America’s Blackbeard

2018 ◽  
pp. 25-48
Author(s):  
Sharada Balachandran Orihuela
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
State Building ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Central Character ◽  
Historical Novels ◽  
Property Ownership ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Novela Historica ◽  
State Growth ◽  
American Nation

This chapter examines the ways early nineteenth century authors framed piracy as an instrument of state growth, anti-colonial resistance, as well as a rationale for imperial expansion and intervention in the Americas in William Gilmore Simms’s The Yemassee (1835), John Brougham’s 1857 play Columbus, El Filibustero!, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Red Rover: A Tale (1829) and The Water Witch; or, The Skimmer of the Seas (1830), as well as El Filibustero: Novela Historica (1864), written by Yucatec author Eligio Ancona. In a climate of rapid national expansion, nineteenth century authors used the pirate as a central character to plot national(ist) narratives. Given piracy’s relationship to both state-building and anti-colonial enterprises, as well as piracy’s capacity to both facilitate and threaten property ownership, piracy helps us understand the radical and repressive regimes of American power. The historical novels examined in this chapter are interested in the shadowy origins of the American nation-state, as much as they are with the potentially conflicted present and future of these nation-states.

Bringing the Economic Back In: Andean Indians and the Construction of the Nation-State in Nineteenth-Century Bolivia

2009 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 527-551 ◽  
Author(s):  
ERICK D. LANGER
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Community Members ◽  
The Andes ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Trading Activities ◽  
American Nation

AbstractUsing the example of nineteenth-century Bolivia, this article argues that economic motivations need to be taken into account in understanding the role of peasants in constructing Latin American nation-states, especially in the Andes. Based on local archives, it considers the case of the altiplano region of Oruro-Poopó. From this perspective, during the half-century that followed independence, Andean communities were mostly in favour of a free-trade regime. They were integrated into the nation-state, but in a subordinate position. By the 1850s there was such prosperity in trading activities that community members refused to participate as authorities in their communities due to the time it would consume. However, the assault on community lands that began in the 1860s impoverished the Indians and marginalised them as peasants, turning them into a threat to the new, racist nation-state.

scholarly journals Overlapping Histories, Co-produced Concepts: Imperialism in Chinese Eyes

2020 ◽  
Vol 79 (3) ◽  
pp. 685-706
Author(s):  
Leigh K. Jenco ◽  
Jonathan Chappell
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
State Building ◽  
People’S Republic Of China ◽  
Nation State ◽  
People's Republic Of China ◽  
Territorial Expansion ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Chinese Nationalism ◽  
Nation States

Many historians of China, particularly those based in North America, insist that the Qing dynasty's territorial expansion was imperial and comparable to the imperial expansions of other global empires. Other historians, particularly but not only those based in the People's Republic of China, continue to resist this interpretation. They argue that dynastic expansion in the Ming and Qing periods was simply a form of nation-state building, akin to similar processes in Europe. Rather than rejecting their claims as a product of Chinese nationalism, we argue that the term “empire” should be (re)understood as a global co-production, emerging from multiple intersecting histories and scholarly debates about those histories. Doing so challenges influential definitions of empire that rely on a distinction between empires and nation-states, highlighting their dual presence in both Euro-American and Chinese pasts (and presents). This move demands a rejection of periodizations that suggest that empires ceased to exist following the period of decolonization from 1945 to the 1970s. This opens up new avenues of historical and normative inquiry to acknowledge the modern continuity between empires and nation-states.

Nation-State Science: Lappology and Sweden's Ethnoracial Purity

2014 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 320-350 ◽  
Author(s):  
Greggor Mattson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Scientific Work ◽  
State Building ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Empirical Knowledge ◽  
Paradigm Shifts ◽  
Scientific Thought ◽  
Scientific Labor ◽  
And Control ◽  
The Ideal

AbstractThis paper introduces the concept of “nation-state science” to describe the scientific work of ethnoracial classification that made possible the ideal of the homogenous nation-state. Swedish scientists implicitly defined their nation for Continental Europeans when they explicitly created knowledge about the “Lapps” (today's Sámi/Saami). Nation was coupled to state through such ethnoracial categories, the content of which were redefined as Sweden's geopolitical power rose and fell. These shifts sparked methodological innovations to redefine the Lapp, making it a durable category whose content was plastic enough to survive paradigm shifts in political and scientific thought. Idiosyncratic Swedish concerns thus became universalized through the scientific diffusion of empirical knowledge about Lapps and generalizable anthropometric techniques to distinguish among populations. What Sweden lost during the nineteenth century in terms of geopolitical power, it gained in terms of biopower: the knowledge and control of internal populations made possible by its widely adopted anthropometric innovations. Nation-state science helps unpack the interrelationships between state-building, nation-making, and scientific labor.

Revolution in the Hispanic World, 1808–1816

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaime E. Rodríguez O.
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Iberian Peninsula ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Home Rule ◽  
Nation States ◽  
New Nation ◽  
Modern Nation State

The collapse of the Spanish monarchy in 1808 precipitated a political revolution that shattered that worldwide polity into new nation-states, among them Spain itself. In the wake of France's invasion of the Iberian Peninsula, three broad movements emerged in the Spanish world: the struggle against the invaders, the great political revolution that sought to transform the Spanish monarchy into a modern nation-state with one of the most radical constitutions of the nineteenth century, and a fragmented insurgency in America that relied on force to secure home rule. Elections to form a representative government for the Spanish world were held in the midst of a crisis of confidence. As their first act, the deputies to the Cortes of Cádiz declared themselves representatives of the nation and assumed sovereignty. The insurgencies and civil wars that engulfed some regions of Spanish America were a response to the same events that generated the constitutional political revolution. Both movements sought to maintain the Spanish monarchy as an independent political entity and to expand local political authority and representation.

