Early Republican Research Articles

Debt, Land, and Labor in the Early Republican Economy

Debt, Land, and Labor in the Early Republican Economy

Evolution of Modern Housing in Turkey Since Early Republican Period as Part of Socio-Cultural Relation: Case of Izmit

Culture being one of the basic subjects of social and cultural anthropology has been a concept used to search and understand the society and their lives by philosophers, anthropologists, ethnologists and people from many other disciplines. Culture defined as everything created by humankind in contrast to the things created by nature according to Marx, can be defined with a more common expression as a whole that includes knowledge, faith, art, morals, law, tradition and other capability and habits acquired by human as a member of the society. The houses, have showed some varieties with the cultural effects changed throughout time and have complied with the current relations system of the society.Anatolia has hosted many different civilizations down the ages and has been a rich geography where cultures have been synthesized by being under the effect of different cultures. However, people and their needs changed through time have caused houses to differentiate in spatial order, form and usage. Life styles and needs changed through time have caused traditional house types to give space to modern culture and modern houses suitable to lives. Modern house types applied with the new technology and new spatial fiction have reached the present day by evolving while they comply with the life in 20th and 21st cc.Within the scope of the study, house improvement process of Kocaeli province in the west part of Anatolia from the early republican period to today, will be evaluated in the context of socio-cultural relation.

The Traveling Life of John Littlejohn: Methodism, Mobility, and Social Exchange from Revolutionary Virginia to Early Republican Kentucky

Word of the preacher's arrival in Louisville preceded him. To his surprise as he stepped onto the city's riverside docks, he was greeted by an enslaved woman, who beseeched him to visit her ailing mistress. John Littlejohn was a longtime Methodist preacher, but not in Kentucky. He had lived the last four decades in Virginia's Northern Neck, but now, in the autumn of 1818, he was migrating with his family to Kentucky. While sojourning in Louisville, waiting to take up a farm in the country, Littlejohn found his talents as a preacher quickly put to use in the local Methodist society. He presided at sickbeds, funerals, prayer gatherings, and class meetings on top of preaching several times per week. In turn, he benefited from the favors of friends in town. A former Virginia houseguest would take no payment for stabling the horses the preacher had sent ahead. Others bestowed gifts of firewood to warm his family against the chill October nights. Rather than relying on kinship, wealth, or elite status, Littlejohn exploited exchanges to ease his migration. (1) He accessed a network of resources to acquire housing, employment, and property--the critical dimensions of settlement in the trans-Appalachian West. Americans have long understood that the westward movement uprooted people from the communities where they had passed most of their lives but might never see again after crossing the Appalachians. But in recent years historians have told an alternative migration story, one that describes connection as much as separation. The case of John Littlejohn allows us to detail that narrative's social mechanisms, which he developed in the Revolutionary Chesapeake and carried to early republican Kentucky. At the center was religion. (2) The American Revolution profoundly influenced Americans' mobility and their religious lives. Littlejohn experienced these changes intimately through the full course of his years. (3) He was one of thousands of migrants who traveled the Ohio River to Louisville in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. (4) Not all white westward settlers achieved prosperity, but those who did relied on social resources. Through religious associations, evangelicals maintained old bonds while creating new ones with strangers in frontier communities. Littlejohn's social network was Methodist, and it was founded on his work as a circuit rider. Despite the Methodist itinerancy's importance as a religious institution in early America, historians have only occasionally recognized the important resources it provided individuals/ Instead, scholars describe Methodist itinerancy as a brief but disorienting experience for young men during the years of the early American republic. As this story goes, older preachers recruited poor and middling young men into an ecclesiastical system that demanded much personal sacrifice. The rigors of constant travel wore on circuit riders' minds and bodies, resulting in fatigue, emotional stress, and frequent early location (that is, retirement from the itinerancy). The worst cases ended in debility, insanity, or death. (6) This depiction, however, ignores important evidence. The Methodist itinerancy indeed presented individual and social challenges, especially when coupled with the disruptions of migration and warfare during the era, but Methodist sources amplify those challenges to the point of distortion. When historians have credited the benefits of itinerancy, it has been in the context of the formal bureaucratic development of the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC) in the middle and late nineteenth century. (7) However, the social benefits of itinerancy originated in the personal relationships of evangelical social networks, an organizational development that was far older than the popular evangelical churches that thrived in America during the First and Second Great Awakenings. (8) John Littlejohn's journal allows us to construct a different model of the worldly significance of itinerancy. …

