Early Empire Research Articles

The Expressions of Political Power in Panoramic and Grand Space in Ancient Roman Empire before A.D. 476

This article argues the occupation, penetration and radiation of political power in the panoramic space by explaining the typical public architecture and public space in the former Roman Empire. As the most important public space, squares are the places where emperors show their powers. So the political elites try to occupy it. In Colosseum the emperors’ supreme power is thoroughly and incisively expressed by the carefully designed space settings. The public baths with compound decorations and functions are the visual panoramic scene. In this entertaining public space political power penetrates the individual life. The grandness of public architectures in roman city are the result of powers’ ostentation. With the imperial structure the styles and functions of public architectures in roman city radiates the whole empire. With these three relations between power and space this article draws two conclusions. First the ostentatious power based on the competitive power system is the connector between the republic and early empire. The great achievements in public architecture are the fruits of it. Second the super grand territory is the result of the links between military and politics. This links lead to the competitive power system. It also explains why the roman empire is invaded by the barbarians in the west but it continues in the east. 

Promoting a New Kind of Education: Greek and Roman Philosophical Protreptic, by Daniel Markovich

Promoting a New Kind of Education: Greek and Roman Philosophical Protreptic, by Daniel Markovich

Janissaries in the making: coerced labor and chivalric masculinity in the early modern Ottoman Empire

ABSTRACT Until the late sixteenth century, the devşirme system was the main method of manning the janissary army. This was no simple conscription. It required an intense process of identity formation that transformed adolescent Christian boys into Muslim warriors fighting for Islam and the sultan. The training that the boys and young men received was composed of several aspects, including coerced labor, disciplined and harsh physical training, the learning of Turkish and Islamic practices, and a mental formation that would give them a certain perception of their manhood. This article examines these prominent components of janissary training. First, it investigates the function of coerced labor in the boys’ transformation, followed by a discussion of the centrality of structured and intensive training with weapons to become professional warriors. Second, it examines the masculine identity formed by the communal way of life in the barracks as soldiers and by notions of military prowess, brotherhood, and comrade solidarity that were strengthened through Bektashism. These dynamics are investigated through an examination of archival sources, chronicles, travelers’ writings, and poems by janissary poets.

The Institution of the Rectorship within the Higher Education System of the 19th and Early 20th Century Russian Empire: The Case of Imperial Novorossiya University

The Institution of the Rectorship within the Higher Education System of the 19th and Early 20th Century Russian Empire: The Case of Imperial Novorossiya University

Ireland and America: Empire, Revolution, and Sovereignty ed. by Patrick Griffin and Francis D. Cogliano

