Imperial Realm Research Articles

Reformatting a Traditional Image of the Qing Imperial Realm According to Modern Western Cartography

Abstract The Göttingen State and University Library in Germany possesses the only surviving copy of a general map of the Qing empire, which until early 2014 was considered to be lost. The map is a middle-format hand-coloured block print. All the place names and other textual elements in the map are given exclusively in Chinese. The map is authored by a known Chinese scholar, Li Mingche 李明徹 (1751–1832), but is undated. Yet the time of its creation can be reliably approximated to the mid-1820s, most likely 1825–1826. The map exhibits a clear stamp of Western mapmaking, primarily that of French cartography of the eighteenth century, yet its fine fusion with the system of traditional Chinese cartographic conventions and aesthetic preferences makes it an interesting hybrid cartographic specimen. This article proposes an initial analysis of the map providing a basis for future more detailed study.

Ending slavery in imperial peripheries: Ottoman abolitionist policy in Trablusgarp and Benghazi provinces (1857–1911)

When Istanbul prohibited the trade of enslaved Africans in 1857, the Ottoman local authorities expanded efforts to curb human trafficking throughout the imperial realm. These endeavours also included Libya, which lies at the frontiers of the Greater Sahara, a major slave-raiding zone in the nineteenth century. The historiography devoted to modern Libya maintains that the Porte took action to curb slavery only in response to British pressure. In this article, I seek to situate the prohibition of human trade in Libya within the larger scope of the end of slavery in the imperial realm. I argue that the Ottomans conducted an abolitionist policy in Libya that was embedded in the reforms undertaken in these peripheral provinces, namely, to foster the Porte’s sovereignty at its imperial frontier. I further argue that the enslaved population gained agency in the manumission process and in their integration into Ottoman society after their liberation. This bottom-up approach to the end of human bondage reveals the entanglement of old and new patterns of manumission in the era of abolition as well as the social integration of these emancipated slaves into Ottoman society during the Reform period.

The Not-So-Puritan Origins of the American Self

The Not-So-Puritan Origins of the American Self Gideon Mailer (bio) Evan Haefeli, Accidental Pluralism: America and the Religious Politics of English Expansion, 1497–1662. Chicago & London: Chicago University Press, 2021. viii + 383 pp. Notes and index. $45.00. Twenty years ago, while I was studying at Cambridge University, my accommodation overlooked a college chapel that had once been a victim of Puritan iconoclasm. The chapel of Peterhouse was consecrated in 1633 by supporters of Archbishop William Laud and his Beauty of Holiness movement. Unsurprisingly, its quirky Renaissance-Gothic synthesis did not appeal to the thousands of Parliamentary troops who were quartered in Cambridge during the English Civil Wars, nor the newly appointed "Commissioner for the destruction of monuments of idolatry and superstition" for the Eastern Association, William Dowsing (1596–1668). Though Dowsing succeeded in removing statues of angels and cherubs from the chapel in 1643, High-Church-leaning Peterhouse fellows managed to hide the Flemish stained-glass panel that depicted Rubens's Le Coup de Lance, which they reinstalled after the restoration of the Stuart royal line in 1660.1 Ten years after gazing at that chapel roof, during my two-day campus interview for a job at the University of Minnesota, I included its iconoclastic story in my response to a question from a search committee member. I had been discussing how the 1707 Act of Union between the English and Scottish parliaments had created a bi-confessional British state, which provided a model of jurisdictional pluralism for dissenting Protestants in North America. But the professor asked me to rewind one century to consider how the 1603 Regal Union between the English and Scottish monarchies might also help us to understand the origins of religious pluralism in colonial North America and the nascent United States. I used the chapel story to illustrate a warning that I offered to students: be careful mining seventeenth-century Anglo-Scottish history for the disestablishmentarian roots of British imperial life and American religious pluralism, or even the notion that multiple religious establishments might cohere within a single political union. As demonstrated by the deployment of authority by William Dowsing, iconoclastic Puritans shared a tendency for [End Page 7] centralized statecraft and bureaucratic control with their Laudian adversaries, even as they sought to devolve some forms of power to local Congregational churches. Those who opposed the nature of the Anglican establishment of religion did not necessarily repudiate public and civic support for religious authority in principle, nor hold tightly to grand theories of religious pluralism. Following my Peterhouse vignette, therefore, I suggested that civic leaders in Massachusetts, Maryland, and Virginia were likely to have demonstrated similar ambiguities in their approach to religious pluralism during the foundational period of their colonies. But I was not able to support my assertion with any historiographical reference. I certainly raised a knowing eyebrow as I played an audio recording of President Ronald Reagan's speeches from the Oval Office, which claimed that the liberty of religious conscience had spearheaded the American Founding during the 1770s and the destruction of "Godless communism" during the 1980s; and that those successes were rooted in the work of pilgrims to America such as the "early freedom man" and Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop.2 Yet I could not yet point to any Americanist who had examined conceptual similarities between the work of mainland English leaders and the constrained approach to religious pluralism among settler elites in Anglican Virginia, Puritan New England, or Catholic Maryland during the first half of the seventeenth century. Instead, I quickly turned to the more familiar historiographical terrain of the 1688 Glorious Revolution, the contingency of Lockean contractual theory, and their influence on the freedoms enjoyed by dissenting Protestants in British North America. Patriots eventually complained that the British Kingin-Parliament had afforded too many religious liberties to French-speaking Catholics in the territory of Quebec, which included Indigenous lands in present-day Minnesota. Notwithstanding the move towards disestablishment in the nascent United States, I finished with a flourish, some Patriots looked back to the Glorious Revolution as they opposed London for expanding religious pluralism in the British imperial realm.3 If I had had recourse to Evan...

