Imperial Vision Research Articles

Imperial Visions: The Prophet and the Book of Isaiah in an Age of Empires, edited by Reinhard Gregor Kratz and Joachim Schaper

Imperial Visions: The Prophet and the Book of Isaiah in an Age of Empires, edited by Reinhard Gregor Kratz and Joachim Schaper

Articulating women's bodies: Montesquieu, Diderot, and the imperial and settler-colonial politics of gender and sexuality

ABSTRACT In this essay I develop a feminist anti-colonial critique by reading two eighteenth-century literary texts that discuss Middle Eastern and Indigenous gender and sexual practices at length: Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes (1721) and Diderot's Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville (1772). While Montesquieu and Diderot are often heralded as anti-imperial European Enlightenment thinkers, the specific ways in which Montesquieu and Diderot use gender and non-European women's bodies to construct their political-theoretical arguments show us two distinct colonial logics, one imperial and the other settler-colonial. I show that whereas Montesquieu uses Persian and Muslim sexual and gender practices to put forward an imperial vision premised on the superiority of French political order over a despotic ‘oriental’ order, Diderot uses Indigenous sexual practices to denote a settler-colonial logic premised on the erasure of conquest and pacification of Indigenous women's bodies. In doing so I build on existing feminist and post/anti-colonial scholarship to develop gender and sexuality as central analytics of imperial and settler-colonial politics.

The Lost Inner Beauty in Martial Arts: A Pencak Silat Case

The establishment of a football association in the 1930s in Indonesia marked the dominant Anglo/Euro-American control of the global diffusion of sport mingled with the imperial vision of those states to promote western colonialism’s social mores as part of a mission to ‘civilize’ people in other lands. These phenomena justify a model of spatial diffusion of sports that spread from the West as the centre (core) to colonised nations as periphery. On the other hand, the diffusion of martial arts in Indonesia passed through other routes, and established several axes driven by enculturation, so a strand of influence of elements of Chinese martial arts emerged in a certain genre of Indonesia’s martial art–pencak silat. However the intrinsic beauty of this precious cultural heritage has been lost, with the development of a focus on sport and the prowess of the ‘body as machine’, and on gaining gold medals and financial rewards.

"Their Own Happiness": The Ownership of Enslaved Africans' Emotions in William Warburton's SPG Sermon

This essay examines the condemnation of chattel slavery that William Warburton delivered in the anniversary sermon of 1766 for the Society for Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. This sermon, which was the first in the SPG's history to express outrage, rather than just sorrow, over slavery, merits attention for its contributions to abolitionist rhetoric, philosophies of feeling, and anti-racist thought. One of the most important contributions Warburton made was to assert enslaved Africans' ability to know their feelings, using those feelings to make decisions conducive to their own welfare. The sermon shows how Locke's writings on mental perception, emotions, and individual liberty combined with an Anglican missionary agenda and British imperial vision after the Seven Years' War to attack not only slavery but also assertions of Africans' mental inferiority.

Lost Maps of the Caliphs: Drawing the World in Eleventh-Century Cairo by Yossef Rapoport and Emilie Savage-Smith