Reviewed by: Ireland and America: Empire, Revolution, and Sovereignty ed. by Patrick Griffin and Francis D. Cogliano Nicola Martin (bio) Ireland, Early United States, American Revolution, Empire, Imperialism, Sovereignty Ireland and America: Empire, Revolution, and Sovereignty. Edited by Patrick Griffin and Francis D. Cogliano. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2021. Pp. 356. Cloth, $49.50.) This volume is the fruit of a conference held to examine Ireland and America as places that were both shaped by, and actively shaped, empire and revolution. Patrick Griffin and Francis D. Cogliano have done an excellent job in selecting and drawing together thirteen broadly ranging, both chronologically and geographically, contributions to achieve their aim of complicating current understandings of both places. Written by renowned experts in Atlantic history, the essays employ a wide range of sources to interrogate various aspects of empire and revolution, all engaging with the central comparative of the volume to frame their studies. The essays in Part One provide direct comparisons between Ireland and America on themes including resistance to empire, alternatives to independence, and the experiences of dominant minorities in the empire. Those in Part Two broaden out to examine a number of themes related to the revolutionary era, such as mapping, religion and ideology, and post-independence readjustments, using the comparative as a framework for their investigations. In many ways Nicholas Canny's opening essay sets up that comparative, demonstrating how Irish Catholics interacted with, and were characterized by, European empires from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. Canny posits this group as one that was part of, yet also somewhat apart from, both Europe and empire. Having set the scene of Irish interactions and position in the Atlantic world, the remaining essays in Part One deal [End Page 163] with a wide range of issues that demonstrate connections and disconnects between Ireland and America. Gordon S. Wood uses revolutionary pamphlets to demonstrate how patriot polemicists used the Irish example, sometimes distorting it in the process, to set out their arguments as to why Parliament had no constitutional authority over them. Eliga Gould outlines a third way between independence and continued subordination, which Ireland achieved through its negotiated settlement of 1782 and which demonstrated a significant divergence from the American patriots, for whom such an option was no longer acceptable. Other essays in Part One are concerned with the volume's key themes of mobilization and imperial attitudes. T. H. Breen posits the British response to the Boston Tea Party and the Easter Rising, rather than the events themselves, as the spark for popular mobilization, while Matthew P. Dziennik emphasises the importance of military mobilization for reinforcing British and American attitudes toward the Irish. Trevor Burnard rounds off Part One with an examination of the development of new imperial attitudes within both the British imperial elite and the imperial populations of Jamaica and Ireland in the 1780s, demonstrating the consequences of the American Revolution throughout the British Atlantic world. In Part Two, the essays move away from direct comparison to a broader framework that draws on the earlier arguments about connections and disconnect to provide important insights to America and the wider Atlantic world before, during, and after the Revolution. Highlights include Max Edelson's study of cadastral maps to illustrate the ad hoc system the British and its imperial peoples used to allocate land throughout the empire during the seventeenth century, a system that invariably ignored Indigenous systems of land allocation. Rachel Banke's investigation of the correspondence and papers of the Earl of Bute and King George III is another important contribution. Banke examines the papers to outline the key tenets of their ideas for imperial reform, convincingly arguing that these were shaped by European influences as a result of George's "enlightened absolutism" (212) and the realities of the post-Seven Years' War context. A key theme running through several essays in Part Two is the new realities and questions of nation and statehood created by the American Revolution. Jessica Choppin Roney examines the co-opting of the Declaration of Independence by Americans who sought support for their own bids for statehood, while Annette Gordon-Reed outlines the constitutional questions arising from the revolution and...

Rumor in the Early Chinese Empires, by Lu Zongli, tr. Wee Kek Koon

This book is a translation of a monograph by Lu Zongli, a specialist in early Chinese history and thought, which originally appeared in 2011 under the Chinese title Han dai de yaoyan. A brief review such as this can hardly do justice to the author’s erudition or to this study’s empirical richness. Readers will also benefit from consulting the ‘Introduction to the English Edition’ provided by Mark Edward Lewis, another well-known authority on early Chinese history, which compares and contrasts Lu’s work with Western (anglophone and francophone) scholarship on rumours. Occasional typographical or grammatical infelicities notwithstanding, this is an admirably executed translation which consists of the author’s original preface, Lewis’s introduction, six main chapters, and a new epilogue written by the author in 2019. The basic structure of the core chapters consists of a thorough interrogation of Chinese terms used to describe a range of ‘rumor-like expressions’, followed by a presentation of specific examples within their proper historical contexts and, finally, some discussion of how such categorisations reflected and often dictated the official dispositions and responses of government authorities towards the particular types of unsanctioned speech and information under consideration.

An Empire in Disguise: The Appropriation of Pre-Existing Modes of Governance in Dutch South Asia, 1650–1800

AbstractThis article presents an analysis of the paper- and office work at two South Asian corners in the early modern Dutch empire. The article engages with current approaches to the histories of bureaucracy and empire that emphasize the lived experience of “paperwork” in order to gain a localized understanding of what constituted empire. The article focuses on the production and use of pattas, olas, and thombos in the offices of the Dutch zamindar-fiscaal in Chinsurah (Bengal) and the Dutch disāva in Jaffna (Sri Lanka). Dutch bureaucracy in these spaces was entrenched in local practices, and created through processes of layering and blending, as evidenced by material and linguistic characteristics. The deeds and registers recorded essential aspects of life such as labor, marriage, and transactions of property, and the article shows how such paperwork mattered to villagers in Chinsurah and Jaffna. The production of the deeds and registers itself could include a public spectacle, and we argue that this performative aspect of the local bureaucracy added to the perceived relevance of the paperwork. Furthermore, through an analysis of legal cases we reconstruct the use and abuse of these bureaucracies by Dutch officials and local inhabitants, which signifies a parasitical relationship that is characteristic of so many imperial and colonial spaces. Through a focus on the local bureaucratic practices, the authors shed new light on questions about the character of the Dutch empire, where things never turned out to be exactly as they appeared at first sight.

