Imperial Context Research Articles

Malaria and Victorian Fictions of Empire, by Jessica Howell and Malarial Subjects: Empire, Medicine and Nonhumans in British India, 1820-1909, by Rohan Deb Roy

Reviewed by: Malaria and Victorian Fictions of Empire by Jessica Howell, and: Malarial Subjects: Empire, Medicine and Nonhumans in British India, 1820–1909 by Rohan Deb Roy Pamela K. Gilbert (bio) Malaria and Victorian Fictions of Empire, by Jessica Howell; pp. x + 238. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018, £75.00, £29.99 paper, $105.00, $44.99 paper. Malarial Subjects: Empire, Medicine and Nonhumans in British India, 1820–1909, by Rohan Deb Roy; pp. xv + 332. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017, £78.99, £24.99 paper, $105.00, $32.99 paper. Malaria, a disease which remains one of the top ten killers globally, is of particular interest to scholars of nineteenth-century Britain because it was seen as a principal obstacle to imperial ambitions. As the century wore on, malaria moved from being a general category of febrile disease, often with a recurring element, to being something increasingly specific, treatable with a particular kind of plant product. Finally it came to be associated with mosquitoes and a certain disease agent, a member of a subgenus of the protozoa plasmodium. The two books discussed here focus on malaria in the British imperial context in this transformational period. Rohan Deb Roy’s Malarial Subjects: Empire, Medicine and Nonhumans in British India, 1820–1909 is a detailed, valuable reading of the history of the period and especially the cultivation of cinchona and development of quinine, brimming with footnotes to primary materials and material from Bengali vernacular texts. Jessica Howell’s Malaria and Victorian Fictions of Empire also provides historical context, but focuses primarily on reading fever in novels of the period. Howell [End Page 705] offers an intriguing understanding of authors’ use of malaria to signal a salutary openness to experience of the colonial landscape and to create opportunities for self-knowledge. Deb Roy organizes his book mostly around quinine, between its discovery and the first imperial conference on malaria in British India. His is not a triumphalist narrative about a cure, and he shows that malaria as a category is in part coproduced with the emerging narrative around quinine, especially from the 1850s on. Deb Roy traces the large-scale production of the drug by the Howard family in Britain, which began synthesizing quinine starting in the late 1850s. Later, as government-run factories began to set up in India to produce the drug more cheaply, metropolitan makers insisted on the inferior quality of the colonial product. Deb Roy details a complex set of conflicts in which the labelling of the drugs was “contingent upon the shifting configurations of authority in the overlapping worlds of pharmaceutical business, colonial government and scientific knowledge” (211). Locally made quinine became possible with the transplantation of cinchona from Peru to India in the 1850s and 1860s. Deb Roy shows that the plants quickly became valuable commodities: not only as objects of medical, chemical, and botanical knowledge but also of commercial rivalry and anxious imperial administration. Deb Roy focuses on Clements Robert Markham, who established cinchona plantations in India and hoped they would provide a lasting benefit to the people, comparing cinchona to the melons supposedly left by the Mughal Empire that survived as a part of daily life. This was envisioned in part as a reparative gesture after the mayhem of 1857, a demonstration of benevolence that, for some, helped to justify empire. It was also profitable. The apparent fragility and new world origins of cinchona gave it added mystery and value. Malaria was a diagnostic category that, by mid-century, was understood as responsive to quinine. Of course, since quinine was also given prophylactically, the claims for its impact on malaria were limitless. If you did not have malaria, quinine had prevented it; if you did, well, quinine would treat it! And if quinine did not work, it probably was not malaria. The typical association in this period of fever with particular landscapes across the globe shifted slowly to a demonization of the colonial landscape by the 1850s; malaria came to be associated not only with marshes but also rocks and soils—“marsh poison, granite poison, sandstone poison”—and Black and brown bodies (99). A brief chapter considers the...

The irony of Spain's imperial denouement : afrancesamiento in Leopoldo Alas Clarin’s La Regenta (1884)

This article discusses the ironic portrayal of afrancesamiento in Leopoldo Alas Clarin’s La Regenta (1884) as a commentary on geopolitical realities. A well-known Francophile in his time, Clarin frequently employed elements of French culture and language in his literary works. The ironic use of these French elements in La Regenta is viewed as criticism of Spain’s patriarchal system and lack of modernization. I discuss how the afrancesamiento of the Spanish bourgeoisie thematized in La Regenta allows Clarin to comment ironically on attempts to fashion an image of Spain as occidental and superior to orientalized Latin America and its people. This evocation of an imperial context is Clarin’s critique of Spain’s unreadiness to accept the loss of its colonial possessions and to build a modern, post-imperial national identity for itself.