Reviewed by: Lost Maps of the Caliphs: Drawing the World in Eleventh-Century Cairo by Yossef Rapoport and Emilie Savage-Smith Pinar Emiralioğlu Lost Maps of the Caliphs: Drawing the World in Eleventh-Century Cairo. By yossef rapoport and emilie savage-smith. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. iii + 349 pp. ISBN 978-0-226-54088-7. $55.00 (hardcover). In this outstanding study on an illustrated copy of the Book of Curiosities from eleventh-century Cairo, Rapoport and Savage-Smith open a window into the global vision, cartographic, and geographic knowledge as well as political and economic aspirations of the Muslim world. With an intricately weaved analysis, the authors come to the conclusion that the Book of Curiosities was composed most probably by a military man, who consulted Greek as well as Persian, Indian, and Coptic geographical and cartographical knowledge. In doing so, he composed one of the greatest achievements of medieval mapmaking and showcased the integral role that the Mediterranean Sea played for political and economic ambitions of the Islamic civilization which had its roots in the desert. Lost Maps of the Caliphs is organized thematically assessing the contents of the Book of Curiosities in ten chapters. Chapter One by Emilie Savage-Smith eloquently narrates the discovery of the treatise, which is illustrated with unique maps and diagrams, and its journey from the Christie's auction house in London to the Bodleian Library in Oxford. In Chapter Two titled "Macrocosm to Microcosm," Savage-Smith analyzes the book one of the manuscript that deals with the sky and its influence on the Earth. She contextualizes this volume within the eleventh-century Fatimid Egypt's political and religious ideologies and knowledge on "folk astronomy" and astrology. Savage-Smith shows that the author of the Book of Curiosities combined Hermetic, Coptic, Greek, and Bedouin nontechnical literature and lore in demonstrating what happens in the Heavens impact what happens on the Earth. The audience for this work was mainly nonscholars and the author accomplished to present his nonscholarly but educated audience "the ever-present influence of the macrocosm upon the microcosm" in an easily accessible and graphic manner (p. 70). In Chapters Three through Ten, Yossef Rapoport discusses a select number of maps and diagrams embellishing the second volume of the Book of Curiosities, titled "On the Earth." Chapter Three focuses on the rectangular world map, which is the earliest surviving example of a world map displaying a calibrated scale bar. Rapoport argues that this particular map combined the Helenistic tradition of mathematical geography and cartographic tradition of the tenth century Balkhi [End Page 550] School, which focused on the abstract schematic itinerary (pp. 78, 96). While the first tradition determined the framework, the second influenced the interior of the map. In Chapter Four, Rapoport draws our attention to the map of the Nile, which appears to be a variant of al-Khwarazmi's map of the Nile. Here, Rapoport traces how new information acquired by Muslim travelers and geographers was incorporated into an overall Ptolemaic framework of mathematical geography. In fact, the incorporation and adaptation of new knowledge into the Hellenistic and other pre-Islamic traditions of map making is one of the recurrent themes of Rapoport and Savage-Smith's argument connecting different maps and diagrams together. In Chapters Five, Six, and Seven, Rapoport evaluates the maps and diagrams of the Mediterranean, the islands of Cyprus and Sicily, and the cities of Mahdia and Tunis. In these chapters, Rapoport reaches to three conclusions that are fundamental to our understanding of the Fatimid rule in Egypt and its geographical and imperial vision of the Mediterranean. First, Rapoport demonstrates that these precompass depictions of the Mediterranean and various locations around the Mediterranean focused exclusively on anchorages, harbors, and bays and ignored the inland topography (pp. 137, 142, 152). This leads the author to conclude that these precompass maps and diagrams were the earliest depictions of the Mediterranean drawn from the perspective of seamen and naval commanders. As such, these depictions of the Mediterranean served as visual representations of "Fatimid power in the Mediterranean from the perspective of a loyal Fatimid court official" (p. 155). Second, focusing exclusively on the defenses of...

Locations of God: Political Theology in the Hebrew Bible

Locations of God: Political Theology in the Hebrew Bible

The Hawaii Promotion Committee and the Appropriation of Surfing

The advent of digital newspapers is providing critical historical information for subjects like surfing that have traditionally had so few primary sources available to researchers. A review of newspapers from the early twentieth century reveals important new evidence that the Hawaii Promotion Committee (HPC) helped support the growth of surfing by coordinating a transpacific marketing campaign to highlight the sport for the sake of boosting tourism. However, because the HPC and the newspapers in which it published its weekly reports represented arms of the colonial powers, much of that new information must be understood in the broader context of how the local Caucasian or haole population used the newspapers to promote their own imperial vision of surfing while often ignoring or suppressing Native Hawaiian voices that represented a critical counternarrative. For their part, Native Hawaiians actively resisted the racist and pro-territorial propaganda by publishing their own newspapers and by directly competing against haole in and around the surf.