From Cosmopolitan to Vernacular in the Language Sciences: A Global History Perspective.

Sheldon Pollock's justly famous work on cosmopolitan orders and processes of vernacularization in the worlds of Latinity and Sanskrit invites questions of a comparative and global-historical character. I will raise such questions in the context of the Persianate cosmopolitan order, especially as exemplified by the early modern Ottoman Empire, focusing on the wave of vernacularizations this empire witnessed in the seventeenth-eighteenth centuries. In this process of vernacularization, new vernacular forms of philological learning appear to have played a crucial role. Building on Bourdieu's work, I will try to analyze the Ottoman cosmopolitan as a pre-modern form of linguistic domination, and vernacularization as a form of resistance. Moving beyond Bourdieu, I will be arguing for a genealogical approach that is alive to premodern non-European philological traditions, and to the historically variable relation between (philological) knowledge and power.

Negociación, lágrimas y maldiciones: La fiscalidad extraordinaria en la monarquía hispánica, 1620–1814

Negociación, lágrimas y maldiciones: La fiscalidad extraordinaria en la monarquía hispánica, 1620–1814

The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse by Valerie Cassel Oliver

Reviewed by: The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse by Valerie Cassel Oliver Sharon P. Holland The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse. By Valerie Cassel Oliver. (Richmond: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; and Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2021. Pp. xiv, 282. $45.00, ISBN 978-1-934351-19-2.) The Dirty South is the culmination of a decade-long plan at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts “to enhance and broaden the institution’s service to the public, specifically in the areas of African and African American art” (p. viii). While the depth of cultural expression for the African-descended on this side of the Atlantic spans more than four hundred years, the exhibit and its catalog explore the period from 1920 to 2020, arguably some of the most turbulent years in Black expression and experience in the United States. The South of the exhibition’s curator, Valerie Cassel Oliver, is indeed dirty, messy even. Its edges need a touch-up, but its roots stretch over that graveyard that begins with the gates through which we all return. The goals of this exhibit are ambitious, as its creators, artists (both visual and sonic), and dreamers aim to reposition our appreciation of the American South and how we frame what Cassel Oliver calls “the overall art historical narrative” (p. xiii). In her signature essay for the exhibition catalog, Cassel Oliver reminds us that the moniker “Dirty South” has been not only about a way of life, but also a way to life. This idea resonates across the spectrum of ideologies of Blackness in social justice and arts movements. In many ways, this collection of essays raises the question: why not use visual culture as a textbook for an understanding of Black history itself? Moreover, it questions what an archive is without its sonic and visual compatriots. Even as the exhibition and its catalog emphasize the materiality of African-descended cultural production, they speak to that place of spirit. Alabama-born artist Jack Whitten, for example, interpreted soul as “dematerialized matter” (p. 18). This is especially true in how the natural world comes forth in “vernacular” cultural production and “land art,” washes over, burrows under their creations. Assembled here in three sections, all of which refer to other artworks across the catalog, the essays yield little gems—like a conversation between Andrea Barnwell Brownlee and Jennifer Burris about how Beverly Buchanan’s works both “live in the world” and speak to the world that the exhibition manifests (p. 36). One of the themes that the collection mines and revisits is more subtle, but perhaps it is its most important contribution to the discursive terrain that is the South. This theme is the sense that folks living elsewhere—in the space on the other side of an inverted Mississippi, or living in what is sometimes called the eastern corridor—often discount the contributions of folks who make their living life in this place, while at the same time waxing poetic about their own connection to this place they only visit in a kind of imaginary. As one of the most important scholars of this Dirty South and its music, Regina N. Bradley, reminds us, even within that entity called hip hop, axes of difference, especially in class, abound. As scholar Kirsten Pai Buick proposes, perhaps these contestations and differences can be understood by following the colonial history of this place. She argues that the South is not necessarily an entity that is part of the matrix [End Page 191] of the United States, but an imperial power that has thought of and—as you learn if you if you live here long enough—continues to think of itself in those terms. Shifting our vision once again, the exhibition catalog’s second section traverses this early southern empire. As scholar Anthony B. Pinn notes, the relationality of life and death in modes of Black expression is manifested in the slab, a custom car that becomes “a marker of ideological commitment aesthetically articulated,” where Black expression remakes transportation, turning it from ordinary to extraordinary (p. 84). In this catalog, we not only see constant...