Education In early republican period: Legitimacy of the new regime and “nation manners”

In 1923 with the proclamation of the Republic began a new era. One of the main issues of this period has been to provide the legitimacy of the new regime. Corresponds to the specified purpose education has tried to take advantage of the functional direction. The secular nature of the winning educational institutions, described the principles of the new regime and the real salvation were stated to be realized by obedience to political power and these principles. In this way, both have tried to create a Turkish nation and commitment to the political power of the shaped by a "manners" the emphasis is prominent.Keywords: Education, Early Republican Period, National Education, The New Regime.

The People’s Houses’ Educational Cinema Repertoire: Cinema, Education, Propaganda during the Early Republican Turkey (1923-1945)

Halkevleri’nde Eğitici Sinema Repertuarı, 1923-1945 yıllarında Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi’nin (CHP) Kemalist ideolojiyi desteklemek için Halkevleri’nde başlattığı eğitici/öğretici ve propaganda amaçlı film gösterimlerinin izini sürer. Makalenin çıkış noktası, Halkevleri’nde 1932’de filizlenen, devlet güdümlü sinema girişimini tarihselleştirmektir. Sözü geçen haber ve seyahat filmlerinin, eğitici/öğretici filmlerin ve diğer belgesellerin çoğu CHP’nin bizzat çektirdiği veya kiraladığı filmlerdir. Bu çalışmanın temelde iki önemli iddiası bulunuyor: Birincisi siyasal ve resmi elit, öncelikle yetişkinleri hedef alarak eğitici/öğretici filmler aracılığıyla (i) ulusal kimlik inşasını, (ii) siyasal liderlerin meşruiyetini ve (iii) Kemalist ideolojiyi yaymayı ve güçlendirmeyi hedeflemiştir. Bu bağlamda Halkevleri kültürel boyutta, Louis Althusser’in tarif ettiği “devletin ideolojik aygıtı” haline gelmiş ve “somut bireylerin birer özne” olarak egemen siyasal görüşü benimsemelerinde rol oynamıştır. İkincisi Halkevleri, özel sinema salonları dışında, sinema için yeni bir kamusal alan oluşturmuştur. Bu araştırmanın ilk bölümünde, tarihsel altyapıyı oluşturmak için Türkiye’deki sinemalar, filmler ve seyirciler çağdaşlarıyla karşılaştırılarak değerlendiriliyor. Bu çalışma, arşiv belgelerine dayalı, niceliksel ve niteliksel temsili örneklemlerle oluşturulan bir tarihsel anlatı denemesidir. Devlet tutanakları, önergeler, yazışmalar ve kararnamelerden derlenen veriler dışında, mevcut birkaç film incelenmektedir. Filmlerin seyirci tarafından alımlanması ve film yapımının tekniği ise yazıya dahil edilmemektedir.

"We Want to Be Recorded": Market Town Elites and Town Literature in Late Qing and Early Republican Jiangnan

"We Want to Be Recorded": Market Town Elites and Town Literature in Late Qing and Early Republican Jiangnan

Agency, the Idea of Agency, and the Problem of Mediation in America's God and Secularism in Antebellum America

A common faith swept the country. According to Mark Noll's now-famous thesis, early republican and antebellum America was characterized by an ideological synthesis of evangelical religion, republican political theory, and common sense epistemology. Noll calls it “the Protestant consensus.” John Modern largely agrees. In Modern's telling, antebellum America was mired in the same entanglement of piety, politics, and epistemology. But in lieu of the civic language of consensus, Modern describes his formation as an “atmosphere,” a kind of conceptual cloud-hanging so thickly in the air that antebellum Americans inhaled it with every breath. This pervasive atmosphere is what Modern means by “the secular.”

