  
Protestant Christianity ◽  
In Christ

Scholarship on nineteenth-century missionary encounters emphasizes either how native converts “indigenized” Christian doctrine and practice, or how missionaries acted as agents of Western imperial expansion. These approaches, however, overlook the ways both missionaries and converts understood Protestant Christianity as a call to transnational community. This essay examines the ways that American Protestants and East Asian Christian converts looked for ways to build a transpacific communion. Despite radically different understandings of Christian scripture, and despite the geopolitics of empire, U.S. and East Asian Protestants nevertheless strove to bring together diverse theologies and experiences into a loosely defined, transnational Protestant community.

REPUBLICANISM, RAILWAY IMPERIALISM, AND THE FRENCH EMPIRE IN AFRICA, 1879–1889

2011 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 401-420 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. W. ROBERTS
Keyword(s):  
Tropical Africa ◽  
French Empire ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Pressure Groups ◽  
The Road ◽  
Imperial Expansion ◽  
On The Road ◽  
Economic Boom

ABSTRACTThis article questions accepted views of French expansion as a largely autonomous process, reflecting new attitudes towards Africa among policy-makers. It argues that the African railway schemes of 1879 were the outcome of an understanding between powerful railway interests and mainstream elements of the newly victorious republican parties. The ambitions of the railway companies were restricted in scope, however, being confined mainly to existing French possessions, while their sponsorship of imperial expansion was little more than a tactical expedient. It was only when the opportunities created for expansion were taken up by locally based pressure-groups or became caught up in international rivalries that empire began to take root in the Soudan and the Congo. By the time the anti-colonial reaction of the mid-1880s took hold, railway imperialism, a product of the short-lived economic boom, had already run its course. Government now had an opportunity and an incentive to put its imperial house in order. Nevertheless, the resulting equilibrium remained vulnerable to a re-emergence of the forces that had first set France on the road to empire in tropical Africa.

Protecting Neutrality at Sea in a Global Age, 1815–1914

2020 ◽  
pp. 157-170
Author(s):  
Maartje Abbenhuis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Easy Access ◽  
Central Importance ◽  
Industrial Growth ◽  
Global Power ◽  
Global Age ◽  
Imperial Expansion ◽  
Economic Warfare ◽  
Principles Of War

This chapter argues for the central importance of the development of the principle of neutrality in explaining the contours of the nineteenth-century age of industrial globalisation and the waging of economic warfare between 1815 and 1914. It highlights how nineteenth-century imperial expansion and industrial growth were dependent on the ability of industrial states to sustain easy access to the open seas, even in time of war. It describes how the naval powers co-ordinated and negotiated the rights and duties of neutrals and belligerents in international law in such a way as to maximise the financial, industrial and imperial advantages from doing so. It also explains how the principles of war avoidance and neutrality maintenance helped to underwrite the global power of Great Britain and the contours of the Pax Britannica.

“The bourgeois nature in difficulties”: The Crisis of Liberalism in Robert Browning's Aristophanes’ Apology

2020 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 551-575
Author(s):  
Joseph Hankinson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Individual Freedom ◽  
Imperial Expansion ◽  
Age Of Liberty ◽  
Crisis Of Liberalism

Nathan K. Hensley's recent study, Forms of Empire (2016), posits that liberalism, as the nineteenth century progressed, came up against the “wayward meanings” generated by its own contradictions, particularly the “curious intimacy between legality and harm” that characterized a doctrine of individual freedom inextricably rooted in violent imperial expansion. For Hensley, “the dogged persistence of killing in an age of liberty disrupted the conceptual assumptions of progressive idealism”; while “the very inseparability of law and violence, never more painfully evident than in episodes of colonial war and legal emergency, collapsed the logical principles of non-contradiction and identity that remain our common sense.”

Barbarism Begins at Home: Islamic Art on Display in Palermo's Museo Nazionale and Sicilian Ethnography at the 1891‐92 Esposizione Nazionale

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-117
Author(s):  
Dana Katz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Regional Differences ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The Other ◽  
National Museum ◽  
Islamic Art ◽  
North African ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Imperial Expansion ◽  
At Home

Abstract In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Palermo's Museo Nazionale (National Museum) displayed one of the earliest institutional collections of Islamic art in Western Europe. The museum's director, Antonino Salinas, exhibited objects demonstrating the island's material heritage, including its two-and-a-half centuries of rule by North African dynasties during the medieval period. The prevailing perception elsewhere in post-unification Italy ‐ that Sicily was ungovernable and barbaric in nature ‐ heightened the display's significance. Another exhibition that many Italians would have perceived as representing the 'other' was the Mostra Etnografica Siciliana (Sicilian Ethnographic Exhibition), which the folklorist Giuseppe Pitrè created for the 1891‐92 Palermo Esposizione Nazionale (National Exposition). Highlighting Sicily's volatile image, the Italian press implicitly equated Pitrè's show with the so-called Abyssinian Village, which stood in the exposition fairgrounds and marked the establishment of Italy's first colony in Eritrea at a time of unprecedented imperial expansion. At the National Museum, Salinas remained undeterred, and despite associations of the island's conditions with Africa, he expanded its Islamic holdings. Likewise, Pitrè exhibited costumes, tools, and devotional objects that further accentuated regional differences at the National Exposition. In both displays, Salinas and Pitrè presented what they conceived as Sicily's unique cultural and historical patrimony.

