scholarly journals From Semi-Colony to Sub-Empire

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 230-259
Author(s):  
György Kövér
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Southeastern Europe ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Habsburg Monarchy ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One

This study analyses the historiographical application of two concepts (colony, and empire), the contemporary interpretations of which fundamentally determined judgements about the status of Hungary within the Habsburg Monarchy. Despite the fact that the concept of ‘colony’ as used in the eighteenth century was widely known, the category of the ‘semi-colony’ eventually proved to be unable to describe the conditions of the Austrian–Hungarian world in the second half of the nineteenth century. The term ‘Hungarian Empire’ clearly arose from the language of the nineteenth century. Various meanings of this were formulated: as a term for the one-time territory of Hungarian Kingdom (the Holy Crown of St. Stephen, meaning Hungary proper, Transylvania, Croatia, and Slavonia) on the one hand; and another one that included expansion beyond the Carpathian basin (mainly toward southeastern Europe). A third meaning also existed: a Hungarian-centered version that included all Habsburg provinces, which from time to time was hard to distinguish from the first and second meanings mentioned above. Reviewing the asymmetrical but parallel developments of the concepts of ‘colony’ and ‘empire,’ we must establish that in the long term the case for the usage of both terms has been undermined. Even more does this opinion seem to be valid in the case of derivative, retrospectively constructed concepts (such as semi-colony, and sub-empire) that are not rooted in the dictionary of the historical sources and conceptual history of political ideas.

Cameralism, Josephinism, and Enlightenment: The Dynamic of Reform in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1740–92

2018 ◽  
Vol 49 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Franz A. J. Szabo
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Habsburg Monarchy ◽  
Historical Drama ◽  
Reform Era ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Joseph Ii ◽  
Franz Grillparzer ◽  
Do So

In his great 1848 historical drama,Ein Bruderzwist im Hause Habsburg, the Austrian playwright Franz Grillparzer has Emperor Matthias utter the words that have often been applied to understanding the whole history of the Habsburg monarchy:Das ist der Fluch von unserm edeln Haus:Auf halben Wegen und zu halber TatMit halben Mitteln zauderhaft zu streben.[That is the curse of our noble house:Striving hesitatingly on half waysto half action with half means.]True as those sentiments may be of many periods in the history of the monarchy, the one period of which it cannotbe said is the second half of eighteenth century. The age of Maria Theresa, Joseph II, and Leopold II was perhaps the greatest era of consistent and committed reform in the four-hundred-year history of the monarchy. What I want to address in this article are some aspects of the dynamic of this reform era, and this falls into two categories. On the one hand, there is the broad energizing or motive force behind the larger development, and on the other, there are the ideas or assumptions that lay behind the policies adopted. As might be evident from the subtitle of my article, I propose to look primarily at the second of these categories. I do so because I think while Habsburg historiography has reached considerable consensus on the first, it has not looked enough on the second as an explanatory hermeneutic.

Filling the Gap between Radishchev and the Decembrists

Slavic Review ◽  
1967 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 395-413 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Raeff
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The Other ◽  
Secret Societies ◽  
Philosophical Thought ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
The Future ◽  
The One

In general histories of Russian social and philosophical thought we usually find a gap between 1790 (publication of Radishchev's Journey) and 1815 (the establishment of the first secret societies by the future Decembrists). This quarter of a century could boast neither a prominent personality nor a cause cèlèbre of government persecution. True enough, there was Karamzin and his Zapiska o drevnei i novoi Rossii (Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia); but the tract remained long unknown, and its author is usually dismissed as a lone figure whose impact on the development of the ideologies that were to matter was, at best, peripheral. General histories of literature treat this period primarily in terms of the philological debate between Karamzin and Shishkov and as prologue to Romanticism. Thus, in the one case, the period is described exclusively in terms of Russia's literary history, which is not very satisfactory to the student of social and political ideas; for literature—even as engagé a literature as was Russia's in the nineteenth century—is hardly an adequate source or form of ideology. In the other case, Radishchev must perforce be viewed as an isolated figure, a maverick, without either followers or immediate influence. Furthermore, the obvious implication is that there were no direct links between the Decembrists and eighteenth-century Russian ideas, so that the young rebels of 1825 must have been influenced exclusively by their experiences with the life and thought of Western Europe.On the strength of the testimony of all contemporaries, however, the first decade of the nineteenth century was a period of great intellectual ferment, of exhilarating optimism about Russia's prospects for “modernization” (to use a fashionable term). Compared with the last years of Catherine II and with the reign of Paul, these decades also offered greater freedom, more opportunities for the expression of ideas and hopes. Could indeed the outrage and disillusionment at Alexander's so-called reactionary stance after 1815 be understood if it were not for the fact that his reign had opened on such a strong note of optimism and vitality?