Making National History with Literary History: Hegel’s Influence via Taine on Meiji Japan and the Late Qing and Early Republican China

Through analyzing Hegel’s influence via Taine on Meiji Japan and later, on the late Qing and early Republican China, this paper will shed lights on the process of the making of national history with literary history in modern Japan and its influences on modern China. It argues that the simultaneous establishment of modern Japanese historiography and the writing of literary history in Japan had a direct impact on the establishment of Chinese historiography in the late Qing, and the writing of Chinese literary history in twentieth-century China. It will focus more on the philosophical ideas of Taine and Hegel and their influence in Japanese literary historiography and, due to the limited length of this paper, only by extension, that of China as well. The primary focus of this paper is the interaction of the modern Japanese and Chinese pursuit of new historical narratives in the construction of new national and cultural identities in the context of global modernity. It also stresses that, an invisible “origin,” the writing of Chinese (literary) history in the early twentieth-century, ironically, directly and indirectly, has been internalized by the writing of Japanese national history in an exclusive framework of nation-building.

ERKEN CUMHURİYET DÖNEMİ ROMANINDA SİNEMANIN İZLERİ ÜZERİNE BİR DEĞERLENDİRME

OZ Turk seyircisi, 1895 yilinda Paris’te ilk acik gosterimi yapilan sinema ile 1897’de Beyoglu’nda tanismistir. 1908 yilindan itibaren basta Istanbul olmak uzere buyuk sehirlerde artarda acilan salonlar ve toplu gosterimlerle memleketin hemen her yerine ulasan sinema, kisa surede halkin en sevdigi eglence hâline gelmistir. Ancak yerli sinemanin teknik ve ekonomik yetersizlikler ile kulturel meseleler dolayisiyla yavas ilerlemesi sonucu bu salonlar, ozellikle Cumhuriyet doneminde tum dunyada sektorun lideri pozisyonunda olan Hollywood filmlerinin hâkimiyetine girmistir. Boylece beyazperdenin guclu etkisiyle sosyal ve kulturel hayata Amerika’nin izleri yansimaya baslamis ve halkin genelinin asrilik (modernlesme) ile ozdeslestirdigi bu durum, pek cok alanda tartismalar yaratmis; baslangicindan itibaren buyuk olcude sosyal faydayi esas alan ve realist ozellikler gosteren Turk romanina da mevzuu olmustur. Sinemanin artik ulkeye tamamen yayildigi ve kadin erkek esit sartlarda seyirci kitlesinin olgunlastigi Erken Cumhuriyet Doneminde nesredilen ve aktuel zamani anlatan romanlar uzerine kurulan bu makalede, beyazperdenin toplum uzerindeki etkilerinin romana aksedisi tespit edilmeye; bu anlamda ortaya konacak malzemelerle romancilarin sinema karsisindaki tavri belirlenmeye calisilacaktir. Anahtar Kelimeler: Erken Cumhuriyet Donemi Turk romani, sinema, populer roman, Server Bedi, Greta Garbo, Hollywood. AN EVALUATION ON THE TREATMENT OF CINEMA IN THE EARLY REPUBLICAN TURKISH NOVELS ABSTRACT The Turkish audience had the first opportunity to see motion pictures in 1897 in Beyoglu (Pera), two years after the first public screening of films in 1895 in Paris. Cinema had rapidly become the most popular means of entertainment in the society in the early 1900s when people welcomed public screenings of movies all around the country and many new movie theaters were opened in big cities, especially in Istanbul. However, since the progress of local cinema was slow due to technical and financial inadequacies as well as cultural matters, these new theaters were predominated by the Hollywood cinema which was a leader in the world film industry during the Early Republican period. Consequently, the social and cultural life in the country had been influenced by American styles and this situation which was associated withmodernization by the majority led to many controversies. This was also an issue in novels of the period that employed an aim of providing social benefits and were characterized by realistic features. This article focuses on novels which were published in the Early Republican period and narratives of the actual time by then. The aim is to identify the ways in which the effects of cinema on the society were treated in these novels. This is also an attempt to detect novelists’ approaches to cinema. Keywords: the Early Republican Period Turkish novels, cinema, popular novels, Server Bedi, Greta Garbo, Hollywood.

