scholarly journals A Colonial Affair

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Danna Agmon
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
South Asia ◽  
French Empire ◽  
High Ranking ◽  
Trading Company ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
Fault Lines

Early in the eighteenth century, in the French colony of Pondichéry, India, a man’s life was thrust into turmoil. A Tamil commercial broker named Nayiniyappa, the colony’s most powerful local man, was arrested, swiftly convicted of tyranny and sedition, and died in prison while serving out his sentence. But following his death a global mobilization effort on his behalf ensued, and the French King exonerated Nayiniyappa posthumously. The struggle over this man’s guilt or innocence drew into debate merchants of the French trading company, the Compagnie des Indes, Catholic missionaries of various orders, high ranking officials in Paris and Versailles, and local families in Pondichéry. As they fought over Nayiniyappa’s fate, they also articulated radically different visions of the French colonial project in India. This microhistory of the affair and the fault lines it reveals shows that conflicts between and within the projects of trade and religion were a defining feature of the little-known French empire in South Asia.

Networks and fault lines in eighteenth-century Deccani literary communities: Lachmī Narāyan ‘Shafīq’ and his circle

2020 ◽  
Vol 57 (4) ◽  
pp. 461-480
Author(s):  
Purnima Dhavan
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Collaborative Networks ◽  
Self Presentation ◽  
Shared History ◽  
Literary Communities ◽  
Cultural Spaces ◽  
New States ◽  
Fault Lines ◽  
Individual Self

By the end of the eighteenth century, emerging states in South Asia drew on successive waves of migration to staff their institutions. Scholars, poets and bureaucrats in these new states were entrusted with the crafting and maintenance of new bureaucratic systems and cultural spaces. The attempts to create shared bonds in these new spaces, however, also created tensions between those who were recent arrivals in these communities and those whose families had settled there earlier. In the fiercely competitive world of late Mughal literary culture, the task of uniting these groups by creating new networks was complicated by divergent goals. I examine how the writing and dissemination of new histories, memoirs and literary works with a literary network connected with one author, Lachmī Narāyan ‘Shafīq,’ built a shared history in the eighteenth-century Deccan, but also created moments of acute conflict and dissent through its literary production. The competing needs for individual self-presentation and success in the competitive climate of the period undercut the desire to forge collaborative networks. The conflicting record of these collaborations and fault lines in the archival records of this period invite us to revisit the ways in which both collective and individual identities were forged in this period.

The French Atlantic World in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Silvia Marzagalli
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
French West Indies ◽  
French Empire ◽  
Atlantic Trade ◽  
Progressive Loss ◽  
African Slaves ◽  
French Colonial

The French were major actors in the creation of an Atlantic world. From the sixteenth century onwards, the Atlantic sphere provided employment for thousands of French sailors, sustained a large merchant community, and supplied much capital. In the following two centuries, cities and ports involved in Atlantic trade emerged and prospered. French imperial policy was a source of permanent tensions — between colonists and authorities in Versailles; planters, free coloured, and slaves; France and other European colonial powers — leading eventually to the progressive loss of the French empire in the course of the eighteenth century. Although French colonial trade and movements of people increased considerably over this period — the French West Indies provided Europe with huge quantities of sugar and coffee produced by an increasing number of African slaves — the French Atlantic world was never confined within its imperial boundaries. After the loss of Haiti, the French empire in the Americas was reduced to Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Guyana, where slavery was abolished in 1848.

Beňovský on Madagascar: The Self-fashioning, Career and Knowledge Production of a Central European Actor in the French Colonial Empire

2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 471-480
Author(s):  
Damien Tricoire
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Information Policy ◽  
Great Role ◽  
French Empire ◽  
Central European ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Colonial Empire ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
Insight Into

In the eighteenth century, the French administration usually did not appoint foreigners to leading functions. The Upper Hungarian nobleman Móric Beňovský, who was commissioned by the French king to build a colony on Madagascar, was an exception. Soon, Beňovský developed fanciful accounts of his experience on Madagascar and eventually he became famous across Europe. His case raises the question about the conditions that foreigners had to fulfil in order to make a career in the French empire. This article seeks to answer the question of whether Beňovský’s Upper Hungarian origins contributed to shaping his career, self-fashioning, policy and knowledge production, that is, orientated these in a way that differed from the French colonisers. It claims that Beňovský chose to fictionalise his life and to conjure lies about his experiences on Madagascar because it was the only way to make a career in a system otherwise dominated by established networks of patronage. Furthermore, Beňovský’s fanciful information policy gives some insight into the way information was produced in the French empire: it shows that Versailles was very much dependent on a few informants, and that the logic of court patronage played a great role in knowledge production. Beyond that, the fact that Beňovský’s fantastic stories were considered trustworthy by the elite across the continent says a lot about European colonial imagination in the Enlightenment period.