Roman Past, Jewish Future: Prophecy, Poetry, and the End of Empire

Although classical political values and their Latin sources continuously informed Elizabethan and Jacobean public culture, assessment of the Roman experience itself became sharply contested. By the 1590s reformist Protestants in both England and Scotland discounted the Roman Empire and ultimately the entire arc of Roman history. Instead, they looked to the Hebrew commonwealth, Jewish learning, and, increasingly, contemporary Jews. These developments issued in a preoccupation with Judeocentric prophecy and piety. In stark contrast, anti-reform Protestantism constructed a competing Christocentric piety linked with a resolutely imperial vision. At the center of this emergent push-pull within late sixteenth-century Anglophone spirituality lay conflicted readings of the Roman past.

Galleons from the “Mouth of Hell”: Empire and Religion in Seventeenth Century Acapulco

Abstract Scholarship on the Spanish galleon trade has tended to ignore both the importance of religion and the significance of the port of Acapulco. This paper will seek to offset each shortcoming by offering a glimpse into the religious life of Acapulco during the seventeenth century. This glimpse will aim to establish the spatial linkages between religion and economy in the port by (1) identifying the sacred places, practices, and missions of the city, and (2) illustrating how they were intimately related to the galleon trade. Though Acapulco occupied a paradoxical space within the broader Spain’s imperial vision, its unique spiritual cartography continued to be dictated by the aims of that vision. The port provides a unique case study by which to understand the complex and often-contradictory relationship between urbanity, trade, and religiosity in the Spanish empire. It illustrates that the economic and religious structures needed to create heavenly spaces in Spanish colonial holdings also produced unintended byproducts, places where religion and economics merged to produce more unexpected outcomes. Acapulco never became the envisioned heavenly city; yet, throughout the seventeenth century, it continued to demonstrate that economics and religion remained integrally connected.

Sir John Gladstone and the Debate over the Amelioration of Slavery in the British West Indies in the 1820s

AbstractSir John Gladstone made a fortune as a Demerara sugar-planter and a key supporter of the British policy of amelioration in which slavery would be “improved” by making it more “humane.” Unlike resident planters in the British West Indies, who were firmly opposed to any alteration to the conditions of enslavement, and unlike abolitionists, who saw amelioration as a step toward abolition, Gladstone was a rare but influential metropolitan-based planter with an expansive imperial vision, prepared to work with British politicians to guarantee his investments in slavery through progressive slave reforms. This article intersects with recent historiography highlighting connections between metropole and colony but also insists on the influence of Demerara, including the effects of a large slave rebellion centered on Gladstone's estates (which illustrated that enslaved people were not happy with Gladstone's supposedly enlightened attitudes) on metropolitan sensibilities in the 1820s. Gladstone's strategies for an improved slavery, despite the contradictions inherent in championing such a policy while maintaining a fierce drive for profits, were a powerful counter to a renewed abolitionist thrust against slavery in the mid to late 1820s. Gladstone showed that that the logic of gradual emancipation still had force in imperial thinking in this decade.

Natures in Translation: Romanticism and Colonial Natural History

Natures in Translation: Romanticism and Colonial Natural History

William H. Seward, el vapor, y el imperialismo estadounidense, 1850-1875

Este artículo analiza la manera en que William H. Seward adaptó la visión imperial y las políticas de Estados Unidos a la luz de la revolución de la tecnología de vapor a mediados del siglo XIX. La historiografía ha visto a Seward como uno de los arquitectos más importantes del imperio estadounidense, pero lo que no se ha enfatizado de manera apropiada es cómo su legado fue menos en su continuidad con sus antecesores y sucesores y más en cómo intentó reconfigurar la política estadounidense alrededor de uno de los desarrollos más revolucionarios de su época: la aparición del transporte de vapor.

Imperial Vision, Colonial Prisons:

Prison construction was among the most important infrastructural changes brought about by British rule in nineteenth-century India. Informed by the extension of liberal political philosophy into the colony, the development of the British colonial prison introduced India to a radically new system of punishment based on long-term incarceration. Unlike prisons in Europe and the United States, where moral reform was cited as the primary objective of incarceration, prisons in colonial India focused on confinement as a way of separating and classifying criminal types in order to stabilize colonial categories of difference. In Imperial Vision, Colonial Prisons: British Jails in Bengal, 1823–73, Mira Rai Waits explores nineteenth-century colonial jail plans from India's Bengal Presidency. Although colonial reformers eventually arrived at a model of prison architecture that resembled Euro-American precedents, the built form and functional arrangements of these places reflected a singularly colonial model of operation.

