Imperial Landscape Research Articles

‘About the Tangle of the Rose’: Thinking with the Fin‐de‐Siècle Tendril

‘[It] transported me a thousand miles from London, to a thousand years from the age of Mr. Gladstone’, recalled Robert de la Sizeranne of Edward Burne‐Jones's Briar Rose series (1884–90). This essay argues, on the contrary, that the paintings were closer to contemporary concerns than Sizeranne allowed. In Burne‐Jones's briar, we find a remarkable example of one of the late nineteenth century's most promiscuous and ambiguous motifs: the tendril. Perhaps unexpectedly, this ornamental motif was at the centre of fin‐de‐siècle debates about time, capitalist expansion, and imperialism. In visual art, philosophy, and art history, the tendril figured anxieties about where Europe was heading. Tracing its movement through Burne‐Jones's canvases into texts by Henri Bergson and Alois Riegl, and decorative art by Victor Horta and William Morris, this essay contends that the tendril traverses a shared, but fragile, trans‐European imperial landscape at the end of the nineteenth century.

Colonial Suspects: Suspicion, Imperial Rule, and Colonial Society in Interwar French West Africa

Colonial Suspects: Suspicion, Imperial Rule, and Colonial Society in Interwar French West Africa

3D modeling of the impact of ancient Yellow River floods on urban landscapes: A new look at the late imperial landscape at the Shuntianmen Site of Kaifeng City, Henan Province, China

AbstractFloods had a massive impact on the development of ancient cities around the world and understanding this phenomenon constitutes an essential part of the history of long‐term and dynamic human–environment interactions. There remains, however, an enormous challenge in identifying records of ancient floods in urban environments due to various sedimentation and postdepositional processes that often remove, erase, and alter such environmental records. During archaeological excavations in the famous historic city of Kaifeng, we identified records of two historical floods at the Shuntianmen site. Related stratums were carefully studied, from which dating and sediment samples were collected. These excavated stratums were also scanned to obtain digital data for modeling. Combining these data, we then applied three‐dimensional modeling to reconstruct the evolution of the natural and cultural landscape of the site since the Northern Song Dynasty (960–1127 AD), which was not possible in previous studies due to the deep burial of archaeological strata. Our results indicate that the two floods occurred during the late Ming Dynasty (1368–1644 AD) and the Qing Dynasty (1636–1912 AD), respectively. During the Northern Song Dynasty, Shuntianmen was an important part of Kaifeng, which was, at that time, the capital of China and one of the largest cities in the world. Later, during the Yuan and Ming dynasties, Shuntianmen became a suburban settlement situated along various traffic routes. During the Qing Dynasty, the area became a small village. Subsequently, the area was completely abandoned and deserted until modern Kaifeng, which was built at the same place. The evolution of the regional landscape is the direct result of the interaction between the natural environment and human activities, among which the precarious alluvial processes of the Yellow River were playing an increasingly vital role. Over the centuries, the Yellow River floods, warfare, and wind‐blown sand accumulation reduced the Kaifeng region from a prosperous capital to a comparatively deserted area.

Where Dragon Veins Meet: The Kangxi Emperor and His Estate at Rehe by Stephen H. Whiteman

