scholarly journals The Chemical Theory of Phlogiston in the Cultural Economy of Fire: From the Enlightenment to Contemporary Times

Stasis ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-111
Author(s):  
Olga Kirillova
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Digital Economy ◽  
Cultural Economy ◽  
Theory Theory ◽  
Industrial Capitalism ◽  
Surplus Value ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Chemical Concept ◽  
Chemical Theory

The article focuses on how the chemical concept of phlogiston functions in the so-called economy of fire from the eighteenth to twenty-first centuries, in view of a shift in “pyropolitics” (politics of fire) in their relation to the economic paradigms (cameralism, industrial capitalism, postindustrial digital economy), and theories of chemical flame processes (phlogistics, oxygen theory,theory of detonation and deflagration). The phlogiston concept is explored as the key substantial notion of the phlogictic chemical theory of the Enlightenment (regarded also as a natural “cameralistic science” in terms of metallurgy), the epistemological metaphor of ignorance in nineteenth-century Marxist discourse. Phlogiston circulates in the economics of fire discourse as a signifier for surplus value (and some other Marxist terms). “Fire as equivalent to money” becomes, in petropolitical studies, a means for turning petropolitics into pyropolitics with the radical metaphor of “PyroGaia” (Nigel Clark) in the Anthropocene period.

Disease and Civilization: A Scottish Atlantic Network of Physicians in the Enlightenment

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-216
Author(s):  
Sarah Irving-Stonebraker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Historical Progress ◽  
Practice Of Medicine ◽  
Benjamin Rush ◽  
American Physician ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
A Current

Through an examination of the extensive papers, manuscripts and correspondence of American physician Benjamin Rush and his friends, this article argues that it is possible to map a network of Scottish-trained physicians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world. These physicians, whose members included Benjamin Rush, John Redman, John Morgan, Adam Kuhn, and others, not only brought the Edinburgh model for medical pedagogy across the Atlantic, but also disseminated Scottish stadial theories of development, which they applied to their study of the natural history and medical practices of Native Americans and slaves. In doing so, these physicians developed theories about the relationship between civilization, historical progress and the practice of medicine. Exploring this network deepens our understanding of the transnational intellectual geography of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century British World. This article develops, in relation to Scotland, a current strand of scholarship that maps the colonial and global contexts of Enlightenment thought.

Looking Backward 2000-1887

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward Bellamy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Democratic Society ◽  
The Political ◽  
Industrial Capitalism ◽  
Ideal Society ◽  
The Past ◽  
Utopian Fiction ◽  
Socialist Utopia ◽  
Year 2000 ◽  
The Ideal

‘No person can be blamed for refusing to read another word of what promises to be a mere imposition upon his credulity.’ Julian West, a feckless aristocrat living in fin-de-siècle Boston, plunges into a deep hypnotic sleep in 1887 and wakes up in the year 2000. America has been turned into a rigorously centralized democratic society in which everything is controlled by a humane and efficient state. In little more than a hundred years the horrors of nineteenth-century capitalism have been all but forgotten. The squalid slums of Boston have been replaced by broad streets, and technological inventions have transformed people’s everyday lives. Exiled from the past, West excitedly settles into the ideal society of the future, while still fearing that he has dreamt up his experiences as a time traveller. Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) is a thunderous indictment of industrial capitalism and a resplendent vision of life in a socialist utopia. Matthew Beaumont’s lively edition explores the political and psychological peculiarities of this celebrated utopian fiction.

A Mediterranean insular port-city in transition: economic transformations, spatial antagonism and the metamorphosis of landscape in nineteenth-century Hermoupolis on the island of Syros

Urban History ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-245 ◽  
Author(s):  
APOSTOLOS DELIS
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Economic Importance ◽  
Industrial Capitalism ◽  
Port City ◽  
World War ◽  
Port Cities ◽  
Economic Activities ◽  
Economic Transformations ◽  
Economic Landscape

ABSTRACT:Port-cities provide excellent examples of the socio-economic transformations that occurred during the transition from merchant to industrial capitalism in the second half of the nineteenth century. Hermoupolis on the island of Syros was a major economic centre in Greece and a hub of international trade during the nineteenth century. However, economic transformations that commenced in the 1860s affected long-established port-based activities such as wooden shipbuilding and its related industries due to the decline of sailing ships and the expansion of factories. This factor led to an increase in tension and antagonism between manufacturers and shipbuilders over the use of land and altered the physical and the socio-economic landscape of the port-city. However, new types of economic activities flourished, like the tramp steamship business and factories, which enabled Hermoupolis to maintain its economic importance until World War II.

