Early 1840s Research Articles

“Half-Read Wisdom”: Yeats’s Impressionistic Partial Reading of Tagore

W. B. Yeats’s role in promoting Rabindranath Tagore in the West and his laudatory introduction to Tagore’s lyrical volume Gitanjali (1912) have attracted diverse responses from critics. Some have viewed it as a sincere effort by a fellow poet while others criticize him for Orientalizing the Bengali poet. Yeats himself was aware that he could only grasp half of the beauty and power of Tagore’s works given his inability to read Bengali and appreciate the cultural nuances embedded in the lyrics. This put him in the position of an awe-struck but baffled Westerner responding to the exotic charm of an alien Oriental culture. Nevertheless, his mystical orientation allowed him to have an empathic and intuitive understanding of Tagore’s soulful renditions. Due to such complexities, neither a political nor a mystical-spiritual approach does justice to Yeats’s framing of Tagore in the early 1910s and beyond. By combining both these approaches, this essay intends to look at them as enabling rather disabling factors. The two sections of the essay probe into the cultural-political and the mystical-esthetic dimensions of Yeats’s half or partial reading of Tagore’s works with a view to offering a holistic understanding of the matter.

Dialect levelling and merchant writing in Renaissance Italy

Abstract This article aims to assess the extent to which merchant language in Renaissance Italy can be said to have undergone a process of dialect levelling. Merchant letters in the Italian context are characterised by their high degree of verb allomorphy, both verbal and nominal. Previous investigations have shown that this degree of allomorphy is much more present in merchant texts than in other text genres immediately preceding codification in the 1500s. This article continues this line of research, showing how a process of dialect levelling occurs in a corpus of merchant writing sent from Milan in the late 1300s and early 1400s. Specifically, it focuses on 1pl. verb endings and the presence of voicing in past participles to show that Tuscan linguistic items infiltrated and then spread into neighbouring dialectal areas, such as Gallo-Italian, that is typologically distinct from Tuscan. Since this process of levelling was occurring at the same time as literary Tuscan was spreading, sometimes mediated also by merchants, the article also discusses these issues. While focus is placed on the contribution of merchant language in Renaissance Italy, the article can be seen as a case-study as evidence of language evolution ‘from below’. Overall, it argues that historical sociolinguistics provide powerful tools which help to show the various processes identified during standardization.

From Popularity to Suppression: Cockfighting and English Society c.1730 to the 1835 Cruelty to Animals Act

ABSTRACT The reasons for cockfighting's relatively successful legal suppression by Act of Parliament in 1835 were complex, subtle and nuanced. This study begins by placing cockfighting's social and cultural functioning across the period from c. 1750 to 1835 in far clearer historical context, stressing the centrality of wagering. During this period, cocking had a key place in the cultural wars that increasingly focused on so called ‘blood sports' and animal-human relationships. Opposition to cockfighting came from two directions: concerns about animal suffering and the behaviour of attenders. There was a decline in plebeian cockfight reportage after 1800 but cockfighting continued to enjoy support amongst some groups, most importantly within the elite, up to and beyond 1835. There was increased humanitarian concern about cocks’ treatment, although such concerns were still not widely accepted. The success of reformers was less due to worries about cruelty to animals per se, than to their ability to link cockfighting to human behaviour and notions of moral degeneration such as gambling or drinking. Increased attacks on these aspects from the 1770s led by local magistrates, more pressure on Parliament from the 1820s, and wider social changes in the early 1830s, finally led to the Act.

Klassisia muotoja persoonallisin kääntein: Erik Tulindbergin jousikvartetot op. 1 ja op. 2