The Return of longue durée in Political History of the Russian Empire

Abstract The present intervention makes a mental experiment of thinking about recent historiographic “turns” in terms of “returns.” It takes its point of departure from the recent book by John LeDonne Forging a Unitary State: Russia’s Management of the Eurasian Space, 1650–1850. This book shows how much is needed to be done in terms of returning to the institutional, military, and legal history of the Russian imperial state. But there is also a return to the long-term historical perspective that presents the challenge of constructing a coherent historical narrative when the process of imperial expansion produced the growing diversity of the imperial realm. This challenge can be solved and the narrative can be stabilized by projecting nation-centered categories on to the past experience (such as “majority” and “minority”). But the same long-term perspective can also empower historians to align their analytical language with the grammar of the imperial archive and lexicon of the political praxis and register shifts and ruptures in the grand trajectory spanning several centuries.

Vilne, Vilne undzer Meka: A City on the Border between Old and New, East and West

One of the key features of the image of Vilnius is its position on a symbolic spatial and chronological border. Depending on the ideological agenda of a particular imperial or national discourse, Vilnius can be located on the western or the eastern frontier of the imaginary imperial realm (Russian or German respectively), or as a historic national capital (for Poles, Lithuanians and Belarusians). Correspondingly, different national and imperial narratives evaluated particular historical periods differently, usually portraying the more remote past positively, as opposed to the most recent past. The Russian city guide by Flavian Dobrianskii and the German books by Paul Weber and Paul Monty, published respectively before and during the First World War, described the city from two opposite perspectives using the same conceptual opposition of East versus West. Unlike these dichotomous representations, Jewish Modernist poetry, exemplified by two poems entitled ‘Vilna’, by the Hebrew poet Zalman Shneour and the Yiddish poet Moyshe Kulbak, as well as the Yiddish city guide by Zalmen Szyk, sought to restore the imaginary unity of time and space, celebrating the complexity and diversity of the city.

The collapse of the Ottoman Empire and survival strategies of Christian communities in Greater Syria

ABSTRACT The millet system compartmentalised religious communities into different sociopolitical environments under the overarching Ottoman imperial realm. However, during the nineteenth century, state transformation and crisis and the global re-allocation of political and economic power led to the exacerbation of ethnoreligious conflicts. Facing the collapse of the Ottoman imperium and the threat of extinction, the Greek Orthodox, Assyrian, Chaldean and Syrian Orthodox communities developed five survival strategies. The first was co-optation by state authorities; the second, protection of the Great Powers; the third armed resistance and the creation of autonomous enclaves; the fourth was that of exodus; and the last was to integrate themselves into Arab nationalism, lowering the banner of religion and becoming strong advocates of an Arab national identity encompassing Muslims and Christians alike. This paper aims to present a comparative approach to these strategies in the period from the beginning of the twentieth century to the formation of the Mandates.

Imperial Inca-style pottery from Ecuador: Insights into provenance and production using INAA and ceramic petrography

A signature element of the Inca Empire is the highly standardized assemblage of ceramic vessels found across the length and breadth of the imperial realm. The question of how such standardization was achieved has long intrigued Inca scholars and led to a growing number of investigations into the organization of imperial pottery production. The present study contributes to this body of research through a compositional analysis of Inca-style pottery recovered from various sites in Ecuador. The goal of the analysis was to gain insight into where imperial-style wares from this region were produced. The results of the study indicate that production of Inca-style vessels in the distant provinces was less regulated than in areas nearer the imperial center. This suggests that local potters may have been free to emulate imperial forms, but that certain standards of care in paste preparation may have nonetheless been followed to elevate the state-styles above local varieties.

