Mid-nineteenth Century Research Articles

Eastern isles, western isles: Geographical imaginaries and trans-island identities in British conceptions of Japan, 1800–1868

Ideas of islands shaped Britain's self-identity and its relationship with the wider world in the early and mid-nineteenth century. Existing interpretations of Anglo-Japanese relations have emphasized the development of the idea of Japan as the ‘Britain of the East’ in the late nineteenth century with the significance of Japan adopting a western model of development. This article argues for a critical re-evaluation that directly engages with the crucial developments within early nineteenth-century ideas of Japan as Britain's eastern reflection. It argues that the idea of Japan as Britain's eastern reflection did not arise out of Japanese reforms during the mid-nineteenth century but significantly predated these developments, grounded in ideas of geographical and cartographical connections between the two island nations and reinforced by firsthand travel accounts from the late 1850s onwards. Crucially, it argues that these ideas of twin isles of East and West exerted a powerful, at times eclipsing, influence over British conceptions of Japan in the early and mid-nineteenth century, employing geographical imaginaries in the face of geographical and cartographical difference.

From museum to school and back again: tracing the biographies of natural history objects, 1866–2024

ABSTRACT The article traces and examines the history of some of the specimens used in teaching in Swedish secondary grammar schools from the mid-nineteenth century up until today. Previous research has focused on empirical analyses of teaching materials and school collections, while this paper adds new knowledge to the history of education using an object-biographic approach. Whilst focusing on the history of two distinct specimens, a bird and a small collection of butterflies, and how these were circulated and recontextualised, the paper raises wider questions about how different actors are involved as meanings and knowledge content change. Through the object-biographic approach, we show that the use of natural history objects was multifaceted and had several purposes at the same time, ranging from research to education to providing status or being a hobby. The use of natural history specimens changed with reforms of the Swedish educational system. New teaching materials and new educational ideals were developed, and from 1960 onwards the importance of these objects decreased. We show how the specimens have taken on new meanings today as selected and displayed museum objects.

Romanian water-cure resorts and the state before the Second World War: health, leisure and public-private partnership

ABSTRACT Romanian water-cure resorts were established in the mid-nineteenth century following the discovery of thermal waters. The Romanian state and prominent politicians sought to create modern spa resorts (like those established a century before in France and Germany) by allocating funds and implementing public policies and laws to develop bathing establishments for more people who suffered from different ailments. The local spa resorts could promote health tourism with active support from the state and public-private partnerships. Therefore, the two water-cure resorts analysed in this article, Băile Herculane and Băile Govora, with different histories and evolutions, designed modern medical treatments and leisure activities in the interwar period, encouraging wealthy people and people of modest income to spend a holiday and ‘take the cure’ (drinking and bathing) at these resorts.

Subversive Sketching: Intratextual Debate in British Accounts of China, 1797–1805

This article focuses on the intratextual relationship between written and visual representations within George Staunton’s and John Barrow’s travel narratives (1797 and 1804 respectively) and William Alexander’s pictorial volumes (1797 and 1805) to underscore the ambiguity undergirding Romantic-era appraisals of China. These competing depictions disrupt narratives – beginning in the mid-nineteenth century – that expunge equivocal representation to perpetuate false teleological narratives of Anglo-Sino relations, culminating in familiar orientalist models.

Food Encounters in the Tropics and the Andes: Isaac Holton’s Sensorial Construction of Disgust with Colombian Food in the Nineteenth Century

ABSTRACT This article examines the circulation of travel writing in the formation of white tastes created rhetorically and materially in opposition to the tastes of locals, focusing on food encounters between U.S. writers and Latin Americans in the mid-nineteenth century. It examines the representation of Colombian foodways in the travel accounts of North American botanist Isaac Holton published in 1857. Holton’s rejection of certain foods, especially those that Colombians seemed to enjoy most, is presented as evidence of his sense of moral superiority. Scholarship on American travel and empire shows how discourses in colonial food encounters and narratives about morality and good taste created stereotypes that persisted over time. Food mediated the daily relationship between travelers and locals in contexts of contested social and political power. To address the coloniality of food encounters, this essay focuses on the textual circulation of representations of African-descended and racially mixed Colombians as lazy and dirty. Their food and foodways served as political, racialized, and gendered metaphors that represented subaltern Colombians in a growing global community of readers. Narratives of disgust about people of the tropics and the Andes help readers to understand how early American travelers to Colombia drew on their sensory experiences to construct narratives that interpreted cultural differences as national and moral. This analysis exposes the link between emotions and senses in forming narratives of “otherness” in the Americas.