This article concerns the String Quartets of Erik Tulindberg (1761–1814), who was the first known Finnish composer. Tulindberg was musically active primarily in the late 1770s and early 1780s, when he was studying at the Royal Academy of Turku (Kunglika Akademien i Åbo). He was respected as a skilful violinist and a chamber musician, playing in the Academy’s orchestra on ceremonial occasions and giving public concerts. Tulindberg’s compositional oeuvre comprises two Violin Concertos, six String Quartets and a few works for solo violin. The corpus of Tulindberg’s String Quartets is approached from two perspectives, namely conventional strategies of the Classical style on one hand, and Tulindberg’s recurrent choices as attributes of his personal musical language on the other. Widely used analytical tools are applied in studying the corpus, and the Quartets are compared with certain works that originate in the same period and reside in Tulindberg’s archive. The theoretical framework includes writings that focus specifically on describing the compositional strategies used in Classical and Pre-Classical music, the authors including James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy, Graham Hunt, William Caplin, Poundie Burstein and Danuta Mirka, among others. The discussion covers 1) the overall structure, the key design and cadences in the opening movements, all of which are in sonata form; 2) the essential harmonic traits; and 3) surface characteristics and expressive means such as topics, melodic figuration and instrumental writing. The analysis reveals that Tulindberg adopted the commonly used strategies and main expressive means of the Classical style. The attributes of his musical language include traits such as the constant use of extended modal mixture, enthusiasm for a varied rondo-form and frequent violoncello solos in the upper register. Although the String Quartets are conventional in structure, each one is individual in its construction. The stylistic correspondence between the works and those of composers such as Joseph Haydn, Luigi Boccherini and Ignace Pleyel, shows his thorough understanding of the music written by his contemporaries.

The Malacca dilemma of the Raj: the Indian Uprising of 1857, the Second Opium War, and the British proposal of a Kra passage

Abstract In the late 1850s and early 1860s, the idea of building a passage through the Isthmus of Kra in the Malay Peninsula was hotly debated amongst British officials, merchants, and investors. This study finds that the British East India Company's rule over the Straits of Malacca had been a dilemma for itself and British merchants in China. The Second Opium War and the Indian Revolt of 1857 exacerbated the dilemma and pushed some British policymakers and investors to seek an alternative route between India and China. The proposal of the Kra passage was the response and solution to the Malacca dilemma. In historicising the Kra passage proposal and putting it in the context of the British empire's simultaneous crises in Asia in the mid-nineteenth century, the case of the proposed Kra passage reveals the complex relations between different actors within the British empire and the challenges of integrating multiple imperial interests into a British world system

The 1847 de Salis Experiment and Chinese Indentured Labour in Colonial Australia

In 1847 a pastoralist in southern New South Wales experimented with the use of indentured Chinese labourers. This article reveals the identity of this pastoralist to be Leopold Fane de Salis and examines his use of indentured Chinese labourers in his employ in the late 1840s and early 1850s. We argue that de Salis’ initial sourcing of Chinese labour illuminates the importance of local experimentation and transnational colonial trading networks in the iterative development of those larger indentured migration schemes which soon followed. Further, we interrogate the public representation of this experiment by analysing the experience of Chinese labourers as revealed through de Salis’ station ledgers.

Lully’s music in northern Europe: evidence of early circulation in Swedish libraries

Abstract At Jean-Baptiste Lully’s death in 1687, music from his stage works was already circulating within and outside France, and was used and praised by ‘all connoisseurs’ in Europe (according to Dutch music publisher Amédée Le Chevalier). This was at a point when many of Lully’s works were still not printed and the Parisian music dealers had not yet started their business with his music. Surviving manuscript sources from the dissemination of Lully’s music before his death are few and fragmentary and have sometimes survived at a geographical distance from Paris. This article investigates a handful of previously unconsidered music sources, copied or printed in France in the 1670s and early 1680s, which were acquired by various members of northern aristocratic families and have survived in Swedish libraries. Viewed as a whole, these seemingly disparate sources can throw light on the details of the early circulation of Lully’s music, as well as on musical practices of the elites in late 17th-century Europe.

William Paulet Carey and Irish Caricature, 1780–92

Though best known for his involvement with the United Irishmen and his brief career as a newspaper editor, William Paulet Carey (1768–1848) was one of the first, and most interesting practitioners of graphic satire in Ireland during its inaugural phase. Having demonstrated his potential with an artistically indifferent caricature of the Gordon Riots in 1780, he acquired a fuller knowledge of the craft engraving copy plates for William Allen, then Dublin’s primary print seller. Subsequently, Carey sought, unsuccessfully, to make his mark in London in 1783–84, though he did produce a number of distinctive engravings in the Whig cause. Back in Dublin, he resumed his relationship with William Allen, in the course of which he produced a series of superior copies of William Bunbury’s single sheets and smaller engravings for a Dublin edition of the Geoffrey Gambado’s Annals of Horsemanship . Carey possessed strong political opinions, and having manifested his unease at the energizing of Irish conservativism with caricatures critical of the advocates of ‘Protestant Ascendancy’ in 1786–87, he prioritized literary satire until the early 1790s when he joined the United Irishmen and established a radical newspaper. However, his failure, other than on one occasion, to use his artistic skills in the radical cause deprived Irish radicalism of a potentially important means of promoting their cause.

