Breaking the Soft Border

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Song-Chuan Chen
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Interaction Networks ◽  
Ruling Class ◽  
Trade Expansion ◽  
Major Threat ◽  
British Trade ◽  
Foreign Trading ◽  
Canton System

A third force at play in the British maritime public sphere, an inadvertent participant neither anti-war nor pro-war, was the ‘Canton system’. More than the physical border of the Thirteen Factories (Canton’s foreign trading quarters), the Canton system was primarily a ‘soft border’ made of a series of rules and regulations that constrained British merchants’ activities in China and restricted their interaction with Qing subjects. Soft borders here were figurative borderlines on the maritime frontier that cut through transnational information and interaction networks. By preventing interactions other than those necessary for trade, the Qing believed they had successfully prevented the possibility of foreigners joining forces with Chinese rebels—the dynasty’s major threat. The security order in Canton was paramount to the Qing ruling class. However, the Warlike party believed it necessary to start a war to abolish the system that confined British trade expansion and insulted the British Empire.

Festivals, Ceremonies, and the Commemoration of Power

2019 ◽  
pp. 124-161
Author(s):  
Carlos Machado
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Personal Identity ◽  
Ruling Class ◽  
Funerary Monuments ◽  
The Public ◽  
Social Distinction ◽  
City Space ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The City

This chapter analyses the ways in which members of the roman elite used festivals and public celebrations as a form of advertising their social and political standing. Analysing senatorial involvement in imperial festivals like adventus and anniversaries and in the celebration of appointments to public office, it considers how public celebrations advertised individual political achievement and participation in the city’s ruling class. The statue monuments that immortalized these feats were also used as tools for expressing personal identity and social distinction. Finally, the chapter analyses the performance of private celebrations in the public sphere, such as baptism and especially the role of funerals and funerary monuments in the commemoration of aristocratic dominance in the city-space.

Negotiating Female Identity in Nineteenth-Century Ireland

2019 ◽  
pp. 69-83
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Tilley
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Cultural Influence ◽  
Female Identity ◽  
Local Market ◽  
Employment Opportunities ◽  
Cultural Products ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere

Periodicals such as the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine were created in England but were often read in diverse locations within the British Empire and beyond. Indeed, as Elizabeth Tilley notes in this chapter, women in Ireland often had no choice but to read magazines and newspapers produced in the metropole. Consequently, she notes, it is ‘difficult to establish the cultural influence of Irish-produced periodicals, including those aimed at women, before the 1870s’ (69). The emergence of periodicals such as the Emerald; The Irish Ladies’ Journal (1870–1) demonstrated that there was a sufficient local market to support Irish periodicals for women. The journal not only incorporated fashion, recipes, and domestic advice but also information about women’s educational and employment opportunities. Still, it was ‘not until well into the twentieth century that women claimed a larger share of the public sphere and its cultural products’ (83).

Elite Integration in the United States and Australia

1981 ◽  
Vol 75 (3) ◽  
pp. 581-597 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Higley ◽  
Gwen Moore
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Interaction Networks ◽  
Network Structures ◽  
Power Elite ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
Ruling Class ◽  
Personal Interaction ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
Class Models

Taking its point of departure in the elitist paradigm and the much-discussed relationship between elite integration and stable democratic political systems, this article offers a typology of fragmented and integrated national elites and investigates the structure of the “consensually integrated” elite type. It is hypothesized that “consensually integrated” elites have largely similar structures consisting of personal interaction networks which are more inclusive and less class-based, and which contain more extensive and centralized connections among all major elite groups, than the plural elite, power elite or ruling class models of elite structure separately depict. Support for these hypotheses is found in a comparison of the network structures of two consensually integrated national elites, the American and Australian, as these structures are revealed by issue-based sociometric data taken from closely comparable elite samples and studies in the two countries.

Te Karere o Poneke: Creating an Indigenous Discursive Space?

Itinerario ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 365-390
Author(s):  
Lachy Paterson
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Market Economy ◽  
Discursive Space ◽  
The Public ◽  
Western Model ◽  
The World ◽  
The Public Sphere