Architectural Remains at Fort St. Joseph

2019 ◽  
pp. 79-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erika K. Hartley ◽  
Michael S. Nassaney
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
Structural Materials ◽  
New France ◽  
Documentary Sources ◽  
Architectural Styles ◽  
Construction Techniques ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
Materials Used ◽  
Function Construction

This chapter reveals the architectural remains recovered at Fort St. Joseph. Unlike other colonial settlements, no detailed maps, drawings, or descriptions have come to light to illuminate the physical appearance of the fort. Here, we trace the origins of French colonial architectural styles and how they were adapted to the New World. We then employ archaeological and documentary sources to ascertain the types of buildings that may have existed at Fort St. Joseph, their functions, and what they may have looked like. This information will help in our interpretations of the function, construction techniques, and materials used to construct buildings as revealed through the architectural remains and associated structural materials found at Fort St. Joseph. This examination of eighteenth-century buildings in New France provides a better appreciation and understanding of colonial architecture and the conservative nature of French building practices.

scholarly journals A hard nut to crack: nutmeg cultivation and the application of natural history between the Maluku islands and Isle de France (1750s–1780s)

2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 585-606 ◽  
Author(s):  
DORIT BRIXIUS
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Pacific Islands ◽  
Prior Experience ◽  
Soil Conditions ◽  
Critical Aspect ◽  
Complex Process ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
Colonial Botany ◽  
Circulation Of Knowledge

AbstractOne of France's colonial enterprises in the eighteenth century was to acclimatize nutmeg, native to the Maluku islands, in the French colony of Isle de France (today's Mauritius). Exploring the acclimatization of nutmeg as a practice, this paper reveals the practical challenges of transferring knowledge between Indo-Pacific islands in the second half of the eighteenth century. This essay will look at the process through which knowledge was created – including ruptures and fractures – as opposed to looking at the mere circulation of knowledge. I argue that nutmeg cultivation on Isle de France was a complex process of creolizing expertise originating from the local populations of the plants’ native islands with the horticultural knowledge of colonists, settlers, labourers and slaves living on Isle de France. In this respect, creolization describes a process of knowledge production rather than a form of knowledge. Once on Isle de France, nutmeg took root in climate and soil conditions which were different from those of its native South East Asian islands. It was cultivated by slaves and colonists who lacked prior experience with the cultivation of this particular spice. Experienced horticulturalists experimented with their own traditions. While they relied on old assumptions, they also came to question them. By examining cultivation as an applied practice, this paper argues that the creolization of knowledge was a critical aspect in French colonial botany.

Appropriations and Contestations of the Islamic Nomenclature in Muslim North India

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 76-110
Author(s):  
Jan-Peter Hartung
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
South Asia ◽  
North India ◽  
The Political ◽  
Semantic Field ◽  
Socioeconomic Groups ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Ruling Elites

This article comprises a twofold attempt: the first is to establish a semantic field that revolves around the concept of siyāsat—roughly equivalent to the political—in Muslim South Asia; the second is to trace semantic shifts in this field and to identify circumstances that may have prompted those shifts. It is argued here that the terms that constitute the semantic field of the political oscillate between two sociolinguistic traditions: a strongly Islamicate Arabic one, and a more imperially oriented Persian one. Another linguistic shift is indicated with the replacement of Persian by Urdu as the dominant literary idiom in and beyond North India since the eighteenth century. The aim is to serve only as a starting point for a more intensive discussion that brings in other materials and perspectives, thus helping to elucidate the tension between normative aspirations by ruling elites and actual political praxes by variant socioeconomic groups.

‘Mission Civilisatrice’: French Cultural Policy in the Middle East, 1860–1914

1986 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-135 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mathew Burrows
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Policy ◽  
Third Republic ◽  
The Political ◽  
Economic Aspects ◽  
French Colonialism ◽  
French Empire ◽  
The Third ◽  
Colonial Expansion ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
Cultural Components

Mission civilisatnce was one of the bywords of French colonial expansion under the Third Republic. Unfortunately until now there have been few works devoted to its study. Indeed, the notion itself has not been taken very seriously by scholars. As long ago as 1960 when Henri Brunschwig published his seminal work on French colonialism, he stated quite categorically: ‘en Angleterre la justification humanitaire l'emporta’ while ‘en France le nationalisme de 1870 domina’ even if that nationalism ‘ne s'exprima presque jamais sans une mention de cette “politique indigène” qui devait remplir les devoirs du civilisé envers des populations plus arriérées.’ Since then academics both in France and outside have tended to concentrate (in what few works have been written on French colonialism) on the political and economic aspects of the French Empire to the detriment of its cultural components.

Sacred Torrents in Modernity: German Jewish Philosophers and the Legacy of Secularization

transversal ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-44
Author(s):  
Nils Roemer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Martin Buber ◽  
Franz Rosenzweig ◽  
Critical Response ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Historical Progress ◽  
Fault Lines ◽  
German Jewish

AbstractThis article investigates the ongoing interaction between the Jewish sacred past and its modern interpreters. Jewish thinkers from the eighteenth century reclaimed these ideals instead of dismissing them. Sacred traditions and modern secular thought existed in their mutual constitutive interdependence and not in opposition. When the optimism in historical progress and faith in reason unraveled in the fin de siècle, it engendered a new critical response by Jewish historians and philosophers of the twentieth century. These critical voices emerged within the fault lines of nineteenth and early twentieth century Jewish anti-historicist responses. What separated twentieth-century Jewish thinkers such as Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Gershom Scholem from their nineteenth-century forerunners was not their embrace of religion but their critical stance toward reason and their crumbling faith in historical progress.

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