From Montserrat to Settler-Colonial Australia: the Intersecting Histories of Caribbean Slave-owning Families, Transported British Radicals, and Indigenous Peoples

Abstract When the British government abolished slavery in the Caribbean and compensated the slave-owners, some of the beneficiaries and/or their children and grandchildren went to Australia to make a new life and if possible a new fortune. This essay traces the history of one such family, the Shiells of Montserrat, alongside two other contemporaneous histories – that of Yorkshire radical and convict, John Burkinshaw, and his family, into which one of the Shiells married, and that of the several Indigenous communities these families encountered. Through the experiences of these disparate and intersecting family groups, we can gain insight into both the lived experience and the wider imperial context of the expansion of Australian settler colonialism.

British Visions, African Voices: The “Imperial” and the “Colonial” in World War II

AbstractThis article is focused on a magazine calledJambo, which was published by the British East Africa Command for troops in its employ between 1942 and 1945.Jambowas an agglomeration of political articles, general interest stories, propaganda, cartoons, crosswords, and more, with many of its contributions authored (or drawn) by men serving in the Allied forces. Here, I useJamboto consider notions of the “colonial” and “imperial” during the Second World War, exploring how the realities of racial segregation in the colonies fit awkwardly with imperial service.Jamboalso permits us a window into the views of some hundreds of British servicemen, who wrote extensively about the Africans with whom they served, revealing the complexities and shifts in British perceptions of African peoples during the conflict.Jambois unique in another respect: it also provided a forum for African troops. In few other publications—and even fewer with such wide circulation—could educated (but nonelite) African peoples reach thousands of British readers. Though their published letters and articles were few compared to those written byJambo's British authors, African writers used the venue to critique the conditions of their military service, argue about the sort of social ordering they desired in their home communities, and create an alternate narrative of the war. Like most colonial publications,Jambohad intended audiences, but also voracious, additional, alternate publics that mediated the articles which appeared in its pages. All this suggests that we might think of the colonial public sphere as both local and global, inward and outward looking, personal and communal, and situated along a continuum between colonial and imperial contexts.

Prosperity and prestige: Archaeological realities of unfree laborers under Inka imperialism

Inka imperial policies reorganized the social and labor landscapes of their subjects on a grand scale and unprecedented degree in the Americas. The two most numerous categories of resettled laborers created by these imperial policies were the mitmaqkuna and yanakuna, who together represented at least a third of the total subject population. The Inkas resettled them, often far from their homelands. They were responsible for the daily provisioning of Inka settlements and keeping the peace among conquered populations. Despite their central role in Inka state consolidation and economy, we know little about these populations outside of ethnohistorical interpretations of their privileged status relative to normal tribute-paying communities. Because ethnohistoric documents were written with Inka and Spanish state interests in mind, archaeological evidence is crucial to evaluate their lived experiences. We compare the ethnohistoric and archaeological evidence of the lives of the mitmaqkuna and yanakuna in two regions: the mitmaqkuna site of Yanawilka in the Vilcas Huamán province and the yanakuna site of Cheqoq in the rural Inka heartland of Cuzco. Archaeological comparisons yield evidence contradicting the long-held assumption that prestige is synonymous with autonomy, power, or even wealth in imperial contexts.

Mission, Empire, and the Ultimate Good: Colonel John Munro, Benjamin Bailey, and the Church Missionary Society “Mission of Help” to Travancore (1816–18)

Abstract The Church Missionary Society “Mission of Help” to the Syrian Church of Travancore in the nineteenth century provides much instructive food for thought concerning debates that continue in mission up to the present day. In particular, the episode shows that the links between mission and empire cannot be reduced to seeing mission as a mere handmaiden to imperial concerns, although empire certainly provided a context to missionary endeavor throughout the imperial period. In this specific instance it was the forceful personality of Colonel John Munro who ensured that the Mission of Help became more intertwined with empire than might otherwise have been the case. Another effect of this imperial context for the Mission of Help was that the nature and scope of mission inevitably ended up being broadened to include aspects of societal transformation. It is shown that Benjamin Bailey was not primarily motivated by such concerns, yet was not unconcerned about them. Bailey’s thinking through of these tensions perhaps provide a way to think today about the links between the “Great Commission,” the “Great Commandment,” and cultural transformation.

