“Hindoo Marriage” and National Sovereignty in the Early-Nineteenth-Century United States

Author(s):  
Brian Connolly

This essay explored the concept of sovereignty in relation both to the legal definition of marriage within the emergent field of private international law and representations of “Hindoo” marriage in the early nineteenth century. I argue that in establishing national sovereignty the United States, paradoxically, had to give up a bit of sovereignty in order to be recognized as a sovereign nation. This was apparent in legal writings on marriage, wherein influential jurists like Joseph Story argued that a marriage legally recognized in one country was valid everywhere, even if it violated the domestic laws of a new nation. In order to deal with this paradox the cultural apparatus – in this case, print culture – worked to supplement the law. Missionary writings on supposedly “Hindoo” marriages and marital relations such as sati, child marriage, and infanticide supplemented the law by marking these kinds of relations, which would potentially have been legal in the US, as outside the logic of liberal democracy.

Laws ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 54
Author(s):  
Nofar Sheffi

Rethinking ‘sharing’ and the relationship between ‘sharing’ and ‘jurisdiction’, this meander proceeds in three parts. It begins with a journey to and through the forests of the nineteenth-century Rhineland, rereading Marx’s journalistic reports on debates in the Sixth Rhine Province Assembly about proposed amendments to forest regulation (including an extension of the definition of ‘wood theft’ to include the gathering of fallen wood) as a reflection on the making of law by legal bodies. From the forests of the Rhineland, the paper journeys to the forests of England, retracing the common story about the development, by legal bodies, of the body of common law principles applicable to ‘innkeeping’. Traveling to and through the ‘concrete jungles’ of the United States of America, the paper concludes with a reflection on Airbnb’s common story of creation as well as debates about the legality of Airbnb, Airbnb-ing, and ‘sharing’.


2008 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caitlin A. Fitz

A new order for the New World was unfolding in the early nineteenth century, or so many in the United States believed. Between 1808 and 1825, all of Portuguese America and nearly all of Spanish America broke away from Europe, casting off Old World monarchs and inaugurating home-grown governments instead. People throughout the United States looked on with excitement, as the new order seemed at once to vindicate their own revolution as well as offer new possibilities for future progress. Free from obsolete European alliances, they hoped, the entire hemisphere could now rally together around republican government and commercial reciprocity. Statesmen and politicians were no exception, as men from Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe to John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay tried to exclude European influence from the hemisphere while securing new markets for American manufactures and agricultural surplus.


Author(s):  
David R. Mayhew

This chapter analyzes three U.S. performances: the launch of a new nation, continental expansion, and national consolidation. The mid-nineteenth century, notably the 1860s, seems to have brought a spasm of special character across much of the developed or developing world. Centralizing states swung into place offering strong nationalisms, new constitutional formulas, a spirit of reform in state and economy, and a bent for commodifying property and homogenizing the rights of citizenship across entire populations. In these respects, the 1860s seem to have brought a transnational ideological high. Ensuing years brought a recession from it, as the promises and commitments of the decade wore down. In the United States, the thrusts of rights expansion lost force in the 1870s.


Perceptions ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 5
Author(s):  
Julius Nathan Fortaleza Klinger

The purpose of this paper is to explore the question of whether or not early nineteenth-century lawmakers saw the Missouri Compromise of 1820 as a true solution to the question of slavery in the United States, or if it was simply a stopgap solution. The information used to conduct this research paper comes in the form of a collation of primary and secondary sources. My findings indicate that the debate over Missouri's statehood was in fact about slavery in the US, and that the underlying causes of the Civil War were already quite prevalent four whole decades before the conflict broke out.


2019 ◽  
Vol 79 (2) ◽  
pp. 383-416 ◽  
Author(s):  
Santiago Pérez

I compare rates of intergenerational occupational mobility across four countries in the late nineteenth century: 1869–1895 Argentina, 1850–1880 United States, 1851–1881 Britain, and 1865–1900 Norway. Argentina and the United States had similar levels of intergenerational mobility, and these levels were above those of Britain and Norway. These findings suggest that the higher mobility of nineteenth-century United States relative to Britain might not have been a reflection of “American exceptionalism,” but rather a manifestation of more widespread differences between settler economies of the New World and Europe.


The aftershocks of the American Revolution reverberated through the early nineteenth century, leaving the new country unsettled and at odds with itself. The essays in Warring for America offer a kaleidoscope of perspectives on the internal divisions amongst the inhabitants of the early Republic that hindered the emergence of a coherent American nation as much as did the lingering impact of British imperial influence. Traditional understanding of the War of 1812 era as a moment that reaffirmed the political independence of the United States, thereby ushering in a neat period of stability, have failed to explain the enduring struggle to define the social and physical parameters of the new nation that dominated much of the nineteenth century. By turning from high politics to cultural productions and material problems, the authors in this volume explore the many social and economic conflicts within the United States that were fought on cultural terrain. Wartime calls for unity only cast into sharper relief the arduous efforts of varied Americans to control the terms of inclusion or exclusion within their country. From presidents to African Free School students, from hack magazine writers to Choctaw mothers, Americans fought for country on the battleground of belonging.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-66
Author(s):  
Zach Sell

Abstract Historians of the United States have often described slavery as guided by the chattel principle. Yet in Black Reconstruction, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, “No matter how degraded the factory hand, he is not real estate.” This article builds upon Du Bois’s description of slavery’s real estate basis and considers real estate as central to both slavery and territorial expansion in the nineteenth-century United States. Real estate formed the basis of slaveholder family stability and also enabled the intergenerational transfer of wealth. The article also considers the continuing influence of real estate after black emancipation. Real estate enabled post-slavery black dispossession and also facilitated the continuation of the United States as a settler empire.


Slavic Review ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 335-349
Author(s):  
Priscilla R. Roosevelt

In “Baryshnia-krestianka” Aleksandr Pushkin introduces us to Grigorii Ivanovich Muromskii, a “nastoiashchii russkii barin” reduced to living on his one remaining estate, who squanders his remaining wealth creating an “Angliiskii sad.” The gardening revolution of eighteenth century England, inspired by the overgrown ruins of Rome and Naples and by a new feeling for untrammeled nature, set in motion a vogue for informal, picturesque landscaping that swept across Europe, altered garden design in the United States, and reached Russia in the reign of Catherine as the harbinger of a later, more pervasive aristocratic Anglomania. As Muromskii's landscaping proclivities suggest, by the early nineteenth century the English or “irregular” garden had become a universal form for the Russian country estate, its basic motifs carried out on whatever scale an estate owner could afford.


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