‘Contra ius gentium’: The Mendoza-Drake Dispute and English Legal Arguments for Empire, 1580–1585

ABSTRACT To what extent did Francis Drake’s circumnavigation of the globe influence empire formation in the late sixteenth century? In analyzing diplomatic letters of correspondence from the State Papers, this investigation reveals that Drake’s piratical activities, claims of English sovereignty, and the ensuing diplomatic controversy with the Spanish ambassador, Bernardino de Mendoza, forced the English Crown to use legal arguments rooted in the ius gentium (law of nations) and natural law to justify expansion into the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. During the dispute, both Mendoza and the English Crown variously invoked natural law and the law of nations to argue for justice and friendship. In testing these legal arguments, the Crown demonstrated that it had the capacity to counter Spanish claims for empire, which subsequently influenced imperial propagandists like Richard Hakluyt to promote English expansionism in natural law and ius gentium terms. In turn, the English Crown’s newfound confidence from the dispute manifested in its turn to reason of state and self-preservationist thinking in its international relations in the early 1580s, shortly before the outbreak of the Anglo-Spanish War (1585–1604). The dispute thus facilitated an ideology for empire rooted in natural law and the law of nations in the sixteenth century.

“Divide According to Sharīʿa”: The Islamic Inheritance System in the Russian Empire

Abstract Until the end of the imperial period, the Volga-Ural Muslim communities in the Russian empire practiced several methods of intergenerational property transfer, such as waṣiyyat (bequest), hiba (gift), ṣulḥ/takhāruj (peaceful settlement) and the “science of the shares” (ʿilm al-farāʾiḍ). The Volga-Ural Muslims considered them all as legitimate ways of property division according to Islamic law (sharīʿa). However, a significant shift occurred in the early 1820s when the Russian imperial state confirmed the Orenburg Muslim Spiritual Assembly as the court of appeal for family and inheritance matters. Subsequently, Volga-Ural Muslims began to petition the oa, seeking a reconsideration of their inheritance divisions, specifically requesting a division “according to sharīʿa”. By the end of the nineteenth century, most of these petitions resulted in divisions based on the science of the shares. I argue that the oa served as an extra-communal venue where Muslims could challenge intra-familial or communal methods of inheritance division, and request divisions based on the science of the shares.

INTRODUCTION OF THE MILITARY-DISTRICT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM ON BELARUSIAN LANDS IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE 1850s – EARLY 1860s

This article examines a wide range of issues related to the specifics of the preparation and implementation of military reform in the Belarusian lands. The work identifies the main directions of activity of military department officials to develop options for improving the military command and control system. During the research, an in-depth analysis of the reasons that led to changes in government policy in the field of military control in the region was carried out. In chronological order, through the prism of normative legal acts, the processes of formation and legislative registration of district management institutions in the region are shown. Factors that had a negative impact on the formation of the district management structure were identified. The organizational measures of the War Ministry aimed at improving the structure of the Vilna Military District are shown. It is noted that the implementation of measures to create a military district system on Belarusian lands in the early 1860s. was carried out in a difficult international and socio-political situation associated with the consequences of the Crimean War and anti-government protests. Extraordinary circum-stances determined the repressive and punitive nature of its structure and powers. At the same time, along with general features, in the process of forming the Vilna Military District, local features emerged that reflected the level of military threats in the region. The results and conclusions of the study can be used in the preparation of textbooks, lectures and special courses on national and military history for students and cadets of higher educational institutions of the Republic of Belarus.

