Late Imperial Era Research Articles

Expansion and Restriction: Divergent Paths Towards Modernizing Family Laws in Japan and China, 1868–1930

Abstract Before their encounters with Western powers in the nineteenth century, Chinese and Japanese societies were deeply embedded in traditional family systems that formed the backbone of their social structures. However, with the onset of legal modernization, these nations adopted nearly diametrically opposed strategies for reforming their customary family laws. Primarily, Japanese legal reformers under the Meiji regime bolstered the family’s authority and emphasized its political role. In stark contrast, the Chinese legal reformers during the late Qing and Republican periods curtailed family authority and diminished its significance. While the modernization of family laws in Japan and China has been the subject of scholarly research respectively, the differences between the two countries and the reasons behind their distinct approaches have not been adequately explored. This Article seeks to fill this gap. Through a comparative analysis of the legislative histories of both countries, this Article argues that their divergent paths stemmed from differences in the historical functions of family systems and the modern political contexts encountered by legal reformers during the period of legal modernization. In Japan, the family system was historically politically connected with the state, and the Meiji regime solidified its control over this system through modern codification efforts. Consequently, Meiji political elites saw the integration of the populace into the new absolutist imperial regime as advantageous, leveraging the political loyalty of families to achieve this. In contrast, the Chinese family system had become politically disconnected from the state by the late imperial era. In the aftermath of the Republican Revolution, the Guomindang regime navigated a landscape of rival political forces that significantly challenged its authority. Political elites aimed to dismantle customary family laws to weaken the traditional family system, which they viewed as a threat to governmental centralization and societal unity. They also sought to project a modern, liberal image to garner wider political support.

CENSORSHIP AND PRESS OF THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE 19TH - EARLY 20TH CENTURIES IN MODERN RUSSIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY

The paper provides a historiographical analysis of the points of view by modern Russian researchers on the development of censorship and press in Russia in the second half of the XIX - early XX century. The paper notes that there was no consensus among Russian researchers on the transformation of the domestic information sphere during this period. The studies of Russian historians have a very ambiguous assessment of its potential and the results of its development. The paper concludes that the works of modern Russian historians do not completely exhaust the topic of socio-cultural modernization in the field of censorship and press of the late Imperial era. Therefore, the development of Russian information sphere in the aforementioned period needs further comprehensive research.

Emblems of Authority, Symbols of Protest: Crowds and the Materiality of Their Signs

Abstract: This essay explores the relationship between the materiality of signs, crowds, and community, focusing on the territory of the former Russian Empire. The first part traces how emblems of authority carried in crowds have evolved from medieval war flags and gonfalons to twentieth-century military distinctions. The ease of production and distribution in the post-Soviet era ushered in symbolic inflation, prompting state attempts to reestablish control over the meaning of such signs. The second part looks at material markers of dissent since the late imperial era, and argues that the individualized production of protest signs in the twenty-first century has fractured protest communities, and discusses recent examples of collective sign-making as attempts to reestablish protest communities in new form.

The Northern Stronghold Sacrifice and the Political Legitimacy of Ethnic Minority Regimes in the Late Imperial China

Traditional Chinese state sacrificial ritual represented a symbolic system of integrating religious belief, divine authority, and political legitimacy. The Northern Stronghold (Beizhen 北鎮, i.e., Mount Yiwulü 醫巫閭山) was equal in status to the other four strongholds, which, moreover, served as a strategic military fortress and represented the earth virtue in the early state sacrifice system. In the late imperial era of China, and during the Yuan (1279–1368) and Qing (1644–1911) dynasties in particular, the Northern Stronghold swiftly achieved prominence and eventually became an instrument used by minority ethnic groups, namely the Mongolians and Manchus, when elaborating upon the legitimacy of their political regimes. During the Yuan dynasty, the mountain spirits of the five strongholds (Wuzhen 五鎮) were formally invested as kings and, as a result, were accorded equivalent sacrifices in comparison to those given to the five sacred peaks (Wuyue 五嶽). Given that the Northern Stronghold was located near the northeast of Beijing, the Yuan government considered it the foundation of the state. Thereafter, the Northern Stronghold was regarded as the most important of the five stronghold mountains. In the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), the Northern Stronghold Temple (Beizhenmiao 北鎮廟) was reconstructed as both a military fortress and religious site, while its representation as a significant site for a foreign conquest dynasty diminished and its significance as a bastion of anti-insurgent suppression emerged. By the Qing dynasty, the Northern Stronghold was regarded as an integral component of the geographic origin of the Manchu people and thereby assumed once again a position of substantial political significance. Several Qing emperors visited the Northern Stronghold and left poems and prose written in graceful Chinese to present their high respect and their mastery of Chinese culture. The history of the Northern Stronghold demonstrates how the ethnic minority regimes successfully utilized the traditional Chinese state sacrificial ritual to serve their political purpose.

Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction by Li Guo

Reviewed by: Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction by Li Guo Christopher Lupke (bio) Li Guo. Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction. Purdue UP, 2021. 273 p. The Chinese literary genre tanci 彈詞, a prosimetric form that mixes fictional narrative with poetry of various sorts, has been referred to in English translation as chantefable, plucking rhyme, or simply by its original Chinese term tanci or tanci fiction. It emerged in the late imperial era as the preferred medium of expression for literate women in China. Its mixed storytelling and singing structure suggests that it evolved out of an oral tradition. Long overlooked or dismissed as middlebrow, it has received little scholarly attention until recent decades. But in the past 30 years, and especially recently, it has attracted much serious scholarship, such as the Chinese-language book-length work of Hu Siao-chen, studies by Mark Bender, Maram Epstein, Yu Zhang, Lingzhen Wang, and others, as well as by Li Guo, this volume's author, her second on the topic of tanci. Guo's book comprises a lengthy, informative and sophisticated introduction, five main chapters--each devoted to the study of one tanci work—and a brief conclusion. As Guo indicates, the Chinese bibliographer Sheng Zhimei asserts that 538 novel-length tanci survive down to the present. Guo's rationale for selecting the five on which she focuses is to choose significant tanci that have received little to no scholarly attention in English. Of these five, one exists only in a handwritten manuscript in the Shanghai Library. Another has only recently been discovered, and Guo's discussion is its first such scholarly treatment in English. Having devoted her graduate research and first book to tanci, Guo presents these five tanci with the authority of a true expert—one of the leading scholars on the topic in the world. Her intimate understanding of the genre as a whole, her theoretical sophistication, and her exhaustive analysis of these five texts makes Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction an exemplary work of scholarship and a significant intervention into world feminist literary studies. It will be of great interest to any scholar who is curious about the development of literature written by women in Chinese but who does not have a knowledge of Chinese, and will assist Chinese [End Page 139] Studies scholars unfamiliar with the genre as well. It is not merely that tanci are mainly written by women. The themes of the narratives are deeply informed by the concerns of women and their status in late imperial China at a time when the onslaught of the Taiping and other rebellions, as well as the imperialist incursion of such military powers as the British, were posing a major threat to the millennia-long dynastic system and governmental structure. Additionally, the texts reflect the emergence of nascent global capitalism. Given these stresses, it stands to reason that the unprecedented social problems that Chinese people were confronting would surface in literature. Within these texts, traditional notions of gender roles, the established system of patriarchal kinship, as well as the relationship between subject and state were all called into question. And yet, as Guo demonstrates, the texts were doubly inscribed, which is to say that while genuinely subversive elements were at the center of these texts, they also depicted characters who ultimately returned to the fold, seeking readmission to the heteronormative hierarchies from which they initially strayed and rebelled. Among the theoretical reasoning that she draws upon, Guo turns to the notion of "spatialization" pioneered by Susan Friedman, who developed her ideas out of the writings of Julia Kristeva and Mikhail Bakhtin. "Spatialization" works on two axes, a horizontal and a vertical one. Guo sees Friedman's theory as fashioning a "horizontal" relationship between writer and reader and a "vertical" line in the space and time that the reader occupies. Space indeed does play a crucial role in most tanci, which frequently feature a woman who, in the disguise of a man, ventures out into the external world, leaving the domestic sphere behind. Guo also engages Nancy Armstrong's classic cornerstone essay "The Rise of Feminine...