GREEK SHIPPING ON THE BLACK AND AZOV SEAS AT THE TURN OF THE 40s - 50s OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY (BASED ON THE MATERIALS OF THE AUSTRIAN CONSULAR REPORTS AND THE AUSTRIAN PRESS)

The article aims to examine the participation of the Greek merchant fleet in the navigation of the Black and Azov Seas in the mid-nineteenth century on the basis of a complex of Austrian sources that has been little studied in Ukrainian historiography. The latter included published reports from Austrian consular offices in Odesa, Berdiansk, Mariupol, Trebizond, and Galați. Materials from the Austrian press of the time are also used, primarily from the Austrian Ministry of Commerce's “Austria” newspaper, which was published as a daily newspaper from 1849 to 1856 and as a weekly from 1856. During the period under review, the Greek fleet was in a leading position in shipping in the Black and Azov Seas, successfully competing with the Austrian, British and Italian fleets. The success of the Greek merchant fleet was due, among other things, to the fact that seafaring was an ancient Greek craft, and in Ottoman times they were able to maintain the continuity of experience and tradition. In addition, this was facilitated by the developed network of Greek trading houses, which were widely represented in the main area of their fleet's navigation, in the Mediterranean Sea, especially its eastern part, and in the Black and Azov Seas. Therefore, the radical political and economic changes in the Black and Azov Seas regions did not take them and the Italians by surprise, and they were the first to take advantage of the rapid development of trade and transport traffic there. And despite increased competition in the mid-nineteenth century from the Austrians and the British, the Greeks continued to hold top positions in the shipping of the Black and Azov Seas. Moreover, unlike the Sardinians, they were gradually involved in long-distance voyages beyond Gibraltar, mainly to Great Britain. At the same time, the challenges for the traditionally sailing Greek merchant fleet from the emergence of steamship lines on the Black Sea were outlined. The first indicators were the activities of some of the Greeks' main competitors, the Austrians, in the Danube ports and on the Bulgarian coast, and the British, Austrians and Turks in the Anatolian ports.

Between Whale Teeth and the Moral Uses of the Sea: Considering Religion in the US Whaling Industry’s Extractive Zone

This article argues that the nineteenth century US whaling industry provides an oceanic perspective on extractive zones that illuminates their multi-sited, multiscalar nature where the local and global are deeply entangled. Further, I suggest that viewing this process through the underexamined lens of religion can contribute to a fuller understanding of the widespread, often neglected, impacts of extractivism. I take an 1845 sermon by liberal Protestant theologian Horace Bushnell, “A Discourse on the Moral Uses of the Sea,” read alongside the labors of the American whaling industry, as a mid-nineteenth century moment to consider the concealment of the natural resource extraction that is necessary for the production of the conditions of possibility for the imagination of “civilization” ideologically and theologically in the mid-nineteenth century. I look to the journey of whale teeth as they move between waste, items of trade in a global capitalist market, and powerful ritual objects in Fiji, assessing how the extractive zone as a contact zone also transforms religion, which in turn can be a location of agency and resistance. The article calls attention to the critical entanglements of indigenous and settler worlds, whose stories cannot be told separately from one another.

The Geopolitical Imaginaries in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale and Hakugei: Legend of the Moby Dick

This paper explores the geopolitical imaginaries in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851) and in the Japanese science fiction animation titled Hakugei: Legend of the Moby Dick (1997-1999) by the Japanese animation artist Osamu Dezaki. Although it is an adaptation of Moby-Dick, the setting of Hakugei has been creatively changed from the sea to space. In the mid-nineteenth century, when Melville chose the sea as the setting of his quest novel, the sea was inextricably intertwined with the nineteenth-century myth of U.S. expansionism. Melville presents a double vision of imaginary islands in the South Sea and the actual geopolitical relationships between existing transatlantic countries. Yet in the second half of the twentieth century, especially in the wake of Transpacific tensions, the sea as a place of quest among Japanese writers could not be delineated in the same kind of prefigurative language used by Melville, such as by drawing on symbolism. Instead, the animation reflects a Cold War psychology that was prevalent among Japanese after the defeat of World War II. As this paper suggests, Hakugei displays both fear and hope for the geopolitical transformation of the Pacific Rim countries and their future safety by choosing outer space as a site for the fable. It is in this way that the Japanese animator Dezaki draws on Melville’s Moby-Dick as a source text by engaging geopolitics, anti-war psychology, and uneasiness toward expansionism. Melville’s pacifism can be argued for as major transcultural influence, at the very least, driving Hakugei’s anime characterization. In fact, going beyond drawing on certain characters, including Ahab, Dezaki retains Melville’s anxiety over the proximity of creation and destruction in yet another era of increasing concern for world peace.

