Egypt’s Coptic Museum: From Patriarchal to National

2020 ◽  
pp. 181-204
Author(s):  
Dina Ishak Bakhoum

This chapter traces the most significant episodes of the Coptic Museum’s history and argues that the museum was not founded as a ‘minority’ museum but rather as an archaeological museum holding valuable religious Coptic art. Its foundation aimed at demonstrating that Coptic material culture had equivalent value in Egyptian history to Pharaonic, Greco-Roman and Islamic arts, which in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries already had their own museums. Unlike other museums, however, the Coptic Museum was established under the aegis of the Patriarch, giving it an unconventional status within Egyptian heritage owing to the religious nature of its initial collection. The essay presents the museum’s foundation during the early nineteenth century and discusses the context of its nationalization and transformation into a public domain museum (1931) as well as its expansion (1947).

2007 ◽  
Vol 86 (2) ◽  
pp. 278-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Constable

This article examines the Scottish missionary contribution to a Scottish sense of empire in India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Initially, the article reviews general historiographical interpretations which have in recent years been developed to explain the Scottish relationship with British imperial development in India. Subsequently the article analyses in detail the religious contributions of Scottish Presbyterian missionaries of the Church of Scotland and the Free Church Missions to a Scottish sense of empire with a focus on their interaction with Hindu socioreligious thought in nineteenth-century western India. Previous missionary historiography has tended to focus substantially on the emergence of Scottish evangelical missionary activity in India in the early nineteenth century and most notably on Alexander Duff (1806–78). Relatively little has been written on Scottish Presbyterian missions in India in the later nineteenth century, and even less on the significance of their missionary thought to a Scottish sense of Indian empire. Through an analysis of Scottish Presbyterian missionary critiques in both vernacular Marathi and English, this article outlines the orientalist engagement of Scottish Presbyterian missionary thought with late nineteenth-century popular Hinduism. In conclusion this article demonstrates how this intellectual engagement contributed to and helped define a Scottish missionary sense of empire in India.


Author(s):  
Brian Stanley

In any survey of influential British missionary thinkers, Scottish names would occupy a prominent place. The Scottish contribution was not confined to those who served with the missions of the Presbyterian churches: some influential Scottish missionaries served with English societies, and some were not even Presbyterians. Nevertheless, five generalizations can be offered: (1) Scots Presbyterians opted to do mission through ecclesiastical structures, rather than through voluntary societies. (2) Scottish Presbyterian missions aimed to bring the entire life of Christian communities under the rule of Christ. (3) Scottish missionaries tended to insist that education was integral to the missionary task. (4) Scottish missionaries trained in the early nineteenth century drew deeply from the Scottish Enlightenment. (5) From the late nineteenth century, Scottish (like English) missionary theology was affected by philosophical idealism, though the mid-twentieth-century ascendancy of Barthianism may have helped to sustain the Scottish missionary movement in the turbulent post-war environment.


2007 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 231-252 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bart Ooghe

Since the creation of its first disciplinary histories in the late nineteenth century, Near Eastern archaeology has perceived its origins largely in terms of individual breakthroughs, following the common precepts of a pre-Annales historiography. The founding figures mentioned in the works of Rogers, Hilprecht, Budge or Parrot were either great explorers, great scholars or, most importantly, great excavators. From Della Valle's first tentative explorations at Babylon in 1616 to the major excavations at Nineveh and Babylon three centuries later, Near Eastern archaeology saw itself as the fruit of individual discovery. ‘Real’ archaeology was furthermore perceived as a natural rather than a human science and subsequently taken to have originated in nineteenth-century positivism; earlier accounts were hinted at in only the briefest fashion.


2005 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 281-298 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roy Church

Historians of medicine have tended to be preoccupied primarily with scientific research, the development of therapeutically significant medicines, and ethical business practice. Roy Porter, however, adopted a wider conception. Referring to the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, he redefined the role of “the vile race of quacks” (so described by their own contemporaries) as a manifestation of a burgeoning medical entrepreneurship in an emerging consumer society. He maintained that “Irregular medicine … mobilised the growth of medicine as business”, an aspect of medical history which he believed to have been largely ignored hitherto and one which requires of historians an understanding of the market for pharmaceuticals. Anne Digby has examined the market for medical services during the nineteenth century in an analysis of interactions between doctors and patients at a time when self-dosing was prevalent. However, interactions between medical practitioners and suppliers of medicines in Britain for most of this period remain largely unexplored (with the significant exception of the work by Jonathan Liebenau) and as a result, it will be argued, have been misunderstood.