From Macanese Opium Traders to British Aristocrats: The Trans-Imperial Migration of the Pereiras

This study follows the multiple migrations of a middle class ‘Portuguese’/‘Macanese’ family in two imperial contexts and explores the complex relationship between ‘race’, ‘class’ and social mobility as wider social experiences shaped by imperial traditions, personal ambitions, social networks, and identity transformations. Through an examination of four generations of the Pereira family, from the late seventeenth century to the early twentieth century, I trace their movement from Portugal to Portuguese Macau to British Hong Kong, and finally to Britain, in order to reveal the shifting meanings and strategic value of being ‘Portuguese’, ‘Macanese’, and ‘British’ under different social settings and timeframes. Ultimately, this study aims, through the lens of middle-class migrants, to understand the construct of ‘race’ beyond the coloniser-colonised spectrum and to reconsider the colonial encounter as a pragmatic response to migration opportunities, social traditions and life challenges.

Whiteness, Imperial Anxiety, and the “Global 1930s”: The White British League Debate in Hong Kong

AbstractWhat is a British colony for, and who is it for? These were the questions at the crux of a public debate in 1933 in Hong Kong sparked by a British resident claiming to have formed an organization for the “protection and advancement” of the “British white race.” This article explores how anxieties about fascism, white privilege, and “others” in the empire allowed the very idea of such a political movement to be elevated to the subject of heated debate. The discussion on British unemployment, poor whites, and European “intruders” in the colony tells us less about the actual socioeconomic conditions that Hong Kong Britons faced than about their subjective experience of being “British” in an imperial context. The articulation of imperial anxiety also shows us how the fluid, ambiguous borders of whiteness and Britishness were negotiated at the intersections of nationalism, ethnicity, class, and race. Highlighting the global perspectives demonstrated in the debate and the various transnational networks across Hong Kong, this article argues that the debate was as much about global sociopolitical circumstances as about what was happening in Hong Kong. It therefore offers a timely opportunity to rethink how the local, “national,” regional, and global were interwoven in the “global 1930s,” even among the English reading public in the British colony of Hong Kong.

John Stuart Mill and the practice of colonial rule in India

John Stuart Mill’s justification for British rule in India is well known. Less well known and discussed are Mill’s extensive writings on the practice of British rule in India. A close engagement with Mill’s writings on this issue shows Mill was a much more uncertain and anxious imperialist than he is often presented to be. Mill was acutely aware of the difficulties presented by the imperial context in India, he identified a number of very demanding conditions that would have to be met if Britain’s imperial mission was to be successful, and he was very troubled by the dangers posed to this mission from politics in Britain. Toward the end of his life, Mill become much more pessimistic about the progressive possibilities of British colonialism, in part because of what he thought had happened after the transfer of British rule from the East India Company to the British state. A focus on Mill’s arguments about the practice of British rule in India goes some way to providing a more nuanced account of what Mill thought about colonialism.

Мировая юстиция в Бессарабской губернии: сравнительный анализ в имперском контексте

Мировая юстиция в Бессарабской губернии: сравнительный анализ в имперском контексте

The Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic (TDFR) as a “Georgian” responsibility

ABSTRACTThis article looks at the historical perspectives and positions of key Georgian political figures – mostly leading Social Democrats such as Noe Zhordania and Akaki Chkhenkeli, as well as National Democrats such as Niko Nikoladze – on the making and unmaking of the Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic (TDFR) by analyzing their reflections on the most heated political concepts of the first two decades of the twentieth century: nationality, nationalism, the nation-state, federation, economic development, and socialism in the Georgian, Transcaucasian and imperial contexts, given the rapidly shifting geopolitics of the region triggered by the onset of the Great War and aggravated by the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917. The article demonstrates that already having conceptualized the socio-economic and cultural needs of the nation as developing outside of the framework of the nation-state, Zhordania and Chkhenkeli viewed these instead within a regional federative context under a revolutionarily transformed imperial centre, while assuming that the Social Democrats would hold the commanding political position in Georgia. This prepared them to take responsibility for establishing de facto federative political institutions for Transcaucasia. That responsibility facilitated the making and unmaking of the short-lived, independent TDFR.

