Late Eighteenth Century Research Articles

The Remains of the Night

Several theories claim that the rhythms of daily life changed dramatically in the late eighteenth century, as a result of the advent of street lighting. New technologies made it possible to work longer hours, enjoy a dash of leisure time, or otherwise stay active during the evening. People thus slowly but surely ‘colonized’ the night. Drawing on new empirical data from the eyewitness accounts of the local criminal court in Antwerp, this article subjects this theory to a thorough investigation. The findings show that there was no real increase in nocturnalization because Antwerpers – even without new street lamps – remained active for a long time anyway. They usually continued working long after sunset or had time for leisure. Sleep was limited to the biological minimum. A deviant rhythm in which people remained active until the wee hours of the morning and only got up well after sunrise was reserved for a small group of people who belonged either to the absolute cream of the crop or to the fringes of society.

Choosing the Lesser Evil: The Holy Office, the Jews and Voltaire. Censorship Notes on La difesa de’ libri santi e della religione giudaica (Venice, 1770)

It is possible to uncover certain aspects of the Catholic Church’s attitude towards Jews, the Enlightenment and philosophical-cultural productions through case studies of Catholic control and censorship in the late eighteenth century. In this vein, an analysis of the censorship notes produced by the Roman Holy Office on the content of the book La difesa de’ libri santi e della religione giudaica, published in Venice in 1770, can be particularly useful. The original documents, currently held at the Archives for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly the Holy Office, Rome), shed light on the methods and approaches the Catholic Church adopted to control the circulation of new ideas in a century characterised by profound intellectual, cultural and political change.

Gianfrancesco Corradino dall’Aglio and Two Manuscripts of Catullus That He Did Not Invent

Abstract A new edition of the poems of Catullus was published in 1738 in Venice by a young scholar named Gianfrancesco Corradino dall’Aglio. The title and preface promised a revolutionary edition that would surpass all its predecessors and restore the authentic text of Catullus with the help of an excellent early manuscript discovered in Rome. Corradino dall’Aglio’s grandiose claims attracted criticism and he soon came to be accused of having invented his manuscript sources. This article shows that the accusations go back to a misunderstanding by Scipione Maffei, who accused the editor in 1749 of having invented a liber Maffei. In fact the references to that manuscript stem from Achilles Statius’ commentary of 1566. More recently, that manuscript has been identified by Berthold Ullman with BAV, Ott. lat. 1829, that is, the famous codex Romanus of Catullus. But from the late eighteenth century onwards, the accusations of fraud directed against Corradino dall’Aglio centered on the Roman manuscript that is mentioned in his title and preface. This article shows that that manuscript cannot be identified with any surviving manuscript of Catullus, but due to several factors there is no reason to believe that it was invented by Corradino dall’Aglio. The article closes with an examination of the editorial practice of the young scholar, who turns out to have been a conservative editor of Catullus: he often advocated the reading of the manuscripts against the conjectures of earlier editors.

Between the Bishop’s Hall and the Hurchin: Enlightenment Legacies in Post-Union Antrim and Down

This essay looks at post 1798 tensions in Belfast, Antrim and Down, using a survey of literary and cultural texts. It notes a range of responses to the first two decades of the nineteenth century in those associated with United Irish aspiration and those associated with maintaining establishment control. On one hand there was a maintenance of the publication of United Irish political, cultural thought and language in the first two decades after the union through continued publication of collections of poetry and other works (Samuel Thomson, James Orr, William Drennan). The essay explores how this work took shape and how it responded to the trauma of 1798, particularly in how the Scots language was deployed as a cultural tool/ weapon in the early 1800s. Alongside this, I discuss the creation and development of a range of “Enlightenment” ventures such as Academical Institution, Poor House, Literary Society and question the extent of these undertakings by looking at how far these were “enlightenment” or were generated by factional, mercantile interests operating under the guise of philanthropic endeavours (e.g. extension of cotton industry in Belfast, economic expansion built on Transatlantic slave trade, imperialist/colonialist animus of many ventures, rewriting of recent history to fit establishment view). These developments are contextualised and questioned alongside the creation of post-Union “Union-ist” Agendas and Groupings (Conservative Anglican and Presbyterian alliances in the cultural sphere in the work of Bishop Thomas Percy, Thomas Romney Robinson, Hugh Porter and Thomas Stott). The trauma and memory of the late eighteenth century left a legacy played out in Belfast’s development post Union and in its articulation, or non-articulation as an Enlightenment space.

