Unwomanly Woman: How Some Nineteenth-Century British Fictions Imagined Begum Samru of Sardhana

In the late eighteenth century India, Begum Samru rose from a dancing girl to become a renowned military adventuress and the ruler of a small semi-independent principality. One of the few female rulers in the country at that period, she is romanticized nowadays in popular histories and biographies. This article examines how three nineteenth-century colonial authors imagined her in their fiction. It shows that these provide counternarratives to contemporary romanticizations of the Begum. By comparing colonial depictions of her with contemporary ones, the article highlights how all such imaginings are informed by the authors’ confirmation biases. It finally argues for the need to look beyond the personal life of Begum Samru to fully appreciate the other aspects of her sterling career.

Johann Georg Zimmermann’s Therapeutics of Solitude in the German Enlightenment

This essay charts the German eighteenth-century physician and writer Johann Georg Zimmermann’s monumental work on solitude. The essay draws on but also challenges recent historiography on two counts. First, it situates Zimmermann’s discourse on solitude in the context of the early modern cultura animi tradition, in which philosophy provided a cure for a soul perceived as diseased and perturbed by passion and desire. Placed in this context, solitude comes into view not primarily as a passive state of rest and tranquillity connected to the rural life, but as active, therapeutic and exercise-oriented work on the self. Second, it argues that Zimmermann also shaped his discourse in relation to the increasingly radical late eighteenth-century exploration of subjectivity and selfhood, an exploration that reflects the emergence of the modern conception of the unique individual and autonomous self.

Love as a Source of Illness in Late Eighteenth-Century Sweden – Examples from the Life Description of Pehr Stenberg

Through the analysis of an extensive biographical source material – the life description of Swedish clergyman Pehr Stenberg – this article examines how love was framed as a cause of illness in everyday contexts in late eighteenth-century Sweden. Love was perceived as an emotion that could cause both physical and mental forms of illness. Although lovesickness has been regarded as an illness that could be used by afflicted individuals to communicate emotions, this source material indicates that illnesses caused by love were regarded as actual afflictions. In the framing of these illnesses, conceptions of female fragility were reinforced as love was perceived to have a particularly destabilising power on women.

Identity crises of ethnic groups in the colonial structure

In the late eighteenth century the colony moved on to rail, bridges, cash crops, and new laws to expand its structure. They developed cash crops centered on the Western Continuum Mountains and multiplied their business economy. Various ethnic groups were brought from the plains and settled in the mountains to create this structure. The land ethnics faced various hardships when they are adopting to the hill environment. Another dimension of the struggle faced by the tribes is to adopt and live in the mountains, by that situation British continued to conquer the south. These have been written as fictions by various writers. Here the study takes into account how the fictions of colonial-centric politics are recorded. After discussing these, theory of post colonialism forms this article.

La figura di Daniele Farsetti collezionista negli epistolari

The last setting of the Farsetti picture gallery, the least studied part of the collection owned by this Venetian family, was already attributed to Daniele. Now, two unpublished letters written by Daniele to the Bergamasque Sebastiano Muletti not only confirm his role, but also portray a figure of connoisseur of manuscripts, printed books, artistic literature and, of course, painting. It seems that two main motivations led Daniele in his purchases of paintings: their presence in artistic literature and their state of preservation. These criteria were broadly recognised in late eighteenth-century Venice.

Genealogies of “Verification”: Policing the Master–Servant Relationship in Colonial and Postcolonial India

Police verification of domestic servants has become standard practice in many cities in contemporary India. However, the regularization of work, which brings domestic servants under protective labour laws, is still a work in progress. Examining a long timespan, this article shows how policing of the servant, through practices of identification and verification, came to be institutionalized. It looks at the history of registration within the larger mechanism of regulation that emerged for domestic servants in the late eighteenth century. However, the establishment of control over servants was not linear in its subsequent development; registration as a tool of control took on different meanings within the changing ecosystem of legal provisions. In the late eighteenth century, it was discussed as being directly embedded in the logic of master–servant regulation, a template that was borrowed from English law. In the late nineteenth century, it was increasingly seen as a proxy for formal means of regulation, although this viewpoint was not universally accepted. Charting this history of changing structures of inclusion and exclusion within the law, the article argues that overt policing of servants is a manifestation of the colonial legacy, in which the identity of the servant is fused with potential criminality.