Skull morphology analysis suggests the extinct Cape lion, Panthera leo melanochaita (Smith, 1842), is not distinctive

The lion (Panthera leo) was extirpated from the Cape region of South Africa during the mid-nineteenth century. Whilst historically classified as a distinct subspecies known as the Cape lion (P. l. melanochaita), recent molecular studies challenge the distinctiveness of this population, suggesting that it represents the southernmost population of the species' Southern Clade. The Cape lion is often cited as having a distinctive skull morphology, which has justified its subspecific classification, but only a limited number of specimens have been available for examination, so that the Cape lion’s skull morphology has not been satisfactorily understood. In this study we collected morphometric data from a greatly enlarged sample of 22 Cape lion skulls, including 12 adults, constituting the largest sample size analysed for this possible subspecies. The results suggest that (1) morphological characteristics of the skull previously thought to distinguish the Cape lion are not diagnostic, and (2) nor is the skull morphology of male and female Cape lions distinct from that of males and females of other southern African lions. Our results independently support those based on molecular investigations, which suggest that the Cape lion was not distinct from other lions within the Southern Clade.

New Poland in the New World

Abstract This paper discusses the project of creating a Polish colony in the United States, propagated by Józef Alfons Potrykowski and a group of his followers. In 1843–1853, seeing no possibility of preserving Polishness in Europe, they strove to establish a New Poland (Nowa Polska) in North America or Australia. Initially it was to be a single colony, but Potrykowski’s blueprint projected its development and the creation of an entire Polish province that would eventually join the United States as an autonomous state. In propounding such solutions, Potrykowski was under the tangible influence of the early socialists, and for this reason he stressed the necessity of building the colony upon such principles as equality and brotherhood. From a conceptual point of view, his project was based on categories of both a universal and particular character, with such paired (counter)concepts as sacrifice-treason, or brotherhood-egoism coming to the fore. Whilst Potrykowski’s plans bore scant fruit in terms of their practical realisation, they nevertheless offer valuable insights into East Central European utopianism in the mid-nineteenth century.

Black-necked crane as border object: interspecies politics in Himalayan borderlands

ABSTRACT Legacies of imperial frontier-making, ongoing border conflicts between nuclear armed nations, changing livelihoods, and the impact of anthropogenic climate change have created complicated claims on Himalayan borderland areas in the name of conservation, security, ethnic identity and development. Combining historical research with ethnography, this article traces the role of the Black-necked crane (grus nigricollis) in the formation of mid-nineteenth century imperial frontiers in the Himalayas and, subsequently, its present-day position in the political ecology of two Himalayan regions along the Sino-India border – Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh. We introduce the concept of ‘border object’ and demonstrate how it can serve as a useful concept to understand how non-humans become participants in changing configurations of territoriality, biopolitics and science, which underpin both a past imperial frontier and present-day border regimes.

Churchgoing in Edinburgh and Leith, 1836–2016: The Statistical Record

In the ongoing scholarly debate about the secularisation of Scottish (and British) society, churchgoing is one of the few metrics for which longitudinal data exist, albeit fragmentarily. This article assembles and analyses the evidence about levels of church attendance in Scotland’s capital (and second largest) city during the nineteenth to early twenty-first centuries. It draws upon quantitative data (nine religious censuses, with varying methodologies, in 1836, 1851, 1882 and between 1980 and 2016) and qualitative sources (chiefly local newspapers). Relative to population, churchgoing in Edinburgh and Leith appears to have declined continuously since the mid-nineteenth century, in-person attendance standing at an estimated 3.59% of the city’s residents on an average Sunday in 2022–3, somewhat lower than in Glasgow. Possible explanations for this decrease are briefly explored.

Locating Irishness in the “Belfast of this Great Dominion”: Toronto, 1841–1926

Abstract Through an exploration of how readings of Irish ethnic identity were produced, reproduced, and modified in Toronto between 1841 and 1926, this article contributes an urban-scale study to research on global Irishness. In the mid-nineteenth century, Toronto numbered among the most Irish of North American cities, and Catholics and Protestants of Irish birth and ancestry were touched by two nineteenth-century political projects that reached global levels of significance. The first concerned the attempted resurrection of the “Irish nation” through the return of a self-governing Dublin parliament by either constitutional or violent means. The second was the ongoing expansion of Britain's empire, a geo-political entity for which the Irish in Canada displayed varying degrees of affection through the century. For these projects, Toronto can be seen as both an Irish diasporic and British imperial location of importance. The study is informed by scholarship cautioning against the essentializing of any ethnic group as a transhistorical entity with consensual goals, and it considers the role of ethno-political entrepreneurs within the historical cycle of ethnic group-making.

