Eighteenth Nineteenth Centuries Research Articles

The Customs of Conquest: Legal Primitivism and British Paramountcy in Northeast India

The discourse around indigeneity, customary rights of possession and claims to political autonomy in Northeast India conventionally traces the postcolonial protectionist legislation for ‘tribes’ to various acts passed under the late colonial state, the most significant precursor being seen as the Government of India Act, 1935. This article will argue that one can in fact trace the ‘original moment’ in the idea of customary law for ‘tribes’ much further back in history, to the early decades of the nineteenth century. This historical moment was anchored in the beginnings of the East India Company’s conquest of the Garo hills in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in the appropriation of the land and revenue of the Garos and in the ethnogenesis of the ‘hill Garo’. The article will explore the ways in which the beginning of the invention of customary law and traditional authority in Northeast India under East India Company rule was impelled by the Company’s demands for revenue and was shielded and secured by the deployment of military power across the hills. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the strategies of imperial control first introduced in the region were reproduced across the rest of Northeast India, underscoring the significance of the Garo hills as the first ‘laboratory’ of colonial rule in the region as well as sharpening our understanding of the character of the early colonial state. The article thus takes as its task the historicization of the categories of ‘customary law’, ‘traditional/indigenous authority’ and the ‘hill tribe’, all of which form the basis of late colonial and postcolonial legislation on the ‘tribe’.

Pompeji in Paris. Die Quatre Saisons (1821) von Eugène Delacroix

The Quatre Saisons by Eugène Delacroix are among the lesser-known and hitherto little-explored works of the French artist. Designed in 1821, the paintings served as decorations for the dining room in the hôtel particulier of the French actor François-Joseph Talma in Paris. Stylistically, the series draws inspiration from ancient art, especially from the Roman wall paintings of Herculaneum and Pompeii that were rediscovered during the eighteenth century. However, rather than imitating models from the past, the artist adapts and rearranges them, thus also revitalising the motif of the four seasons that was very popular for interior decorations in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The paper discusses Delacroix’s four-part cycle as a striking example of both the rediscovery and appropriation of antiquity in nineteenth-century art. In doing so, it examines the artist’s close relationship with ancient art and the way in which Delacroix draws on models from the past and eclectically transforms them for his own artistic needs. The interest for ancient Roman art is also considered according to the role the patron Talma played in the development of the décor.

Böndernas agerande inför och anpassning till storskiftet i sydvästra Finland

This article examines peasants’ goals and means of negotiation in the reallocation of land or enclosure reform called storskifte in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century in Southwest Finland. It stresses the agency of peasants and their actions in the quest for best practices. The study is based on the meeting minutes of the storskifte reform of 230 villages with mainly freeholders or crown tenants as stakeholders. This article shows how peasants balanced between individualism and collectivism in their decision making because their goals were opposite. They aimed to increase the freedom of work and decision making in the household economy. At the same time, the cooperation with neighbours was an important method of decreasing the workload and costs of farming. Sources indicate that peasants made agreements with each other so they could combine both goals. They achieved independence as farmers as well as low costs by combining consolidation of land with mutual agreements about cooperation in specific issues, but they allowed each other to do individual decisions, too. This kind of flexible solution-seeking behaviour provides a new perspective on the discussion about peasants and agricultural change.

Scholarship, skill and community: collections and the creation of ‘provincial’ medical education in Manchester, 1750–1850

Abstract This article explores how medical collections, representing repositories of knowledge and prestige, were used in the communication and representation of medical education and provincial identity in Manchester in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It charts the changing ways in which medical collections and knowledge were represented as both pedagogical and promotional devices, demonstrating the importance of a localized approach to medical culture and, particularly, collecting in the long eighteenth century, and a sensitivity to how different generations inherited their recent past. It argues against any assumption of the easy transmission of scholarly cultural codes from metropolitan ‘centres’ to provincial ‘peripheries’.