Translatio

This intervention considers the Medieval Latin concept of translatio, relatively well-rehearsed in literary, cultural and historical studies of the Middle Ages, but comparatively absent from performance and dance history and theory. Alternately described as translatio studii, to denote the translation or passage from one discipline to another, and translatio imperii, to denote the same from one imperial realm to another, translatio can also productively be deployed to describe disciplinary and geopolitical passage in performance studies broadly construed. More specifically, translatio enables choreographic or choreopolitical (and choreo-geopolitical) thinking-through the passage of concepts from one discursive realm to another, i.e. between “fields.” These may be taken ethnopoetically, following James Clifford, as sites of temporary residence, cultivation and passage (Routes [1997]). Translatio then suggests a kinetic moment and movement, at once the deand reterritorialization of thought-images, a displacement and transformation of concepts, but also a meeting-point between language use, a state of perpetual transit or transitoriness and transgeography. Translatio signals the movement of concepts, but also their reculturation on exogenous terrain. Taken as a concept of motility and a mobile concept and method in the expanded fields of dance and performance studies, translatio then informs choreogeopolitical thinking about the micro-translations, the code-switchings, writers and artists (as well as artist-writers) perform everyday between “fields.” In this way, the notion of translatio may enable us to reconfigure the way we understand performance and dance – and scholarly practice more broadly – not as institutional and discursive sites but as translational events, discourses and homes or oikoi perpetually migrating. Translatio then suggests a way of rethinking disciplinary (trans-) history in performance: as a set inter-articulated re-locations.

Composing communities: Chalcolithic through Iron Age survey ceramics in the Marmara Lake basin, western Turkey

Diachronic survey in the Marmara Lake basin of western Turkey confirms long-term settlement activity from the 5th millennium b.c. to the present. Here we present the results from a study of ceramics and settlement distribution pertaining to the Chalcolithic through the Iron Age periods (ca. 5th/4th–1st millennium b.c.). Our dataset confirms the value of a multi-pronged approach when establishing ceramic typologies from survey datasets, incorporating distribution in the landscape with macroscopic, microscopic (petrographic), and chemical (Instrumental Neutron Activation) analyses. Our results offer valuable insights into continuity as well as change of ceramic recipes in western Anatolia during the rise of urbanism in the Middle to Late Bronze Age followed by the establishment of an imperial realm in the Iron Age. From a methodological perspective, our results illustrate the value of macroscopic and chemical approaches, including principal component, distribution, density, and discriminant analyses that can be refined further by petrography, for the interpretation of surface survey ceramics.