Russia in the German Global Imaginary: Imperial Visions and Utopian Desires, 1905–1941. By James E. Casteel. Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies. Edited by Jonathan Harris.Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016. Pp. xii+252. $28.95 (paper).Between Yesterday and Tomorrow: German Visions of Europe, 1926–1950. By Christian Bailey.New York: Berghahn Books, 2013. Pp. xiv+260. $120.00 (cloth); $34.95 (paper).

<i>Russia in the German Global Imaginary: Imperial Visions and Utopian Desires, 1905–1941</i>. By James E. Casteel. Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies. Edited by Jonathan Harris.Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016. Pp. xii+252. $28.95 (paper).<i>Between Yesterday and Tomorrow: German Visions of Europe, 1926–1950</i>. By Christian Bailey.New York: Berghahn Books, 2013. Pp. xiv+260. $120.00 (cloth); $34.95 (paper).

James E. Casteel. Russia in the German Global Imaginary: Imperial Visions and Utopian Desires, 1905–1941.

James E. Casteel. Russia in the German Global Imaginary: Imperial Visions and Utopian Desires, 1905–1941.

Sky Blue Stone: The Turquoise Trade in World History by Arash Khazeni, and: Constantinopolis/Istanbul: Cultural Encounter, Imperial Vision, and the Construction of the Ottoman Capital by Çiğdem Kafescioğlu

Sky Blue Stone: The Turquoise Trade in World History by Arash Khazeni, and: Constantinopolis/Istanbul: Cultural Encounter, Imperial Vision, and the Construction of the Ottoman Capital by Çiğdem Kafescioğlu

Internationalism between national questions and imperial considerations: Henry Noel Brailsford and the transformations of Central and Eastern Europe (1898–1919)

ABSTRACTThe article recovers Henry Brailsford’s reflections on south-eastern and east-central Europe in a transformative period in international politics. Although the British journalist has been considered as key influence in the development of international relations in Britain, his commentary on the national questions in eastern Europe has remained relatively unexplored. The article argues that in response to the international politics of the Eastern Question and to concurrent imperial questions in Britain, Brailsford articulated an imperial anti-imperialist vision of international order based on the support for local autonomy and self-government across eastern Europe and the colonial world. It then proceeds to chart his gradual distancing from the politics of self-determination during the Great War and argues that Brailsford’s international thought was influenced by a series of pragmatic considerations regarding the future of central and eastern Europe. The intricacies of Brailsford’s international thought offer an informative case-study of the symbiosis of liberal and socialist varieties of internationalism in early twentieth century Britain.

Travels in Fiction: Baker, Stanley, Cameron and the Adventure of African Exploration

AbstractSamuel White Baker, Henry Morton Stanley, and Verney Lovett Cameron are some of the most familiar names on the roster of African exploration. Together, they are associated with central and east Africa’s most important geographical questions as well as political developments in the run up to partition. While these figures are well known for their substantial expeditionary narratives, the fact that they also published works of fiction has been almost entirely overlooked. This article investigates the phenomenon, identifying the turn to fiction as an important feature of the Victorian culture of exploration. The ‘fiction of exploration’ was part of the period’s cult of celebrity, a means of reaching new audiences, and an important contribution to the adventure genre. These novels are read here as a means of reimagining the expeditionary experience, and as literary cartographies in which place and politics intersect on behalf of an imperial vision.