The Deportation of Political Prisoners to Fernando Po and the Spanish State (1866–68)

The Deportation of Political Prisoners to Fernando Po and the Spanish State (1866–68) Dan Royle In the summer of 1866, nineteen radical leaders were sentenced to deportation to Fernando Po—now Bioko in Equatorial Guinea, then a Spanish imperial possession—for fomenting popular revolution. In February 1867, two of these men managed to escape but, by the time they returned to the Peninsula, a competing elite revolution had already been set in motion. Their deportation ensured that the nineteen played no part in organising the popular response to the initial coup d'état in September 1868, although some did participate in the extemporaneous barricade fighting that followed. The character of this popular response meant that the elites were able to impose a postrevolutionary settlement which excluded more radical elements. Those deported in the years before 1868—including the nineteen—came to have prominent roles in local and national government in the years that followed. Had they remained in Spain and continued to organise, the balance of power immediately after revolution might have been different. As it was, the nineteen men and their experience have largely been forgotten in favour of the military leaders of the coup d'état and the elite government that was installed thereafter. Deportation had long been a feature of the Spanish imperial experience, but relatively few political prisoners were ever sent from the metropolis: several thousand before 1868, primarily to North Africa and the Philippines. Only 1,600 political prisoners were sent to Fernando Po in the entire period between 1861 and 1895.1 The majority of Spanish deportations were between two colonies, often for non-political reasons.2 Nevertheless, it had formed an important part of the government's reaction to unsuccessful popular revolutionary attempts in both 1848 and 1861. And in the years before 1868, the tool was wielded with unprecedented reach and frequency in an attempt to remove the threat of popular revolution altogether. The deportation of the nineteen to Fernando Po in 1866 was a continuation of this tradition, but also a radical departure. Transporting deportees to an isolated, tropical island required a more sophisticated state apparatus than previous waves, a challenge that was not only practical but also conceptual. It demonstrated the aspirations of the state not just in terms of counter-revolutionary politics, but also its colonial project and its justice system. These aspirations proved largely irreconcilable. Deportation is an amorphous form of punishment, the reality of which depends on the individual experience of the deportee and the way his or her story is told.3 Yet it is inherently violent, dually so, both in process and result. In the Spanish case, it was also a reflection of the structural violence of the state in this period. Consistently powerless to broaden citizenship beyond a narrow elite, its only recourse was to violence. The deportation of the nineteen to Fernando Po was an example of its failure to convert victory over political opponents into hegemonic legitimacy.4 Weber's theory that the state has the monopoly on the legitimate use of violence has limits in the imperial context, but it remains true that state violence need not be callous and indiscriminate.5 Indeed it could even have been legitimated; the nineteen deportees, for example, were convicted as part of a constitutional judicial process and sentenced to a legal punishment by state functionaries. Nevertheless, this relied on a legitimacy which the Spanish state lacked; "only a legitimate entity can punish, all others abuse."6 A Precarious Colonisation Approached as the sun sets over the Bight of Biafra, Fernando Po could appear to be a tropical island paradise; the first European to visit called it Formosa Flora (beautiful flower). But such first impressions belie the difficulties the early colonists faced. Richard Burton, the British consul in the 1860s, recalled feeling "uncommonly suicidal" through his first night on the island.7 Around the same time, the captain of a US anti-slaving ship wrote that it possessed "as many of the requisites for forming an uncomfortable disagreeable place, as any other locality in the world."8 And yet, to many Spaniards, who increasingly mythologised the lost American colonies, Fernando Po represented something of...

