Late 1840s Research Articles

European Goods Market Integration in the Very Long Run: From the Black Death to the First World War

This paper examines price convergence and changes in the efficiency of wheat markets, covering the period from the mid-fourteenth to the early twentieth century and most of Europe. The analysis is based on a new data set of prices from almost 600 markets. Unlike previous research, we find that convergence was a predominantly pre-modern phenomenon. It started in the late fifteenth century, advanced rapidly until the beginning of the seventeenth century when it temporarily stalled, resumed after the Thirty Years’ War, and accelerated after the Napoleonic Wars in response to trade liberalization. From the late 1840s, convergence petered out and turned into divergence after 1875 as policy decisions dominated technological change. Our results point to the ‘Little Divergence’ between North-Western Europe and the rest of the continent as starting about 1600. Long-term improvements in market efficiency began in the early sixteenth century, with advances over time being as uneven as in price convergence. We trace this to differential institutional change and the non-synchronous spread of modern media and systems of information transmission that affected the ability of merchants to react to news.

Причины отказа служащим гражданских учреждений Калужской губернии в получении классных чинов в 1849–1854 гг. По материалам кратких списков о службе

In the article draws on the complex of short records of service of officials and clerical servants of various departments revealed in the State Archive of the Kaluga Region and introduced into scientific use, to establish reasons for refusing local government officials in receiving class ranks. It is to be noted that during the reign of Nicholas I, when producing class ranks, it was necessary to take into account not only the length of service in the previous rank, but also to maintain strict adherence to other legislative norms: i.e. correspondence of rank to class of the position held, positive review of the superiors, correct compilation and timely submission of the award documentation. Analysis of retrospective information contained in short records of the employees of gubernia, uezd, and town institutions reveals real reasons for rejecting petitions for awarding class ranks to the employees of the Kaluga institutions in 1849–54. For the most part, it was due to failure to comply with elementary rules of clerical work: not including all necessary information in formal and short records, incorrect paperwork. It was also in no small part due to violation of established deadlines for receiving official documents from the employees themselves or to absence of some documents. The study has registered no cases of refusal of requests for promotion to class rank bypassing the most important requirement of the legislator – production to the rank according to the class of position. The author believes that the heads of institutions, prior to allowing the awarding of employees with class rank, established how it would correspond to the class of their post and whether or not it would conflict with the current rules. It may be concluded that the legislation of Nicholas I in rank promotion in the daily practice of local institutions in the late 1840s – first half of the 1850s was well observed, reasoning from formal documentary and partly legal requirements, without taking into account other factors that played an important role in this case.

A Parable in Painting: “Room in a Dutch House” and “Woman Reading” by Pieter Janssens Elinga

This article proposes the hypothesis that the paintings “A Room in a Dutch House” (late 1660s — early 1670s) and “Woman Reading” (1660) by Delft artist of genre scenes Pieter Janssens Elinga (1623–1682) are paired and in a mutual dialogue and the New Testament parable is told about Martha and Mary, as a symbol of two worldviews — contemplative and effective, spiritual and material. The proposed assumption is mainly justified by comparing biblical texts (the Gospel of Luke, the Epistle of James and others) with the figurative system of paintings examined and sequentially interpreted in the context of emblematic and Protestant thinking. Thus, upon a detailed and comprehensive examination of the painting “A Room in a Dutch House”, the image of Martha appears to be much more complex and paradoxical than at first glance — the imposition of a peculiar Protestant hierotopy of order on the plot canvas reveals a new meaning to the depicted scene. A study of paintings belonging to the beginning of the 17th century and dedicated to the life of Saints Martha and Mary made it possible to discover on the canvases of Elinga both traditional iconographic motifs and a conscious departure from them. Particular attention is paid to the specifics of the creative method of the master and his connection with the trends of the Delft school of art, especially with the work of Pieter de Hooch. In conditions of shortage of scientific material, this work is of scientific value. Thus, the interpretation proposed in the article turns the biblical parable into a link between the studied canvases.