BİR GEÇMİŞ ZAMAN EFENDİSİ: MÜKRİMİN HALİL YİNANÇ

Mukrimin Halil Yinanc (1900-1961) Mesrutiyetten Cumhuriyete uzanan donemin bizde modern tarih yazimi konusunda dikkate deger sahsiyetler arasindadir. Mukrimin Halil’in dusunce cevresi ile bu cevredeki konumunu ve bir de tarih yazimina katkilarini aciklarken donemin sartlarini, erken cumhuriyet doneminde Istanbul muhitinde yetistigi cevreyi ve bu cevre ile iliskilerini dikkatle inceledik. Mukrimin Halil Yinanc, Elbistan’in en eski Turkmen asiretlerine bagli ve koklu Musluman geleneklerine sahip bir ailenin bir ferdi olmasi bakimindan muhafazakâr bir kultur cevresine mensuptur. 1916’da Istanbul Darulfunun Edebiyat Fakultesinde tarih tahsiline baslamis, burayi bitirince (1919) Mekteb-i Mulkiye talebesi olmustur. Buradan mezun olunca (1921) Davut Pasa Ortaokulu’na tarih ogretmeni olarak atanmis, 1923’ten itibaren bu gorevinin yanisira yeniden etkinlestirilen Turk Tarih Encumeni’nde kutuphane memurlugu gorevini ustlenmistir. Iste bu sirada Istanbul sehrinin romantik aydin cevresine girmis, olunceye kadar bu cevreye bagli kalmistir. Mekteb-i Mulkiyede okurken icinde bulundugu memleketci hareketin bir mensubu olarak tarihcilik ugrasina baslamis, ozellikle Tevaif-i Muluk (Beylikler) ve Selcuklu konularinda topladigi nadir eserler ve ortaya koydugu nadide calismalari sayesinde donemin en seckin tarihcileri arasinda yerini almistir. Bu calismalarinin bir devami olarak Paris’te ayni konuya iliskin arastirmalar yapmis, bu sirada Fransizlarin sarkiyat enstitusu Societe Asiatique uyeligine secilmistir. Fransa’dan yurda dondugu yillarda bu bilgi, beceri ve deneyimlerinin etkisiyle Turk Tarih Tetkik Cemiyeti uyeligine secilmistir. Mukrimin Halil, Ataturk’un onderlik ettigi yeni olusum icinde, Tarih Tezini savunanlar ve acilimini yapanlar arasinda bulunmamistir. Anahtar Kelimeler: Mukrimin Halil Yinanc; Societe Asiatique; Anadolucu Hareket; Turk Tarih Encumeni A LORD OF THE PAST TIMES: MUKRIMIN HALIL YINANC Abstract: Mukrimin Halil Yinanc (1900-1961) is one of the remarkable personages of modern history writing in the period from Constitutional Monarchy to Republic, in Turkey. Describing Mukrimin Halil Yinanc‘s intellectual milieu vis-a-vis his position within this environment besides his contribution to historiography, we meticulously examined the conditions at that period, the environment in Istanbul where Mukrimin Halil Yinanc grew up in the early Republican Period and his relationship with this environment. Since Mukrimin Halil Yinanc is a member of a family related to oldest Turkmen tribes in Elbistan, with long-established Muslim traditions, he belongs to an environment determined by a conservative culture. In 1916, he studied history at the Faculty of Literature in Istanbul Darulfunun; when he graduated from this faculty (1919), he became a student in Mekteb-i Mulkiye (The School of Political Science). After his graduation (1921), he was appointed to Davut Pasha Secondary School as a teacher of history. In addition to this task, he undertakes a mission in a re-actived institution, namely Turk Tarih Encumeni (Council of The Turkish History) as a library officer, beginning from 1923. In the meantime, he got involved with the environment shaped by the romantic intellectuals in Istanbul and stuck to this milieu until his death. While studying at Mekteb-i Mulkiye, as one of the members of the ‘Memleketci’ movement, he pursued the occupation of historiography activity and took a place within the prominent historians at that period, especially due to the rare books that he collected and unique studies that he made in the field of Tevaif-i Muluk and Seljukes. As an extension to these studies, he conducted research on the same subject in Paris; in the meantime, he was elected as a member of the French Institute of Oriental Studies ( Societe Asiatique). During the period after he returned back to the homeland from France, he was elected as a member of Turk Tarih Tetkik Cemiyeti (Turkish Historical Research Society) due to his knowledge, skills and experiences. Mukrimin Halil was not a part of the new formation led by Ataturk, i.e. among ‘Turkish History Thesis’ defenders and reformers. Key Words: Mukrimin Halil Yinanc; Societe Asiatique; Anatolist Movement; Society of Turkish History