The Perils of Reading Fiction: the Female Quixote and the Thai New Woman

AbstractBritish literary history routinely associated women with reading fiction, especially the novel. This association seemingly threatened male hegemony and cultural authority. It led, therefore, to the portrayal of the woman reader as a female quixote who was prone to misreading and being misled by what she read. This representation became popular during the rise of the novel in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and the New Woman's emergence at the fin-de-siècle. Similar developments took place in Siam/Thailand where the birth of fiction, the advent of the woman reader, and the New Woman's rise roughly coincided in the late 1910s and early 1920s. By examining San Thewarak's novel Bandai haeng khwam rak [Stairways to Love] (1932), this paper demonstrates the trope of the female quixote's invocation to describe the emerging Thai (New) Woman reader and the threat that she embodied that had to be managed and controlled.

THE MILL TRADITIONAL CRAFTS OF DAGESTAN: ETHNIC CULTURE, TERMINOLOGY

The article is devoted to the characteristics of the traditions of mill crafts in Dagestan, their development in the historical perspective. The topic is poorly researched. At the same time, there are valuable observations on the topic made by Dagestani ethnographers. Admittedly, "mill" adaptations and crafts appear with the advent of agriculture, and crafts using water mills begin to develop in the conditions of arable farming. The design of water mills with a horizontal turbine is considered an invention of the Caucasian peoples. Watermills in Dagestan in the conditions of mountain rivers have become widespread. Researchers attribute the emergence of such crafts in Dagestan to the beginning of a new era. Written sources about such mills belong to the middle of the XIV century. On the basis of linguistic (terminology) materials, we can make a cautious conclusion that initially watermills were widespread in the Dagestan foothills. Then they spread to the mountain zone. The mill industries of Dagestan can be divided into flour-milling, grain-milling, and production of oils, pastes (urbech) from fruit seeds (apricot seed oil was especially popular), cereals (flax, hemp), oilseeds (sunflower), vegetables (pumpkin), and others.In the past, if a river flowed near the village, water mills were actively built. They were in every village and often there were several of them. In addition to public mills, there were privately owned and owned by individual tukhums mills. Water mills in Dagestan "survived" until the end of the twentieth century. Presumably in EIGHTEENTH and early NINETEENTH century in the plains and foothill zone of Dagestan began to spread of water mills with a vertical turbine, borrowed from Russian. In the twentieth century, steam, electric, and windmills were also used here. Today, historic watermills are still used in a number of places to make traditional urbecha paste (oil) and rarely flour.

The Response of the Auld Kirk in Haddington to the Disruption

This article will provide a case study of how the Auld Kirk in Haddington responded to the Disruption of 1843. It will show that despite the diversification of the church in the burgh during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in 1843 the Church of Scotland was by far the largest denomination and that, despite two ministers and just under 500 members ‘coming out’, it retained its dominance during the remainder of the nineteenth century. This article will identify a number of factors which enabled the established church in Haddington to respond effectively to the Disruption, including the speed with which it reacted to the events of 1843; the reluctance of parishioners to leave the ancient parish church of St Mary's; the relative weakness of other denominations in the town; its ability to attract able and energetic ministers; and, its willingness to pursue a form of ‘territorial ministry’.

Collecting Chinese things from social status to public use: an early nineteenth-century Italian example

ABSTRACT Between the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, as a consequence of the increasing intercourse between China and the West, private collections of Chinese arts and crafts by European residents in China are growing. Diplomats, officials, merchants take these often-impressive collections back home to embellish residences with prestigious and attractive decoration. In the 1820s and 1830s such collections are transformed by entrepreneurs into public exhibitions or itinerant museums of Chinese material culture, for educational and commercial purpose. After introducing English Dutch and American examples, the article focuses on the case of Italian globetrotter businessman Onorato Martucci. On his return to Rome after a multi-year residence in China, he brings with him a vast assortment of Chinese objects and set up a public exhibition to promote knowledge of the Chinese world and sell the collection. The article also reconstructs Martucci’s writings as a passionate popularizer of the reality of the Chinese empire.