Monumental Ephemera: British Sculpture in the Arctic, Icebergs in London, an Inuit Map

Abstract The Arctic fascinated Londoners in the nineteenth century in panoramas, paintings and sculptures, voyage narratives and—tragically—transplanted Inuit. What has not been fully examined are the little-known amateur ‘snow sculptures’ of Britannia and other imperial figures made on a monumental scale in the Arctic in the early 1850s, when hundreds of sailors were searching for the lost 1845 Franklin expedition. Comparable with this crossing in sculpture is the amalgamation in one Parliamentary chart of an anonymous Inuk’s drawing of Franklin’s ships in the ice with a rendering of the area approved by the Admiralty. While these chiasmic interactions map a circuit of exchange, they also lack a centre. The most conspicuous absence in the Arctic was John Franklin, his crew and his two recently-recovered ships. In England, what was never ‘fixed’ was the idea of the Arctic.

Fried. Krupp’s ‘Chinese Trade’ prior to the First World War, 1895–1914

Abstract The German arms company Fried. Krupp exported weapons and military material to China beginning in the early 1870s. It achieved marked success during the 1880s and 1890s. The Sino-Japanese War (1894/95) represented an important milestone for the company’s ‘Chinese trade’. Because the Chinese government had to pay war reparations to Japan, it did not have the funds for purchasing weapons. As a result, not even the posting of German advisors to China saw particularly positive results. Following the Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901), an embargo on the import of weapons to China was declared. After the embargo was revoked in 1903, the German manufacturer never again achieved the results it had attained in 1884 and 1894. The Germans were negatively affected by the rise of Japanese influence in China following Japan’s victory in its war with Russia. Additionally, some of China’s plans were not in line with Krupp’s capabilities. The Essen company’s managers, for example, considered entirely unrealistic China’s plan to form thirty-six new divisions equipped with modern weapons, which Krupp would supply, by funding the construction of a huge munitions factory in Central China. Although China remained a major purchaser primarily of Krupp’s guns until the First World War, it was no longer one of its main customers. The outbreak of the First World War marked an end to Krupp’s activities in China and the entire Far East.

STUDENT YEARS OF ACADEMICIAN P.G. VINOGRADOFF

The article reveals the importance of the period of student studies at Moscow University for the future career of the Russian and British historian Pavel Gavrilovich Vinogradoff (1854–1925), who became a member of Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society of London. The research source base was made up of offi cial documents from Moscow University collection and ego-documents, i.e. correspondence, diaries and memoirs. The results are presented in the form of a “thick description”, revealing the culture of higher education in the Russian Empire in the early 1870s. Home training under the guidance of his father, as well as graduation from the 4th men’s gymnasium in Moscow with a gold medal became a reliable basis for Pavel Vinogradoff ’s mastery of the university course at the Department of History and Philology at Moscow University. The author characterizes not only the successes in the study of individual disciplines, but also the infl uence of professors, and most importantly, practices of their educational activities and relationships. He was especially influenced by those professors who were active in research — S.M. Solovyov, F.I. Buslaev, and, especially, V.I. Guerrier, whose disciple Pavel Vinogradoff became from the first year of his study. His scientifi c interests were formed under Guerrier’s infl uence. The system of lecture courses and the professor’s seminars recently introduced into the practice of teaching became a model to be perfected by the student, later himself a professor at Moscow University. N.I. Storozhenko’s home meetings were renewed by P.G. Vinogradoff in the early 1890s and created the basis for the Historical Society at Moscow University. In the author’s opinion, it was the mastery of educational practices, rather than evaluative indicators of success in certain disciplines that were crucial to the success of Vinogradoff ’s future career. Diverging from his teacher’s theoretical and methodological views on the principles of studying the past, nevertheless he, as a successor of Guerrier’s work, improved the methods of the scientific and pedagogical school of Moscow University’s “world historians”.

“There Is No Stopping in Kotlin’s Work”: A.D. Menshikov and Stone Construction on Kotlin in the Early 1720s

“There Is No Stopping in Kotlin’s Work”: A.D. Menshikov and Stone Construction on Kotlin in the Early 1720s

European Smalt in 17th-Century Japan: Porcelain Decoration and Sacred Art

Japanese art tradition, contrary to the case of China, is characterized by an efficient and continued, although mostly undocumented, use of smalt from the late 16th century onward. Recent studies have successfully identified this pigment, the cobalt-colored glass that spread throughout the Old Continent during the Renaissance period, as the coloring agent employed for overglaze-blue enameling on Japanese porcelains produced at the kilns of Arita (the porcelain production center of Japan) from the early 1640s until the 20th century. Fragmentary evidence of the use of smalt in Japanese sacred art has also been reported, yet its earliest incorporation into such a type of traditional art form could not be identified. In order to resolve this crucial issue, portable EDXRF was employed for the non-destructive analyses of Japanese porcelains and sacred images bearing blue decoration. Scientific analysis allowed, for the first time ever, to establish a clear timeline of smalt use. Furthermore, this evidence and the literature data both agree, leading to the identification of the origin of the blue material used on both art productions.