Reviewed by: Where Dragon Veins Meet: The Kangxi Emperor and His Estate at Rehe by Stephen H. Whiteman Aurelia Campbell Where Dragon Veins Meet: The Kangxi Emperor and His Estate at Rehe by Stephen H. Whiteman. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020. Pp. xix + 271. $70.00 hardcover, $70.00 e-book. Where Dragon Veins Meet: The Kangxi Emperor and His Estate at Rehe, by Stephen Whiteman, focuses on the Mountain Estate to Escape the Heat (Bishu shanzhuang 避暑山莊, hereafter Mountain Estate), the renowned Qing dynasty (1636–1912) summer palace in Rehe (now Chengde), located 180 kilometers northeast of Beijing, beyond the Great Wall. Originally one of a network of traveling palaces at which the Manchu emperor would stop during his annual tours among the court's Inner Mongolian allies, in the first decade of the eighteenth century, the site was transformed by the Kangxi 康熙 emperor (r. 1661–1722) into a lavish complex of gardens and palaces that eventually served as a secondary Qing capital. Most extant scholarship examines the Mountain Estate as it was handed down to us from the reign of the Qianlong 乾隆 emperor (r. 1735–1796), Kangxi's grandson, who made a number of significant additions to the site. Whiteman instead takes up the difficult task of reconstructing the Mountain Estate as it existed, in both actual and represented forms, during Kangxi's reign. Drawing [End Page 193] upon a wide array of primary evidence, including maps, paintings, prints, poems, and essays, Whiteman reveals that the landscape of the Mountain Estate served as a key medium through which Kangxi defined his imperial ideology. In the introduction, Whiteman lays out the book's main arguments and methodologies. He begins by explaining the reasons why he concentrates on the Mountain Estate during the reign of Kangxi instead of Qianlong: "To view the park solely through the lens of Qianlong's vision for it … risks (indeed, enacts) an act of historical erasure, subsuming the intentions of an earlier period under the actions of a later one" (p. 4). Whiteman's goal is instead to "pull apart the collapsed layers" of the Mountain Estate in order to understand how Kangxi shaped the estate to establish Qing political legitimacy within the "rapidly developing networks of the early modern world" (p. 8). Rather than basing his discussion of the Mountain Estate on nineteenth-century records, as scholars have done in the past, Whiteman relies mainly on sources from Kangxi's reign, including the emperor's own writings as well as imperially sponsored paintings and prints of the gardens. Part 1, "Recovering the Kangxi Landscape," begins with a translated excerpt from "Record of Traveling at the Invitation of the Emperor," the high official Zhang Yushu's 張玉書 (1642–1711) brief but detailed personal account of his visit to the Mountain Estate in 1708. This text is followed by chapter 1, "Reconstructing Kangxi," which, in the absence of surviving buildings, relies on textual evidence to reconstruct the estate's early built environment. Whiteman determines that the Kangxi-era park was constructed in three main phases over the course of a decade (1703–1713), and he describes in great detail its early palaces, temples, gardens, and water features. One of Whiteman's most important sources is the Imperial Poems on the Mountain Estate to Escape the Heat (Yuzhi Bishu shanzhuang shi 御制避暑山莊詩, here-after Imperial Poems), a set of poems written by Kangxi about thirty-six favorite scenic spots at the park. In 1713, an album of the poems, accompanied by woodblock-printed illustrations by the court artist Shen Yu 沈喻 (1649–after 1728), was published in many copies, affording a "virtual tour" (p. 6) of the estate to a broader audience. Several of Shen's prints are reproduced in this chapter, along with topographic maps created by the author, aiding present readers in envisioning the early layout of the Mountain Estate. [End Page 194] Part 2, "Allegories of Empire," comprises three sections. It begins with chapter 2, "Mountain Veins," in which Whiteman discusses how Kangxi created a new Manchu imperial landscape at Rehe by touring, hunting, writing, mapmaking, and conducting rituals. Within this new political geography, Whiteman argues, the geomantic significance of the Manchu ancestral homeland in the northeast...

The Remains of Empires in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of The Day

This paper aims to explore how Kazuo Ishiguro has found a position of enunciation away from the conflicting sentiments of otherness between the deeply rooted traditions of both Japan and England. With a particular focus on Ishiguro’s third novel, The Remains of the Day (1989), the paper highlights the shift of the scene from Japan in his first two novels, A Pale View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating World to a purely English setting in The Remains of the Day. Drawing on the postcolonial theoretical framework, the study examines Ishiguro’s literary production grapples with universal themes. It offers ways to question the ‘national greatness’ of both empires as represented through Japanese and British voices while narrating their personal histories and traumas. The main contribution of this study lies in extending arguments on the postcolonial engagement of Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, by focusing on his demythologization of both Eastern and Western Empires. The paper concludes that Ishiguro’s ‘fictional’ metamorphosis serves to subvert imperial landscapes, and convert them into mythical metaphors to approach universal themes and worlds, while simultaneously finding his own voice and territory.