Freedom and liberty: the influence of the ideology of the polish uprising of 1830 on Russian philosophy and literature

The relevance of the topic is due to the history of the concept of freedom in the Russian, Polish and Ukrainian thesauri in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Because the concept of "freedom" is important in shaping the national identities of these Slavic peoples.The aim of the article was to consider the causes of metamorphoses that occurred in the use of words and changes in the connotations of the concept of "freedom". It is determined that the development of philosophical ideas about freedom in Russia in the early nineteenth century is influenced by two contradictory tendencies: nihilistic-deterministic and religious-libertarian. It is studied that in the Soviet official philosophy and ideology the concept of "freedom" acquires ritual-official and rational-determinist meaning ("freedom as a known necessity"). In contrast, "freedom" is replaced by the concept of "freedom", which has acquired positive connotations. At the same time, the identification of "freedom" with "arbitrariness" in recent years has been a source of Russian anti-liberal discourse.Conclusions. The concept of "freedom" in literature, official documents and philosophical considerations originally had two verbal reflections "liberty" and "freedom". And the first of them actually dominated until the early nineteenth century. Its meanings were related to the influence of Polish political principles and the Ukrainian Orthodox tradition, which was spread by graduates of the Kyiv-Mohyla Collegium (Academy). At the same time, it was gradually supplanted by another word, "liberty," especially under the influence of the reaction to the events and slogans of the French Revolution.

Offspring fertility and grandchild survival enhanced by maternal grandmothers in a pre-industrial human society

Help is directed towards kin in many cooperative species, but its nature and intensity can vary by context. Humans are one of few species in which grandmothers invest in grandchildren, and this may have served as an important driver of our unusual life history. But helping behaviour is hardly uniform, and insight into the importance of grandmothering in human evolution depends on understanding the contextual expression of helping benefits. Here, we use an eighteenth-nineteenth century pre-industrial genealogical dataset from Finland to investigate whether maternal or paternal grandmother presence (lineage relative to focal individuals) differentially affects two key fitness outcomes of descendants: fertility and survival. We found grandmother presence shortened spacing between births, particularly at younger mother ages and earlier birth orders. Maternal grandmother presence increased the likelihood of focal grandchild survival, regardless of whether grandmothers had grandchildren only through daughters, sons, or both. In contrast, paternal grandmother presence was not associated with descendants’ fertility or survival. We discuss these results in terms of current hypotheses for lineage differences in helping outcomes.

From Customary Law to Codification: Secret Tribunal Scenes in Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen and Kleist’s Käthchen of Heilbronn

The motif of the Vehmic Court—a medieval “secret tribunal”—enjoyed remarkable popularity in German literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This paper analyzes the structure and function of Secret Tribunal scenes in two canonical plays of the time: Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen (1773), which served as a template for the development of the motif, and one of its most prominent literary echoes, Heinrich von Kleist’s Käthchen of Heilbronn (1810). By defining how both texts handle, elaborate and transform the historical subject, the paper examines to what degree Goethe and Kleist functionalized Vehmic trial scenes in order to comment on contemporary legal debates. In both dramas, such scenes are embedded in a multi-layered discourse on legal practices, which places a particular focus on the divide between customary and positive law, though from different angles: whereas the young Goethe offers a negative picture of instituted justice based on Roman law, and praises Germanic customary law as a form of justice that balances the power of absolutist rulers over the people, Kleist offers a parody of Vehmic Court proceedings and advocates instead for modern forms of codified justice that are meant to gradually displace outdated judicial systems.

DẤU ẤN VÙNG ĐẤT NGHỆ AN – HÀ TĨNH TRÊN BÌNH DIỆN QUỐC GIA ĐẠI VIỆT NỬA CUỐI THẾ KỈ XVIII

During the history of Vietnam in the medieval period, the area of Nghe An - Ha Tinh was often considered the “key land” of the country, but it was also the place where “poor land, poor residents”, suffered with many natural disasters and enemy sabotages. In comparing with the Northern region, the socio-economic development process in Nghe An – Ha Tinh was usually one step behind and more or less different. By the second half of the eighteenth century, in a new context full of events and changes, the land and Nghe An – Ha Tinh people step by step established a new position with many great marks on the national level, especially in the political arena, academic fields, literature. The rise of Nghe An – Ha Tinh during this period showed great changes in the development and correlation of regional forces in Vietnam in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

The Eighteenth-Century Gardens of Bundelkhand, India, compared to the Mughal, Rajput and Colonial Gardens