Facing Empire: Indigenous Experiences in a Revolutionary Age ed. by Kate Fullagar and Michael A. McDonnell

Reviewed by: Facing Empire: Indigenous Experiences in a Revolutionary Age ed. by Kate Fullagar and Michael A. McDonnell Katie Lantz (bio) Keywords Native Americans, Indigenous peoples, British Empire, Africa, North America Facing Empire: Indigenous Experiences in a Revolutionary Age. Edited by Kate Fullagar and Michael A. McDonnell. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. Pp. 356. Paper, $39.95.) In Facing Empire: Indigenous Experiences in a Revolutionary Age, editors Kate Fullagar and Michael McDonnell place indigenous peoples at the center of histories of the British Empire during the Age of Revolution (1760–1840). Even indigeneity, the editors observe, is a category born of empire: a shorthand through which colonial officials could distinguish between imperial subjects imported by empire, and those whose residence pre-dated imperial imposition. These essays range from Australia, the West African coast, Pacific Islands, the Great Lakes, the Persian Gulf, the Ohio country, to the Scottish Highlands. The editors facilitate comparisons between diverse indigenous experiences and strategies, and seek to demonstrate that Native peoples collectively influenced European policies and practices during the Age of Revolutions. Most of these essays offer stories of indigenous peoples deploying strategies to advance their own goals in new imperial contexts. Set on the shores of Lake Huron, Michael McDonnell's essay demonstrates the power of the Anishinaabe Odawa to teach British newcomers to trade and engage in diplomacy on Native terms during the 1760s and 1770s and in the aftermath of the Seven Years' War, when the French ceded their northern North American claims to the British Empire. Rebecca Shumway explores the Fante, a community on the coast of modern-day Ghana, between 1807 and the mid-nineteenth century. Taking advantage of confused British policy toward West Africa, the Fante drew British military commanders to their defense against the encroaching Asante kingdom. Sujit Sivasudaram examines the Persian Gulf, a space of many peoples and diverse communities contesting power. Colin Calloway tells a complex borderlands story of Iroquois, Shawnee, British, French, and eventually American powers competing for advantage in the Ohio country, from the 1750s to the 1770s. Nicole Ulrich examines class formation in the Cape of Good Hope from the 1790s through the 1810s, as the [End Page 334] region passed from Dutch East India Company to British colonial rule. Tony Ballantyne considers late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century New Zealand, where multiple Māori leaders competed for trade advantages, and interacted with Samuel Marsden, a missionary skilled at interpolating his cosmology into new cultural contexts. Kate Fullagar shows how Ostecano, a Cherokee leader, and Mai, the son of a prominent family from Ra'iatea, tried to maneuver the British into serving the interests of their communities and homelands during the late eighteenth century. Justin Brooks compares the experiences of Scottish Highlanders, North American Indians, and Bengalis in South Asia, 1745–1775. In each region, Brooks finds that British imperial policy evolved from diplomacy to increased use of military force to secure colonial aims. Finally, Elspeth Martini explores the efforts of an Ojibwe Methodist missionary, Shawundais, alias John Sunday, to convert his people and protect their lands around the upper Great Lakes during the mid-nineteenth century. The other primary pattern examines how indigenous peoples adapted to environmental change caused by imported plants and animals—and the commercial exploitation of resources for external markets. Bill Gammage shows how Aboriginal peoples before the colonization of Australia used fire to cultivate a mix of grassland and forests, ecosystems that supported the plants and animals and their lifeways. Robert Kenny reveals how Australian settlers' livestock transformed the landscape cultivated by the Taungurung—and how the Taungurung drew on their cosmological knowledge to resist invaders who unbalanced their lands. Examining two Pacific archipelagos, Tahiti and Samoa, from the 1760s to 1840s, Jennifer Newell depicts how Tahitians and Samoans incorporated British plants, animals, and cosmology into their environments and cultures. Joshua Reid carries the interaction between settler colonialism and indigenous lifeways into maritime space, and compares the Māori of the South Pacific and the Makah of northwestern North America, during the mid-nineteenth century. By framing essays around indigenous peoples "facing empire," this collection locates specific Native groups in binary relationships with the British Empire. Editors Fullagar...

Revolution against Empire: Taxes, Politics, and the Origins of American Independence by Justin du Rivage