AbstractOver sixteen months in 1857 and 1858, Walter Buller produced a weekly newspaper for Māori of the Wellington region in their own language. Although he was the son of a Wesleyan missionary and an official interpreter, the niupepa was neither a church nor a government publication, although it promoted discourses favoured by both. A number of niupepa had preceded Buller's Te Karere o Poneke, the first appearing in 1842, but his paper was distinctive in the sizable platform he provided for correspondence. Over half of the items printed comprised letters from Māori, many of them commenting on, and occasionally critiquing the colonial milieu.The concept of “public sphere” is heavily theorized, often postulated in acultural terms (although suspiciously European in form) and it is debatable if Te Karere o Poneke's readership and their engagement with the textual discourse meet the theory's required criteria of constituting a public sphere. New Zealand was annexed to the British Empire in 1840, meaning that by 1857 colonization was still a relatively new phenomenon, but with substantial immigration and a developing infrastructure, change was both extensive and dynamic. According to the theory, it may be difficult to apply the concept of “public sphere” to Māori anytime during the changing contexts of nineteenth-century colonialism, and indeed other colonised cultures for whom the advent of literacy, Christianity, market economy and colonial administration had been sudden and unexpected. Of course this does not mean that Māori lacked a voice, at times critical. Using Te Karere o Poneke as a case study, this essay argues that Wellington Māori of 1857 do not readily fit the Western model of the “public sphere”, but they nevertheless utilized the discursive spaces available to them to discuss and evaluate the world they now encountered.

Empire and Eugenics

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 445-454
Author(s):  
Ezra Horbury ◽  
Christine “Xine” Yao
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Gender Recognition ◽  
The Public ◽  
Radical Feminist ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Trans Studies ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Uk

Abstract This essay offers an overview of trans studies in the United Kingdom in the current climate of transphobia in both academia and the public sphere. This report outlines how trans-exclusionary radical feminist scholars have co-opted the language of victimization and academic freedom following proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act in 2018. The production of ignorance about trans issues and trans studies is a deliberate project abetted by the UK media even on the left. In response, the authors organized an interdisciplinary trans symposium to affirm trans lives and trans studies for students, scholars, and the wider community. The authors reflect on the successes and failures of the event in light of their institution's past as the origin of eugenics founded by Frances Galton and the broader scope of the legacies of the British empire.

“Londublin”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleni Loukopoulou
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Capital City ◽  
Compound Word ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Spatial Politics ◽  
The World ◽  
Canonical Representations

‘“Londublin”: The Linguistic and Spatial Politics of “Oxen of the Sun”’ investigates the ways the episode of Ulysses “Oxen of the Sun” negotiates London into Dublin’s public sphere. In 1995, Jay Clayton coined the term “Londublin” to refer to the ways Joyce delved into Dickens’ representations of the “first” city of the empire to write about Dublin, which in 1905 Joyce had provocatively described as the second city of the British Empire, assigning thus a central role to Dublin. The compound word “Londublin” suggests a textual subversion of the concept of London as the “capital city of the world” as Dickens had described it. Clayton’s incisive promulgation of the concept of “Londublin” at the centre of a critical cultural history about the first and second cities in Joyce’s poetic geography has been key for my approach. While Clayton focuses on Joyce’s conversations with Dickens in Ulysses, though, chapter two explores how in “Oxen of the Sun” Joyce handles canonical representations of London by a variety of writers while paying particular attention to Thomas Carlyle’s writings.

William Le Queux and Russia

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 119-138
Author(s):  
Michael Hughes
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
German Government ◽  
Revolutionary Movement ◽  
Major Threat ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Positive Treatment ◽  
History Of ◽  
First World

This article examines how Le Queux’s writings about Russia both reflected and shaped the construction of the country in the British imagination in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first part examines Le Queux’s early novels, showing how his conviction that tsarist Russia posed a major threat to the security of the British Empire was reflected in his surprisingly positive treatment of the Russian revolutionary movement. The second part then examines how Le Queux’s later writings on Russia reflected the changing nature of international politics following the outbreak of war in 1914. Russia’s new-found status as Britain’s ally in the First World War shaped the content of a number of books written by Le Queux in 1917–1918. These include Rasputin the Rascal Monk (1917) and The Minister of Evil: The Secret History of Rasputin’s Betrayal of Russia (1918), in which Le Queux claimed that Rasputin was a creature of the German government.

‘Innocent’ Victims/‘Guilty’ Migrants: Hindi public sphere, caste and indentured women in colonial North India

2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (5) ◽  
pp. 1345-1377 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHARU GUPTA
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
British Empire ◽  
North India ◽  
Migrant Women ◽  
Subjective Experiences ◽  
Transnational Movements ◽  
Indian Women ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

AbstractThis article analyses representations of the indentured woman in the Hindi print-public sphere of colonial north India in the early twentieth century. There have been sophisticated studies on the condition of Indian women in the plantation colonies of the British Empire, this article focuses instead on the vernacular world within India, showing how the transnational movements of these women emigrants led to animated discussions, in which they came to be constructed as both innocent victims and guilty migrants, insiders and outsiders. The ways in which these mobile women came to be represented reveal significant intersections between nation, gender, caste, sexuality, and morality. It also demonstrates how middle-class Indian women attempted to establish bonds of diasporic sisterhood with low-caste indentured women, bonds that were also deeply hierarchical. In addition, the article attempts to grasp the subjective experiences of Dalit migrant, and potentially migrant, women themselves, and illustrates their ambivalences of identity in particularly gendered ways.

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