The Gender of Knowledge in Forensic Drama of Late Imperial China

Abstract In late imperial China practitioners of forensic investigation in legal cases were predominantly male. While crime literature frequently features female characters, the question of how this literature represents the gender dimension of forensic knowledge remains unanswered. This paper aims to answer this question with an examination of a number of late imperial era theatrical works that depict how forensic knowledge differed across the male and female divide. It argues court-case literature increasingly valorized male forensic knowledge and its relevance to the state legal system. At the same time, these theatrical pieces signify female forensic knowledge following two literary traditions, namely, the commendation of exemplary women and the condemnation of “wanton women.” Investigating these theatrical works at the interstices between court-case literature, women’s history, and forensic history, this paper suggests that the representations of forensic knowledge in Chinese drama accord with major developments in the history of women and gender in premodern China.

On the Evolution of Hierarchical Urban Systems in Soviet Russia, 1897–1989

One piece of evidence of the inefficiency of the spatial economy of modern Russia presented in the seminal work of Hill and Gaddy (2004) is that Russian urban agglomerations are non-viable. This was demonstrated using Zipf’s rank-size distribution, which does not hold for Russian urban systems. Hill and Gaddy explained this through the legacy of the Soviet command-administrative planning. Having constructed an original dataset, which incorporated comprehensive historical data for all the cities in the former Soviet Union republics and tested the rank-size distributions for the respective years, the study yielded more nuanced findings. First, unlike the modern Russian hierarchical urban systems, the Soviet ones followed rank-size distribution fairly well. Second, the Soviet urban systems were evolving. In the late Imperial era and early Soviet period, they followed the Zipf’s law prediction. However, between 1939 and 1959, the rank-size distribution diverged from the predicted one. Yet again, the Soviet hierarchical urban systems revealed a trend of convergence toward the traditional rank-size distribution in the late Soviet era. A corollary to such evidence from data trajectory appears that the evolution of the Soviet hierarchical urban systems was not necessarily the ultimate product of the urban development policies of the command-administrative system. It can be thus presumed that, contrary to the established belief, command administrative urban development might be ineffectual even in centrally planned socialist economies.

From the “Influx of the Yellow Race” to “Migrant Workers”: Dynamics of the Languages for Describing Cross-Border Migrations in Russia

The phenomenon of mass cross-border labour migrations to Russia of the late imperial and post-Soviet periods was in an urgent need of comprehension in order to build relationships (for the population) and to “manage the process” (for the authorities). The novelty of the phenomenon required the formation of a corpus of migration terminology, both ordinary and official, public one. The importance of studying the issue lies in the fact that both the understanding of the phenomenon and the relation to it are implied in the terms, and a discourse is formed with their help. In the late imperial era, the familiar terminology of citizenship and social class was used, and ethnic categories started being applied. However, the key metaphor was the term “the influx of the yellow race”. It implied the idea of migration as a natural spontaneous process and of migrants as a part of racially alien persons. The Soviet era preserved the dominance of primordialist ethnic discourse, which prevailed at the first stage of the post-Soviet era migration process. However, it was soon supplemented and then replaced by social and, particularly, migration terminology. A “Chinese” becomes a “Chinese migrant”, and then simply a “migrant”, followed by a “migrant worker”. These dynamics did not mean a complete replacement of one system of representations and the description language with another; the hierarchy of discourses changed. However, it clearly demonstrates a change in the attitude of the host Russian society towards migrants and the migration situation in general

Land Law in Chinese History

Although land law or “real property law” is but one of several branches of what scholars commonly call “economic law,” or laws that regulate everyday economic activity, its history has drawn, over the past several decades, an unusually large amount of attention from legal theorists, economists, and comparative scholars of all methodological orientations. This has been especially true within the field of Chinese legal history: few scholars outside the field have any clear sense of pre-modern, early modern, or even modern Chinese family law, the law of personal injury, or even criminal law, but a much larger number will likely have some impression of historical Chinese land law, and may even have an educated opinion about it. This is not because land law was any more important to everyday socioeconomic life than those other bodies of law, but rather because land law has played a much larger role in theoretical and comparative scholarship, particularly in scholarship that seeks to explain global economic divergence—specifically, the divergence between China and the West in the 18th and 19th Centuries. Although this literature has perpetrated its share of myths about Chinese property institutions, much progress has been made over the past few decades, to the point where something approaching an academic consensus on core institutional features has emerged. This chapter outlines these core features of Chinese land law, focusing primarily on the late imperial era, and provides a short summary of how the field arrived at them. Whereas it was once thought that Chinese property rights were comparatively less secure or less alienable than Western European property rights, it now seems unlikely that major differences existed at this general level. They did exist, however, in the finer institutional details of tenancy law and collateralization instruments, and potentially in inheritance law as well. In these latter features, Chinese land law tended to produce institutional incentives that leveled and fractured the pattern of rural landholding, thereby reinforcing the economic dominance of household-level production throughout the late imperial era, and well into the 20th Century. The chapter then discusses relatively recent trends in the academic literature, reaching back to 1970s and 1980s, when the study of Chinese land law became deeply intertwined with debates over economic divergence. It concludes by briefly pondering the costs and benefits of such intertwinement, and what it means to study “the history of Chinese land law” as a consolidated subject.