Romaniello, Matthew P. and Starks, Tricia (eds) Russian History through the Senses: From 1700 to the Present (review)

SEER, 95, 3, JULY 2017 560 the elections. It is therefore a pity that she seems not even to have read some of the major works written in Polish on Lithuania in this period, in particular the magisterial study by Henryk Lulewicz, which covers exactly this territory. The same can be said of the discussion of Polish government. The author claims that historians have neglected the fiscal and financial side of the problems faced by the monarchy, but the works by Anna Sucheni-Grabowska, who has analysed the finances of the monarchy and the Polish taxation system in the first half of the sixteenth century in great detail, and others who deal with the execution movement, are absent from the bibliography. There is much of interest in this book, but the execution is flawed at times. University of Aberdeen Robert Frost Romaniello, Matthew P. and Starks, Tricia (eds). Russian History through the Senses: From 1700 to the Present. Bloomsbury Academic, London and New York, 2016. xiii + 302 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Selected bibliography. Index. £21.99 (paperback). As the author of the Introduction to this collection, Alexander Martin, notes, any depiction of human lives would be incomplete without ‘fleeting elusive feelings and perceptions’ (p. 1). Accounting for them confronts the historian with great challenges. Following the work of the pioneer of the history of senses, the French historian Alain Corbin, Martin maintains that the senses provide ‘an avenue for understanding how people interpret, at a holistic and non-rational level, situations that are difficult or unfamiliar’ (p. 2). The Introduction gives an overview of thematic contexts of the eleven essays, thus trying to give a cohesion to the volume’s content. The essays are divided chronologically into four parts: Imperial Russia, Revolutionary Russia, Soviet Russia and Reconstructing Russia. This categorization provides the reader with little help in conceptualizing the notion of the senses. All four parts include thematically diverse material which, while presenting notable case studies, remain isolated and conceptually unintegrated. The absence of conclusion to the volume underlines the lack of theorizing of ‘the senses’ in Russian history. Romaniello’s ‘Humoral Bodies in Cold Climates’ demonstrates that over the course of the eighteenth century a belief in ‘the descriptive power of the humors’ (p. 37) persisted among Western visitors to Russia. The humoural descriptions of the environment provided foreigners with a tool to understand the influence of the climate upon the body. Alison Smith in ‘Fermentation, Taste and Identity’ demonstrates that in the nineteenth century the lines REVIEWS 561 between the ‘desirable’ and the ‘bad’, ‘pleasantly sour’ and ‘the too’ (p. 59), were based both on individual taste and on cultural norms. Such Russian foods as kvas, rye bread and fermented cabbage were considered too sour by foreigners. This perception has ‘larger implications as these products come up against the boundary of what can be considered food’ (p. 59). Abby Schrader in ‘Market Pleasures and Prostitution’ suggests that in the secularized urban culture of shopping arcades and streets of St Petersburg woman was inscribed both as consumer and commodity which made it harder ‘to tell the girl who worked from a working girl’ (p. 87). Tricia Stark’s ‘The Taste, Smell, and Semiotics of Cigarettes’ shows that at the end of the nineteenth century, brand choice of tobacco made a statement that should be viewed as a sensory performance. The smoker created a blended identity by consuming cosmopolitan brands of tobacco and ‘embodied a global, imperial vision of Russian identity’ (p. 111). Laurie Stoff’s ‘The Sounds, Odors, and Textures of Russian Wartime Nursing’ seeks ‘to integrate multiple sensory perceptions into descriptions of war experience’ (p. 119) and examines both physical and illusionary perceptions, suggesting that this helps to better understand the effect on the women who served as wartime nurses. Aaron Retish’s ‘The Taste of kumyshka and the Debate over the Udmurt Culture’ maintains that discussions of kumyshka and Udmurts in late imperial and early Soviet Russia can be understood by examining the taste of the drink. Its sensation became ‘a symbol for various social and political groups to debate the role of non-Russians (p. 157). The drink became a cultural sign of backwardness and otherness...

Hydrology and the Imperial Vision of Bois de Boulogne

SUMMARY: Bois de Boulogne was a key urban design effort of Second Empire France. This essay surveys the landscape of the park with particular attention to water; social practices that engendered the use of water, and social practices which water enabled. The hydrology of the site — the grand lake, streams and waterfalls — is a statement and demonstration of imperial mastery and sensibility. Nearly half of the project budget was devoted to hydraulics and, in the opening years, more than 15% of the municipal water supply was diverted to the park; all of which supported a status-laden array of features attractive to elites of the Second Empire and Third Republic.