Oh Capitano!

Author(s):  
Rudolph J. Vecoli ◽  
Francesco Durante

Italian adventurer and sea captain Celso Cesare Moreno traveled the world lying, scheming, and building an extensive patron/client network to establish his reputation as a middleman and person of significance. Through his machinations, Moreno became a critical player in the expansion of western trade and imperialism in Asia, the trafficking of migrant workers and children in the Atlantic, the conflicts of Americans and Native Hawaiians over the fate of Hawaii, and the imperial competitions of French, British, Italian, and American governments in an important era of imperial expansion during the nineteenth century. This book teases out Moreno's enormous peculiarities and fascination as well as his significance. It examines how he repeatedly sought a role at the center of a globalizing world with gusto and had no qualms about lying or betraying others. Dragged by his uncontrollable polemical passions, the old Captain died alone, unloved by anyone and with no meaningful relations to others. With its focus on Moreno, this book illustrates some of the most puzzling cultural traits of emigrant Italian elites. Called a “carpetbagger,” “land pirate,” “extinct volcano,” among many other derogatory monikers, Celso emerges in this fascinating biography as a multifaceted, chameleon-like personality not reducible to a single epithet.

2018 ◽  
Vol 87 (4) ◽  
pp. 575-592
Author(s):  
Gavin James Campbell

Scholarship on nineteenth-century missionary encounters emphasizes either how native converts “indigenized” Christian doctrine and practice, or how missionaries acted as agents of Western imperial expansion. These approaches, however, overlook the ways both missionaries and converts understood Protestant Christianity as a call to transnational community. This essay examines the ways that American Protestants and East Asian Christian converts looked for ways to build a transpacific communion. Despite radically different understandings of Christian scripture, and despite the geopolitics of empire, U.S. and East Asian Protestants nevertheless strove to bring together diverse theologies and experiences into a loosely defined, transnational Protestant community.


Author(s):  
Gregory Rosenthal

This book’s epilogue considers how the story of the rise and fall of Hawaiʻi’s indigenous workers—and the diasporic, migratory nature of their experiences—revolutionizes what we think we know about the place of Hawaiʻi in the Pacific, and the place of the Pacific in the world. I also raise questions about what this story can contribute to twenty-first-century struggles over capitalism and colonialism in Hawaiʻi as well as across our globalizing world. The epilogue looks specifically at the twenty-first-century legacies of nineteenth-century practices and experiences of Hawaiian migrant labor, state labor discipline, indigenous land dispossession, policing and incarceration, and life in “perpetual diaspora.”


Author(s):  
Tamara S Wagner

Abstract This article analyses the representation of migrant workers in Victorian fiction. While exploring the seldom-discussed experience of such migrants, I argue that in the fiction of the time, migration for work outside of the empire expresses the experience of individual isolation as the result of increasing urban anonymity as well as of global exchanges. The figure of the migrant thereby literalizes modern isolation in an emergent society of strangers. In depicting migratory characters as embodiments of loneliness, while establishing it as a shared experience through parallel plots, nineteenth-century novels map out possible connections in a globalizing world. In parsing the interplay of isolation and imaginary sympathy in two texts of the 1850s, Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit and Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, I argue that the experience of feeling foreign while working abroad enables characters to seek connections that transcend boundaries of class and national identity, even as the sympathy they imagine might be flawed, warped by projection and identification. In Little Dorrit, Cavalletto’s accident in the streets of London enacts a pivotal moment of imagined sympathy for the recently returned Arthur Clennam that ultimately helps to solve the renegotiation of home and host country in the novel, while in Villette, a female migrant articulates an increasingly widespread experience not only of modern isolation, social invisibility, and cultural disorientation, but also of the power of anonymity. A critical analysis of migratory work in Victorian fiction adds an important new dimension to nineteenth-century global studies.


2011 ◽  
Vol 79 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Prasannan Parthasarathi ◽  
Donald Quataert

Transnational labor migration is one of the most visible features of our globalizing world. The International Organization for Migration estimates that there are 214 million migrant workers crossing national borders in the world today. Migration both in and to the Middle East constitutes an important part of this movement of laborers and has deep roots. In the mid-fifteenth century, workers across a broad spectrum of occupations, including stevedores, boatmen, and bakers, trekked from areas in eastern and central Anatolia to the new imperial Ottoman capital, Istanbul, where they lived and worked for months and even years. Workers from outside the Middle East also have been part of the fabric of life in the region for several centuries, the slave trade from sub-Saharan Africa, which long supplied labor for a variety of purposes, being one of the most notable. Migrant workers took on new significance in the twentieth century, especially after the oil price hikes of 1973. Today the nations on the Arabian Peninsula, the destination for most workers, have the highest ratio of migrants to locals in the world.