Vico and China by Daniel Canaris

Reviewed by: Vico and China by Daniel Canaris Harry Liebersohn Daniel Canaris, Vico and China ( Liverpool: Liverpool Univ. Press, 2020). In the series Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment. Pp. 296. £65.00 paper. Seeking the sources of modern scientific thought, Ernst Cassirer in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923–29) turned first to theories of language—and, within the history of linguistic theory, he gave special pride of place to the writings of Giambattista Vico as the forerunner of later theories of language. From the relative obscurity of his home in late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century Naples, Vico pioneered a philosophy of history that has been cited during the past century by an impressive cluster of commentators, including Cassirer, Benedetto Croce, Edmund Wilson, Isaiah Berlin, Erich Auerbach, Jonathan Israel, and Edward Said—all of whom, in different ways, looked to him as the founder of something leading up to the thought of their own time, possibly the Counter-Enlightenment or radical Enlightenment or a culturally diverse cosmopolitanism. Vico has become a favorite choice for twentieth and twenty-first century genealogies of the present. In his erudite study of Vico and China, Daniel Canaris calls into question such appropriations of Vico for later intellectual movements. Instead he follows up leads that contextualize Vico in his own time and place. Canaris sharply defines his monograph around Vico's changing assessments of China; within this topic his choice of context is Vico's relationship to the theological debates of his time, especially those swirling around the Jesuits and their enemies. Without being wholly dismissive, Canaris's introduction criticizes recent post-colonial studies, as well as scholarship invoking the Enlightenment or Counter-Enlightenment, as having lost sight of dimensions of Vico's thought that emerge when it is taken more seriously on its own terms. Naples, writes Canaris, was a center of transmission of knowledge about China. As such, it could not avoid the polemics surrounding the Jesuits and their approach to Chinese missionary work. Their policy of accommodationism, closely associated with Matteo Ricci, took as point of departure the notion of a shared natural philosophy guiding both pre-Christian thinkers in the West and Confucius; Jesuits also argued for tolerance toward Confucian rites, which they maintained were purely civil and did not interfere with the work of conversion. The arguments for and against these Jesuit positions culminated in "three authoritative papal declarations in 1704, 1715 and 1742" (18–19); they were reinforced by the founding of the Collegio de Cinesi in the late 1720s by an opponent of the Jesuits, Matteo Ripa, in the late 1720s. According to Canaris, Vico had good contacts on both sides of the pro- and anti-Jesuit controversies. His monograph traces how Vico's views on China took shape through his initial attraction to, and later repudiation of, Jesuit writings, a process Canaris relates to a wider campaign to delegitimize Jesuit thought. Canaris's book is organized with close attention to the changes over time in Vico's view of China. Chapters one to three examine the highly favorable view of Chinese civilization in Vico's study of law, the Diritto Universale (Universal Right, 1720–22). As chief sources for his understanding of China, Vico had at his disposal works that included both Ricci's diaries and his dialogue between a Confucian and a European scholar, On the True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven (1603). Canaris praises Ricci's writings, and more generally those of the early Jesuit missionaries, for their nuanced portrayal of China, noting Ricci's special admiration for both Confucius as the equal of any Western pagan philosopher and China's political [End Page 742] system, with its meritocratic selection of mandarins. Another source that shaped Vico's understanding of China was a Jesuit response to the order's detractors in the form of a monumental translation of neo-Confucian works, the Confucius Sinarum philosophus (1687). The compilers of this work, according to Canaris, went beyond Ricci and tried to present Confucian texts as part of "a coherent philosophical system" (114). With an impressive body of Jesuit works as guide, how did Vico initially account for the ethical and political excellence of...

Хронограф Русский III редакции из 182 глав. Часть 1. Хронограф патриаршего скриптория 1680-х гг