A Visitor's Guide to Shamans and Shamanism

In the late imperial era, the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (the Kunstkamera) in St. Petersburg produced a series of guidebooks for visitors that provided an account of the changes in the gallery spaces and collections within the museum. Among the changes was a reorganization of the collection that brought about the removal of a gallery dedicated to Russian ethnography, which had housed Siberian, Central Asian, and a small number of European Russian objects. Siberian and Central Asian materials were then presented by the museum in an Asian ethnographic collection. In this new Asian collection, shamanism emerged as a category that operated to unify Russia in Asia as a culturally contiguous space located in an imperial elsewhere east of the Urals.

«У ЖИТТІ ПОКИ “ЩАСТИТЬ”»: ОСВІТНЯ ТРАЄКТОРІЯ ПЕРЕСІЧНОЇ КИЯНКИ МОДЕРНОЇ ДОБИ ЗА АВТОБІОГРАФІЄЮ

To this day, the opinion that is widespread in the scientific literature about the accessibility of secondary and higher women’s education in the imperial era mainly for daughters of wealthy people, has led to the expediency of studying the problem. The autobiography of the average Kyivan burgher woman Dashko from a low-income family of traders has become the empirical material of the study. The chronological framework of the study, represented in the autobiography, includes the late imperial era: late 19th century — year 1913. The methodological basis of the study is the microhistory, which focuses on the development of history “from below” and “from within”, the study of living conditions, educational needs, motivations and forms of behaviour of the individual. As a result of the study it has been proven that at the late 19th and early 20th century the urban attractiveness of Kyiv prompted the city authorities to ensure the accessibility of school education for children of city residents. The autobiography of the average Kyivan woman Dashko demonstrates a specific educational trajectory of the daughter of Orthodox low-income burghers. The circumstances of life of the Kyivan woman show a clear connection between the wealth of the burgher family and plans for the future of the children. The low income of the family of traders resulted in the utilitarianism of the initial training of the daughter, as well as breaks in education, studying in various types of lower educational institutions in Kyiv. An innate curiosity, a formed desire for further development and going beyond the everyday life of the burgher family, combined with persistent training, ensured the girl’s admission to the Kyiv-Podilsky Women Gymnasium. Obtaining a secondary education became a significant achievement in the educational trajectory of the daughter of low-income Kyivan residents. Having tried the effectiveness of education as a channel of social mobility, the graduate of the gymnasium dreams of further education at the medical department of the Kyiv Higher Courses for Women.

The Grand Canal in Republican China

AbstractSince the late imperial era, Yellow River floods have endangered the environmental equilibrium of North China, including parts of the Grand Canal. The Republican government’s response to water disasters reflected the influence of global networks and institutions of expertise. By turning to an American company for infrastructure work on the Grand Canal, Chinese government officials placed their faith in global science and finance to renew a domestic symbol of state power. The project failed; nonetheless the efforts to restore the waterways and provide relief reveal the entangled humanitarian, corporate, and educational interests of modern China’s state building and environmental management.

THE SITE OF SAN CALOCERO DI ALBENGA (SV). AN INTER-DISCIPLINARY METHODOLOGICAL TRAINING GROUND

Abstract. This paper summarizes the results of the research on the site of San Calocero di Albenga where, in late antiquity, a martyrial sanctuary was built on the remains of a probable funerary enclosure of the late imperial era. This site is known since the first half of the twentieth century for the pioneering research of Nino Lamboglia both in the field of the first experiences of stratigraphic archaeology and for an embryonic reading of the walls. After further investigations by the Soprintendenza della Liguria, the archaeological complex has been the subject of new studies since 2014. At this moment, the Politecnico di Milano was involved in surveying activities, and extensive use of archaeometric investigations was made. In particular, the minero-petrographic analysis of the mortars and the C14 on the lime clumps allowed reaching new significant knowledge in the scanning of construction activities and their dating.