ON THE UNIVERSITY CAREER AND SCHOLARLY HERITAGE OF V.A. GEORGIEV (1944-2022)

The article is devoted to the memory of Vladimir Anatolievich Georgiev, Associate Professor of the Faculty of History at Moscow State University, his scholarly heritage and participation in the activities of Professor N.S. Kinyapina’s school in the study of foreign policy of the Russian Empire, especially concerning national peripheries - the Caucasus and Central Asia. The author provides the main facts of Georgiev’s biography, including information about the activities of his parents, who were also professional historians and graduates of the Department of History, Moscow State University. Georgiev was a representative of one of the four generations of this family who graduated from the Faculty of History of Moscow State University. His scholarly career and many years of teaching are connected with the Department of Russian history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Under the supervision of Professor N.S. Kinyapina he successfully defended his PhD thesis “Russian Foreign Policy in the Middle East in the Late 1830s and Early 1840s” and published a corresponding monograph in the mid-1970s. The article also deals with his major publications in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, in particular, with his contribution to the collective monograph The Eastern Question in Russian Foreign Policy. From the Late Eighteenth through the Early Twentieth Century. Special attention is paid to the group set up by Georgiev for research on Russian policy in the Caucasus during the imperial period. The article lists all of the students, who studied under his direction from writing student essays to defending dissertations and compiling their own monographs. Georgiev’s multifaceted work on popularization of historical knowledge in text- and handbooks for students and schoolchildren is not forgotten. They are still in great demand and published in large editions. Georgiev also wrote for the Soviet Military Encyclopedia and the Large Russian Encyclopedia.

Establishing the original order of the poems in Harward’s Almanac using paleography, codicology, X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, and statistical analysis

This work presents the results of a transdisciplinary analysis performed on Harward’s Almanac (Dublin, 1666), an extremely rare volume currently housed in the National Library of Ireland. The uniqueness and historical value of the Almanac is related to the presence of nineteen handwritten poems, entered by an anonymous scribe. These record textually important English clandestine satire circulating anonymously in Dublin in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Following a comprehensive historical assessment, it appeared evident that the current order of leaves was incorrect. To reconstruct the correct order of the leaves, and hence the likely sequence in which the manuscript poems were inscribed, this study employed a codicological/paleographic analysis complemented by analytical (X-ray fluorescence, XRF) and statistical (Self Organizing Map, SOM) investigation. Specifically, point XRF analysis was carried out for each handwritten page of the Almanac, allowing identification of ink elemental compositions (iron-based ink) and successfully supporting the validity of historical hypotheses on the poems’ order of inscription. The statistical organization of XRF data by SOMs allowed easy bi-dimensional visualization of the data set (54 points) and identification of ink similarities, once more validating the historical assessment.

“There are no secrets here”: Sex and Scandal in the Streets of Curaçao

This article challenges the assumptions about what spaces were actually private in the late early modern colonial world. Centered on a case of adultery amongst the Sephardic Jewish community of Curaçao in the late eighteenth century, this piece looks at the entangled lives of enslaved people, Dutch colonial officials, free people of color, Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. Gossip, private information transition, and the architecture and town planning of Willemstad, Curaçao, are integral to this story of community norms, legal systems, and colonial spaces.