The Dramatic End of The Excursion

At the end of The Excursion, the Wanderer calls for System of National Education established universally by Government (Cornell ed. 47): Oh for the coming of that glorious time When, prizing knowledge as her noblest wealth And best protection, this Imperial Realm, While she exacts allegiance, shall admit An obligation, on her part, to leach Them who are to serve her and obey; herself by Statute ... (IX 292-98) An endnote to the line on Binding ... by Statute--the last piece of text in The Excursion--cites Andrew 's monitorial system of education using the of tuition by the scholars themselves (Madras School [1808] 96, 23): P. 400. Line 19.--Binding herself by Statute. The discovery of Dr. affords marvellous facilities for carrying this into effect, and it is impossible to overrate the benefit which might accrue to humanity from the universal application of this simple engine under an enlightened and conscientious government. (The Excursion 1814, 447; Cornell ed., 314) Wordsworth claimed that The Excursion had something of a dramatic (Preface 1814 x; Cornell ed. 39). But his friendship with and personal interest in the system suggest that there is very little drama left by the end of the poem. The Wanderer calling for statutory education reads like Wordsworth ventriloquizing through another man's mouth (Coleridge, Table Talk I 308-9, 307). Wordsworth was the last of the Lake Poets publicly to endorse and the Madras system. As De Quincey put it, was taken up by the Westmoreland people: by with his usual temperate fervor; by Coleridge with such monomaniac liking that London was abuzz with his lecture on and the (De Quincey II 278). This Dragon was Joseph Lancaster, a Quaker and author of a rival system, allied with the ministry of all the talents and the Edinburgh Review. Bell and the was the working title of Southey's October, 1811, essay on education in the Quarterly (CLRS letter 1992). Thomas Rowlandson's cartoon of December 1811 reflects the public impact. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Historical scholarship has recovered the context of reactionary progressivism (Gilmartin 66-7) that solves the problem of the Romantic poets supporting the Gradgrind school. The multiplication of power in Bell's system reflected new industrial and colonial conditions. It was also traditionally English: framed in the same spirit, on the same principle as the Anglican Church (Bell 321). Madras thus modelled the Lake Poets' developing ideas of Clerisy, National Church, and transformative historical genius. (1) By supporting and his Anglican intellectual steam-engine (Southey, QR 15:29 [1816], 227), Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey became champion [s] of the old order ... in an ideal (Butler 165). But is the Wanderer's call for unambitious Schools and rudimentary teaching for those born to serve . . . and obey (IX 297-398) really Wordsworth's authentic comment on education? Any more than the Wanderer's advocacy of early rising, hill-climbing, and goat chasing (IV 489-504) adequately reflects Wordsworth's philosophy of nature? (2) Wordsworth's correspondence suggests rather a continual ambivalence on the issue. A letter of June, 1808, to Francis Wrangham sets the tone. National education will not take in a complex commercial society: Heaven and Hell are scarcely more different from each other than Sheffield and Manchester, etc. differ from the plains and Vallies of Surrey, Essex, Cumberland, or Westmoreland. We have mighty cities, and towns of all sizes, with villages and cottages scattered everywhere. We are mariners, miners, manufacturers in tens of thousands, traders, husbandmen, everything. What form of discipline, what books or doctrines --I will not say would equally suit all these--but which, if happily fitted for one, would not perhaps be an absolute nuisance in another? …

Writing History, Shaping Images in Later Roman Empire

Arnaldo Momigliano drew our attention on the fact that Christians in Late Antiquity did not try to Christianize ordinary political history, i.e. the imperial realm. Indeed, history writing, all the way to Procopius, remained staunchly traditional. A similar phenomenon is present in visual arts. The absence of Christian themes and symbols on Constantine’s triumphal arch in Rome has often been understood as a proof of Constantine’s phony conversion to Christianity. However, if we look closer at the iconography of imperial art throughout the 4th century, we shall discover that it rarely, if ever, puts an emphasis on religious convictions of the ruler (which may have been taken for granted).

Not Just Words: Shogunal Politics and the Daijōsai in Mori Ōgai's "Saigo no ikku"

