Ganja and the Government of India: Cannabis, Excise, and Colonial Administration in the Late Nineteenth Century

Cannabis ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Bragues

Though now almost entirely forgotten, Herbert Spencer was among the most widely read thinkers during the late nineteenth century. As part of his system of synthetic philosophy, Herbert Spencer addressed the topics of money and banking. This philosophic system articulates a concept of justice based on the principle of equal freedom. Invoking this principle, Spencer rejected a government-superintended regime of money and banking as unjust. Instead, he morally favored a system of free banking. Spencer also defended this system on economic grounds. His argument was that banks could be self-regulating in their management of the money supply, on the condition that the government limit its activities in the financial sphere to the enforcement of contracts. While Spencer’s case is not beyond questioning on philosophic and political grounds, he offers a distinctive and forceful analysis.


Author(s):  
Sarah Palmer

This essay charts the considerable decline of the British shipping industry in the twentieth century. Sarah Palmer demonstrates that growing distance between shipowners and shipbuilders; tremendous decline in liner shipping; unwillingness to innovate; and inconsistent policies established by the government that played significant roles in the decline from the turn of the century’s forty percent global tonnage rates to the meagre three percent reported in 2007.


2007 ◽  
Vol 14 (01) ◽  
pp. 129-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jayson Althofer

I had been under the impression that there was only one Brisbane. — Steele Rudd In 1921, Jack Lindsay wrote from Brisbane of Nietzsche's assertion ‘that the academic virtue is sleep, i.e., narcotisation’. A common academic and non-academic indulgence in remembering Brisbane is the narcotic of Queensland's extreme difference: a state of exceptional boredom and brutality. It is widely assumed that, for most of its history, Queensland was a sleepy backwater; its capital the country town described by a late nineteenth century visitor: ‘Brisbane is quite a pretty town, to be sure, but it bores you to death.’ Dismissive characterisations of Queensland coarsened as a result of Bjelke-Petersen's ascendency. If you were not bored to death by its cultural wastelands, you could be beaten close to it in the boorish badlands patrolled by his pigs. The crazed Dane fed the chooks while watching cranes rise over this animal farm, apparently untouchable in his Elsinore: The rest of the country often thought [Queenslanders] a bit peculiar: a maverick state, populated by politically backward ‘banana benders’ who chose a crank … to rule them. These rather offensive stereotypes helped in turn to sustain a political myth that the government was somehow unique in its reactionary politics — even ‘fascist’ — making Petersen impossible to defeat or dislodge.


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 279-286
Author(s):  
Ambreen Bibi ◽  
Saimaan Ashfaq ◽  
Qazi Muhammad Saeed Ullah ◽  
Naseem Abbas

There are multiple ways of transferring human values, cultures and history from one generation to another. Literature, Art, Paintings and Theatrical performances are the real reflection of any civilization. In the history of subcontinent, theatres played a vital role in promoting the Pakistani and Indian history; Mughal culture and traditions. Pakistani theatre, “Ajoka” played significant role to propagate positive, humanitarian and liberal humanist values. This research aims to investigate the transformation in the history of Pakistani theatre specifically the “Ajoka” theatre that was established under the government of military dictatorship in Pakistan in the late nineteenth century.  It was not a compromising time for the celebration of liberal humanist values in Pakistan as the country was under the rules of military dictatorship. The present study is intended to explore the dissemination of liberal humanist values in the plays and performances of “Ajoka” theatre. The research is meant to highlight the struggle of “Ajoka” theatre for enhancing the message of love, tolerance, peace and other humanist values in such crucial time.


2010 ◽  

The subject around which the contributions in this volume gravitate is the creation of a higher institute of engineering studies in Florence in the late nineteenth-century. On the eve of the unification of Italy, Florence was a promising centre for a Polytechnic, in view of the experience of the Corpo di Ingegneri di Acque e Strade, the precocious railway building, the importance of the mining sector and the solidity of the Istituto Tecnico Toscano. Despite this, unlike what took place in Milan and in Turin, the Istituto Tecnico Toscano was not transformed into a Polytechnic for the training of engineers. The reasons for this non-development can be traced to the lack of "industrialist" propensities in the managerial group that emerged victorious from the "peaceful revolution" of 1859, to a desire for independence from the national academic system built on the Casati law, and to a local demand for engineering skills that was less dynamic than expected. Consequently, the prevailing winds were those of "normalisation" blowing from the government, the universities and the most prestigious Colleges of Engineers. Nevertheless, Florence continued to represent an important technological centre, especially in relation to railway infrastructures, public works, and the mechanical engineering industries (for example Pignone and Galileo). In the end it was not until one hundred years after unification that the city finally became the seat of a Faculty of Engineering.


Author(s):  
Shaul Stampfer

This chapter analyses the developments that brought about the Volozhin yeshiva's closure. It reveals surprising conclusions that illuminate both the yeshiva's internal politics in the late nineteenth century and its precarious status. The ostensible reason for the closure of the yeshiva was its refusal to accept the government demand for far-reaching changes in the curriculum so as to incorporate secular studies and to devote a significant number of hours to these studies. However, it is highly probable that this was not the real reason. The chapter draws from the archives of the former Soviet Union to conduct an examination of internal government documents from the tsarist period. These archives can reveal more about what really motivated the authorities in various episodes affecting the Jewish community. The chapter shows that the authorities knew a great deal about the internal affairs of the yeshiva, and certainly far more than most Jews ever imagined.


1989 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-223
Author(s):  
Virginia Garrard Burnett

“Our institutions,” remarked a North American Protestant missionary in Guatemala in 1910 referring to his denomination's missions, schools and clinics, “can do more than gunboats.” From the time of the Liberal reform of Justo Rufino Barrios, most of Guatemala's Liberal rulers had agreed. Valued by nineteenth century Liberal rulers for their development projects, their usefulness in the struggle against Catholic clericalism, and, most importantly, for the packaging of North American values, beliefs and culture in which they wrapped the Word of God, Protestant missionaries worked in Guatemala with the blessing and encouragement of the government from the late nineteenth century until 1944. That year, the “last caudillo”—the old Liberal dictator Jorge Ubico —was ousted from power and replaced by a reformist junta, marking the beginning of Guatemala's decade-long flirtation with progressive revolutionary government.


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