Reviewed by: Revolution against Empire: Taxes, Politics, and the Origins of American Independence by Justin du Rivage Frank W. Garmon Jr. (bio) Revolution against Empire: Taxes, Politics, and the Origins of American Independence. By Justin du Rivage. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017. Pp. 371. Cloth, $40.00.) Revolution against Empire masterfully synthesizes eighteenth-century debates over political economy and foregrounds them as a major cause of the American Revolution. Rather than concentrating on the American revolutionaries, however, Justin du Rivage focuses his attention on the discussions that unfolded across the British Empire between parliamentary leaders and colonial subjects who championed competing visions of empire. Examining the American Revolution in an imperial context helps to explain not only why the colonists rebelled but also why British officials stubbornly pursued tax strategies that so aggravated the colonists. Du Rivage argues persuasively that the American Revolution was "a revolution not for or against monarchy, but against the authoritarian transformation of the British empire" (4). The author introduces three competing groups that vied for influence in British politics in the second half of the eighteenth century. Establishment Whigs sought a commercial empire supported by a powerful military. Imperial expansion provided the source for economic growth, they reasoned, and therefore military spending should continue unabated. Establishment Whigs believed that existing revenues would be sufficient to fund current operations. Excise and consumption taxes would make colonial taxation unnecessary. The rising costs of maintaining empire provoked challenges from authoritarian reformers, however, who believed that fiscal austerity was necessary to repay the government's [End Page 541] immense loans. Authoritarian reformers promoted a vision of empire that emphasized order and centralization. Excise taxes initiated by the establishment Whig government had rendered British exports uncompetitive and encouraged moral disintegration and debauchery among the lower classes. Taxes on luxury would rein in licentiousness, authoritarian reformers argued, and taxes on subsistence goods would lower wages sufficiently to restore the competitiveness of British manufactures. Radical Whigs shared authoritarian reformers' concerns about corruption, but rejected both their premises and their conclusions. Less concerned about moral corruption among the lower classes, radical Whigs decried the proliferation of sinecure positions in government. Colonial trade, rather than exports, provided the lifeblood of the empire according to radical Whig pamphleteers. High taxes and commercial regulations threatened to suffocate trade and stifle growth. Radical Whigs proposed replacing the excise system with higher taxes on the landed gentry. Eliminating colonial taxes would promote free trade and foster a decentralized vision of empire. Du Rivage argues that historians have largely accepted authoritarian reformers' arguments at face value and treated imperial tax policy after the Seven Years' War as a foregone conclusion. Such interpretations ignore the arguments put forward by their Whig critics. While radical Whig arguments found strong support in the American colonies, du Rivage explains how authoritarian reformers came to dominate British politics on the eve of the Revolution. These reformers argued convincingly that colonial taxes were indispensable to maintaining the fiscal solvency of the empire. Colonial resistance provided support for their worldview. Unruly colonists appeared to be disciples of anarchy and disorder. Authoritarian reformers called for even greater administrative centralization and new taxes to force the colonists to submit. In this context, taxes not only presented a demand for revenue but also reflected imperial priorities. Du Rivage describes the outcome of this political polarization as an imperial civil war. The colonists declared independence not because they had developed a distinct identity but because they rejected "the empire that Britain was becoming" (204). Revolution against Empire complicates the traditional narrative of taxation and representation while simplifying the messy political economy distinctions that cloud the American Revolution. A major contribution of this work is in reconciling the transatlantic historiography. Historians of the revolutionary era have often neglected or misunderstood British [End Page 542] politics by suggesting a broader consensus existed in favor of parliamentary authority to tax the colonies (13–14). Du Rivage has marshalled an impressive number of pamphlets and essays to dissect and survey the intellectual history of the period. At times the author could give a better sense of the relative size of each of the respective factions. While most colonists found radical Whigs persuasive...

The Ottoman-Kurdish Bedirhani Family Between Imperial and Post-Imperial Contexts: Navigating Change and Narrating Experiences of Transition. PhD Dissertation by Barbara Henning

The Ottoman-Kurdish Bedirhani Family Between Imperial and Post-Imperial Contexts: Navigating Change and Narrating Experiences of Transition. PhD Dissertation by Barbara Henning