The article deals with the special version of the third redaction of the Old Russian Chronograph from the collection of V. M. Undolsky. It is quite different from other copies of this text. The compiler of the manuscript not only revised the traditional structure of the third redaction of the Chronograph by increasing the number of its chapters from 169 to 182 but also fundamentally changed its historical meaning. The vast majority of manuscripts of the third redaction of the Chronograph brought its narrative up to the end of the Time of Troubles in 1618, thereby emphasizing the end of the “rebellious” period in Russian history and the relative “unimportance” of the following years of quiet rule of the first Romanovs. The Chronograph in 182 chapters continues its narrative of Russian history up to the Eternal Peace Treaty of 1686 and pays much attention to the military events and rebellions of the early Romanov era. This codex was written in the patriarchal scriptorium between 1686 and 1696 (most likely in 1686–1689). The paper on which it is written was actively used in other textually related manuscripts from the patriarchal scriptorium in the late 1680s– 1690s. The Undolsky’s copy of the third redaction of the Old Russian Chronograph is not the only version enlarged by additional chapters. More chapters than in the “classical” version can be found in Rumyantsev’s second copy of the Chronograph. Both Undolsky’s and Rumyantsev’s manuscripts derive from a common protograph — a special form of the third redaction of the Chronograph in 179 chapters. The Undolsky manuscript, however, is continued by the Patriarchal Chronicle for the years 1619–1686. Accordingly, the number of chapters is increased to 182. In contrast, the Rumyantsev manuscript is augmented by the Tale of Mosokh and retains the original 179 chapters. Both manuscripts are supplemented by various excerpts from the Book of Royal Degrees. Simultaneously with them, there also appeared other variants of the Chronograph that expressed the patriarchal bookmen’s thoughts about Russian and world history in the 1680s and 1690s: the Fokhtov Chronograph in 187 chapters and its revised version – the Vologodsky Chronograph in 189 chapters, and also the Tikhonravov Chronograph in 184 chapters. The changes that became fixed in some codices from the last quarter of the 17th century were the results of editorial work of patriarchal and other scribes, who compiled new chronographs and their brief redactions (“chronographets”) in the 1680s – 1690s

What Library Digitization Leaves Out: Predicting the Availability of Digital Surrogates of English Novels

Library digitization has made more than a hundred thousand 19th-century English-language books available to the public. Do the books which have been digitized reflect the population of published books? An affirmative answer would allow book and literary historians to use holdings of major digital libraries as proxies for the population of published works, sparing them the labor of collecting a representative sample. We address this question by taking advantage of exhaustive bibliographies of novels published for the first time in the British Isles in 1836 and 1838, identifying which of these novels have at least one digital surrogate in the Internet Archive, HathiTrust, Google Books, and the British Library. We find that digital surrogate availability is not random. Certain kinds of novels, notably novels written by men and novels published in multivolume format, have digital surrogates available at distinctly higher rates than other kinds of novels. As the processes leading to this outcome are unlikely to be isolated to the novel and the late 1830s, these findings suggest that similar patterns will likely be observed during adjacent decades and in other genres of publishing (e.g., non-fiction).

¿Es la dinámica de Leibniz compatible con su monadología?

From the beginning of Leibniz’s dynamics, his program for a science of force, there was a metaphysics of body. When the program first emerged in the late 1670s, Leibniz argued that his science of force entailed the reestablishment of substantial form. But in the same period, Leibniz’s interest in genuine unities as the ultimate constituents of the world led him to posit a world of corporeal substances, bodies made one by virtue of a substantial form. In this way by the early 1680s, there seemed to be two convergent paths to a single metaphysics: the revival of substantial form. Over the years, both of these metaphysics evolved. By the mid 1690s, to substantial form, understood as active force, the dynamical metaphysics added materia prima, understood as passive force. Meanwhile unities that ground the world evolved from corporeal substances to monads, now considered non-extended, mindlike, and the ultimate constituents of things. When this happened, I argue, it was no longer obvious that these two metaphysical pictures were still consistent with one another: the dynamical metaphysics, grounded in force, and the metaphysics of unity, now understood in terms of monads, seemed increasingly to be in tension with one another.

"There should be no hyphen in American Catholic": Bishop John Timon and the Assimilation of Buffalo Catholicism

Buffalo, New York, in the late 1840s was evolving into the gateway of the West. Because of its location on Lake Erie, the city became a haven for the Irish who built the Erie Canal and the Germans fleeing political turmoil in Europe. The Catholic Church responded to the growth, seeking to meet both the spiritual and secular needs of the growing immigrant and native-born Catholic population. The Diocese of Buffalo was established in 1847 with John Timon (1797–1867) as its first bishop. This American-born bishop fought religious, political, and cultural threats, resisting both Protestant and Catholic opposition, to solidify the Church's standing on the Niagara frontier. Through the formation of schools and institutions for health care and charity, he successfully established an assimilated American Catholic presence.