ABSTRACT Bundelkhand is a region in central India demarcated on the basis of uniform socio-cultural practices. During the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century, a peculiar garden-style developed under the patronisation of the princely states in Bundelkhand. The gardens of Bundelkhand have a characteristic typology and identical gardens can be seen all across Bundelkhand. These walled gardens consist of an outhouse (kothi), a temple, well, stepwell (baoli/bawdi), irrigation channels (milai), and memorial structures. Their distinctiveness illustrates how regional styles flourished despite the influence of the Mughal, Rajput and Colonial styles which otherwise dominated the Indian garden landscape in this period. Following the authors’ previous papers on the typology of Bungali gardens, the present paper compares them with the other established garden types in India: Mughal, Rajput and Colonial. The comparison is helpful to understand the development of regional garden style, sometimes influenced by other typologies, yet which developed into an independent type.

Politicizing the Geological: Articulations of Earth and History in Modern Philosophical Race Discourse

AbstractAgainst the backdrop of the current “geological turn,” the article sheds light on the ways in which the earth has been articulated through strategies of temporalization and territorialization in the context of modern philosophical race discourse. The author first reconstructs the constitution of a “geographic imagination” as it emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The first part focuses on the role of geography in Kant's theory of race, and Alexander von Humboldt's project of plant geography. In the second part, the author discusses Henrik Steffens's account of race. In the third part, the author turns to Heidegger, who rearticulated the “geographic imagination” in the first decades of the twentieth century. The article concludes that a critical theory of nature relations needs to overcome the semantic connections between conceptualizations of the earth and the modern race discourse that haunt contemporary ecological thinking

ХУДОЖЕСТВЕННОЕ ОФОРМЛЕНИЕ СЕВЕРНЫХ РУКОПИСНЫХ КНИГ

For a long time Russian manuscript book has been famous for its rich artistic design. Miniatures containing parts of liturgical texts, sermons, saints’ lives, richly decorated miniatures, initials have changed over time, so they help to date a manuscript. The article studies the artistic design of northern manuscripts in order to figure out a more accurate date of the source. The subjects of the study are liturgical and theological books from the collection of the Arkhangelsk Museum Association “Russian North artistic culture”, created in the XV–XIX centuries. All researched manuscripts are written on paper and all of them are not dated, therefore the date of writing a book is first determined by paper signs, which is then confirmed by other facts, namely by drawings written at the same time as the main text. In “Prologue”, created at the end of the 15th century, the scribe uses the Balkan ornament, which was popular in Russian books of the second half of the 15th and 16th centuries. On the sheets with miniatures there are also large initials of the Balkan type. The “Psalter” of the late 18th century was copied from the printed edition of 1651. It contains the unfinished design of King David copied from the printed edition evidenced by the artist’s manner of performing this image. Some of the manuscripts are decorated by scribes with drawings copied or taken from printed editions of the same period as the book. Thus, in the collection of the early XIX century (a “white” date on paper – 1815) there is a miniature that occurs in such printed editions as “The Life of Basil the New”, 1792–1795 and 1801, or “Psalter” 1802–1803, 1812–1814 years. In the collection of the museum there are books consisting of printed and handwritten sheets, restored instead of lost printed ones. For example, in the “Tablet” of Patriarch Nikon, published in 1656, the text was restored by hand on several pages at the beginning of the 18th century that is determined by the paper signs on the pages of the book. On the one of the manuscript sheets there is a miniature taken from a printed source and pasted into the text. Such an ornament is found, for example, in the Minne December 1714. These data show that the handwritten text and design were made at one time. The collection of the museum contains several bright books, richly decorated with Pomor ornament, which was popular in Old Believers' manuscripts written in the Russian North, near the White Sea, in the second half of the 17th and 19th centuries. The Pomor ornament is noted in the books that were created in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and is no longer found in manuscripts of late writing, which also indicates that a text and a décor of the book were made the same time. Thereby, the studied material helped to confirm the dates of the creation of the manuscripts, and also showed once again that when the source is dated, all the data in the book are taken into account.