Race and Its Discontents in the Enlightenment

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin E. H. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
The Other ◽  
Johann Gottfried Herder ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Human Difference ◽  
The One

This chapter surveys some of the more important developments in the history of the concept of race in eighteenth-century Germany. It reveals an inconsistency between the desire to make taxonomic distinctions and a hesitance to posit any real ontological divisions within the human species. This inconsistency was well represented in the physical-anthropological work of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who was, in many respects, the most important eighteenth-century theorist of human difference. Johann Gottfried Herder, a contemporary of Blumenbach's, was intensely interested in human diversity, but saw this diversity as entirely based in culture rather than biology, and saw cultural difference as an entirely neutral matter, rather than as a continuum of higher and lower. Herder constitutes an important link between early modern universalism, on the one hand, and on the other the ideally value-neutral project of cultural anthropology as it would begin to emerge in the nineteenth century.

Acts or Identities? Rethinking Foucault on Homosexuality

2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 200-221
Author(s):  
Umberto Grassi
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Sexual Behaviors ◽  
International Debate ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Will ◽  
The One ◽  
Postcolonial Feminist ◽  
Blind Spots

In the first part of this article I summarize the ongoing historiographical debate over Michel Foucault's theory of the nineteenth-century medical ‘invention’ of homosexuality, as it was formulated in the 1976 first volume of The History of Sexuality, The Will to Knowledge. Starting from the now-outdated conflict between ‘essentialists’ and ‘social constructionists’, I underline the ‘blind spots’ of the Foucauldian narrative as highlighted by postcolonial, feminist and queer criticisms. In the second part, I shift to the historiography of the early modern Iberian and Colonial world. Even though a lot of work in this field has already been done, I think that a full comprehension of the connections between this research and the international debate on the history of gender and sexual transgressions is still lacking. Through the analysis of this literature, I propose a revision of Foucault's account, questioning the idea of the nineteenth-century ‘great paradigm shift’. On the one hand, these studies address the long-term genealogy of issues that has fully ripened in the nineteenth century. On the other, they confirm the coexistence in past societies of a multiplicity of understandings of sexual behaviors that questions the hypothesis of a succession of coherent and homogeneous epistemological patterns.

Victorian Pain

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Ablow
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Harriet Martineau ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Natural Philosophers ◽  
First Time

The nineteenth century introduced developments in science and medicine that made the eradication of pain conceivable for the first time. This new understanding of pain brought with it a complex set of moral and philosophical dilemmas. If pain serves no obvious purpose, how do we reconcile its existence with a well-ordered universe? Examining how writers of the day engaged with such questions, this book offers a compelling new literary and philosophical history of modern pain. The book provides close readings of novelists Charlotte Brontë and Thomas Hardy and political and natural philosophers John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau, and Charles Darwin, as well as a variety of medical, scientific, and popular writers of the Victorian age. The book explores how discussions of pain served as investigations into the status of persons and the nature and parameters of social life. No longer conceivable as divine trial or punishment, pain in the nineteenth century came to seem instead like a historical accident suggesting little or nothing about the individual who suffers. A landmark study of Victorian literature and the history of pain, the book shows how these writers came to see pain as a social as well as a personal problem. Rather than simply self-evident to the sufferer and unknowable to anyone else, pain was also understood to be produced between persons—and even, perhaps, by the fictions they read.

First grammar books in the Habsburg Monarchy: individual initiative and regulatory interference by the state (1760s–1770s)

2020 ◽  
Vol 2019 (2 (11)) ◽  
pp. 137-157
Author(s):  
Olga V. Khavanova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
State Policy ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Linguistic Diversity ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
German Language ◽  
Habsburg Monarchy ◽  
Private Initiative ◽  
The One

