Bureaucratic Civilization

2019 ◽  
pp. 143-162
Author(s):  
Padraic X. Scanlan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Reform Movements ◽  
Economic Exploitation ◽  
Colonial Expansion ◽  
Missionary Movement ◽  
History Of ◽  
Bourgeois Culture ◽  
Imperial Governance ◽  
Domestic Reform

This chapter shows how Europe's colonial expansion and imperial economic exploitation contributed to the rise of European middle classes and at the same time shaped European bourgeois culture and values. It points out that Britain's nineteenth-century middle class was as much a product of imperial expansion and the integration of global markets as it was one of religious introspection or the politics of bourgeois respectability. The chapter reveals that the Victorian middle class made, and was made by, the domestic and imperial reform movements of the nineteenth century. Campaigns for reform in imperial governance, for the end of slavery in British colonies, and for the expansion of the British missionary movement shared practices, ideas, and key personnel with many vigorous domestic reform programs. The chapter locates the connections between the imperial and domestic faces of Victorian values in the history of Britain's place in an emerging global capitalism and points to the spread of “Victorianism” far beyond the British archipelago.

Stammering, stuttering and stumbling: A transnational history of the pathologization of dysfluency in nineteenth-century Europe

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-146
Author(s):  
Josephine Hoegaerts
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Medical Discourse ◽  
National Language ◽  
Systematic Observation ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Embodied Experiences ◽  
History Of ◽  
Medical Treatises

The nineteenth century saw a rise in the categorization and systematic observation of manifestations of dysfluent speech. This article examines how, from the 1820s onward, different vocabularies to distinguish between different speech impediments were developed in France, Germany and Britain. It also charts how different meanings, categories and chronologies of ‘stammering’ knowledge were exchanged transnationally. The universalist medical models emerging around stammering were, despite this constant exchange, also closely connected to cultural imaginations of speech, the particular values assigned to one’s (national) language and political modes of belonging. Although the analysis is largely based on prescriptive texts, it also reveals how embodied experiences of dysfluency informed the medical and pedagogical work undertaken in the nineteenth century: a remarkable number of ‘experts’ on speech impediments claimed to be ‘former sufferers’. The history of dysfluency in the nineteenth century is therefore not one of linear medicalization and pathologization, but a continuous exchange of vocabularies between different actors of middle-class culture. Expertise on speaking ‘well’ was shared in medical treatises, but also on the benches of parliament, in cheap self-help pamphlets, in the parlour, or in debating clubs – suggesting that the model of ‘recovery’ was a manifestation of (middle class) culture rather than of a strictly medical discourse.

Operatic Battlefields, Theater of War

2019 ◽  
pp. 175-195
Author(s):  
Flora Willson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Military Bands ◽  
Imperial Court ◽  
History Of ◽  
Opera House ◽  
Listening Habits

Willson’s chapter explores how opera inflected listening for British officers and tourists in and near Crimea: in particular it discusses operatic perceptions in the Pera district of Constantinople, the site of the city’s first opera house, as well as ways of listening to traveling military bands connected with the Ottoman imperial court. It also examines European elites’ perceptions of foreign battlefields and cityscapes, with the aim of examining a larger shift in the history of listening: that of middle-class audiences falling silent in theatrical spaces during the nineteenth century, supposedly to devote more concentrated attention to elite music. The chapter argues that these listening habits, formed in part in the opera house, persisted well beyond its hallowed enclosures when war came to extend the complex geographies of attentive listening.

‘The Heavy Artillery of the Missionary Army’: The Domestic Importance of the Nineteenth-Century Medical Missionary

1982 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 287-297 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. F. Walls
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Medical Profession ◽  
Medical Missions ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Missionary Movement ◽  
The First World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The One ◽  
Medical Missionary

The history of medical missions is an epiphenomenon of the history of the medical profession. On the one hand they can be seen as a late growth in the missionary movement, and throughout the nineteenth century they required explanation and apology; on the other, they can be seen as present from the movement’s earliest days. After all, when William Carey sailed for India in 1793 his only colleague was a medical man; and a ‘surgeon’ was specifically included amongst the first party sent by the London Missionary Society to the Pacific in 1796. Indeed, generations of missionaries carried out a form of pillbox ministry, gravely administering draughts, lancing excrescences and proceeding by trial and error (‘We soon discovered the unfitness of calomel for African fevers’, observed the Rev. Hope Waddell of Calabar, ‘by its prostrating effect upon ourselves’), Some, like David Livingstone, studied medicine as part of their missionary training, without thereby becoming any special sort of missionary, or one whit less the minister of the Gospel that the ordinary missionary was assumed to be. The difference between this and the developed medical missions which were all but universal by the First World War was created less by developments in missionary thought than by developments in the medical profession.

Republican Imperialisms

2018 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 118-142
Author(s):  
Christina Carroll
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Advocacy Groups ◽  
Colonial Expansion ◽  
Colonial Empire ◽  
History Of ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
History Of Empire

In the 1880s and 1890s, a wave of histories of colonial empire appeared in France. But even though they were produced by members of similar republican colonial advocacy groups, these accounts narrated the history of empire in contradictory ways. Some positioned “colonial empire” as an enterprise with ancient roots, while others treated modern colonization as distinct. Some argued that French colonial empire was a unique enterprise in line with republican ideals, but others insisted that it was a European-wide project that transcended domestic political questions. By tracing the differences between these accounts, this article highlights the flexibility that characterized late nineteenth-century republican understandings of empire. It also points to the ways republican advocates for colonial expansion during this period looked both historically and comparatively to legitimize their visions for empire’s future in France.

SELF-TEACHING: MARY CARPENTER, PUBLIC SPEECH, AND THE DISCIPLINE OF DELINQUENCY

2008 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 149-161 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janice Schroeder
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Reform Movements ◽  
Public Address ◽  
Public Speech ◽  
Women Reformers ◽  
Male Privilege ◽  
Public Persona ◽  
History Of ◽  
Public Speakers ◽  
Public Lecture

With the growth of the organized feminist movement in England at the end of the 1850s, women began to mount public lecture platforms in increasing numbers. By claiming a space in public assembly rooms through the simple use of their voices, women reformers such as Bessie Rayner Parkes and Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon challenged the male privilege of public address, and changed the visual, oral, and aural culture of Victorian reform movements. Women's public speech in the 1850s and 60s was never linked with the kind of riotous responses provoked later by Josephine Butler or the women's suffrage movement. But even public speakers associated with a more moderate or “polite” tone, such as Parkes and Frances Power Cobbe, routinely received a mixture of moral censure and ridicule, causing them to question the value of publicity – both print and platform – for the feminist cause. However, one of the most prolific female public speakers of mid nineteenth-century England, Mary Carpenter (1807–77), seems to have escaped all such criticism and was repeatedly held up as a shining example, by both feminists and non-feminists, of appropriate womanly behavior in official public settings. Commentators on Carpenter's work and her public reputation were nearly unanimous in their approval of not only the content of her public speech but also its flawless delivery. What can Carpenter's apparently unique public persona tell us about shifts in the gendered dimensions of public utterance in the 1850s and 60s, when she was most active? More broadly, what does the history of women's platform speech have to do with a seemingly unrelated narrative: that is, the theorization of juvenile delinquency as a specific problem in nineteenth-century England?

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