Ovid, Rhetoric, and Freedom of Speech in the Augustan Age

Ovid, Rhetoric, and Freedom of Speech in the Augustan Age Jeffrey M. Hunt The impetus for this volume was a conference on Ovid’s exile poetry held at Baylor University in February of 2019. That conference sprung to life in a conversation between Eleonora Tola and Alden Smith at the Université Blaise Pascal in Clermont-Ferrand in 2017, during a symposium on Ovid sponsored by Hélène Vial. When Smith returned to Texas, he discussed the possibilities with me, and we decided to put some ideas on paper. Having chosen the topic, Smith approached a group of distinguished scholars with the proposal, which received favorable responses. We settled on the title “Ovid, Rhetoric, and Freedom of Speech in the Late Augustan Age: A Symposium on the Poet Ovid and his Milieu”—a truncated version of which serves as this volume’s title. The scholars who presented at the colloquium are among the best in the field. Carole Newlands has made outstanding contributions to Ovidian scholarship: from her studies on the Fasti to her overview of the Ovidian corpus. Her piece in this volume sheds light on Ovid’s poetic engagement with Virgil through the character of Aesacus. Alessandra Romeo’s rich work on Ovid’s Metamorphoses is well known. Her paper here focuses on Ovid’s adaptation of earlier versions of the myth of Cephalus. Eleonora Tola’s 2004 monograph (La métamorphose poétique chez Ovide: Tristes et Pontiques) offers a groundbreaking look at Ovidian intratextuality. In this volume, she investigates Ovid’s use of persuasive speech in Tristia 2. Alden Smith, who has spent most of his career writing on Virgil, wrote his first book on Ovid and has produced a number of articles on our poet, with the majority of them of late focusing on Ovid’s exile poetry. His paper concerns Ovid’s use of allusion and other rhetorical techniques in his letter addressed to Paullus Maximus (ex Ponto 1.2). Hélène Vial’s work on Ovid’s [End Page 133] exile poetry, particularly the Ibis, is widely recognized. Here she addresses the issue of free speech and Ovid’s strategy of leaving those he would reproach unnamed. Laurent Pernot, who gave the conference’s keynote address, is a major figure in ancient rhetorical studies. We are particularly grateful to Professor Pernot for urging us to assemble revised versions of the conference papers for this publication and his assistance in its preparation. His paper considers the role of figured speech as a formative element in Roman education and leads to insights about Ovid’s understanding of rhetoric. Julia Hejduk, whose The God of Rome (2020), treats Jupiter in Augustan literature, has published widely on both Virgil and Ovid. A former president of the Classical Association of the Middle West and South, Professor Hejduk is acutely aware of our profession’s political and social challenges, which she addresses head-on in her important contribution that considers Donna Zuckerberg’s recent book Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age. Finally, Karl Galinsky’s name has been synonymous with Ovidian studies ever since the publication of his 1975 monograph: Ovid’s Metamorphoses: An Introduction to the Basic Aspects. We are deeply grateful to Professor Galinsky for offering his rich response to the papers that make up this collection. His thoughtful consideration of the variety of ideas presented in this volume includes indispensable observations on how they fit within their early imperial context; his synthesis provides a most fitting conclusion. The conference that inspired this volume could not have happened without the support of many colleagues at Baylor University. I would like to thank Ken Jones, the chair of Classics at Baylor, as well as all of my colleagues in the department for their many contributions to its success. I would like also to express my appreciation to Baylor’s College of Arts and Sciences, as well as the Armstrong Browning Library, which generously accommodated the Ovid conference. I am delighted to have had a small role in presenting here the intellectual fruits of a gathering of such outstanding Ovidian scholars. [End Page 134] Jeffrey M. Hunt Baylor University Copyright © 2020...

The Imperial Politics of Youth and Age in Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room

My article addresses the question of youth and age in Virginia Woolf’s third novel, Jacob’s Room (1922), which is her modernist rewriting of the conventional Bildungsroman. Woolf’s presentation of her protagonist’s short life is specifically limited to his adolescence and young adulthood, both of which unfold within the early twentieth-century context of British imperialism. By explaining how Jacob Flanders’s adolescence and young adulthood are portrayed as far from developmental, I discuss the gap between Jacob’s chronological youth and symbolic age. The novel characterizes him as young and old at once and therefore makes a connection between the two seemingly contradictory age categories in its attempt to question the ways in which the traditional Englishness has been constructed and preserved in the modern era. In order to explicate the symbolism of Jacob’s youth that ends too early, I take a psychosocial approach to see what lies behind this young man’s quick demise. Specifically, in shedding light on the prewar context in which a young man’s youthful energy was regarded as the best catalyst for the British Empire’s continued progress, I argue that in this anti-developmental narrative, Woolf makes it impossible for her young male protagonist to live forward, letting him lead a life in stasis and age unnaturally from his late teens to twenties. As such, Woolf shows that the harmonious relationship between individual aging and imperial advancement is not possible in a modern world that obsessively measures one’s remaining potential for linear progress.