Калмыцкая степь Астраханской губернии в первой половине XIX в.: этапы и основные модели административной системы управления

Introduction. The article deals with some key stages and patterns of administrative governance sequentially adopted for Kalmyk Steppe of Astrakhan Governorate in the early-to-mid nineteenth century. This very period was witnessing the integration and incorporation of Kalmyk Steppe into Russia’s administrative system, though some ethnos-specific governance elements would still be retained. The related historiography contains no explicit data as to certain governance stages (and patterns) characterized by corresponding qualitative changes. Results. The paper examines the publication titled ‘Ministry of State Property over the Fifty Years, 1837–1887: A Historical Review’ (Pt. 2: Protectorship. Land Affairs) for provisions pertaining to the governance system in Kalmyk Steppe. According to the document, efforts of the Russian Government across Kalmyk Steppe in the early-to-mid nineteenth century were primarily aimed at: 1) interacting with ethnic elites, endowing the latter with certain rights and privileges, involving them into the imperial power hierarchy at regional and local levels; 2) introducing (step by step) imperial legislative and court practices (common-law norms remain in force at lower levels for civil circulation); 3) laying foundations of imperial financial and tax policies (given that local elites would retain their original privileges). Conclusions. Our insights into opinions and viewpoints of contemporary researchers have identified a number of distinct features inherent to the shaping and functioning of the administrative governance system in early-to-mid nineteenth century Kalmyk Steppe. So, the early nineteenth century namestnichestvo was essentially rather that of the late eighteenth century. At the same time, pristavstvo should be viewed only as a milestone towards popechitelstvo. In general, the three can still be considered as individual governance patterns — with differing governance objects. However, the basis was compiled from supervision and wardship, and preservation of some ethnic governance traditions.

Taxa proposed by Pourret based on the specimens conserved in Salvador herbarium (eighteenth century)

The Salvador herbarium (seventeenth to eighteenth century) is one of the oldest pre-Linnaean herbaria in Spain. Currently preserved in the Botanical Institute of Barcelona, it was reviewed by Pourret during the eighteenth century, who added the Linnaean name of the species to the labels and proposed many new names. Our study has allowed us to enlist all taxa proposed by Pourret (a total of 335); however, only 12 were validly published (some by other authors), and two of them are lectotypified here. We have also classified the rest of names into three categories: 35 that were included in publications by other authors but are not validly published names; 160 that were published by other authors; and 128 that we have not been able to find in any publication, and they should be considered as merely Pourret’s proposals without any validity. These results reflect the situation of plant taxonomy in the late eighteenth century; in Pourret’s time the number of published taxa was very low while taxonomical studies done by other contemporary authors were rarely available. Thus, Pourret was not able to assign already published taxa to all specimens and, therefore, he was forced to do new proposals that were mostly incorrectly published.

On the Western reception of Prince Zhu Zaiyu’s music theory from the eighteenth to the twentieth century

This article provides a case study of the historical process of the reception of an eminent aspect of pre-modern Chinese music theory in Western scholarship: The music-theoretical works of Zhu Zaiyu 朱载堉 (1536–1611), often considered as the greatest theorist in the history of Chinese music, are discussed in relation to their initial Western reception by Joseph-Marie Amiot, a Jesuit missionary who lived in China during the eighteenth century. It is shown how Amiot’s most important corresponding work, which still remains one of the basic texts for the study of Zhu Zaiyu in the West, initiated the reception of Zhu’s theoretical views in Europe, how it influenced and partly also misinformed the views mostly in German musicology from the late eighteenth century to the 1920s, and how the later and more progressive Anglophone Zhu Zaiyu studies from the 1960s to the 1980s emancipated themselves from this. Critical reflections on the Western history of the reception of Zhu’s thought and especially his understanding of the equal temperament system are included along the way and in the final section.

Changing rice geographies: a long-term perspective of Portuguese regional production (1860-2018)

From its origins in Asia, cultivation of Oryza sativa L. in Portugal has had to adapt to local agroecological conditions. Since the late eighteenth century, there has been significant human intervention in rice production, particularly through public policies aimed at increasing production to achieve national food self-sufficiency. Using national and regional statistics on rice production, this article analyses how public policies on rice cultivation over the last 160 years have impacted and interacted with territorial agroecological conditions and the genetic characteristics of the rice varieties being cultivated. We concluded that public policies led to increased production by favouring the geographical reorganisation of rice production based on the rice varieties used and changing territorial agroecological conditions.