Moral Contagion: Black Atlantic Sailors, Citizenship, and Diplomacy in Antebellum America by Michael A. Schoeppner

Reviewed by: Moral Contagion: Black Atlantic Sailors, Citizenship, and Diplomacy in Antebellum America by Michael A. Schoeppner Christopher James Bonner (bio) Negro Seamen Acts, Black mobility, Black sailors, Quarantine laws, Citizenship Moral Contagion: Black Atlantic Sailors, Citizenship, and Diplomacy in Antebellum America. By Michael A. Schoeppner. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. 252. Cloth, $59.99; paper, $32.99.) Early in the 1820s, reports placed Denmark Vesey at the head of a conspiracy to dismantle South Carolina's racial power structure. Michael Schoeppner notes a revealing thread in these narratives: the idea that Vesey came to Charleston after having inhabited the fluid society of the Atlantic world. In response, Charleston authorities tried to prevent other black people deemed foreign and dangerous from entering through the city's ports. Schoeppner explores the Negro Seamen Acts enacted across the South in the early republic, laws intended to suppress the spread of revolutionary ideas and to curtail the black mobility that threatened southern racial hierarchy. Moral Contagion examines critical questions these laws raised about federalism and citizenship, and the negotiation over these concepts in state, national, and international politics. A vigilante group known as the South Carolina Association played a key role in the early implementation of the state's Negro Seamen Act. First enacted in 1822, the measure required black soldiers on ships that entered Charleston Harbor to be jailed, or quarantined, until their ships departed. Members of the Association, including some prominent and [End Page 313] powerful white Charlestonians, petitioned for strict enforcement of the law, helped craft more stringent arrest policies, and policed the docks themselves. By the late 1820s, the Association became "a publicly recognized, private policing agency" (60), endorsed by the state government to arrest black sailors. The group's actions offer a compelling story about people engaging with the flexible legal order in the early republic, a point Schoeppner makes by building on work such as Laura Edwards's The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-revolutionary South (Chapel Hill, NC, 2009). The South Carolina Association worked to make the legal order more rigid, not only by arresting hundreds of black sailors in the 1820s but also by securing a state law that levied a hefty fine on any sheriff who failed to enforce the Seaman Acts. A combination of legal and extralegal activity ensured that state government operated to uphold racial order. Schoeppner also looks outward from South Carolina. In the 1830s, lawmakers across the coastal South enacted similar quarantine laws. These laws responded in part to anxieties over British abolition in the West Indies. And the laws produced tensions with authorities in both the northern United States and in Britain who sought to protect black sailors from the indignity and brutality of southern imprisonment. Quarantine laws intersected often with early U.S. diplomacy. When British authorities insisted on free mobility for black British subjects, they challenged the Seamen Acts and questioned the entire legal system that marginalized black Americans. In response, state legislators, attorneys general, and U.S. Supreme Court justices solidified their commitment to securing slavery and insisted on a constitutional right to restrict people from bringing "moral pestilence" (106) into American communities. In 1837 Spain enacted its own law restricting black sailors from colonial ports like Havana. Initially, U.S. Consul Nicholas Trist contested the policy, claiming it restricted commerce, but ultimately he acquiesced. Schoeppner suggests Spanish authorities swayed Trist by telling him a black British sailor had been arrested in Cuba carrying antislavery literature. Even as it troubled Anglo–American diplomacy, the threat of moral contagion felt real enough to unite some Atlantic empires. Given this, it is surprising when Schoeppner aligns Trist with the opponents of quarantine laws, such as black newspaper editors who argued black sailors were citizens entitled to free movement. Schoeppner suggests both parties envisioned citizenship as a status that might obligate a government to protect individuals, but it's important that Trist considered [End Page 314] yet declined to make public an argument that black men were citizens. Most American authorities would have found it unacceptable for a U.S. diplomat to claim that black men were entitled...

Армения и армяне в сознании Грибоедова

A systematic analysis of all the contexts from A. S. Griboyedov’s works in which the words Armenia, Armenians and Armenian are used allows us to consider them as a single narrative describing the history of Griboedov’s attitude to Armenia and the Armenians. At the beginning of his diplomatic career (the turn of the 1810-1820s) Griboyedov treated modern Armenians quite indifferently, without any personal interest. For Griboyedov, Armenia did not exist as a state entity but rather as a historical and cultural phenomenon, and his statements about the Armenian statehood are explained either by the ignorance of historical facts or by his poetic passion. However, Griboyedov knew the history of the forced resettlement of the Armenian people from the places of traditional habitation (Great Surgun). In the late 1820s, in connection with the mass immigration of Armenians to his historical homeland, Griboedov appeared to have reconsidered his attitude to the fate of modern Armenia, although his assistance to the Armenian people can be interpreted either as a state official fulfilling his duties, or as an interested assistance to the suffering people.