Ensouling the Nation through Fiction: Liang Qichao’s Applied Buddhism

以小说赋魂予国家： 梁启超的应用佛学 摘要 梁启超的应用佛学在他对构建现代中国的政治想象和社会倡导中起到了重要的作用。本文以梁启超的政治小说为个案提出三个相互关联的论点。第一，梁启超在他倡导政治小说的过程中所表达的民族主义是一种源于欧洲的浪漫民族主义，但是在晚清民初的语境下被推动；第二，梁启超的应用佛学是当时汉传佛教世俗化的一部分，其目的并不像欧洲政教分离式的世俗化，而是致力于把佛教价值观普及到中国社会里；第三，梁启超的应用佛学应该被追认为当代左翼佛教的前驱之一。

Yenişehir Sineması ve Endüstri Kenti Karabük'ün Sosyal Yaşantısının Şekillenişindeki Rolü

This study investigates the Yenisehir Movie Theater which building witnessed to the early periods of the 20 th century Turkey who was trying to catch industrialization after the Turkish War of Independence. Notably, the building reflects the modernization process with its existence. While the archival study reveals story of the Yenisehir Movie Theater with its construction process, at the same time it sheds light on how modernism was acknowledged outside of the capital in local level. In this regard, the building could be accepted as a local acknowledgment of modernism, thus, it becomes symbolic structure not only for the 1950s Karabuk but also for the period of the Early Republican Turkey. In this study, foundation of Karabuk Iron-Steel Factories as a reflection of industrialization aims, construction process of Yenisehir Movie Theater and its effects on formation of social and spatial environment are respectively investigated.

Sinology, Feminist History, and Everydayness in the Early Republican Periodical Press

This article merges two approaches in what I am calling a horizontal reading of the women’s periodical press in early twentieth-century China. Feminism’s skepticism of all-encompassing narratives and attentiveness to the circuitous routes through which knowledge is produced make these multigenre, multivocal, and multiregistered materials legitimate objects of historical study. At the same time the methods of sinology, which combine competence in the mutating forms of Republican-era written Chinese with openness to new theoretically inflected approaches, help to unlock their aporetic richness. Aimed at capturing rather than disciplining the chaotic richness of these publications, this horizontal method reads the range of materials within women’s magazines against one another: discursive essays against photographic portraits, and advertisements against readers’ columns, for example. Rather than seeking the discursive logic articulated in selected essays—the prevailing scholarly approach to the periodical press—the horizontal method aims to capture the naturally occurring oddities of quotidian print matter. These oddities, in turn, highlight productive disjunctions inherent in Republican culture. Such a reading deepens our knowledge of the dramatic early twentieth-century changes that altered the course of modern Chinese history and enriches our understanding of the demographic that was arguably most affected by those changes—urban women. It also offers an alternate vision of how those dramatic changes were lived and understood, not in terms of a series of stark binaries that pitted “Western modernity” against “Chinese tradition” but through blended accommodations grounded in the intimate details of daily life.

Haiti and the Americas ed. by Carla Calargé, Raphael Dalleo, Luis Duno-Gottberg, and Clevis Headley (review)