Lotteries and Overlapping Providences in Early America

ABSTRACTWhat kind of world did early American men and women believe they were living in? Did God choose lottery winners or did intellectual, economic, and scientific insights engender more reasonable, skeptical, or secular formulations? Lotteries were a common and uncontroversial presence in early American economic and civic life, funding the construction of everything from bridges to churches. George Washington liked giving lottery tickets as gifts. Denmark Vesey purchased his freedom by winning a lottery. Although scholars have used the lottery and other forms of gambling to make important claims about class and culture in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, lotteries hold rich, untapped insights for American religious history. By offering a specific causal experience to explain, lotteries prompted answers from their participants, known as “adventurers,” about why things happened. Relying on firsthand accounts of lottery winners, correspondence among the managers who oversaw lotteries, promotional schemes designed to entice participation, and newspaper coverage, this article demonstrates providence's ongoing centrality to causality in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century America. Far from jettisoning an animated, meaningful universe with the aid of reason or in the face of debilitating doubt, lottery adventurers employed both longstanding and novel versions of providence to explain how the world worked and how God worked in the world.

The Transformation of Debt: The Paper State and Paper Economy in Early America

Debt underpins the modern global economy. Debt is also intimately tied to the function and form of the modern state. As a form of capital, debt is a combination of several legal modules and legal qualities that allow holders of debt to secure a future pecuniary return. The development of these legal modules and legal qualities may be observed in the emerging commercial society of the United States of America in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. By tracing the transformation of debt over this time period in the USA, we may gain insight into how debt, the economy, and the state could be re-envisioned for the future.

Uncrowned kings: rituals and ritual objects in eighteenth–nineteenth century Portuguese royal acclamation ceremonies

ABSTRACT This article examines the royal acclamation ceremonies of the Portuguese crown in order to grasp the responsiveness of the institution of the monarchy and regime to the challenges of modernity throughout the delicate watershed period of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Portuguese Catholic and absolutist monarchy of the ancien régime had a strict protocol and a set of insignia of power that acted together at the moment of the acclamation and legitimation of each new king. The purpose of this research is to assess the adaptation and reinvention of these insignia and rituals according to the revolutionary demands of social change and secularization brought about by the turbulent period of the beginning of the nineteenth century: the French military invasions (1807–11); the departure of the royal family, court and administration to Brazil (1807); the liberal constitutional revolution (1820); and the civil war pitting liberals against absolutists (1832–34). The new constitutional monarchy that came out of this revolutionary flow faced many challenges of legitimacy, including the test of its capacity to create a modern royal imaginary updated to the cultural mindset of national and secular societies, and capable of bonding rulers with their people. The authors believe that the study of the acclamation ceremonies in the Portuguese constitutional monarchy can give us an accurate perspective on the quality of the symbolic image of the crown, therefore assessing the political efficiency of rituals as one of the structural aspects for institutional legitimization.

Geographic Thought and the Anthropocene: What Geographers Have Said and Have to Say

Drawing from early modern and contemporary geographic thought, this article explores how the premise of an Anthropocene (Age of Humans) can be used to reinforce enduring modes of human–environment thinking. Anthropocene dialogues build on insights posed by geographers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: unity of nature, humans as nature made conscious, humans as nature’s conscience, and time periods as devices for thinking about human–environment relations. Complementing these ideas, contemporary geographers are making compelling statements about the Anthropocene, affirming that interpretations of the proposed geologic time period differ according to socioenvironmental variables, geographic imaginations, local contexts, and critical perspectives. Three forms of human–environment thinking emerge from examining links between early modern geographers and current geographers addressing the Anthropocene: synthesis thinking, epistemological thinking, and ethical thinking. Connections across ideas concerning the Anthropocene and geographic thought will be strengthened by developing systematic chronologies of the human–environment relationship.

Models of parliamentary speakership in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: France, Italy, Portugal and Spain

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the speakership in the lower parliamentary chamber in France, Italy, Portugal and Spain) during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the systems for electing and defining the functions of the speakership underwent a similar evolution in these countries. Three particular periods are examined when this evolution can be observed: the start of the liberal revolution in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; the formation of the liberal-conservative monarchies, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century; and the development of the democratic parliaments in the second half of the twentieth century. In these three periods, the manner in which the speaker is elected, the length of the mandate of the speakership, and the functions performed by the speaker are examined.