Ozer , Dzhesco Talashkino: Dereviannye izdeliia masterskikh Kn. M. Kl. Tenishevoi. 2 toma (review)

REVIEWS 357 Bakhtin initially conceived specifically for the novel, in opposition to the supposed ‘monologism’ of poetry) to The Waste Land and considers how ‘Eliot uses dialogism […] to shift in time and space, creating the chronotopi of love, the road, the quest, and combining the epic past with the lyric present’ (p. 153). Probstein further shows how Four Quartets perfectly lends itself to a chronotope-based analysis, given how prominent the theme of time is in this text: ‘Time and history, as well as space’, notes Probstein, ‘are lyrical characters’ (p. 185) in the poem. Having delved into Eliot’s works, the book returns to the Russian context and explores Brodsky’s preoccupation with time and space, likewise ‘lyrical characters’ of his texts. Probstein begins with Brodsky’s poetical book, To Urania, and ends with his play, Marbles. While in the former the poet prioritizes Urania (space) over Clio (time), in the latter Brodsky succumbs to time positing that ‘a poet always deals with time, one way or another. […] Even while scribbling about space. Because what is a song anyway but restructured time?’ (p. 216). The conflict between space and time does not presuppose resolution for Brodsky. What is at stake for him, instead, is their complex relationship, which Probstein elucidates in this part of his work. The two closing chapters of The River of Time show how some of the modernist concerns of time and space are echoed in the works of two poets belonging to the postmodernist era: John Ashbery and Charles Bernstein. The chapter on Ashbery’s poetics contains the author’s interview with the poet, which is a valuable addition to Probstein’s study. In this interview, Ashbery, whose work for many epitomizes postmodernist poetry, incidentally admits that ‘[he does not] understand the difference between modernism and postmodernism ’ (p. 220), an ironic observation that nonetheless reveals the salient connection between different poetical layers of the twentieth century, which Probstein’s The River of Time extensively explores. Slavonic Studies Section B. Tokarsky Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages University of Cambridge Ozer, Dzhesco [Jesco Oser]. Talashkino: Dereviannye izdeliia masterskikh Kn. M. Kl. Tenishevoi. 2 toma. Izdatel´skii dom Rudentsovykh, Moscow, 2016. 654 & 304 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Chronology. R 8,000.00. If, in art history, scholarship on the nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts movement has suffered from the longstanding bias towards the fine arts over thedecorativeandappliedarts,itslesser-knownRussianvarianthaslanguished SEER, 97, 2, APRIL 2019 358 even further in the shadows. Yet study of the Arts and Crafts demands us to consider such issues as the ‘democraticization’ of art-making, the attention of professional artists (including a significant number of women) to vernacular craft and national ornamental tradition, and the modernist turn to new media and collaborative projects; all of which are vital in histories of design, as well as those of global artistic modernism. It is in these broader histories, which have recently been garnering much attention, that the Russian movement tends to be overlooked. For these reasons Jesco Oser’s hefty two-volume tome, which examines the furniture and carved wood production of the Talashkino artist’s colony (the second of the important Russian Arts and Crafts centres of the late imperial era, after the more well-known kustar workshops at Abramtsevo) is a welcome addition to the literature. The first volume is divided roughly into two halves: the first providing a chronological account, the second, an artist by artist discussion. If the former suffers a little from being divided into sections of sometimes only a handful of lines, plentiful illustrations, many of which are published for the first time, give much to learn from visually. The second volume contains an anthology of primary and historical secondary sources, a bibliography, a detailed catalogue of known Talashkino works with photographs, or a description only (‘image unknown’), a chronology and, finally, an English translation (by Wendy Salmond) of the overview history in the first volume. As with his earlier book, Mir emalei kniagini Marii Tenishevoi (Moscow, 2004), which detailed the revivalist enamel works of Mariia Klavdievna Tenisheva, Talashkino’s founder, Oser situates the patron of the colony centre-stage in this account. Tenisheva, he infers, was the leading creative...