Blood in the Borderlands: Conflict, Kinship, and the Bent Family, 1821–1920 by David C. Beyreis

Reviewed by: Blood in the Borderlands: Conflict, Kinship, and the Bent Family, 1821–1920 by David C. Beyreis William S. Kiser Blood in the Borderlands: Conflict, Kinship, and the Bent Family, 1821–1920. By David C. Beyreis. ( Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020. Pp. 270. Notes, bibliography, illustrations, index.) The Bents ranked among the most well-known families in the nineteenth century American West, and this book demonstrates the many ways in which brothers William and Charles—along with their wives and biracial children—navigated the region's social and cultural systems. Using kinship as an analytical framework, David Beyreis argues that "family ties and the creation of alliance networks helped the Bents become phenomenally successful businessmen" (1). Claiming that previous books on the western frontier have placed "too much emphasis on stability and intercultural accommodation" (2), the author also aims to highlight the role of conflict and violence in shaping regional affairs. Bent family members offer a compelling case study because they participated in so many formative frontier events and processes, including the fur trade, the Santa Fe trade, Mexican land grants, Texan filibustering, the U.S. invasion of New Mexico in 1846, Indian treaty councils, U.S. Army campaigns, the 1859 Pike's Peak Gold Rush, the Sand Creek Massacre, the Dawes Act, and Indian boarding schools. Each of these themes has received extensive scholarly attention, but Beyreis ties them together in a unique way with his quasi-biographical focus on a single family. Notably, this approach allows the author to place women at the center of the narrative. Readers will come away with a clear understanding of how Hispanas like María Ignacia Jaramillo (Charles Bent's partner), Indians like Owl Woman (William Bent's wife), and their culturally mixed daughters shaped the course of events in the communities and nations to which they belonged. In addition to emphasizing female actors, the author's ethnohistorical treatment of the Southern Cheyennes and Kiowas contextualizes the central roles that Southern Plains tribes played in Bent's sophisticated but precarious trade network. "Despite the firm's general profitability," Beyreis explains, "Bent, St. Vrain and Company was never the master of its own destiny" (47) because Indigenous politics and ecological phenomena usually dictated the course of regional events. While this focus on social, cultural, and gender history demonstrates some of the complexities of doing business on the western frontier, the general absence of economic analysis leaves out a significant part of the story that also helps to explain the rise and fall of this financial empire. National economic crises in the late 1830s and late 1850s, for instance, receive little treatment in this volume, nor does the concept of merchant capitalism play meaningfully into the analytical framework. Although the Bent Family had two main branches—William was closely oriented to Cheyenne society while Charles integrated into northern New [End Page 348] Mexico's Hispano community—the book focuses more on the former than the latter. Part of this is explained by the availability of source material, but an effect of such unequal treatment is a sense that one side of the family was more historically prominent than the other. Whereas William comes across in a generally positive light, marrying a Southern Cheyenne woman and embracing certain tribal customs, Charles emerges as a deeply flawed character. A veritable misfit in Nnuevomexicano society, he cohabited with but did not marry the aforementioned Jaramillo, bribed insiders and conspired with outsiders as caprice dictated, and sometimes even spoke his racist mind. As the author points out in the conclusion, Charles Bent remains a controversial figure in New Mexico. Some still see him as a martyr, while many others believe that he got what he deserved on that fateful night in January 1847 when angry Taos residents killed and scalped him before dragging his corpse through the streets of town. The fact that one brother perished prematurely in a horrific act of corporeal mutilation while the other succumbed to natural causes two decades later speaks to the complexities and controversies surrounding outsider assimilation into these borderlands societies. Well-researched and well-written, Blood in the Borderlands is a very readable account of the Bent Family. The...