Imagining imperial frontiers: Photography-as-cartography in the mapping of eastern Africa

This paper examines the construction of imperial landscapes in the borderlands of eastern Africa in the early twentieth century. Recent literature has emphasized the haphazard, contingent, and often hybrid nature of mapping imperial frontiers and colonial governance in eastern Africa. This paper looks at the role of photography in the mapping of the Kenya-Somali frontier through the rich photographic archive of colonial official, Sir Geoffrey Archer. Archer documented his cartographic surveys through multiple media – diaries, maps, photographs – that provide a unique lens through which to explore the role of visual culture in contestations over territoriality, mobility, and sovereignty. While this photographic archive visualized imperial frontier landscapes and documented the work of cartographic surveys, it also revealed the dependency on local intermediaries, through their labour, geographic knowledge, and spatial practices. Photography-as-cartography demonstrated both the productive work of photography and the ambivalent presence of colonized peoples in the mapping of imperial frontiers, revealing the social lives of the borderlands and capturing fugitive meanings, bodies, and landscapes.

Climatic Variations and Imperial Landscapes in Northern Mesopotamia : From the Fall of Assyria to the Parthian-Roman Period

Climatic Variations and Imperial Landscapes in Northern Mesopotamia : From the Fall of Assyria to the Parthian-Roman Period

The Neo-Assyrian Empire in the Southwest: Imperial Domination and Its Consequences

The Neo-Assyrian Empire in the Southwest: Imperial Domination and Its Consequences

Imperial Architecture and Identity: An Introduction

Imperial Architecture and Identity: An Introduction

Alternatives

Whiteness was abundantly in evidence during the 2020 election in the United States and subsequently when a white mob stormed the Capitol to protest what they regarded as a stolen election. I suggest that we locate the confluence of “God, guns, and country” on that day on a settler-colonial and imperial landscape, tracing how a territorial white subject comes to feel racial entitlement and aggrievement through Christianity, an affect that is evident when we consider Muslims in the white imaginary.

The Infrastructural Sublime and Imperial Landscape Aesthetics: Robert Southey, Poet Laureate, and Thomas Telford, Father of Civil Engineering

ABSTRACT The following essay turns to Britain’s imperial past to unravel a knotty link between celebrations of Britain’s civil infrastructure and Romantic authors’ accounts of poetic prowess. Although the relationship between poetics, landscape, and architecture remains a core concern within Romantic literary criticism, little work studies the widely celebrated innovations of this period’s civil engineers. But when we recognize how bridges, roadways, and canals from this era were rendered sublime both by influential poets such as Robert Southey and Britain’s popular presses, we discover a troubling link between British infrastructural aesthetics, poetics, and empire. Studies on Romantic literature and architectural form tend to foreground ruins, and they typically theorize the decay of structures both actual and figurative. Left virtually unconsidered in these accounts is the technology of the bridge, not to mention grand undertakings like Thomas Telford’s work on the expansive Holyhead Road project, its relation to colonial ideology, or to Southey, Telford’s close acquaintance and Britain’s Poet Laureate. Yet to bring these massive and widely celebrated infrastructural developments into conversation with historical and literary inquiry compels us to reconsider key intersections between national politics, sublime aesthetics, and architectural and poetic art born of the British Romantic movement.