“Shakespeare is a Finnish national poet:” Developing Finnish Shakespeare Scholarship from the Enlightenment to the Twentieth Century

In this article, I will take up the idea of “origins” as it pertains to Finnish Shakespeare during Finland’s time as an autonomous Grand Duchy of Russia from 1809-1917. While not technically the beginning of Shakespearean performances, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are the beginning of the rhetorical use of Shakespeare in public discourse used to establish cultural sovereignty distinct from Sweden and Russia. Beginning with a brief overview of Shakespearean mentions in the latter half of the eighteenth century, I will analyse the public discourse found in Finnish literary journals and newspaper articles in the 1810’s and 20’s. Following an analysis of J. F. Lagervall’s 1834 Ruunulinna, I will then briefly track how shifting attitudes towards translations such as those found in J. V. Snellman’s writings influenced the emerging Finnish literary and theatre tradition, most notably with Kaarlo Slöör and Paavo Cajendar’s Shakespeare translations and the establishment of the Finnish Theatre in 1871. Finally, an analysis of Juhani Aho’s untranslated essay in Gollancz’ 1916 A Book of Homage to Shakespeare will highlight the legacy of prior Finnish Shakespearean traditions, while also highlighting the limits of translation. Ultimately, I suggest that Shakespeare was appropriated early on as an accessible figure of resistance in the face of Swedish linguistic supremacy and the increasing threat of Russian assimilation and oppression.

The architecture of colonial jurisdiction: the annexation of Queensland's offshore islands

This paper explores the relationship between architecture and colonial sovereignty. It considers the case of the British colony of Queensland’s offshore islands, which existed somewhere between competing colonial jurisdictions and international waters following Queensland’s separation from the colony of New South Wales in 1859. The discussion situates this nineteenth-century moment within a broader history of British colonial occupation and development along Australia’s eastern seaboard dating to the late eighteenth century. This paper argues that anomalies of colonial law did not constitute an impediment to colonial sovereignty — rather, they were its very modes of articulation. Whereas Queensland’s offshore islands had previously constituted a maritime frontier that was actively exploited by private enterprise, as a result of the Queensland Coast Islands Act 1879, the Great Barrier Reef and Torres Strait Islands were gradually transformed into a geography of regulation that assisted in governing the political community of the colony as a whole. This paper adopts an infrastructuralist analysis, reading the architecture of colonial development alongside other technologies and media as instruments in the implementation and clarification of colonial jurisdiction.

The Failure of the Dutch Free Ports in the Nineteenth Century: Commerce, Colonialism and the Constitution

ABSTRACT In the 1820s and 1830s, two debates about free ports took place in the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. One debate concerned domestic fiscal policy and the regulation of foreign trade. In this debate the legacies of the political economic thought of Gijsbert Karel van Hogendorp and the mid eighteenth-century debate on turning the Dutch Republic into a limited free port were played out. The first Dutch debate on free ports was a response to changing conditions in global trade and a further attempt to regain the old staple market and connect it to an industrialising national economy. The other debate concerned the establishment of the Dutch Trade Company (Nederlandse Handels Maatschappij) and the declaration of a series of overseas free ports in the years after the British seizure of Singapore and its ratification in 1824. This second debate concerned the modernisation of colonial trade to halt the expansion of British commercial settlements in and around the Dutch East Indies as well as in the Caribbean. Together these debates represented the national challenge to put the entire Dutch economy on a new foundation and reflected differing constitutional perspectives that had pitted liberals against patriots since the late eighteenth century.

The socio-environmental impact of mining in a peripheral Andean region, 1776–1831

Abstract From an environmental-historical perspective, this article seeks to contribute to the characterization of mining and metallurgy developed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the Argentine Cuyo region (Mendoza, San Juan and San Luis). It also seeks to examine the role they played in the region’s socio-historical dynamics, particularly in terms of the appropriation of available natural resources and the strategies employed in mining labours. The relationship among economic activities and the environmental configuration of the Cuyo territory and the social agents that lived there is analysed through four case studies that allow for greater understanding of the central role of sociopolitical causes in the definition of environmental transformations.