2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 330-346 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meaghan Walker

Between 1860 and 1880, the years which hold the richest collection of log books at the Maritime History Archive in St. John’s, NL, an average of 4,400 seafarers died per year working in the British merchant marine. Each of these deaths potentially produced an inventory of effects showing the material wealth of working people at sea. These inventories reveal the material possessions of late nineteenth-century seafarers, particularly young working-class men who exposed themselves most to danger but also were the most numerous demographic. By analyzing both what these inventories contain, but also what inventories are missing, it is possible to understand material factors stemming from changing dynamics in a workforce undergoing technological and demographical change.


Author(s):  
Clare Parfitt-Brown

The cancan is a popular dance form closely associated with the Parisian setting in which it emerged and underwent much of its early development. From its origins as a French social dance practice in the early nineteenth century, the dance shifted to a more performative mode of presentation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The nineteenth-century cancan involved both male and female dancers performing either solo or in couples, improvising around the quadrille form. The dance attracted the attention of the writers and artists of an incipient Parisian modernism in the 1830s and 1840s, and this connection was reinvigorated in the 1880s and 1890s, particularly within the bohemian culture that centered on the Moulin Rouge. The familiar stereotype of the cancan as a female kick-line refers primarily to the form of the dance that emerged in the early twentieth century, echoing the development of modern mass culture. Later representations of the cancan, particularly in American films of the 1950s, referenced the Moulin Rouge of the 1890s and its connections with both the cancan and the post-Impressionist modern art of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.


Author(s):  
Andrew Smith

This chapter examines the relationship between late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century gothic, the sensation fiction of the middle decades of the nineteenth century, fin-de-siècle gothic works and modernism. It argues that in the late nineteenth century a distinctive, but implicit, gothic aesthetic developed which was characterised by a concern with divided selves, fragmented narratives and science. It also shows that this aesthetic was distinguished by optimistic narratives about adaptability and the presence of a mystical or spiritual world.


2019 ◽  
pp. 57-75
Author(s):  
Nicholas Owen

Chapter 4 develops, through a historical illustration, the arguments concerning motivation presented in chapter 3. It makes a distinction between causes—movements made up of adherents motivated (disjointly) by others’ gains—and combinations—movements made up of constituents motivated (conjointly) by their own gains. This distinction is applied to three British historical cases from the long nineteenth century, to explain why—and with what consequences—the place of adherents differed between the metropolitan antislavery movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the Chartists of the mid-nineteenth century, and movements of and for the poor (“neighboring” and “charity”) in the Victorian slums in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.


1991 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 545-569 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas M. Peers

The ethnocentric and racialist overtones of the Victorian empire have long been acknowledged. Most work in this field has generally centred on the mid to late nineteenth century and, by emphasizing the intellectual and cultural currents in domestic society, has focused our attention on the metropole. This reveals only part of the equation; British attitudes towards the outside world arose from a complex matrix of ideas, assumptions and contacts that linked the metropole and colonial environments. In order to understand more fully British responses to non-European societies, and the impact these had on imperial developments, this paper will examine the Bengal army in the 1820s and demonstrate that it was during this period, and under this institution, that many of the assumptions were established under which the later Raj would operate. Of great importance were experiences in the Burma War (1824–26) and the simultaneous mutiny at Barrackpore which, by bringing to the surface doubts about the loyalty and reliability of the Bengal army, hastened a transition from an army modelled on caste lines to one that rested principally on race. This transformation from a caste-based army to an army of martial races was not fully completed, although the foundations were laid, in the years before the Indian Mutiny of 1857, largely because even those who rejected Bengal's dependence upon the highest castes could not bring themselves to argue for the recruitment of the lowest castes no matter what ‘race’ they were drawn from.


1997 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-281 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANDREW BANK

The fundamental preoccupation with race in later historical writing in South Africa has its origins in the Great Debate between liberals and their enemies in the early nineteenth century. Standard overviews of South African historiography date the emergence of racially structured histories to the second half of the nineteenth century. For Saunders, the making of the South African past and its thematic ordering in terms of race only began in the 1870s ‘when the first major historian [G. M. Theal] began to write his history’. Prior to Theal's monumental efforts, ‘only a few amateur historians had turned their hands to the writing of the history of particular areas or topics’. Likewise, in Smith's analysis, also published in 1988, the construction of South African history in terms of race is seen almost exclusively as the product of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In a very brief introductory section, Smith suggests that what little historical writing there was before the middle of the nineteenth century is scarcely to be taken seriously, and his study offers no more than a bare outline of historiographical developments before Theal and his heirs.


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