scholarly journals The Nation and Its Deserters: Conscription in Mehmed Ali's Egypt

1998 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 421-436 ◽  
Author(s):  
Khaled Fahmy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
State Building ◽  
European History ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The Past ◽  
War Effort ◽  
Public Lecture ◽  
Modern Nation State

“Could a Nation, in any true sense of the word, really be born without war?” Such was the question raised by Michael Howard, the eminent Oxford military historian in a public lecture delivered on the topic of “War and the Nation State”. Looking generally at European history in the past two centuries he argued that war was indeed central for the appearance of the modern nation-state and that modern armies are somehow intimately linked to the rise of nationalism. During the first half of the nineteenth century this argument could very well be applied to Egypt. Having been incorporated in the Ottoman Empire for more than two and a half centuries, Egypt, by the beginning the nineteenth century and mostly through an unprecedented war effort that was concurrent and often synonymous with state-building, had come to play an increasingly independent role on the international plane.

The Interface of Nation-State Building and Transnationalism

2021 ◽  
pp. 45-74
Author(s):  
Luis Roniger
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Central America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
State Building ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Collective Identities ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Transnational Social Movements ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Latin American Countries

This chapter discusses how separate nation-states crystallized, turning Latin America into a multistate region subject to persistent transnational trends. The story of Latin America as a multistate region is one of contested territorial boundaries and a tension-ridden consolidation of separate collective identities out of a tapestry of transnational interaction. The chapter traces how states were constructed and narrated national formation; how transnational visions continued to reverberate; how transnational events such as wars were framed as national; and how transnational social movements promoted interstate connections, sometimes trying to recreate the lost unity of earlier times and the transnational visions of some of the founding fathers of independence. The textual discussion addresses cases of the Southern Andean and Río de la Plata expanses, namely Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, Uruguay, and Brazil, as well as Central America, including primarily El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. The chapter also embeds references to the Latin American countries.

Legal Exceptionalism in Egypt’s Borderlands

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew H. Ellis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Geography ◽  
Historical Geography ◽  
State Building ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Territorial Sovereignty ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter opens with a brief overview of the historical geography of the Egyptian West, highlighting the diversity within the region’s human and physical landscapes. It then moves on to illustrate the uneven political geography of the Egyptian nation-state in the late nineteenth century by highlighting two salient themes: the persistence of legal exceptionalism in the western oases and other desert territories, even after Egypt’s state-wide judicial reforms starting in the 1870s; and the state’s fraught efforts to standardize its policy vis-à-vis Egypt’s bedouin population around the country. Both these themes illustrate the emergence of Egypt’s borderlands as enclaves of exceptionalism within the emergent Egyptian nation-state. Accordingly, the chapter questions prevailing notions of territorial sovereignty in the nineteenth century and argues against normative Euro-centric top-down frameworks for understanding the process of state-building in the period.

The Latino Continuum and the Nineteenth-Century Americas

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carmen E. Lamas
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Latin American ◽  
English Language ◽  
Jose Marti ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The Us ◽  
Latin American Countries ◽  
American Nation

This book argues that the process of recovering Latina/o figures and writings in the nineteenth century does not merely create a bridge between the US and Latin American countries, peoples, and literatures, as they are currently understood, but reveals their fundamentally interdependent natures, politically, socially, historically, and aesthetically, thereby recognizing the degree of mutual imbrication of their peoples and literatures of the period. Largely archived in Spanish, it addresses concerns palpably felt within (and integral to) the US and beyond. English-language works also find a place on this continuum and have real implications for the political and cultural life of hispanophone and anglophone communities in the US. Moreover, the central role of Latina/o translations signals the global and the local nature of the continuum. For the Latino Continuum embeds layered and complex political and literary contexts and overlooked histories, situated as it is at the crossroads of both hemispheric and transatlantic currents of exchange often effaced by the logic of borders—national, cultural, religious, linguistic, and temporal. To recover this continuum of Latinidad, which is neither confined to the US or Latin American nation states nor located primarily within them, is to recover forgotten histories of the hemisphere, and to find new ways of seeing the past as we have understood it. The figures of Félix Varela, Miguel Teurbe Tolón, Eusebio Guiteras, José Martí, and Martín Morúa Delgado serve as points of departures for this reconceptualization of the intersection between American, Latin American, Cuban, and Latinx studies.

Haiti in the British Imagination

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack Daniel Webb
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Cultural Landscapes ◽  
Cultural Exchange ◽  
The Political ◽  
Diplomatic Relations ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Victorian Period

In 1804, Haiti declared its independence from France to become the world’s first ‘black’ nation state. Throughout the nineteenth century, Haiti maintained its independence, consolidating and expanding its national and, at times, imperial projects. In doing so, Haiti joined a host of other nation states and empires that were emerging and expanding across the Atlantic World. The largest and, in many ways, most powerful of these empires was that of Britain. Haiti in the British Imagination is the first book to focus on the diplomatic relations and cultural interactions between Haiti and Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century. As well as a story of British imperial aggression and Haitian ‘resistance’, it is also one of a more complicated set of relations: of rivalry, cultural exchange and intellectual dialogue. At particular moments in the Victorian period, ideas about Haiti had wide-reaching relevancies for British anxieties over the quality of British imperial administration, over what should be the relations between ‘the British’ and people of African descent, and defining the limits of black sovereignty. Haitians were key in formulating, disseminating and correcting ideas about Haiti. Through acts of dialogue, Britons and Haitians impacted on the worldviews of one another, and with that changed the political and cultural landscapes of the Atlantic World.

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