Not Just Words:Shogunal Politics and the Daijōsai in Mori Ōgai's "Saigo no ikku" Doris G. Bargen (bio) At a banquet a palace woman (uneme 釆女) offered the royal wine cup to the Emperor, unaware that a leaf had fallen into it from a giant zelkova tree next to the Hall of First Fruits (niinaeya 新嘗屋). Seeing this, the Emperor put his sword to her neck and almost killed her, had she not been able to soothe him with a poem. Her staggering song celebrated the journey of the leaf through the entire imperial realm—from the upper through the middle to the lower branches, swirling like a brine-churning spearhead into the "moist, gem-glistening cup" of the Child of the Sun. Trembling, she bore irrefutable testimony, "The story,The words of the storyAre these words."And the Emperor was moved to forgive her.1 Kojiki, Book 3, Chapter 133 This episode from Japan's most ancient chronicle powerfully reflects the magic of words inspired by narrative tradition to restrain the severe hand of authority. The uneme saves her own life at the site of the annual Harvest Festival by singing a song for her ruthless ruler, often thought to be Emperor Yūryaku 雄略 (traditional reign dates, 456-479). Her verbal triumph over her sovereign's threat of brute force has a remarkable affinity to the story "Saigo no ikku" 最後の一句 (1915) by [End Page 1] Mori Ōgai 森鴎外 (1862-1922). In both tales, feasting—at the Hall of First Fruits and the Great Feast of Enthronement (Daijōsai 大嘗祭, or daijō-e 大嘗会), respectively—forms the ritual frame for the clash between ruler and subject. Ōgai's story celebrates the victory of self-sacrifice over formal legal procedures. In this article I illuminate aspects of "Saigo no ikku" that have not yet been examined in detail, such as economic conditions under shogunal rule and the political repercussions of self-sacrifice inside and outside a court of law and within the ritual context of the Daijōsai. Although this imperial enthronement rite is mentioned only at the end of the tale, its significance must be appreciated in order to feel the force and understand the extraordinary efficacy of the young female protagonist's offer to die in her father's place. The Daijōsai, to which no previous critic has given more than passing attention, enables the reader to untie the knots in Ōgai's formidably complicated narrative. Ōgai wrote "Saigo no ikku" in a very short time—virtually "in one sitting" (ikki kasei 一気呵成), according to Takita Choin 滝田樗陰 (Tetsutarō 哲太郎, 1882-1925), the noted liberal and editor in chief of Chūō kōron 中央公論. Having finished the story on 17 September 1915, Ōgai handed it three days later to Takita, who published it in Chūō kōron in October under the author's given name of Rintarō 林太郎, rather than his nom de plume of Ōgai.2 This short piece of historical fiction belongs to a group of stories that Ōgai himself characterized as rekishibanare 歴史離れ (departing from history), in contrast to his earlier tales that follow his sources more closely, although never slavishly so. Written a few months after his somewhat perplexing—and hence much discussed—historiographical essay "Rekishi sonomama to rekishibanare" 歴史其儘と歴史離れ (January 1915), which deals with the search for truth both in and aside from recorded "fact,"3 it takes as its principal source an account by Ōta Nanpo 大田南畝 (1749-1823) of the so-called Katsuraya Incident. The Katsuraya Incident in Nanpo's Ichiwa Ichigen Nanpo's text, titled "Genbun sannen Ōsaka Horiebashi kinpen Katsuraya Tarobē no koto" 元文三年大坂堀江橋近辺かつらや太郎兵衛事 (The 1738 Incident Involving Katsuraya Tarobē in the Horiebashi Neighborhood of Osaka), appears in chapter 17 of Ichiwa ichigen 一話一言 (1779-1820), his monumental collection of various writings (zuihitsu 随筆).4 According to the postscript, the account is a faithful copy, made by [End Page 2] an unidentified person on 1739.3.23, of notes set down, immediately after the case was settled, by an official named Kin'ya. Ōgai's story, then, is thrice removed from the historical event by Kin'ya's report, the copy of Kin'ya's report, and Nanpo's reproduction of both. The Ichiwa ichigen episode begins with the jailing of a...

The Globalisation of Enclosure: interrogating the geopolitics of empire

This article examines the question of global order in the contemporary historical conjuncture. I argue that Hardt and Negri's Empire provides a response to such a question. This response is necessary given the manner in which globalisation theory's explanation of global order has been contested by the George W Bush regime. An exegesis of the manner in which Empire delineates global order in the contemporary era provides, moreover, a fruitful encounter between elements of post-structuralist International Relations theory and the subject matter of International Political Economy. The article sketches out the principal characteristics of empire followed by an exegesis of the empirical manifestation of imperial characteristics in the contemporary global order. I argue that the present global order is characterised by the drawing of boundaries or the constitution of thresholds that define what is to be regarded as included and excluded from the imperial realm. Empire vigorously polices these thresholds in order to defer encounters with others that might question its self-asserted timeless pacific civility. Finally, I conclude by noting that the centrality of such boundary constitution to imperial forms suggests that a logic of security underlies contemporary global order. Thus investigations into the political economy of Empire will always already comprise an investigation of imperial logics of security.

Empire Migration in Post-War Reconstruction: The Role of the Oversea Settlement Committee, 1919–1922

World War One and its aftermath restored the empire to a central place in the considerations of Whitehall. Not only did the war open new vistas for imperial ambitions and drive home the benefits to be drawn from the established dominions, notably in terms of manpower and materiel: it also brought into seats of power the likes of Lords Milner and Curzon, men whose careers had been devoted to the maintenance and expansion of Britain's imperial realm. Though their autocratic style ill-suited democratic politics, it did serve the needs of a modern state at war, where all sectors of society were subordinated to central command. It can be argued that these imperial bureaucrats had a more sophisticated appreciation for the power of the state than their domestic counterparts, who still labored under the lingering constraints of laissez-faire doctrine. They understood from colonial experience the state's potential for engineering social change. And they saw change as vital to Britain's future. Deeply imbued with a social Darwinist world-view, they regarded the war as evidence that national survival would require a more integrated, self-contained, harmonious imperial system, directed with greater deliberation and rigor from above. They were, in effect, social imperialists. Although this doctrine had taken shape in the Edwardian years, it was the war that eroded much of the resistance to its implementation. Yet how far could these gains be extended into the critical post-war period?As Keith Williams has argued in his valuable dissertation, an important feature of social imperialist doctrine concerned migration: here the bonds between Britain and the empire were those of culture and blood.