Russian legal tradition

The purpose of this article is to discuss the traditional attitudes towards law which have been dominant in Russian society at different periods of its history. The article demonstrates the sources and causes of paternalism reinforcing the casual link between legality and obedience in the minds and practices of the Russian political authorities. Special attention is paid to the views on private property which took hold among the key Russian political thinkers of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, such as V. S. Solovyov and V. V. Rozanov, and the related state of the limited development of the Russian civil society in the late imperial era and throughout the Soviet period. In relation to this, an assumption is made that the attitude of the Bolsheviks to law and state was a crude form of continuing this contiguous tradition. In order to support these theses, a comparative analysis of the views of L. D. Trotsky and E. B. Khokhlov on the organization of labor during the first years of the Soviet regime is provided. The authors argue that the emergence of the early Soviet doctrine of the militarization of labor and the concomitant bureaucratic system of labor management was due to the authorities’ desire to centralize the distribution of factory production under the planned economy and the substantial public ownership of industry. A gradual change of social consciousness and practices during the recent decade — a trend that could not avoid affecting the current state of Russian legal studies and political thought — is thoroughly emphasized.

Royal Hittite Instructions and Related Administrative Texts by Jared L. Miller

Reviewed by: Royal Hittite Instructions and Related Administrative Texts by Jared L. Miller Michael S. Moore jared l. miller, Royal Hittite Instructions and Related Administrative Texts (WAW 31; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2013). Pp. xx + 451. $73.95. Where Gary Beckman's Hittite Diplomatic Texts (WAW 7; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996; 2nd ed., 1999) publishes English translations of some twenty treaties, seventeen letters, and thirteen edicts defining Hittite leaders' external relationships with (recently) pacified neighbors, the present volume transliterates and translates twenty-eight Hittite texts defining the boundaries of the internal relationships maintained by various Anatolian leaders with palace gatekeepers, royal bodyguards, military officers, provincial governors, regional mayors, and religious chaplains, all with the intention of maintaining and improving the health and wealth of their kingdoms. Following a seventy-two-page essay aggressively attacking the problem of defining this "genre"—one that, to be kind, is deceptively bounded by mercurial boundaries—chap. 1 transliterates and translates six texts commonly dated to the Old Hittite era (CTH [Catalogue des textes hittites (ed. Emmanuel Laroche; Études et commentaires 75; Paris: Klincksieck, 1971)] 262, 263, 265, 269, 272, and 275). Chapter 2 transliterates and translates fourteen instructional memos datable to the transitional reigns of Tudḫaliya I and Arnuwanda I (CTH 251, 252, 257, 258.1, 258.2, 259, 260, [End Page 716] 261.1, 261.2, 264, 268, 270, 271 and 275), and chap. 3 transliterates and translates eight internal memos datable to the late imperial era (CTH 253, 254, 255.1, 255.2, 256, 266, 267 and 275). Not everyone will agree with the text selections here or the criteria consulted to justify them, but (a) this will not surprise anyone familiar with the ins and outs of Anatolian studies, and (b) this is one of the best English sourcebooks on this literature ever produced. Since so many of these instructional texts originate from the courts of Tudḫaliya I and Arnuwanda I (a transitional, innovative era), the author spills a great deal of ink defending the hypothesis (earlier proposed in his essay "Die hethitischen Dienstanweisungen: Zwischen normativer Vorschrift und Traditionsliteratur," in Hethitischer Literatur: Überlieferungsprozesse, Textstrukturen, Ausdrucksformen und Nachwirken [ed. M. Hutter and S. Braunsar-Hutter; Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2011] 193-205) that the "obligation" (isḫiul-) + "oath" (lingai) combination embedded within these administrative texts hardly undergoes "a process of mitosis at the end of the reign of Tudḫaliya I" (contra F. Pecchioli Daddi, "A 'New' Instruction from Arnuwanda I," in Silva Anatolica: Anatolian Studies Presented to Marciej Popko on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday [ed. P. Taracha; Warsaw: Agade, 2002] 261-68; and M. Giorgieri, "Zu den Treueiden mittelhethitischer Zeit," Altorientalische Forschungen 32 [2005] 322-46). This was rather a time, M. argues, when a "single obligation and oath genre" from the Old Hittite era "emphasizes practical and concrete obligations (isḫiul-)" within a composite genre that "in its later phases highlights above all loyalty to the king and his family (via) the (allegiance) oath" (lingai, p. 19). Whether this or any other form-critical hypothesis is provable from the fragmentary evidence at hand is, of course, problematic, so the author is quick to admit that "the assertion that the reigns of Tudḫaliya I and Arnuwanda I witness a significant change in state and administrative structures is still in need of clear support (and) should (not simply) be excluded a priori" (pp. 20-21). Still, one of the book's primary goals is to fend off any and all attempts to segregate these components. While the Hittitologists argue, Tanak students will appreciate how much these texts illuminate the literary-historical context from which several Hebrew texts emerge. Those wishing to understand, for example, (a) why Dtr so scrupulously details the priestly corruptions of Eli's sons (Hophni and Phineas), as well as (b) how best to gauge the severity of their punishment will profit greatly from examining 1 Sam 2:12–4:11 alongside the "Instructions for Priests and Temple Personnel" in CTH 264 (pp. 248-65). Why? Because this text, like Dtr, warns readers to beware of a long list of social, economic, and ethical vices constantly tempting religious professionals everywhere—not just Hebrew...