The World Colonization Made: The Racial Geography of Early American Empire by Brandon Mills, and: Atlantic Passages: Race, Mobility, and Liberian Colonization by Robert Murray

Reviewed by: The World Colonization Made: The Racial Geography of Early American Empire by Brandon Mills, and: Atlantic Passages: Race, Mobility, and Liberian Colonization by Robert Murray Eve Eure (bio) The World Colonization Made: The Racial Geography of Early American Empire brandon mills University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020 254 pp. Atlantic Passages: Race, Mobility, and Liberian Colonization robert murray University Press of Florida, 2021 282 pp. Studies of the American Colonization Society (ACS) remain an important site of critical inquiry into the scholarship on the African colonization movement. Brandon Mills's The World Colonization Made: The Racial Geography of Early American Empire and Robert Murray's Atlantic Passages: Race, Mobility, and Liberian Colonization offer new direction in reassessing the role of the ACS in colonization studies. Brandon Mills's book is an important addition to this robust scholarship on the African colonization movement, an effort led by the American Colonization Society to resettle African Americans in the nineteenth century. Mills demonstrates how a reconsideration of the "decades preceding the formation of the American Colonization Society" reveals that colonizationist ideas about African American resettlement were constantly shifting (5). By drawing our attention to this understudied earlier period, Mills seeks to highlight the "competing visions of the United States' settler state" and to suggest that these debates on African colonization expose how they were "both an extension and reinvention of early American empire" (9). Although Mills is interested in the history of the ACS, he is also concerned with tracing the multiple routes of colonizationist ideas as they were fastened to discussions about race, citizenship, and settlement within the Western Hemisphere. Mills draws on an impressive array of historical and literary archives such as colonizationist pamphlets, newspapers like the Cherokee Phoenix and the African Repository, and the writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Martin Delany. Mills presents this history of the colonization movement by sketching a chronological narrative of its emergence in the Revolutionary era and [End Page 234] geographic and ideological circulation in the nineteenth century. The first chapter begins with correspondence between James Monroe, the governor of Virginia, and Thomas Jefferson, president in 1801, about "whether the federal government could help his state create a colony of former slaves somewhere within the western territory of North America" (8). He demonstrates how ideas about establishing a Black settlement circulated before the formalization of the ACS in 1816 and that proposals for a Black colony were in response to fears of slave rebellions and ongoing wars with Indigenous nations. Highlighting the numerous pamphlets written between 1796 and 1805 on the subject of a Black colony in the US, Mills explores a variety of colonizationist pamphlets (authored by St. George Tucker, Moses Fisk, John Parrish, William Thornton, and Lewis Dupré) that imagined not only western territories but also Louisiana as a possible place for a Black settlement. By the mid-1810s, however, colonizationists no longer envisioned a Black colony within North America but in Africa. In one particularly fascinating section titled, "Preventing an 'African Tecumseh,'" Mills suggests that colonizationists looked to Africa because they "viewed African Americans' aspirations for sovereignty within North America as a dangerous prospect when paired with the potential collaboration of Indian allies" (28). What emerges in this discussion is an illuminating reading of the interplay between Native resistance movements, Black freedom, African colonization, and US empire. The World Colonization Made emphasizes the language of "failure" to call attention to the significance of the evolution of ideas on African colonization to later proposals on Black settlements in Africa. Such a framework enables Mills to broaden the historical archive on the colonization movement to include failed attempts to establish an African colony in North America and Africa. The World Colonization Made persuasively suggests that what counts as failure in some respects are the unrealized aspirations of the aforementioned authors of pre-ACS pamphlets. In a footnote, Mills observes that historians have often described these pre-ACS documents as "incoherent and unsuccessful precursors to the formidable organization that would coalesce behind African colonization" (203–4). Instead, Mills argues that they should be considered "an incipient movement" (43). He examines Paul Cuffe's efforts to create a Black settlement in Sierra Leone to...