2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-35
Author(s):  
Julian Wolfreys

Writers of the early nineteenth century sought to find new ways of writing about the urban landscape when first confronted with the phenomena of London. The very nature of London's rapid growth, its unprecedented scale, and its mere difference from any other urban centre throughout the world marked it out as demanding a different register in prose and poetry. The condition of writing the city, of inventing a new writing for a new experience is explored by familiar texts of urban representation such as by Thomas De Quincey and William Wordsworth, as well as through less widely read authors such as Sarah Green, Pierce Egan, and Robert Southey, particularly his fictional Letters from England.


2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 256-275
Author(s):  
Molly C. O'Donnell

All the narrators and characters in J. Sheridan Le Fanu's In a Glass Darkly are unreliable impostors. As the title suggests, this is also the case with Arthur Machen's The Three Impostors, which similarly presents a virtual matryoshka of unreliability through a series of impostors. Both texts effect this systematic insistence on social constructedness by using and undermining the specific context of the male homosocial world. What served as the cure-all in the world of Pickwick – the homosocial bond – has here been exported, exposed, and proven flawed. The gothic is out in the open now, and the feared ghost resides without and within the group. The inability of anyone to interpret its signs, communicate its meaning, and rely on one's friends to talk one through it is the horror that cannot be overcome. Part of a larger project on the nineteenth-century ‘tales novel’ that treats the more heterogeneric and less heteronormative Victorian novel, this article examines how In a Glass Darkly and The Three Impostors blur the clear-cut gender division articulated in prior masculine presentations like The Pickwick Papers and feminine reinterpretations such as Cranford. These later texts challenge binaries of sex, speech, genre, and mode in enacting the previously articulated masculine and feminine simultaneously.


Author(s):  
George E. Dutton

This chapter introduces the book’s main figure and situates him within the historical moment from which he emerges. It shows the degree to which global geographies shaped the European Catholic mission project. It describes the impact of the Padroado system that divided the world for evangelism between the Spanish and Portuguese crowns in the 15th century. It also argues that European clerics were drawing lines on Asian lands even before colonial regimes were established in the nineteenth century, suggesting that these earlier mapping projects were also extremely significant in shaping the lives of people in Asia. I argue for the value of telling this story from the vantage point of a Vietnamese Catholic, and thus restoring agency to a population often obscured by the lives of European missionaries.


Author(s):  
Arun Kumar L.S

International business is essential for the countries to generate Economic growth or to increase in exports and reduce in imports, it encompasses all commercial and economic activities between the nations to promote the ideas, resources, transfer the goods and services, technologies across the national borders. In every country has limited resources therefore a country cannot produce all the goods and services that it requires. The present context of the world, there is imbalance in production and supply factors due to Covid-19 pandemic, which has resulted in market imbalances (demand and supply). The world economy has been hit hard by the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, as on June end more than ten 10 million people around the globe had been affected by this pandemic, India, USA and others are worst hit countries with decrease in GDP (Gross Domestic Product) and increase in unemployment rate. It may be useful to also note that prolonged lockdowns will eventually imply production shortfalls, may lead to increase in unemployment; decrease in demand for products, slowly running out stocks. In recent forecast of World Trade Organisation (WTO) indicated a clear fall in world trade between 13 per cent and 32 per cent in 2020, perhaps the highest fall since the Great Depression of 1930s. India and world can overcome the challenges by specific government fiscal and monetary policies, by providing economic relief packages and increase in employment opportunities by digitalisation in all the sectors of the economy to increase in accountability, convenience, and gross production, and investment, job security to casual labours or migrant workers. These factors may change the world present situation to productive or welfare economy. The purpose of the research paper is to explain Economic and Business crisis, due to covid-19 in present situation in India and the world. KEY WORDS: C0VID-19, GDP, ECONOMY and GLOBAL CRISIS.


Author(s):  
Manju Dhariwal ◽  

Written almost half a century apart, Rajmohan’s Wife (1864) and The Home and the World (1916) can be read as women centric texts written in colonial India. The plot of both the texts is set in Bengal, the cultural and political centre of colonial India. Rajmohan’s Wife, arguably the first Indian English novel, is one of the first novels to realistically represent ‘Woman’ in the nineteenth century. Set in a newly emerging society of India, it provides an insight into the status of women, their susceptibility and dependence on men. The Home and the World, written at the height of Swadeshi movement in Bengal, presents its woman protagonist in a much progressive space. The paper closely examines these two texts and argues that women enact their agency in relational spaces which leads to the process of their ‘becoming’. The paper analyses this journey of the progress of the self, which starts with Matangini and culminates in Bimala. The paper concludes that women’s journey to emancipation is symbolic of the journey of the nation to independence.


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