Abject Realism and the Depiction of Violence in Late Imperial Russian Crime Fiction: The Case of N. P. Timofeev

This article examines violence in ‘Prestuplenie sueveriia’ (1872) and ‘Na sovesti’ (1879) by Nikolai Timofeev. While many works of early Russian crime fiction sanitize the portrayal of violence, Timofeev takes a different approach in these novellas. His unflinching descriptions of violence employ an aesthetic of 'abject realism', a radical extension of the critical realism more typical of the late Imperial era. A reading of abject realism in Timofeev's writing extends our understanding of the variety within early Russian crime fiction and of the ways in which this particular form of realism functions and the effects that it can create.

Forest cover loss and recovery in an East African remnant forest area: Understanding its context and drivers for conservation and sustainable ecosystem service provision

Understanding of the often complex forest cover change drivers, and the perceived and observed forest cover changes substantially contributes to the sustainable management of tropical forests. This paper aims at developing an integrated view on tropical forest cover change and its drivers by combining the perception of the stakeholders (farmers, forest guards, and forest managers) and five decades forest cover mapping, based on interview and remote sensing respectively, through a case study in the central highlands of Ethiopia. Afforestation and deforestation occurred when law enforcement was stronger and weaker respectively, depending on political regimes. Since 1937 i.e., the early Imperial period, the position of the forest edge has not changed much over time, it rather became sharper. In the late Imperial era (1972–1975), the forest cover declined only by 1.6%. In the subsequent two governments, the socialist and the current federal rule (1975–2014), the forest cover increased by 17%. There was a 3.9% forest cover decline during the transition between the two governments. This pattern of overall net forest cover increase observed by remote sensing data has been correctly perceived by stakeholders. Stakeholders acknowledged the observed forest cover increase, however, they argued that the forest is declining in terms of its quality for several ecosystem services (ES). The ES decline is believed to have resulted from the gradual shift of pure dense indigenous forest to an increasing share of exotic plantations. In the three political regimes, land policy, illegal encroachments, population pressure and social unrest have been the leading drivers of forest cover change. Communities' involvement in forest management activities and sharing benefits were regarded as positive perception of forest management strategies during the federal administration (1993–2007) of the current government by farmers. Among the factors that determine forest management strategies proposed by stakeholders are gender, landholding size, education level and age. Future conservation and development interventions need to consider stakeholders' concerns. Their involvement in forest management is also necessary for improved biodiversity conservation, ecosystem service provision, and social wellbeing.

Between State Building and Local Cooperation: Russian Rule in the Kingdom of Poland, 1864–1915