and Americas. Edited by Carla Calarge, Raphael Dalleo, Luis Duno-Gottberg, and Clevis Headley. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013. ISBN 1617037575. 242 pp. $60 hardcover.Review by Kate RamseyThe transnational turn in Haitian studies and hemispheric turn in American studies come together in this groundbreaking interdisciplinary collection, which situates as crossroads of Americas. While until recently scholarly literature focusing on Haiti's engagement with world has centered primarily-with few major exceptions- on revolutionary era, this volume concentrates on hemispheric interconnections since then.In an introduction synthesizing book's contributions, coeditor Raphael Dalleo discusses wealth of recent studies that analyze Haitian Revolution and its reverberations in wider world context. He also surveys smaller but no less significant body of work focused on interactions between and rest of Americas from early nineteenth century to contemporary moment. Dalleo's introduction and collection as whole bear out his contentions that scholars have only begun to understand full scope of [the] relationship between and United States, and that the ongoing relationships between and [other] parts of Americas . . . have scarcely been explored (14).I found Dalleo's claim that essays and contextualize our vision of (16-17) to be consistently true across this volume, beginning with first section on Haiti and Hemispheric Independence. Sibylle Fischer's article in Haiti: Republicanism in Revolutionary Atlantic and Matthew Casey's Between Anti-Haitianism and Antiimperialism: Haitian and Cuban Political Collaborations in Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries both complicate longtime assumptions about how Latin American and Caribbean Creoles viewed postrevolutionary Haiti. Fischer's work problcmatizcs an overemphasis on international isolation of early republican by spotlighting extent to which, in 1810s, Haiti's southern coast became a gathering point for populations that were swept up in insurgencies on mainland (26). If was beacon and sometime refuge for enslaved and free people of African descent across region, Fischer points to how it also became safe haven for wider population of refugees. Her article thus complicates assumption that evoked only dread in imagination of white Creoles. That Simon Bolivar himself took refuge in southern during these years is well known, as is President Alexandre Petions financial and military backing of Latin American wars on condition that slavery be abolished wherever Spanish rule was overthrown. What has not been recognized, Fischer argues, is extent to which Bolivar's political thought was shaped by his experiences in Haiti, and in particular by his admiration for what he considered Petion's success in preventing republic from fracturing into microsovereignties.The specter of Haitian Revolution cast long shadow over nineteenth-century colonial Cuba, with wealthy Creole slaveholders fearing-and, along with Spanish colonial officials, frequently invoking- prospect that would lead to race war. Yet Matthew Casey argues that those who sought to overthrow Spanish rule in Cuba saw in markedly different ways. He explores how was safe haven and support for Cuban leaders and fighters during Ten Years' War (1868-1878), and then again after 1888. One of methodological challenges of studying Haiti's aid to nineteenth-century anti-imperial struggles, as both Fischer and Casey discuss, is that Haitian government insisted that such assistance go unpublicized. In second part of his article, Casey examines how Haitian migrants in eastern Cuba during 1915-1934 US occupation of their homeland invoke[edJ Haiti's previously silenced contribution to Cuban independence in founding and soliciting funds for Cuban branch of Union Patriotique, foremost Haitian antioccupation organization (65). …

Studii su la storia di Sicilia dalla meta del XVIII secolo al 1820 di Michele Amari, ed. Amelia Crisantino

Michele Amari (1806–89) is best known for his pioneering studies on the medieval Islamic Mediterranean and his hugely successful history of the Sicilian Vespers, the popular revolt in Palermo in 1282 that forced the Angevins to abandon Sicily. This was an episode that, not surprisingly, Italian nationalists found attractive, but it was, above all, Amari’s carefully documented account of 1842 that made the story a powerful symbol of nineteenth-century Italian nationalist aspirations. Its success forced its author to leave Sicily for Paris, where he mixed with Italian political émigrés and French intellectuals, expanded his already prodigious knowledge of ancient and modern European literature and philosophy, and began his studies of Islam and the medieval Mediterranean world. In 1848, Amari returned to Palermo where he took a leading role in the revolution, resulting in another decade of exile. The failure of the revolutions cooled his earlier republican and democratic sympathies, however, and in the mid-1850s he became a supporter of Cavour’s project for Italian independence. In Palermo again in 1860, his support for Cavour’s policies set him at odds with Garibaldi, Crispi and Mazzini, although his expectations that the Sicilians would be granted wide autonomy in the new Italy were disappointed. In 1861 he became a Senator, and subsequently served as Italy’s first Minister of Education and then held university posts in Pisa and Florence. He completed his monumental History of the Muslims in Sicily (1854–74), but he never returned to live in Sicily.

A Turkish Architect at Technical Unversity of Budapest: Semih Rüstem

Semih Rüstem (1898-1946), is a Turkish Early Republican era architect who studied architecture at the Technical University of Budapest. His relationship with Hungarian Turanism and his architectural education in Hungary makes him an exception among Turkish architects. In the early 1930’s, he designed several buildings mostly under the influence of European Modernism but traces of these Hungary-related steps can also be followed in some of his designs. The information gathered in the process of this research, which aims to examine Semih Rüstem’s life and career in the context of cultural relationships between Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, provides a basis for a discussion on the formal sources of the buildings he designed.