scholarly journals ‘A Kind of Geological Novel’: Wales and Travel Writing, 1783–1819

Romanticism ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 134-147 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Edwards
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Sense Of Place ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
England And Wales ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Ongoing Work ◽  
Geological Map ◽  
Humphry Davy

This article explores the layered and multivocal nature of Romantic-period travel writing in Wales through the theme of geology. Beginning with an analysis of the spectral sense of place that emerges from William Smith's 1815 geological map of England and Wales, it considers a range of travel texts, from the stones and fossils of Thomas Pennant's A Tour in Wales (1778–83), to Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday's early nineteenth-century Welsh travels, to little-known manuscript accounts. Wales is still the least-researched of the home nations in terms of the Enlightenment and the Romantic period, despite recent and ongoing work that has done much to increase its visibility. Travel writing, meanwhile, is a form whose popularity in the period is now little recognised. These points doubly position Welsh travel writing on the fringes of our field, in an outlying location compounded by the genre's status as a category that defies easy definition.

scholarly journals Insomnia and the late nineteenth-century insomniac: the case of Albert Kimball

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 20190074 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Beaumont
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sleep Problems ◽  
Urban Society ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
The Usa ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Individual

This article explores the emergence, in late nineteenth-century Britain and the USA, of the ‘insomniac’ as a distinct pathological and social archetype. Sleeplessness has of course been a human problem for millennia, but only since the late-Victorian period has there been a specific diagnostic name for the individual who suffers chronically from insufficient sleep. The introductory section of the article, which notes the current panic about sleep problems, offers a brief sketch of the history of sleeplessness, acknowledging the transhistorical nature of this condition but also pointing to the appearance, during the period of the Enlightenment, of the term ‘insomnia’ itself. The second section makes more specific historical claims about the rise of insomnia in the accelerating conditions of everyday life in urban society at the end of the nineteenth century. It traces the rise of the insomniac as such, especially in the context of medical debates about ‘neurasthenia’, as someone whose identity is constitutively defined by their inability to sleep. The third section, tightening the focus of the article, goes on to reconstruct the biography of one exemplary late nineteenth-century insomniac, the American dentist Albert Kimball, in order to illustrate the claim that insomnia was one of the pre-eminent symptoms of a certain crisis in industrial and metropolitan modernity as this social condition was lived by individuals at the fin de siècle .

The Luso-Brazilian Enlightenment: Between Reform and Revolution

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alice Soares Guimarães
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Absolute Power ◽  
Portuguese Empire ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Political Form

This chapter examines transformations of state–society relations in eighteenth-century Portugal in relation to Enlightened political debates of the time. It also explores how these transformations shaped the relations between Portugal and Brazil in the nineteenth century, the debate about the political form of independent Brazil, and the intra-Brazilian struggles over this form before and after independence. More importantly, it challenges the notion that the Enlightenment was absent from the Portuguese Empire as a result of the rejection of modern ideas by conservative world views and projects. It argues that there was a Luso-Brazilian Enlightenment that was plural and eclectic, supporting both critiques and defences of the absolute power of the king, endorsing simultaneously a secularisation process, the promotion of reason and Roman Catholicism, and fostering not only revolutionary projects but also conservative state reforms.

Ambivalent Capitalists: The Roots of Fascist Ideology among Bohemian Nobles, 1880–1938

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eagle Glassheim
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Group ◽  
Land Reform ◽  
Political Influence ◽  
Nazi Germany ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Industrial Capitalism ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Modern Economic ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Although fascism has often been considered a plebeian, even radically egalitarian ideology, many of its outspoken proponents were members of the old European elite: nobles, clericalists and representatives of the haute bourgeoisie. Historians of Nazi Germany have puzzled over the affinity of German conservatives such as Paul von Hindenburg and Franz von Papen to Adolf Hitler's National Socialist version of fascism. A small but extremely wealthy noble elite struggled to maintain its long-standing social, economic and political influence in Bohemia. By the late nineteenth century, the Bohemian nobility was a self-consciously traditional social group with a decidedly modern economic relationship to agrarian and industrial capitalism. This chapter examines the response of the Bohemian aristocracy to the new state of Czechoslovakia. This restricted caste of cosmopolitan latifundist families was more German than Czech in sentiment, and further alienated by land reform. The aristocrats entertained divergent assessments of Nazism and responded in different ways to the crisis of the state by 1938.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document