Tasted

2018 ◽  
pp. 102-161
Author(s):  
Tricia Starks
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civic Participation ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Rapid Urbanization ◽  
Identity Creation ◽  
Imperial Expansion ◽  
Social Comfort ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Tobacconists advertised exotic blends created by imperial expansion to urban sophisticates urging them to choose certain brands as evidence of their cultivated palate. Preying upon a desire for mobility in a static society and creating visions of a world where people of all classes could ingest luxury, advertisers exploited users’ hopes for higher status, material prosperity, or social comfort. The rapid urbanization of the late nineteenth century created an ever larger audience for their messages. Literary examples and social pressures placed smoking in the center of identity creation and liberal values, making the habit attractive to women and children who saw the habit as a gateway to civic participation, maturity, and the modern world.

A Cultural History of the Home in the Age of Empire

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Western World ◽  
Economic Resource ◽  
Emotional Environment ◽  
Male Breadwinner ◽  
Imperial Expansion ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cultural Construct

During the nineteenth century the home, as both a cultural construct and a set of lived practices, became more powerful in the Western world than ever before. The West saw an unprecedented period of imperial expansion, industrialisation and commercialization that transformed both where and how people made their homes. Scientific advances and increasing mass production also changed homes materially, bringing in domestic technologies and new goods. This volume explores how homes and homemaking were imagined and practiced across the globe in the nineteenth century. For instance, not only did the acquisition of empires lead to the establishment of Western European homes in new terrains, but it also buttressed the way in which Europeans saw themselves, as the guardians of superior cultures, patriarchal relationships and living practices. During this period a powerful shared cultural idea of home emerged – championed by a growing urban middle class – that constructed home as a refuge from a chaotic and noisy industrialised world. Gender was an essential part of this idea. Both masculine and feminine virtues were expected to underpin the ideal home: a greater emphasis was placed on an ideal of the male breadwinner and the need for women to maintain the domestic material fabric and emotional environment was stressed. While these ideas were shared and propagated in print culture across Western Europe and North America there were huge differences in how they were realised and practiced. Home was experienced differently according to class and race; different forms of identity and levels of socio-economic resource fashioned a variety of home-making practices. While demonstrating the cultural importance of home, this book reveals the various ways in which home was lived in the nineteenth century.

Who is the spokesperson for whom? Intendants, budgets and action at a distance in the Kingdom of Naples during the French decade (1806–1815)

2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 540-561 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefania Migliori ◽  
Tiziana Di Cimbrini ◽  
Augusta Consorti
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Local Governments ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
Translation Process ◽  
French Empire ◽  
Actor Network ◽  
Kingdom Of Naples ◽  
Action At A Distance ◽  
Human Actors

The article uses Latour’s actor-network perspective to explore the role of accounting and the intendants (administrative officials) in integrating the Kingdom of Naples into Napoleon’s empire during the first decade of the nineteenth century. By comparing the ‘action at a distance’ network planned by the French empire and its actual ‘translation’ played by both human actors and accounting technologies, we reveal certain unintended consequences. Although the French plan assigned the main translating role to the budgets, the intendants resulted as the main players. Their role as intermediates of the budgets transmission between local and central levels of government had the greatest influence on the ‘translation’ process. This role stemmed from the need to overcome the resistance of the local governments against the French plan. The main contribution of this work is to highlight that network survival may require human actors to replace technologies in ‘translation’ processes.

Chicano/a Challenges to Nineteenth-Century History

2012 ◽  
Vol 82 (4) ◽  
pp. 566-580 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raúúl A. Ramos
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Northern Mexico ◽  
Imperial Expansion ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The U.S

This article explores the usefulness of Chicano/a history to teaching and representing the nineteenth-century history of northern Mexico, U.S. imperial expansion, and the constructed nature of borders. Typically considered a twentieth-century discipline, Chicano/a historians have a long history of engaging the subject in the nineteenth century. This focus dovetails with recent critical works on race and gender in the U.S. West as well as transnational approaches to history. This article makes the case that the perspective on the nineteenth century provided by Chicano/a historians forces readers to reframe their understanding of the sweep of U.S. history.

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