Terrifying and Powerful, Fertile and Homely: Flora Shaw and ‘England’ in Representations of the Imperial Landscape, 1890–1904

ABSTRACT In 1892, The Times journalist Flora Shaw, recovering from influenza, set off for Cape Town. Shaw expanded this tour, on her own initiative, going inland in South Africa, and making a tour of Australia as well. These articles were intended to act as a report on the political and economic state of the empire. They were also a platform for Shaw to advance her desire for a more integrated Greater Britain by utilising literary methods of travel writing, and vividly describing the empire in order to advocate emigration. This article builds upon work on imperial representation to consider how emigration to the settler colonies could be presented to a British economic and political elite in the readership of The Times. Shaw used these ‘imagined geographies of empire’ and the representation of imperial landscapes as devices for presenting the colonies as excitingly different areas to Britain. But she also used associative description and language around these landscapes to make the colonies appear more familiar. Placing these descriptions within imperial travel writing, as well as the ideas of Greater Britain, this article argues that the associations of landscape in the empire were used to represent it as terrifying and yet homely.

Book Review of The Archaeology of Imperial Landscapes: A Comparative Study of Empires in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean World, edited by Bleda S. Düring and Tesse D. Stek

Book Review of The Archaeology of Imperial Landscapes: A Comparative Study of Empires in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean World, edited by Bleda S. Düring and Tesse D. Stek

For Whom the Bell Tolls: Memeing French Landscape on Instagram

On the evening of April 15, 2019, hoary plumes of smoke erupted from Notre-Dame Cathedral and rolled across the rooftops of the Ile de la Cité in Paris, France. World leaders expressed their condolences over the loss, and many experts publicly warned that, though it can be rebuilt, the 12th-century monument to Catholicism will never “be the same”. By the end of the next day, cathedral bells tolled across the city in honor of the devastating fire and hundreds of millions in euros already had been pledged, with the uber-wealthy leading the way. In the days that followed the fire, the fire and fundraising efforts garnered a veritable tempest of media coverage and ignited a social media fervor. The hashtag #NotreDameFire trended on Twitter, spread virally across Facebook and, to date, has garnered almost 22,000 posts on Instagram. Much of this online popular discourse has not been as kind and can be read as a form of political struggle around the meaning and identity of Notre-Dame waged on the digital archive of Instagram. This article examines the #NotreDameFire hashtag on Instagram, reading the associated visuals through the framework set out by Cara A. Finnegan in Making Photography Matter: A Viewer’s History from the Civil War to the Great Depression. It considers Finnegan’s presence, character, appropriation and magnitude in the context of Instagram as an archive of, in this case, both site and sight of one imperial landscape — Notre-Dame Cathedral.

Damning Nicomedia

All Christian flights were not created equal. With the aid of pro-Nicene authors, Athanasius of Alexandria's multiple flights quickly became the standard for an orthodox exile. The charge of cowardice, or worse, heresy, was not so easily dismissed, however. While the famed Athanasius would explain away such charges in his own writings, as did many of his later defenders, not all fleeing bishops could escape a damning verdict. In this article, I explore how the enemies of Nicaea, re-read as the enemies of Athanasius, also found themselves in exile. Their episcopal flights were no testament to their virtue but within pro-Nicene Christian memory of fifth-century ecclesiastical historians, the exiles of anti-Nicene bishops, such as Eusebius of Nicomedia, were remembered as evidence of guilt. To show how this memory-making exercise took place we will turn to the imperial landscape and assess how the space someone was exiled from greatly shaped how exile was deemed either orthodox or heretical.

The Historicization of Sharia and Historical Generalization

Abstract This review essay seeks to offer an analytic/historiographical framework that would pay closer attention to the imperial legal landscape and the Hanafi jurisprudential tradition. This framework, I believe, adds to the continuum that Beshara B. Doumani proposes, which is based on the political economy of different localities across the Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean and, perhaps, well beyond. Taken together, both aspects of the framework reveal the complexity of the Ottoman legal landscape. They also suggest new directions in which Family Life in the Ottoman Mediterranean could be generalized while retaining the rich local dimension of the work.

