National Languages and Neutral Idioms

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tekla Mecsnóber
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Political Resistance ◽  
Language Play ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
National Languages

This essay considers laws governing display and use of languages in locales present to James Joyce—early twentieth-century Trieste, Zurich, and the British Empire—as well as attempts in the 1920s to have certain languages officially recognized by the League of Nations. Tekla Mecsnóber argues that these developments and statutes contribute to the polyglot sensibility of Joyce's work and the implications of political resistance in his language play.

The Creative Advance Must Be Defended: Miscegenation, Metaphysics, and Race War in Jan Smuts’s Vision of the League of Nations

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
JACOB KRIPP
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
International Order ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Global Peace ◽  
Mandate System ◽  
Race War ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Indirect Rule

This paper argues that the idea of global peace in early twentieth-century liberal international order was sutured together by the threat of race war. This understanding of racial peace was institutionalized in the League of Nations mandate system through its philosophical architect: Jan Smuts. I argue that the League figured in Smuts’s thought as the culmination of the creative advance of the universe: white internationalist unification and settler colonialism was the cosmological destiny of humanity that enabled a racial peace. In Smuts’s imaginary, the twin prospect of race war and miscegenation serves as the dark underside that both necessitates and threatens to undo this project. By reframing the problem of race war through his metaphysics, Smuts resolves the challenge posed by race war by institutionalizing indirect rule and segregation as a project of pacification that ensured that settlement and the creative advance of the cosmos could proceed.

Englishness, Empire and Nostalgia: A Heterodox Religious Community's Appeal in the Inter-War Years

2018 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 374-392
Author(s):  
Jane Shaw
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Belief Networks ◽  
Healing Ministry ◽  
World War ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Sense Of Identity ◽  
The Rich

This article looks at the ways in which the Panacea Society – a heterodox, millenarian group based in Bedford during the inter-war years – spread its ideas: through personal, familial and shared belief networks across the British empire; by building new modes of attracting adherents, in particular a global healing ministry; and by shipping its publications widely. It then examines how the society appealed to its (white) members in the empire in three ways: through its theology, which put Britain at the centre of the world; by presuming the necessity and existence of a ‘Greater Britain’ and the British empire, while in so many other quarters these entities were being questioned in the wake of World War I; and by a deliberately cultivated and nostalgic notion of ‘Englishness’. The Panacea Society continued and developed the idea of the British empire as providential at a time when the idea no longer held currency in most circles. The article draws on the rich resource of letters in the Panacea Society archive to contribute to an emerging area of scholarship on migrants’ experience in the early twentieth-century British empire (especially the dominions) and their sense of identity, in this case both religious and British.

In International Pursuit of a Caliphate

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mona Hassan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Age ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Religious Community ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Muslim Community ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
New Models ◽  
Muslim Intellectuals ◽  
Post War

This chapter analyzes the vibrant discussions of the early twentieth century over how to revive a caliphate best suited to the post-war era. While some advocated preservation of a traditional caliphal figurehead, many Muslim intellectuals were greatly persuaded by new models of internationalism embracing the nation-state and proposed international caliphal councils and organizations, similar to the League of Nations, or other purportedly spiritual institutions, similar to the refashioned papacy, to preserve the bonds of a transregional religious community. To varying degrees, all the participants in the debate over reviving a twentieth-century caliphate were influenced by an intriguing confluence of both the historic transregionalism of the Muslim community as well as the modern thrust of the new age of global internationalism.

Epilogue

2021 ◽  
pp. 231-236
Author(s):  
Bill Bell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Robinson Crusoe ◽  
Reading Habits ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Official Sources ◽  
The Web

The epilogue rounds off the argument by returning to Crusoe as a paradigm of the act of reading in the British empire. In the hands of different readers not even Robinson Crusoe was as straightforward as it seemed. Despite the fact that the novel has often been read as a manual for empire, it is far more complex than some commentaries would have us believe. Similar ambivalences apply to the lives and minds of many overseas British in the long nineteenth century. While the early twentieth century is commonly thought to have embodied a decline in imperial values, the reading habits of colonial subjects throughout the period would seem to indicate that imperial assurances were less robust than official sources would seem to suggest. The five reading constituencies that are described in the foregoing chapters, all of them in different ways operating within the web of empire, were ones in which individuals often found imperial confidence in its own mission wanting, something that was time and again demonstrated through in their acts of reading.

The Evolution of Japanese Colonialism

1959 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hyman Kublin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
World Wide ◽  
Japanese Colonialism ◽  
Colonial Policy ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Historical Processes ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Colonial Government

Reflecting upon the career in the colonial government of Formosa that was to win him world-wide fame in the early twentieth century, Baron Shimpei Goto once remarked that “Japan had made no preparations whatever for the administration of the island at the time of its acquisition”. Underscoring this neglect, he added, was “the fact that, in the case of other nations confronted by a similar occasion, elaborate schemes are generally formulated to meet contingencies connected with the occupation of a new territory”. One may wonder whether the Baron included among the “elaborate schemers” the “absent-minded” builders of the British Empire.It does not matter whether Baron Goto was aware of the complex historical processes, of the actions and accidents, involved in the creation of great empires. It is not even important whether he really believed that the colonial programs of the imperial powers were, like the war plans carefully devised by army general staffs, drawn from secret files as occasions demanded. Goto was primarily interested in the formulation and implementation of a colonial policy for Japan. His observation on his government's lack of preparedness to assume control and direction of Formosan affairs should thus be taken not simply as a confession and condemnation but rather as a statement of purpose.