The Lost Tradition of Economic Equality in America, 1600–1870 by Daniel R. Mandell

Reviewed by: The Lost Tradition of Economic Equality in America, 1600–1870 by Daniel R. Mandell John Majewski (bio) Keywords Inequality, Economic equality, Capitalism, Egalitarianism The Lost Tradition of Economic Equality in America, 1600–1870. By Daniel R. Mandell. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020. Pp. 314. Cloth, $49.95.) Historians seeking to more explicitly link the past to current economic and political debates can choose between two basic strategies. One strategy—which the 1619 Project used to such great effect—is to expose [End Page 681] the injustices of the past and trace their impact to the present. The other strategy—which Daniel R. Mandell employs in this thought-provoking synthesis—is to recover ideas and movements from the past that can inspire change and reform in the present. Mandell argues that from its colonial origins, a series of thinkers and activists believed that economic equality—whether achieved through universal education, land reform, or government regulation of market activity—was an important value that profoundly influenced government policy. Mandell seamlessly analyzes a number of different egalitarian traditions with nuance and sophistication. He begins in early modern England, where groups such as the Levelers called for the end of great estates and the redistribution of property. Powerful landlords violently crushed the Levelers, but echoes of the movement survived in a republican commonwealth tradition that that linked economic inequality with political inequality and corruption. That tradition took root in colonial North America, where far higher percentage of households owned land. North American Indians—often portrayed in Enlightenment discourse as noble savages— came to symbolize full economic and social equality. As inequality grew in the second half of the eighteenth century, a revolutionary tradition developed that linked economic inequality with British corruption and aristocracy that influenced the anti-Federalists as well as the opponents of Hamiltonian economic policies. Mandell proceeds to show how diff erent movements in the early republic grappled with inequality through the expansion of schooling, the removal of property requirements for voting, and the rise of workingmen parties that supported higher pay for journeymen workers and a ten-hour work day. While these reform movements achieved some significant political successes, they did not halt the advance of capitalism. The movement to expand education, which received strong support from farmers and workers, often resulted in a curriculum that tacitly endorsed inequality and social hierarchies. Political reformers successfully eliminated property requirements in a number of states, but universal white male suffrage did little to remove the influence of the wealthy and well connected. The workingmen parties sometimes put forth socialist ideas, but the Democratic Party successfully incorporated their attacks on wealth and privilege without “fundamental restructuring of the American economy” (119). In the aftermath of financial panics and economic depression in the late 1830s and early 1840s, more radical critiques found significant traction. [End Page 682] Some focused on developing communal alternatives to capitalism. Albert Brisbane found initial success in organizing cooperative communities founded on the ideas of the French socialists Charles Fourier. The communal enterprises ultimately failed, but managed to attract significant support from political and intellectual elites such as Horace Greeley, giving hope that a message of cooperation over competition might find traction. Founded in 1844, the National Reform Association (NRA) fused land reform, anti-rent rhetoric, and support for a ten-hour workday to put forward a political platform explicitly critical of great concentrations of wealth. The NRA could not find political traction as an independent movement, but its central idea that all government land should become free and open to ordinary farm families eventually found a home in the Republican Party. The failure to redistribute land to formerly enslaved families during Reconstruction marked the limits of the land reform movement. Liberal conceptions of private property triumphed throughout the Gilded Age. Mandell successfully demonstrates that a number of vibrant egalitarian traditions offered important critiques of economic inequality in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The book represents a deep engagement with a broad array of thinkers, all of whom are put into specific political, cultural, and social contexts. Specialists and researchers will find Man-dell’s sophisticated and insightful analysis deeply engaging, yet the book’s writing is so...

ФЛАГ КОРАБЛЯ «ОРЕЛ» В КОНТЕКСТЕ ФОРМИРОВАНИЯ РОССИЙСКОЙ ГОСУДАРСТВЕННОЙ СИМВОЛИКИ

The article considers the issue of designing the flag for the first Russian ship “Eagle/Oryol”, built by decree of Tsar Alexey Mikhailovich from 1667. The designing of that flag is in the context of the formation of new state symbols and visual representation of power at the end of the War with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It took place in the late 1660s and early 1670s. At the period, a new version of the state coat of arms, a new coat of arms banner, and then new versions of the title coats of arms were created. An image of a double-headed eagle on the ship “Eagle” ensign (warship flag), perceived as the national flag of Russia, was the most important identifying feature of the ship’s ensign. The color scheme of the flag was not so important and it was determined in 1668. It consisted of three colors – red, white and blue. In historiography, the opinion took hold that the above first Russian flag consisted of four parts formed by a straight cross. However, such a version is not sufficiently confirmed by sources. On the contrary, it can be assumed that the flag of the ship “Eagle” was similar to the Dutch one. Whether they managed to sew the image of a double-headed eagle on its cloth is an open question.