The second half of the eighteenth century in the lands under the sceptre of the House of Austria was a period of development of a language policy addressing the ethno-linguistic diversity of the monarchy’s subjects. On the one hand, the sphere of use of the German language was becoming wider, embracing more and more segments of administration, education, and culture. On the other hand, the authorities were perfectly aware of the fact that communication in the languages and vernaculars of the nationalities living in the Austrian Monarchy was one of the principal instruments of spreading decrees and announcements from the central and local authorities to the less-educated strata of the population. Consequently, a large-scale reform of primary education was launched, aimed at making the whole population literate, regardless of social status, nationality (mother tongue), or confession. In parallel with the centrally coordinated state policy of education and language-use, subjects-both language experts and amateur polyglots-joined the process of writing grammar books, which were intended to ease communication between the different nationalities of the Habsburg lands. This article considers some examples of such editions with primary attention given to the correlation between private initiative and governmental policies, mechanisms of verifying the textbooks to be published, their content, and their potential readers. This paper demonstrates that for grammar-book authors, it was very important to be integrated into the patronage networks at the court and in administrative bodies and stresses that the Vienna court controlled the process of selection and financing of grammar books to be published depending on their quality and ability to satisfy the aims and goals of state policy.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anh Q. Tran
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Pragmatic Approach ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Vietnamese Studies

The Introduction gives the background of the significance of translating and study of the text Errors of the Three Religions. The history of the development of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism in Vietnam from their beginning until the eighteenth century is narrated. Particular attention is given to the different manners in which the Three Religions were taken up by nobles and literati, on the one hand, and commoners, on the other. The chapter also presents the pragmatic approach to religion taken by the Vietnamese, which was in part responsible for the receptivity of the Vietnamese to Christianity. The significance of the discovery of Errors and its impact on Vietnamese studies are also discussed.

Preaching and Sermons

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert H. Ellison
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
North Atlantic ◽  
Religious Revival ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Denominational Identity ◽  
The North ◽  
The North Atlantic ◽  
The One ◽  
The Impact

Prompted by the convulsions of the late eighteenth century and inspired by the expansion of evangelicalism across the North Atlantic world, Protestant Dissenters from the 1790s eagerly subscribed to a millennial vision of a world transformed through missionary activism and religious revival. Voluntary societies proliferated in the early nineteenth century to spread the gospel and transform society at home and overseas. In doing so, they engaged many thousands of converts who felt the call to share their experience of personal conversion with others. Though social respectability and business methods became a notable feature of Victorian Nonconformity, the religious populism of the earlier period did not disappear and religious revival remained a key component of Dissenting experience. The impact of this revitalization was mixed. On the one hand, growth was not sustained in the long term and, to some extent, involvement in interdenominational activity undermined denominational identity; on the other hand, Nonconformists gained a social and political prominence they had not enjoyed since the middle of the seventeenth century and their efforts laid the basis for the twentieth-century explosion of evangelicalism in Africa, Asia, and South America.

Schopenhauer’s Pessimism in Context

2020 ◽  
pp. 283-298
Author(s):  
Mark Migotti
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Flourishing ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

In this chapter, the author attempts to establish what is philosophically living and what is philosophically dead in Schopenhauer’s pessimism. Against the background of the intriguing the history of the terms “optimism” and “pessimism”—in debates about Leibniz’s theodicy in the early eighteenth century and the popularity of Schopenhauer in the late nineteenth century, respectively—the author points up the distinction between affirming life, which all living beings do naturally, and subscribing to philosophical optimism (or pessimism), which is possible only for reflective beings like us. Next, the author notes the significance of Schopenhauer’s claim that optimism is a necessary condition of theism and explains its bearing on his pessimistic argument for the moral unacceptability of suicide. The chapter concludes that Schopenhauer’s case for pessimism is not conclusive, but instructive; his dim view of the prospects for leading a truly rewarding, worthwhile human life draws vivid attention to important questions about how and to what degree an atheistic world can nevertheless be conducive to human flourishing.

Sr. José, the Worker mélomane, or Opera and Democracy in Lisbon ca. 1850

2016 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 81-105
Author(s):  
Gabriela Cruz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Environment ◽  
Bel Canto ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
One Act ◽  
A Performance

Sr. José do capote, a worker and an opera lover, is the monad contemplated in this article. He is a theatrical figure, the protagonist of the one-act burlesque parody Sr. José do capote assistindo a uma representação do torrador (Sr. José of the Cloak attends a performance of The Roaster, 1855), but also an idea that expresses in abbreviated form the urban environment of nineteenth-century Lisbon, the theatrical and operatic sensibility of its citizens, and the politics of their engagement with the stage. This article is a history of Il trovatore and of bel canto claimed for a nascent culture of democracy in nineteenth-century Portugal.

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