The Prose of Our Land: Ban Kōkei, Translation, and National Language Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Japan

Today, Ban Kōkei 伴蒿蹊 (1733–1806) is mostly known as the author of a collection of biographies, which became one of the best-selling books of Japan's late eighteenth century. However, he also devoted much of his career to developing the expressive potential of Japanese prose writing. This article locates Kōkei's promotion of language reform within the context of contemporaneous developments in translation from classical into vernacular Japanese and explains the role of translation in Kōkei's attempts to develop Japanese prose writing nearly one hundred years before the better-known national language advocacy of the “Unification of the Spoken and Written Languages” (Genbun itchi 言文一致) movement of the Meiji period (1868–1912). Considered alongside canonical figures like Motoori Norinaga and Ogyū Sorai, Kōkei's lesser-known work is evidence of a nascent “national” language consciousness among Japanese intellectuals prior to the Meiji period.

Consolations of the Earth

This article looks toward nineteenth-century earth sciences with attention to their humanistic themes. In the early decades of the century, multiple lines of evidence concretized a humanistic experience of man as a finite being with a contingent and accidental planetary existence. Geological humanism refers to the way that themes of earthly existence routinely influenced the status and meaning of being human, culturally and within the sciences, with the collapse of Enlightenment aesthetics of symmetry, purpose, and order in the late eighteenth century. While earth sciences recast humanistic themes in empirical terms, by the latter half of the nineteenth century scientists also regularly articulated prophecies of secular extinction or demise that were resolved, but only partly, both with reference to a long-standing racial schema and through routine consolations that a planet modified by human activity would be a better earth. Coal played a particular role in mediating between earth and atmosphere, mineral and life, and matter and energy. This article details several of these secular consolations offered to popular audiences by prominent climate scientists to show that the earth was far from being understood as a stable domain of nature that could be taken for granted.

Yi Ok 李鈺 and His Iŏn 俚諺 (Folk Vernacular)

Yi Ok 李鈺 (1760–1815) was a prolific writer who lived in Hanyang (modern Seoul) during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Among the massive pile of writings he left behind, his Iŏn 俚諺 (Folk Vernacular) best reveals his broad and multifaceted linguistic and literary knowledge, which in turn epitomizes the cultural complexity of late Chosŏn. In its three introductory treatises, as well as in the ensuing sixty-six pentasyllabic Sinitic quatrains written in female voices, Yi Ok illustrates why and how he writes poems about how “heaven and earth and the ten thousand things” (ch’ŏnji manmul 天地萬物) speak through him. This article combines a scholarly introduction to Yi Ok's life and oeuvre with a philological translation of his Iŏn that unpacks the complexity of Yi Ok's age to gain a fuller understanding of the last stage of Literary Sinitic (hanmun) literature in traditional Korea.

The art of gathering: histories of international scientific conferences.

Hundreds of thousands of conferences have taken place since their first appearance in the late eighteenth century, yet the history of science has often treated them as stages for scientific practice, not as the play itself. Drawing on recent work in the history of science and of international relations, the introduction to this special issue suggests avenues for exploring the phenomenon of the international scientific conference, broadly construed, by highlighting the connected dimensions of communication, sociability and international relations. It lays out a typology of scientific conferences as a way of gaining an overview of their diversity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It argues that the international scientific conference is a central locus for understanding science as a social, cultural and political practice.

Paper tools for broken hearts: fortune-telling with cards in France, c. 1803–1937

Abstract Fortune-telling using cards became increasingly popular in France in the late eighteenth century. But the history of cards as tools for divination has been overshadowed by myths spun by occultist writers, who claimed Tarot were the only cards truly suited to fortune-telling, because they encoded secret magical truths that dated back to ancient Egypt. This article turns from these myths to alternative sources that show cards in action: criminal prosecutions of fortune-tellers, popular card-reading manuals, and surviving cards from the period. Not only Tarot, but cards of all kinds, from playing cards to decks designed for divination became flexible tools for negotiating relationships among a broad range of the French population. As images, texts and objects to be manipulated, cards unlock common structures of emotion in nineteenth-century France, from the sense of order implied by suits, to the importance of juxtapositions and chance, and of turning things over to uncover their true, hidden meaning.