Graeme Morton, Boudien de Vries and R. J. Morris (eds), Civil Society, Associations and Urban Places: Class Nation and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Europe
The establishment of theNemzeti Casino(National Casino) in Pest helped establish civil society in nineteenth-century Hungary. Count István Széchenyi, hoping to modernize Hungary on the English model, established the casino in 1827 as a public forum for the Hungarian nobility. By transcending caste divisions between nobles and bourgeois elites, Széchenyi's casino served as an unofficial parliament and stock exchange, and generally helped cultivate Hungarian patriotism. The Pest Casino inspired a nation-wide trend for casinos, which in turn formed a civil society in opposition to Habsburg absolutism. Yet when the casino movement spread to Hungary's minority nationalities, Jews, Slovaks, Romanians, and particularly Croats, the casino also contributed to national divisions in Hungary's ethnically diverse population that affected the course of the 1848 Revolution.
ABSTRACTThe concept of civil society provides a useful means of evaluating the social and political relationships of British towns. Civil society refers to the non-prescriptive relationships that lie between the state and kin. Such relationships are associated with the existence of the free market, the rule of law and a strong voluntary associational culture. Both theoretical analysis and historical evidence link civil society with the nature of urban places, their complexity, their function as a central place and their operation as a focus for flows of information. Between 1780 and 1820 the agencies of civil society in Britain provided an arena for making choices, for reasoned informed debate and for the collective provision and consumption of services in an open and pluralist manner.
During the last half of the nineteenth century, major population shifts occurred throughout Western Europe, reflecting heavy international migration as well as internal movement from rural to urban places. The latter process, in particular, has been an integral part of the modernization process and was a response both to rural population pressures and to expanding opportunities in the cities. Yet the pace of urbanization was by no means uniform for different countries, in different regions of the same country, or among various subgroups within a single region or province. As a result, analyses using large geographic units or aggregated statistics may mask variations in the underlying dynamics of internal migration.
Giacomo Leopardi was convinced that the willingness of Italians to wallow passively in operatic spectacle was an important reason for Italy's lack of a civil society based on debate and the exchange of opinions. Despite recent proposals that opera and opera going constituted signiªcant means of social engagement and contributed to regional and/or national identity, the preoccupations of early nineteenth-century music journalism suggest that opera existed outside the mainstream of both political and aesthetic debate, and was not yet the subject of a truly vibrant national discourse.
Abstract
This article recovers a dissonant voice from the nineteenth-century nahḍa. Antonius Ameuney (1821–1881) was a fervent Protestant and staunch Anglophile. Unlike his Ottoman Syrian contemporaries, who argued for religious diversity and the formation of a civil society based on a shared Arab past, he believed that the only geopolitical Syria viable in the future was one grounded in Protestant virtues and English values. This article examines Ameuney’s complicated journey to become a Protestant Englishman and his inescapable characterization as a son of Syria. It charts his personal life and intellectual career and explores how he interpreted the religious, cultural, political, and linguistic landscape of his birthplace to British audiences. As an English-speaking Ottoman Syrian intellectual residing permanently in London, the case of Antonius Ameuney illustrates England to have been a constitutive site of the nahḍa and underscores the role played by the British public in shaping nahḍa discourses.
This article reviews a wide body of literature on the emergence and expansion of agro-industrial, monoculture plantations across Southeast Asia through the lens of megaprojects. Following the characterization of megaprojects as displacement, we define mega-plantations as plantation development that rapidly and radically transforms landscapes in ways that displace and replace preexisting human and nonhuman communities. Mega-plantations require the application of large amounts of capital and political power and the transnational organization of labor, capital, and material. They emerged in Southeast Asia under European colonialism in the nineteenth century and have expanded again since the 1980s at an unprecedented scale and scope to feed global appetites for agro-industrial commodities such as palm oil and rubber. While they have been contested by customary land users, smallholders, civil society organizations, and even government regulators, their displacement and transformation of Southeast Asia’s rural landscapes will likely endure for quite some time.
Civil Society, Associations and Urban Places: Class, Nation and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Ed. by Graeme Morton, Boudien de Vries, and Robert John Morris. Ashgate. Aldershot [etc.]. 2006. xiv, 220 pp. £55.00 - Social Capital and Associations in European Democracies: A comparative analysis. Ed. by William A. Maloney and Sigrid Roßteutscher. [Routledge Research in Comparative Politics.] Routledge, London [etc.]2007. xvii, 308 pp. £70.00.