“Love” as the Key Word: New Sexual Morality and New Literature in the Late Qing and Early Republican Years (1900-1920)

Courtesy of translation, the word “love” (lian’ai 恋爱) entered the modern Chinese language in the early 20th century, leading to changes in the mode, experience, meaning and evaluation of “feelings between men and women” by virtue of this new nomenclature. The word entered public discourse and became the point of entry for new Chinese ethical construction, spawning a series of new moral propositions from the late Qing to the May Fourth Movement together with corresponding works of new literature. The “free marriage” advocated in the late Qing confirmed the modern consciousness of marriage premised on love and determined primarily by the will of the parties themselves, initiating a new style of civilized marriage. In the early Republican period, the word “love” was temporarily stigmatized in the course of sinicization, with the result that it was generally avoided in romance fiction. However, the widespread cult of the “spiritual character of love” in novels of tragic love laid the foundation for the emergence of “the sanctity of love” in the May Fourth period. The theory of love constructed at this time under the influence of Western theories made a subtle distinction between the “freedom of love” and “free love,” reflecting the ideological divergence within the New Culture community. In terms of spatial imagery and descriptions of love, the pioneering creation of romantic literature during the May Fourth period deconstructed the patriarchal authority that suppressed individual freedom, undermining traditional morality and opening up new fields for literary expression. But since the one-dimensional pursuit of individual freedom also led to weaknesses such as superficial emotionalism, May Fourth romantic literature could not take the experiences and expression of love to a deeper level.

The Mercantile Enlightenment in Late Qing and Early Republican China

Although late Qing and Republican China failed to witness an enlightenment movement in the European sense, China did go through an enlightenment process of its own. Chinese mercantilism, in close association with industrialization and the rise of capitalism, constituted an intellectual movement that cannot be overlooked. The mercantile enlightenment expressed in mercantilism went through various evolutionary stages, from birth to development to maturation. In this process, the values and beliefs of China’s feudal agrarian society were rejected and attacked and the new values championed by industrialists and merchants grew and spread. Although China’s enlightenment movement had its limitations, it played an important role in promoting the country’s transformation from an agrarian to an industrialized society and helped lay the foundation for China’s modernization. It also has implications for the rebuilding of commericial morality in China.

The Kurds and Settlement Policies from the Late Ottoman Empire to Early Republican Turkey: Continuities and Discontinuities (1916–34)

This article highlights the continuities and discontinuities between the settlement policies of the late Ottoman state and early Republican Turkey. It argues that although there was a certain degree of evolution in the language employed by the state between the late Ottoman and Republican periods, there is a significant amount of overlap between the policies pursued by the Committee of Union and Progress which seized power in 1913 and the Kemalist regime established in the early 1920s towards the Kurds. In short, the emergence of settlement policies aimed at assimilating the Kurds into the Turkish nation are not an innovation of the Kemalists; it is possible to trace them to the late Ottoman period. This is substantiated through a comparison of two laws relating to settlement; the 1916 “Ordinance Outlining the Transfer and Settlement as well as the Sustenance and Maintenance for Refugees arriving from Conflict Zones” prepared by the Ottoman Ministry of the Interior's General Directorate for Tribes and Refugees and the Settlement Law of 1934, which was implemented in Republican Turkey and which remained on the statute books until 2006.

The Thucydidean Moment: History, Science, and the Yellow-Fever Controversy, 1793–1805

From 1793 to 1805, yellow fever devastated the port cities of the eastern United States. As the most pressing natural philosophical issue of the early national period, the search for the cause of the disease generated a heated debate that pitted “contagionists,” who thought the it was imported, against “localists,” who believed it arose from domestic sources. This article examines the fever investigators' uses of history to settle the controversy, thereby showcasing an unknown aspect of the early republicans' well-noted interest in the past. This "Thucydidean moment" (so named for their particular fascination with Thucydides' famous plague narrative) culminated in two massive books on the history of disease: the Treatise on the Plague and Yellow Fever by the contagionist James Tytler, and the Brief History of Epidemic and Pestilential Diseases by the localist Noah Webster. Whereas Tytler's work was roundly rejected by his philosophical peers, Webster's Brief History cogently situated the yellow fever epidemics in the sweep of history, and thus pushed the debate in favor of the localists. But the victory was a Pyrrhic one. The appeal to the past exposed problems that undermined investigators' hopes that history could serve as an empirical basis of disease inquiry. It also threatened early republicans’ pretensions to historical exceptionalism by forcing them to reckon with their own precarious places in the cycles of time.