Peculiarities of A. I. Herzen’s Historical Autobiographism in From the Other Shore

This article examines one of the most stressful and difficult periods in Herzen’s life associated with the writer’s ideological crisis of the late 1840s, which was reflected in his journalistic works of the 1850s. This research is an attempt to carry out a comprehensive analysis of the book From the Other Shore as an autobiographical text in order to trace the formation of a new concept of the author’s personality and ways to overcome his ideological crisis. The article examines the nature of autobiographism in Herzen’s creative writing of the 1850s, which L. Ya. Ginzburg defined as historical autobiographism. Romantic autobiographism of the 1830s and socio-psychological autobiographism of the 1840s were replaced by historical autobiographism (definition by L. Ginzburg). Issues of historical order become part of the writer’s personal life. Moreover, Herzen personifies the principles of historiosophy: he regards the experience of an individual as the experience of humanity at large. However, Herzen’s uncertain position in European democratic social circles was responsible for the crisis as well. That is why Herzen formulated and chose for himself the position of an outside observer. The method of historical analogies (definition by R. Нestanov) highlights this new view — Herzen compares the events of Europe with the events of the end of Ancient civilization and juxtaposes himself with Roman philosophers. Furthermore, he uses the technique of dramatising the present, and, consequently, history itself, which leads to the effect of double reflection (reflection of reflection or meta-reflection), and helps him distance from the present and overcome the emotional drama of the late 1840s — early 1850s.

Искупленный дважды: толмач Ставропольского войска Афанасий Шорин (опыт реконструкции нетипичной биографии крещеного калмыка второй трети XVIII в.)

Introduction. Religious policies of the Russian Empire in early modern history is a topical issue of historiography. An important (though poorly researched) aspect of this question is the role of Kalmyk Christian elites. Being part of the diverse ethnoreligious cluster, the latter served as a conductor of Russia’s influence on subject nomadic communities (Oirats, Turkic tribes) during the period under consideration across southeastern steppe peripheries and adjacent territories. The Stavropol Kalmyk host established in 1737, quartered next to the fortress of Stavropol-on-Volga, and since 1745 referred to as Stavropol Corps of Kalmyk Christians was one of such groups.Goals.The study seeks to reconstruct the biography of Afanasy Shorin, an interpreter socially representing army elites. His life journey may be instrumental in tracing the shaping (and details) of communication patterns between Russian authorities and steppe leaders during the mentioned period. Materials and Methods. The study analyses rich source materials from Russia’s central and local institutions that reflect certain phases of Afanasy Shorin’s biography. The research tools include those of source criticism and archaeography which provided a systematic insight into the documents. Special attention is paid to the collected indirect testimonies that would clarify separate aspects of the person’s life. Results.The biography reconstructed from the documents contains a number of milestones, such as birthright privileges, military career prospects, escape attempts and refusal of active service, two discharges from any liability for the offences by the Russian authorities as a tribute to the social status and merits of ancestors, admission to the Collegium of Foreign Affairs, civil service in Stavropol-onVolga, and an important political mission in 1757–1758. The article identifies how and why the life trajectory unusual for a representative of such background and status — a school teacher, interpreter but not a military officer — reflected the processes of interaction between Russia proper and steppe nomads. It also underlines the importance of the Oirat factor for the state before and after the fall of Dzungaria. In the meantime, the text describes sentiments of the Stavropol host leadership and emphasizes the dissatisfaction with restrictions to have resulted from social class policies of Russian authorities by the late 1760s. The article contains the idea that it was the discontent with his position, which was fully characteristic of many including Afanasy Shorin, that pushed the highest authorities of the host to participate in the Yemelyan Pugachev’s Rebellion. As a possible prospect, the departure was suggested, by the example of the Kalmyks of Ubashi Khan, who departed to China in 1771. The article proves first to reveal the mechanism of how service conditions, kinship and confessional contacts influenced the inclusion of Kalmyk Christian elites into the border Russian military-andpolitical system. The text gives arguments that essentially contradict the trend (previously expressed in historiography) to consider the anti-serfdom protest as the only reason why Stavropol Kalmyks supported Pugachev’s Rebellion. Conclusions. The paper concludes the Kalmyk Christian nobility and related elites of the Kalmyk community played a significant role in foreign and religious policies under Elizaveta Petrovna and in the early years of Catherine the Great’s reign, which explains the increased attention of the government towards them. However, their relevance within the established border system and, consequently, their positions were largely exhausted in the 1770s. This was also facilitated by the decline in the importance of the Oirats, and the rise of the Turkic direction in Russia’s foreign policy in the south and southeast.