A Brownian Model for Literary Crowds

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Crossland
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Brownian Motion ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Molecular Physics ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Brownian Model ◽  
Night And Day

Chapter 6 applies the ideas explored in Chapter 5 to a range of early twentieth-century literary texts, especially those by Woolf and Lawrence. The focus here is on crowd and city scenes, including the modernist figures of the flâneur and the passante. The chapter as a whole argues for the relevance of contemporary ideas on molecular physics, especially Brownian motion, to portrayals of individual characters in relation to crowds, drawing on a range of texts including Woolf’s Night and Day and Mrs Dalloway, Lawrence’s The Trespasser and The White Peacock, and texts by Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and H. G. Wells. Together with Chapter 5, this chapter demonstrates how ideas, language, and imagery were shared across disciplines in the early twentieth century, and argues that considering different disciplines together can help us to recapture a sense of the ways in which particular issues were experienced at the time.

Preference in Paris

2019 ◽  
pp. 41-77
Author(s):  
Christina Luke
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Cultural Relations ◽  
Economic Gain ◽  
War Of Independence ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Learned Societies ◽  
Paris Peace Conference

The pursuit of knowledge, cultural relations and diplomatic practice are discussed in this chapter in the context of the Treaty of Sèvres, the framing the League of Nations, and the role of early twentieth-century philanthropy and academia. The boundaries of where European and US scholars and businessmen penetrated Anatolia are defined as much by the lure of antiquity, recalling the vision of the Megali Idea, as by political posturing and economic gain embedded in the Wilsonian agenda. I trace the strategic diplomacy of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA), Learned Societies, and two members of the Princeton Expedition to Sardis, Howard Crosby Butler and William Hepburn Buckler, during the 1919 Paris Peace Conference and the Turkish War of Independence. I argue that colonial networks writ large framed the nineteenth-century Western gaze of entitlement that underwrote duplicitous claims to Anatolian soil between 1919 and 1922.

New worlds for old: the League of Nations in the age of electricity

2002 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 311-336 ◽  
Author(s):  
JO-ANNE PEMBERTON
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Development ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Electric Energy ◽  
Scientific Organization ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Face ◽  
And Control

This article examines representations of the League of Nations as a creature of early twentieth century modernity. In particular it focuses on the propagation of the doctrine of rationalization in that forum from mid-1920s until early 1930s. Rationalization came to signify not only the scientific organization and control of social development, but also world interpenetration in technical, industrial, cultural and political spheres. Conjuring images of a globe crisscrossed by streams of electric energy, League functionaries and devotees spoke of a bright new dawn. Industrial flow would meld the ‘minds of men’. Discussions of globalization today have a similar repertoire of arguments and many of the same linguistic items as of rationalization. In the inter-war period rationalization was held out as the destiny of the world's people, promising both harmonious integration and cultural profusion. Its rapid evaporation from intellectual and public discourse in the face of the crises of the 1930s serves as a warning to those who would weave fantastic tales of globalized tomorrows.

Artefacts of Writing

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter D. McDonald
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
English Language ◽  
Salman Rushdie ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Philosophical Analysis ◽  
Rabindranath Tagore ◽  
History Of

Some forms of literature interfere with the workings of the literate brain, posing a challenge to readers of all kinds. This book argues that they pose as much of a challenge to the way states conceptualize language, culture, and community. Drawing on a wealth of evidence, from Victorian scholarly disputes over the identity of the English language to the constitutional debates about its future in Ireland, India, and South Africa, and from quarrels over the idea of culture within the League of Nations to UNESCO’s ongoing struggle to articulate a viable concept of diversity, it brings together a large group of legacy writers, including T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Rabindranath Tagore, putting them in dialogue with each other and with the policymakers who shaped the formation of modern states and the history of internationalist thought from the 1860s to the 1940s. The second part of the book reflects on the continuing evolution of these dialogues, showing how a varied array of more contemporary writers from Amit Chaudhuri, J. M. Coetzee, and Salman Rushdie, to Antjie Krog, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, and Es’kia Mphahlele cast new light on a range of questions that have preoccupied UNESCO since 1945. At once a novel contribution to institutional and intellectual history and an innovative exercise in literary and philosophical analysis, Artefacts of Writing affords a unique perspective on literature’s place at the centre of some of the most fraught, often lethal public controversies that defined the long-twentieth century and that continue to haunt us today.

The Translation of European Astronomical Works into Tibetan in the Early Eighteenth Century

Inner Asia ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yongdan Lobsang
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Tycho Brahe

It has long been assumed that European scientific knowledge arrived in Tibet with the agents of the British Empire in the early twentieth century and furthermore that Tibetans did not engage with scientific knowledge until recent years. However, this is far from the case; from the beginning of the eighteenth century onwards Tibetans not only translated a great number of Jesuit astronomical works into Tibetan by order of the Kangxi Emperor (1654–1722), they also reformed one of the calendars in use in Amdo using the principles described by Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546–1601). In this paper I look at how the relevant translations were done, by whom and in what historical context. I shall also explore the process by which the Jesuit-inspired astronomical and calendar turned out to be the catalyst for the adoption, reformation and manufacture of the Qing imperial calendar in Amdo.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document