ЗАРОЖДЕНИЕ РЕКЛАМЫ В РОССИЙСКОЙ ПРОВИНЦИИ (НА ПРИМЕРЕ КУПЕЧЕСКИХ ОБЪЯВЛЕНИЙ В «ВОЛОГОДСКИХ ГУБЕРНСКИХ ВЕДОМОСТЯХ» ВО ВТОРОЙ ТРЕТИ XIX в.)

In the 19th — early 20th centuries Russian Empire the main advertising load fell precisely on periodicals, which determines the importance of advertisements in the periodicals as a source on the history of regional entrepreneurship and trade. Researchers have repeatedly emphasized the significant role of a provincial gazette as an advertising medium. The article considers advertisements published by merchants in the Vologda Provincial Gazette from the first issue in 1838 to 1860. The dynamics of the number of advertisements demonstrates, first, a gradual increase in the importance of the Gazette as a regional mass media and the understanding of this trend by merchants; second, a general intensification of the role of advertising in the field of entrepreneurship. The geography of advertisements correctly reflects the system of trade relations in the province. The subject matter of the ads was quite diverse (haberdashery, printed materials, raw materials, foodstuffs, household goods) and covered mainly elite groups of goods, although agricultural raw materials accounted for a significant share of the advertising objects. An analysis of the ads genre specificity indicates the predominance of narrative ones; the incentive function largely begins to manifest itself in the texts of the 1850s. Graphic design of advertisements in the period under review can be already encountered, but it is not widespread.

:The World Colonization Made: The Racial Geography of Early American Empire

:<i>The World Colonization Made: The Racial Geography of Early American Empire</i>

Rock Art and Early Cultural Dynamics in Eastern Mongolia

Despite playing a key role in the history and prehistory of human societies in eastern Eurasia, the archaeological record of eastern Mongolia—particularly its rich tradition of rock art and petroglyphs—has been poorly integrated into western archaeological literature. We summarize a large body of recent scholarship from Mongolia’s three eastern provinces, Khentii, Sukhbaatar, and Dornod, to identify evidence of cultural activity in the region stretching from the Palaeolithic through the historic era. Rock art imagery from Eastern Mongolia reveals key insights into the region’s under-investigated archaeological record, including the co-occurrence of humans with megafauna such as the wooly rhinocerous and mammoth during the last Ice Age, occupation of the region by pre-pastoral cultures during the Holocene, and important pulses of activity associated with early pastoral cultures and empires during the Late Bronze and Iron Ages. Future analysis of these sites promises to help us understand the murkiest chapters in the region’s past.

‘Europeans’ in the Early Qing Empire

‘Europeans’ in the Early Qing Empire

Pursuing the Past: Hunting in Józef Weyssenhoff’s The Sable and the Girl

The article investigates Józef Weyssenhoff’s novel The Sable and the Girl (Polish: Soból i panna) published in 1911. The name of its author is rarely mentioned when discussing the Polish literature of the late 19th and early 20th century. Most literary critics agree, however, that the signature feature in Weyssenhoff’s works is his poetic descriptions of nature and hunting, especially in aforementioned work. The article analyses the interplay of Lithuanian and Polish cultures in this text as well as its Lithuanian literary geography. The question is raised as to what cultural and literary meanings might have been concentrated in the novel at the turn of the 20th century, and what Polish-Lithuanian cultural connections were revealed due to it. The article introduction offers a brief overview of the changes in depicting hunting in Western literature and cultural tradition, and considers to what extent those insights are still valid when analysing the works of various authors attributed to and impacted by the legacy of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The article further traces the competing plots of love and hunting in Weyssenhoff’s novel, and the writer’s ambition to employ the symbol of the lost world – hunting. A combination of extratextual references, internal textual relations, and detectable intertexts has been employed to interpret the novel; therefore, when delving into the development of the narrative, none of the theories (e.g., intertextuality) is clearly dominant. When discussing The Sable and the Girl in the Lithuanian cultural field, the historical contexts of the early 20th century Russian Empire, the intertexts of Polish literary tradition as well as the concept of hunting and a colonial look at the sociocultural environment where the narrative is developed remain of similar significance.