Language and Educational Practices in the Territories of the Western Russian Empire Governorates in the 19th Century: Searching For National Standards

Languages played a crucial role in the nation-building processes of the 19th century. It is impossible to investigate these processes not taking into consideration the imperial phenomenon. The aim of this article is to analyze and compare peculiarities of language and educational practices that characterized the development of the Jewish and Polish communities in what is referred to as the «Western outskirts» of the Russian Empire. The elimination of the Polish educational institutions was accompanied by the elaboration of options for including the Polish youth into the common imperial context through the educational system, and through the system of higher education in the first place. However, the Polish language maintained the status of the language of record keeping, court proceedings, and daily communication until the November Uprising (1830-1831), which significantly complicated the task of the local Poles’ assimilation.The article hypothesizes that competitive surrounding that was created by the Hebrew and Yiddish supporters, who were aligned with the followers of the Russian language oriented assimilation project, fostered the crystallization and norm introduction of both Jewish languages, which was happening with simultaneous development of their literary standards. The project on the establishment of the Jewish teacher training institutions with elements of secular education, the Russian language and the Russian management proved to be inviable as it failed to conform to Jewish traditional religious education.The methodology of the research: the article uses the comparative method to draw comparisons between language and educational practices of the representatives of the Polish and Jewish communities of the Southwestern and Northwestern territories during «the long 19th century», the elements of constructionist methodology enables the author to investigate the role of language marker in the implementation of the Polish and Jewish national projects. Instrumentarium of a so-called «new empire history» allows considering a destructive influence on national languages development in the nation-building process. The outlined methodology also testifies the presence of the novelty elements in the suggested material. Starting from the middle of the 19th century the communicative dominance in the Russian empire was given to the Russian language. Other languages occupied their local niches, which largely limited their usage and functioning. The efforts of the authorities to reduce the communicative area of the national languages usage and to diminish their status had the perverse effect. The oppression only encouraged the creators of national «projects» to make every effort to standardize, expand the spheres of language usage, to actively use them as languages of literature and science. Questions related to the consolidation of the status of state languages in the newly created nation-states after the destruction of one empire and under new political circumstances in the context of another empire need further studies.

On Belatedness. The Shaping of Portuguese Art History in Modern Times

Portuguese art history experienced remarkable development after World War II, especially with the work of José-Augusto França, who was responsible for establishing a historiographic canon for nineteenth- and twentieth-century Portuguese art that still endures. José-Augusto França developed a narrative that held Paris up as an artistic and cultural role model in relation to which he diagnosed a permanent delay in Portuguese art. This essay analyses França’s idea of belatedness in the context of Portuguese art historiography and political history and how it is part of a genealogy of intellectual thought produced in an imperial context, revisiting previous art historians and important authors, such as Antero de Quental and António Sérgio. Moreover, it aims to address how the concept of belatedness was associated with the idea of “civilisation” and the idea of “art as civilisation.” Belatedness also has implications in the constraints and specificities of writing a master narrative in a peripheral country – a need particularly felt in the second half of the twentieth century, to mark a political standpoint against the dictatorship that ruled from 1926 to 1974. Part of the reaction to fascism expressed the desire to follow other nations’ democratic example, but the self-deprecating judgements on Portuguese art were frequently associated with the identification of essentialist motifs – the “nature” of the Portuguese people, their way of thinking, of living, their lack of capacities or skills – and of a self-image of being “primitive” in comparison with other European countries that has antecedents going back to the eighteenth century. I will address the nostalgia for the empire and the prevailing notion of belatedness throughout the twentieth century regarding unsolved issues with that nostalgia.

Disarming the rulers and authorities: Reading Colossians in its Roman imperial context

The scant scholarly discussion that focuses on the relationship between Colossians and the Roman Empire has tended to reduce the relationship to a binary proposition: either Colossians is anti-empire, or it has little to say altogether with regards to empire. Neither perspective captures the complexity of Colossians in this regard. Colossians was not written explicitly for the purpose of opposing Rome’s empire. Yet it does have significant bearing on understanding how to live life faithfully under the dominion of empire. Writing to combat what the author perceives as a dangerous philosophy for the Colossian Christians, the author gives readers a glimpse into a worldview at sharp odds with Roman imperial ideology. The theological and Christological claims of the letter engage with Roman imperial ideology in ways that contest, threaten, and also mimic Roman imperial power.