“Everybody’ private carriage.” Omnibus Travel in Victorian Literature

Introduced into the streets of first Paris and then London in the late 1820s, the omnibus quickly became a popular and convenient means of urban transport. But as many historians of culture note, the omnibus connecting different points in the metropolitan space, was a space in its own right, with a range of complications and complexities. Its interior constituted a peculiar enclave within a larger communal space and thus made its passengers experience - and negotiate between - freedom and constraint, convenience and discomfort as well as anonymity and intimacy. Using omnibus scenes in the works of such writers as Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, George Augustus Sala, or Amy Levy, I shall examine some of the above-mentioned aspects of the conveyance. Most specifically, I shall look into the complexities of the visual interactions between the omnibus passengers as well as those between the passengers and the urban environment outside the vehicle.

Medicine as a Lens to Examine Cross-Cultural Encounters: A Study of Medical Missionary Samuel Hayward Ford’s Writings in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand

Summary Medical missionary Samuel Hayward Ford arrived in New Zealand’s Bay of Islands in the late 1830s, a few years before the formal colonisation of the country. His letters and medical reports to the Committee of the Church Missionary Society revealed the complicated and malleable nature of medicine in the cross-cultural encounter. Through close study of Ford’s writings, this article argues that medicine worked to transform and interweave Māori and missionary worlds in precolonial New Zealand. Experiencing the spread of disease in the Bay of Islands, Ford practised and was influenced by evangelical humanitarianism, and he was also entangled in the politics of empire. More than this, his medicine exposed the missionary objective to transform Māori society, and it showcased not just cultural differences regarding medical knowledge but also the exchange of ideas and treatments between Māori and the missionaries.

Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Thomas Hobbes

Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Thomas Hobbes

Joachim von Sandrart, aristocrat-painter in Amsterdam, 1637-1645

In this article, the central issue is the interaction between Sandrart’s friendship networks, his art production and success in Amsterdam. His famous literary life’s work the Teutsche Academie, and Lebenslauf, his (auto) biography, will also be involved. Sandrart’s stay in Amsterdam (1637-1645) was the true springboard for his career. Upon arrival in Amsterdam, he immediately positioned himself in the network of influential entrepreneurs, connoisseurs and magistrates by moving into a patrician residence on the Keizersgracht. Sandrart’s wealthy bloedvrienden (family members) with important socio-political networks - the banker Johan de Neufville and the artist-agent Michel le Blon - further brokered easy access to the bourgeois elite network, which soon earned the aristocratic painter many important commissions. In the late 1630s and early 1640s, Sandrart was a pioneer in his use of the Van Dyckian way of portraying and a classicist Italian style in history painting. Although it took a further ten years before the change of style towards academism became definite in Amsterdam, Sandrart had been the artistic leader thereof. Moreover, he launched a new artists image and artistic lifestyle by positioning himself as the aristocratic-artist.

Deconstructing the Protestant Liberation of the Bible: The Case of the Low Countries

Abstract The Grand Narrative of the liberation of Scripture has long taken for granted that the late medieval Catholic Church took a negative, if not repressive, attitude towards vernacular Bible reading; that the Scriptures were only opened up for the masses with the advent of Luther and the Reformers; and that the Catholic authorities reacted by intensifying their repressive policy. Though explicitly criticized in scholarly literature over the last decade, this Grand Narrative, or Protestant Paradigm, continues to pop up in confessionally-colored scholarly publications, as well as in accounts of the Reformation that are destined for a general audience. The present essay examines three incarnations of the Grand Narrative in Dutch Protestant Bible culture. Firstly, it has been argued that the Bibles published by William Vorsterman (not only the edition of 1528, but all subsequent editions) betray sympathies with the upcoming Reformation; secondly, that the printer-publisher Jacob van Liesvelt was beheaded on account of the protestantizing marginal glosses in his Bibles, especially the 1542 edition; and thirdly, that his widow Maria Ancxt continued to print Protestant Bibles from the late 1540s until the early 1560s, in obvious violation of the anti-heresy edicts, yet without being harassed by the Antwerp authorities. The aim of this article is to debunk these incarnations of the Grand Narrative.