Between State Building and Local CooperationRussian Rule in the Kingdom of Poland, 1864–1915 Malte Rolf (bio) In 1896, an anonymous “Warsaw publicist” in the German city of Leipzig published a revealing commentary on the nature of Russian rule over its Polish subjects. According to this author, conditions in the Polish provinces were dire. The region was awash with lawlessness. Corrupt officials acted at will through an overbearing bureaucracy. Local society was completely demoralized. In the decades that followed the January uprising of 1863–64, he argued, “despotism” had become “second nature for the representatives of [tsarist] power.”1 Not only did this abuse cause the suffering of Poland’s citizens; it also had a “corrosive effect … on Russia’s own internal development.” For “as long as despotism exists in Poland,” the author continued, “respect for the law in Russia is also impossible.”2 The Warsaw publicist’s dramatic polemic thus characterized one of the most important territories of the Russian Empire as little more than a “breeding ground for arbitrary rule” (rassadnik proizvola).3 For a contemporary Polish critic to offer this view of the tsarist order is perhaps not terribly surprising. More startling, however, is the extent to which historians have agreed with this dim picture ever since, and not just of Russian Poland in the late imperial era but of the entire so-called “123 dark years” of tsarist rule over the [End Page 385] country more generally.4 This perspective largely denies the reality of multiple and varied forms of engagement between the state and the local population throughout the long 19th century. It also effectively dismisses the no less remarkable flexibility and variety of options for political maneuvering that remained available to the kingdom’s population, even in the aftermath of the January uprising of 1863–64. Most of all, this narrative tends to keep us from looking more carefully into the structures and actors of imperial rule that shaped the politics of empire at the regional and local level. This article aims to revise this approach through a careful focus on the activities of Russian central institutions and their representatives in the Kingdom of Poland during the late imperial decades. To do this, I begin by assembling an overview of the leading figures of the state bureaucracy in the region, which exposes the structure and complex practices of the imperial administration.5 I then provide a detailed analysis of the Warsaw city administration to highlight the inner dynamics of the government apparatus, focusing in particular on two areas: interactions between official decision makers in the imperial capital and in the region; and the varied contacts that unfolded between state bureaucrats and Warsaw’s Polish-Jewish civil society. As my research suggests, these state-society relations were characterized not only by confrontation but by various forms of cooperation as well. [End Page 386] A great break to this pattern, however, occurred with the revolution of 1905, which ushered in a period of rising pressure on the imperial system. To trace this profound turn in imperial politics, I follow the story of state-society relations across the 1905 divide to examine the postrevolutionary political configuration and the changing significance of the state bureaucracy in the years just before World War I. After 1906 conflicts in Poland cast a growing shadow over the overall structure of the empire—full proof, it would seem, of the critical feedback loop between Poland and Russia to which the Warsaw publicist had alluded so evocatively a decade earlier. My goal in digging into the Warsaw case is not, however, merely to expose the intricacies of imperial power in a troublesome imperial region. The broader patterns that defined tsarist rule in the imperial periphery in general around the turn of the 20th century deserve greater attention from historians, and in this respect, Poland has special importance. Among other things, the Kingdom was always a significant proving ground for the empire, a kind of laboratory where the authorities modeled practices for securing power and integrating local populations. The study of imperial rule in the Polish provinces thus offers an opportunity to examine techniques that St. Petersburg employed with regard to the incorporation...

Demographic impact of climate change on northwestern China in the late imperial era

A growing body of quantitative (large-N) studies examines the climate–man nexus in historical agrarian China. Their dominant approach is to take the whole of China as a spatial aggregate, without taking into account the role of regional context. Furthermore, quantitative investigations of the climate–man nexus in northwestern (NW) China remain scarce. This study seeks to address the above issues. We focused on the extent to which periodic fluctuation of precipitation and temperature affected positive checks (famine, epidemics, nomadic invasion, and rebellion) and subsequently population growth dynamics in Sha'anxi, Gansu, and Ningxia, NW China in AD 1500–1911. Multiple Wavelet Coherence and Partial Wavelet Coherence analyses were applied to handle the non-linear and non-stationary nature of the climate–man nexus. Our results show that drought was the common stressor of various positive checks in NW China at the multi-decadal (32–64 year) time-scale. In addition, there was a coherence break of the relationship in AD 1700–1820, owing to the tremendous increase of subsistence brought about by land reclamation policy and the introduction of foreign food crops. Yet, the coherence resumed afterwards, resulting in more disastrous demographic consequences. We highlighted that the climate–man nexus is not entirely deterministic in nature, even in environmentally-fragile NW China. The relationship is mediated by social factors, particularly government policies. Still, if those measures are made at the expense of the environment, although humans might be able to win over nature in the short-term, the final outcome could be catastrophic in the long-term. This study substantiates the above notion with empirical quantitative evidence.