« Une société civilisée et religieuse »: Postrevolutionary French liberalism and the character of Europe

2014 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-138
Author(s):  
Cheryl B. Welch
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Character ◽  
Singular Space ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Many ◽  
European Family

In nineteenth-century Europe there was a growing perception that the peoples within its borders exhibited distinctive “âmes nationales.” This forum attests to the many ways in which the idea of national character was theorized and debated from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, especially in relation to democracy and liberalism. At the same time, however, Europe itself was emerging as an increasingly singular space. Indeed, the European “family of nations” was often conceived as a group of siblings who manifested complementary excellences that helped to explain Europe’s emerging dominance in the world. Rather than considering what Separated national types, I explore in this essay the connection between two shared attributes that formed the basis of a new understanding of European kinship: civilization (or the capacity to achieve it) and Christianity.

The Opium Wars

Jazz in China ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 14-20
Author(s):  
Eugene Marlow
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Eastern Coast ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Unrestricted Access ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Many ◽  
Opium Wars

In the late 1910s, 1920s, and even into the 1930s, “jazz” was the music of the age in the Republic of China, especially and primarily in Shanghai on China's east coast. It was enjoyed equally by sophisticated Chinese gentry and upper-class people in the many dance halls dotting various parts of Shanghai, and by the many Europeans, Russians, and Americans living and working in the so-called “Paris of the East.” These same foreigners also owned pieces of Shanghai, literally. This chapter asks how several foreign nations came to own sections of Shanghai, and have unrestricted access to numerous key ports throughout China's eastern coast? The answer to these questions can be found in a conflict initially between the British (and ultimately the French, Russians, and Americans) and the Chinese in the mid-nineteenth century: the Opium Wars, two wars that had roots in late eighteenth-century China.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Priya Atwal
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Regional Politics ◽  
Founding Father ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Political Dynamics ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Nuanced Understanding ◽  
The Impact

This brief chapter introduces key figures from the ruling dynasty of the nineteenth-century Sikh Empire. It discusses how Maharajah Ranjit Singh, its founding father, has long occupied a central, glorified position in history-writing about this former northern Indian kingdom. It argues how such simplified narrativization has hampered our understanding of the roles played by his female relations and children in the running of the Sikh Empire; alongside the impact of wider cultural and political dynamics that shaped its fortunes in the period between the kingdom’s rise and fall, from 1799 to 1849. The chapter outlines core goals of the book: to reach a more detailed and nuanced understanding of the world of the Sikh Empire and its broader connections to South Asian and global royal history, by setting Ranjit Singh and his empire within the wider context of his family; as well as within the regional politics of the new, expanding powers of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century India.

The Abominables

2019 ◽  
pp. 27-52
Author(s):  
Marco Pinfari
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Irish Nationalism ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Rule Breaking ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
The Many ◽  
Reign Of Terror

This chapter explores the use of monster metaphors in framing “terrorist” actors since the French Revolution. While acknowledging that these metaphors effectively present the “terrorist” as an abject “other,” it argues that the main purpose of the use of monster imagery in framing “terrorists” is to highlight their unmanageability, which may be instrumental in securing popular backing for specific types of rule-breaking behavior in counterterrorism. It presents these arguments while reviewing examples drawn from the origins of modern terrorism in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These include the gorgon Medusa, which appears for instance in relation to Robespierre’s “Reign of Terror,” and the many-headed hydra—one of the oldest metaphors for representing unruly behavior that proves unmanageable. It then introduces another type of unmanageable monster that would become particularly popular to frame terrorists—Frankenstein’s monster—and its use in the late nineteenth century to frame Irish nationalism.

Fictions of Capital in 1870s and 1880s Beirut

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth M. Holt
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
World Economy ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Local Production ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Material Goods ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Many

Arabic readers in the late nineteenth century struggled to negotiate the contradictions of their position in the world economy: Beirut was at once a peripheral hub of speculation, a market for finished French textiles, and an industrializing source of the unrefined silk off which French factory owners profited. While Al-Muqtaṭaf, founded in 1876, was averse (at least in its Beirut years) to speculation and instead championed the local production of commodities in all their materiality, for Salīm al-Bustānī and Al-Jinān, it was becoming clear that finance, through the many fictions it enabled, was decisively changing the future of the region. Al-Bustānī offered late nineteenth-century Beirut and more generally readers of Arabic lessons in how the credit-driven consumption of material goods allowed the keeping up of appearances in his novels Budūr (1872), Bint al-ʿaṣr (1875, Daughter of the Age) and the early 1880s Sāmiyyah.

Numbers

2019 ◽  
pp. 47-73
Author(s):  
Michelle Burnham
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Risk Assessment ◽  
Risk Taking ◽  
Travel Narratives ◽  
Global Trade ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Regular Practice

This chapter focuses on American mathematical schoolbooks from the age of revolutions, as well as associated genres such as manuals on bookkeeping, navigation, and insurance. Knowledge of these fields was crucial for the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century voyages of commerce and discovery that connected the Atlantic and Pacific, and these books introduced a wide variety of readers, including women, to the world of global trade. In their attention to the interrelated practices of calculation and speculation, these genres—in dialogue with literature on the lottery—taught readers the narrative dynamics of suspense that also informed the emerging genre of the novel. Like transoceanic travel narratives, novels were the textual companions to capitalism, offering readers regular practice in accommodating the sensations of expectation central to a world increasingly penetrated by global trade and its mechanisms of risk-taking and risk assessment. Novels emerged, in other words, as numberless representations of an increasingly number-driven world.