Cultural and Linguistic Specifics of a 19th Century Manuscript from the National Library “Ivan Vazov” in Plovdiv

The present article explores a short Bulgarian manuscript preserved in the National Library “Ivan Vazov”. It dates back to the early 1830s and contains 12 pages. Eleven of them are written in Turkish with Cyrillic script and includes over 100 Turkish prov-erbs. The last 12th page contains a marginal note that is written in Bulgarian. The manuscript precedes the appearance of the first editions of printed books in Turkish with Cyrillic script in the early 1840s and is one of the earliest written representations of 19th century Bulgarian-Turkish bilingualism. Several problems are addressed in the article – the authorship and exact date of the manuscript, the specifics of the lan-guage, structure and content of proverbs.

Felix Klein’s early contributions to anschauliche Geometrie

Between 1873 and 1876, Felix Klein published a series of papers that he later placed under the rubric anschauliche Geometrie in the second volume of his collected works (1922). The present study attempts not only to follow the course of this work, but also to place it in a larger historical context. Methodologically, Klein’s approach had roots in Poncelet’s principle of continuity, though the more immediate influences on him came from his teachers, Plücker and Clebsch. In the 1860s, Clebsch reworked some of the central ideas in Riemann’s theory of Abelian functions to obtain complicated results for systems of algebraic curves, most published earlier by Hesse and Steiner. These findings played a major role in enumerative geometry, whereas Plücker’s work had a strongly qualitative character that imbued Klein’s early studies. A leitmotif in these works can be seen in the interplay between real curves and surfaces as reflected by their transformational properties. During the early 1870s, Klein and Zeuthen began to explore the possibility of deriving all possible forms for real cubic surfaces as well as quartic curves. They did so using continuity methods reminiscent of Poncelet’s earlier approach. Both authors also relied on visual arguments, which Klein would later advance under the banner of intuitive geometry (anschauliche Geometrie).

Subjective well-being and inequality in Spain’s decline

AbstractThe economic decline of Early Modern Spain offers an opportunity to explore how it affected perceptions of welfare and inequality. We provide an answer based on the Bull of the Crusade, an inexpensive alms collected by the Hispanic Monarchy and massively purchased by a highly religious population that believed in its spiritual benefits. The purchase of the bull represented a public practice of religion that captured people’s religiosity and belief in the afterlife and had a positive impact on their spiritual well-being. We find that our measure of spiritual well-being—the ratio of (normalized) bulls sold to their recipients (the population aged 12 and above)—deteriorated in the late 1570s and 1580s and the 1640s but improved during the 1670s, while subjective inequality—the ratio between the number of bulls sold to those who deemed themselves affluent and those sold to common individuals—increased from 1600–1640 and fell in the 1580s and early 1590s and the 1670s. Hence, improving (deteriorating) subjective well-being was accompanied by declining (improving) subjective inequality through the seventeenth century.

Faith, Knowledge, and the Ausgang of Classical German Philosophy: Jacobi, Hegel, Feuerbach

This article revisits Feuerbach’s “break with speculation” in the early 1840s in light of issues raised by the original Pantheism Controversy, initiated in 1785 by the publication of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi’s Letters on the Doctrine of Spinoza. The article first describes the concerns underlying Jacobi’s repudiation of Spinozism, and rationalism more generally, in favor of a personalistic theism that disclaims the possibility of philosophical knowledge of God. It goes on to reconstruct Hegel’s alternative to Jacobi’s famous salto mortale before considering how Feuerbach’s critique of Hegel’s philosophy of religion, as well as the personalism of the so-called Positive Philosophy (inspired by the late Schelling), was influenced by both Spinoza and Jacobi in ways that have not yet received sufficient attention.