Between field observations, notes and knowledge

This article discusses M. A. Castrén’s (1803‒1852) ethnographic notes and lectures on Samoyed peoples as part of the development of ethnography and Arctic research in the early 19th-century Russian Empire. Castrén produced several types of texts based on his two Russian expeditions, including travel narratives, letters, linguistic transcriptions and ethnographic notes. In addition, he gave lectures about the peoples he studied. The article describes the types of data Castrén collected, the way he organized it and subsequently presented to academic audiences. The academic and societal background of Castrén’s ethnography illustrated in the article, relates him to A. J. Sjögren and to the Imperial Russian and European development of ethnography. It is argued that the tensions between nationalistic aims and broader academic discussions that split Russian discussions over ethnography represented a fruitful context for imperial subjects, such as Castrén.

Name Recall in the Synoptic Gospels

AbstractOnomastic congruence (a feature defined in this article) is characteristic of historiographic biographies from the Early Empire. The Synoptic Gospels display onomastic congruence, as well as conservatism in their treatment of names. The preservation of names, especially those centred around key roles and events, suggests that some names may have been preserved in the oral archives of early Christian communities to footnote living eyewitness sources, paralleling historiographical situations.

Early Cinema in Lithuania: The Emergence of a Cultural Tradition

Summary Leaning on the notions of transnationalism of cinema or Cinema of Small States, this article sets out to evaluate early cinema in the Northwestern Krai of the late 1800s–early 1900s Russian Empire and the region’s largest city, Vilnius, thematically, rather than chronologically, through the layers of the formation of film culture and the transformation of cinema into an aesthetic object. Such an approach presents a culturally new possibility of finding commonalities, allowing one to see early cinema in the provinces not necessarily as an always-late phenomenon that highlights the provinciality of the provinces, but on the contrary, as part of the overall European film tradition. This is argued from several aspects. Firstly, by showing how the perception of cinema has changed (and how this change coincided with Western trends) from cinema of attractions to narrative cinema; and secondly, by identifying changes in the repertoire of cinemas and in the established preferences of the early cinema audiences.

&lt;i&gt;New Qing History&lt;/i&gt; School: The Manchu Turn in American Historiography

The article gives a detailed overview of modern trends in the American Manchu studies. Special attention is given to theNew Qing History historiographic school, which during the 1980s and 1990s criticized the Sinicization theory on entirely new levels of theorizing during the 1980s and the 1990s. Despite existing differences in views, the experts share common approaches to the Qing studies: importance of the Manchu sources, comparison of the Qing dynasty with the other Early Modern empires of Eurasia, refusal to identify the Manchu regime with China and considering China only as one of the parts of the Empire, close attention to the identities issue in the Qing empire. This article analyzes the ideas of such prominent American experts in Manchu studies as Pamela Kyle Crossley and Mark C. Elliott, as well as some concepts of their teachers and predecessors. The central position of theNew Qing Historyschool is a statement of the importance of the Manchu factor in the functioning of the Qing state. The article also gives the critical response of supporters of the Sinicization theory to the theses prevailing among the American scholars. They express doubts about the dichotomy claimed by the New Qing History scholars between Manchu and Chinese identities. In their opinion, the process of sinicization includes not only Chinese but also other minor forms of identities, so the Manchus could preserve their own identity but still think of themselves as part of the Chinese civilization. Such criticism undoubtedly has common points with the modern Chinese political concept of the «Chinese family of the united nations». The author believes both approaches should be taken into consideration when researching Manchu and Chinese sources as part of the Qing studies.