Samuel Bentham’s Panopticon

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Steadman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Architectural History ◽  
Jeremy Bentham ◽  
Short Life ◽  
The World ◽  
1 Samuel ◽  
The Many

Credit for devising the Panoptical ‘inspection principle’ for prison design is attributed, perhaps now irrevocably, to Jeremy Bentham. However Jeremy always insisted that the original conception came from his younger brother Samuel – ‘After all, I have been obliged to go a-begging to my brother, and borrow an idea of his’. 1 Samuel was to have been an equal partner in the running of Jeremy’s Panopticon penitentiary. What is more, while Jeremy failed to get the penitentiary built in England despite twenty years’ lobbying and a large expense of his own money, Samuel actually erected a Panoptical ‘school of arts’ in Russia in 1807. In this paper I describe this remarkable Russian building, which has received only passing mention in the literature of architectural history and Bentham studies. The building admittedly in its short life had little influence outside Russia; but it anticipated in its geometry the many ‘radial prisons’ built across the world in the later Nineteenth Century. Indeed Samuel’s design avoided some of the contradictions that beset Jeremy’s own detailed penitentiary scheme of 1791 – contradictions which led to the failure of several of those prisons that put Jeremy’s plan directly into practice.

The Sudanese Mahdī: Frontier Fundmentalist

1979 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Voll
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Third World ◽  
Charismatic Leader ◽  
The Third ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The World ◽  
African Context ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Third World

The Sudanese Mahdī has been pictured as a villain, as a hero, as a reactionary, as an anti-imperialist revolutionary, and in many other ways. The romance and excitement of the nineteenth-century Mahdiyya has inspired novels and movies, while the many faceted reality of the movement has caught the attention of a wide range of scholars in search of case studies of specific phenomena. In recent years the Mahdī has been used as an example of a ‘charismatic’ leader,1 the founder of a religionpolitical party in the ‘third world,’2 the leader of a millenarian revolt,3 an African rebel against alien rule,4 and a Semitic messiah in an African context. Many of these analyses are the constructive products of the changing situation in the world of contemporary historical studies. Each tends to reflect a broader analytical concern aroused by modern developments.

PARSING GOD: CONVERSATIONS ABOUT THE MEANING OF WORDS AND METAPHORS IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY SOUTHERN AFRICA

2001 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 417-447 ◽  
Author(s):  
WILLIAM H. WORGER
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
Moral Authority ◽  
National Character ◽  
Existence Of God ◽  
African Languages ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Literal Truth ◽  
The World

During the first half of the nineteenth century, European missionaries in southern Africa sought to establish their intellectual and moral authority over Africans and propagate the tenets of Christianity. Men like Jacob Döhne, Robert Moffat, John Colenso, Henry Callaway and others viewed a knowledge of African languages as key to disclosing ‘the secrets of national character’, to the translation and transmittal of ideas about the Christian ‘God’, and to accepting the ‘literal truth’ of the Bible. Africans, especially the Zulu king, Dingane, disputed these teachings in discussions about the existence of God, suitable indigenous names for such a being (including uThixo, modimo, and unkulunkulu), and his attributes (all-powerful, or merely old), arguing for the significance of metaphor rather than literalness in understanding the world.

‘There are as many Tassos as there are Hamlets’: representations of Tasso’s life in England

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Lawrence
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Prominent Feature ◽  
Romantic Poet ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Biographical Account ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
The Many

During the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, attention in England focused increasingly on the troubled life of the poet, who came to be regarded as ‘a prototype of the Romantic poet, loving passionately but hopelessly and above his station, ...chained in a lunatic’s cell’. In the fifth chapter the second principal strand of this study traces and analyses the development of such views about Tasso himself, from the earliest English biographical account by Henry Layng in 1748 to the last at the start of the twentieth century. It also examines the many imaginative engagements with aspects of the poet’s legendary biography, such as his apparent madness and prolonged imprisonment in Ferrara as a result of his supposed love for Leonora d’Este, the Duke’s sister, which were to become a prominent feature of English and European responses to him in the nineteenth century. It focuses particularly on Lord Byron’s impassioned ventriloquisation of the Italian poet’s voice in The Lament of Tasso (1817).

Afterword

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sharon Hecker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Art Scene ◽  
The World ◽  
Art Historians ◽  
The Many

This concluding chapter explains how Medardo Rosso's posthumous reputation is another story that remains to be told. Except for a handful of enlightened art historians, such as Carola Giedion-Welcker and H. W. Janson, who included Rosso in their histories of modern art, Rosso was forgotten by the world after his death. In 1963 he was suddenly propelled back onto the international art scene by Margaret Scolari Barr, who wrote the first English monograph on Rosso. Since the 1970s, Rosso has been fully reclaimed by Italy and reframed within the nineteenth-century Italian Scapigliatura movement, a tale of local origins that Rosso himself had denied. Today, due to the many international artists inspired by Rosso's work, he has become the only Italian sculptor of his time to be globalized.

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