The Making of Hittite Imperial Landscapes: Territoriality and Balance of Power in South-Central Anatolia during the Late Bronze Age

AbstractAim of the present work is to offer an understanding of the mechanisms informing the making and reproduction of the Hittite Empire (17th-13th BCE) in its diachronic evolution. The analysis focuses on South-Central Anatolia, an area of intense core-periphery interactions within the scope of the Hittite domain and, therefore, of great informative potential about the manifold trajectories of imperial action. Through the combinatory investigation of archaeological and textual data able to account for long- to short-term variables of social change, I will show that South-Central Anatolia evolved from being a loose agglomerate of city-hinterland nuclei into a provincial system. The region thus acquired a pivotal role in the balance of power thanks to its centrality in the communication network, and it became the stage for eventful political revolutions, as well as a new core for Hittite political dynamics. The picture of Hittite imperialism emerging, thus, is that of a set of multi-causal and multi-directional processes, not predicated on the sole centrifugal hegemonic expansion of the empire.

KIPLING'S BESTIARY

The animal turn in studies of nineteenth-century imperialism has been a long time in coming. Scholars seeking to yoke together questions of nonhuman life and the domain of the colony have come to acknowledge, at long last, that the imperial landscape was not a purely human one. Only now, suggests John Miller, has the considerable scholarship on empire and the natural world made an impress upon Victorian literary studies (479). The animal turn, however, is not new in the scholarship on Rudyard Kipling. For Kipling, empire never was simply an affair of human beings; more perhaps than any other writer of the colonial experience, he saw imperialism as encompassing plural and multiply scaled orders of animate life. Henry James, an early admirer of Kipling's work, took disgusted note in 1897 of what seemed to him the simultaneous multitudinousness and diminution of the younger writer's fictional world: “My view of his prose future has much shrunken in light of one's increasingly observing how little life he can make use of. . . . In his earliest time I thought he perhaps contained the seeds of an English Balzac; but I have given that up in proportion as he has come down steadily from the simple in subject to the more simple–from the Anglo-Indians to the natives, from the natives to the Tommies, from the Tommies to the quadrupeds, from the quadrupeds to the fish, and from the fish to the engines and screws” (Page 49).

Unsettling Time: Persistence and Memory in Spanish Colonial Peru

In this paper, I explore the politics of memory during the Toledan reforms—a series of ambitious administrative changes legislated in colonial Peru between 1569 and 1581, by viceroy Francisco de Toledo. At the center of Toledo’s project was an initiative to resettle the entire native population of the audiencias of Lima and Charcas into a series of planned towns called reducciones. This movement—reduccion—sought to transform Andean indigenous peoples into subjects of the Catholic Church and the Spanish crown through a series of explicitly spatial operations, including regional population nucleation and settlement planning. But the terms of these changes were also temporal: as reduccion shaped landscapes and built environments, it also sought to transform indigenous historicity, bringing native peoples into the Era of Christ and carefully regulating the social institutions and practices by which they accounted for their pasts. The Toledan reforms therefore present a clear example of one empire’s attempts to subjugate conquered peoples through mnemonic practices. Yet archaeological research in one corner of the viceroyalty—Peru’s Zana valley—suggests that the story of how indigenous memories were actually shaped during the course of resettlement and its aftermath was far from straightforward. To understand these transformations, I argue that we must explore not only the short-term dialectic of Spanish designs and their indigenous responses, but also the “afterlives” of reduccion in the 17th and 18th centuries. Over the longer term, reduccion achieved staying power through a series of unanticipated pathways, in which landscape change, demography, and indigenous agency all played essential roles. I argue that these developments ultimately resulted in much more complex forms of remembering than those implicit in reduccion legislation and that they underscore the importance for archaeological studies of memory of attending both to the materiality of imperial landscapes and long-term processes of subject formation.

Late imperial landscapes in the early modern world

Late imperial landscapes in the early modern world