Emerging Scholars Researching Black British Histories (mid-Eighteenth to mid-Nineteenth Centuries)

Abstract Recent years have seen a vast expansion of scholarly interest in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Black British histories, and increasing calls to support the work of early-career scholars (ECRs) in this field. Yet ECRs continue to face several specific challenges in conducting this crucial research. This section consists of a brief introduction and two case studies based on the research and experiences of Ph.D. students Annabelle Gilmore and Montaz Marché. Gilmore aims to amplify the connections between the lives and labour of enslaved people on plantations in Jamaica and the wealth and art collection of William Thomas Beckford, now held at Charlecote Park, from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. Marché seeks to trace the presence of Black women in eighteenth-century London, drawing on archival documents that provide traces of who these women may have been, and confronting the limitations of the traditional archive. Together, these pieces offer a glimpse into how these ECRs are positioning themselves within the historiography as well as considering how they hope to contribute to the field.

Distributing a Sane Beverage? The Social Differentiation of Access to Water in Paris

Water management depends on both the physical and social structures of large cities. In Paris, these elements interacted to limit and constrain access to water for large segments of the population for long periods of time. The very unequal distribution of property in the city is central to understanding water regimes in Paris and their evolution over time. This article analyzes the evolution of water systems in Paris from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, considering access to water (and its quality) as well as the provision of sewers to remove waste soiled materials. Important social variations in the modalities of access to water within the city persisted for a long time. They were a consequence of choices made in organizing the distribution of water in the city.

The European Response to US Expansion in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

The territorial expansion of the USA in the 1840s represented an important phase on its way to becoming a world power. Historians have paid considerable attention to US foreign policy during this period but have largely neglected the significant impact of US expansion on Europe. Whereas they have written a great deal about European reflections on American democracy or slavery, they have largely overlooked the geopolitical response that US expansion provoked among Europeans during that decade. This omission is surprising given the fact that this reaction spread not only in governmental circles but also among the broad public: the policy of the USA and its position in the Americas became an important topic with serious consequences for both sides of the Atlantic. Europeans often criticized the USA for its aggressive policy, and they feared that with the rise of its power it would behave in the same way in all parts of the world. The article's principal aim is to reveal the European response to US territorial expansion and how the repercussions of this response on the USA contributed to the rise of pan-Europeanism, nationalism, imperialism, and colonialism from the mid-nineteenth century.

The Malacca dilemma of the Raj: the Indian Uprising of 1857, the Second Opium War, and the British proposal of a Kra passage

Abstract In the late 1850s and early 1860s, the idea of building a passage through the Isthmus of Kra in the Malay Peninsula was hotly debated amongst British officials, merchants, and investors. This study finds that the British East India Company's rule over the Straits of Malacca had been a dilemma for itself and British merchants in China. The Second Opium War and the Indian Revolt of 1857 exacerbated the dilemma and pushed some British policymakers and investors to seek an alternative route between India and China. The proposal of the Kra passage was the response and solution to the Malacca dilemma. In historicising the Kra passage proposal and putting it in the context of the British empire's simultaneous crises in Asia in the mid-nineteenth century, the case of the proposed Kra passage reveals the complex relations between different actors within the British empire and the challenges of integrating multiple imperial interests into a British world system

Mobility, Migration, and Domestic Servants in Mid-Nineteenth Century Egypt

Mobility, Migration, and Domestic Servants in Mid-Nineteenth Century Egypt

Women’s Education: Curriculum and Content in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries India

The initiation and expansion of women’s formal instruction in India in the pre-Independence time is the legacy of both colonialism and the nineteenth-century reform movement among Indians. The latter, to an extent, was a response to the Westernisation embedded in the colonial processes. In pre-colonial India, institutional and formal education was a rarity for womenfolk, and until the mid-nineteenth century, zenana education or instruction imparted at home was the accepted norm. Several scholars have noted that the nineteenth century saw an intense debate on women’s schooling, especially in relation to the wisdom of educating women, the form it should take, and the purpose it should serve. Historically, women’s education was viewed by most communities as meaningless. Large sections of the population of both Hindu and Muslim communities were content with extending conventional approaches of learning to women and were vehemently opposed to changing it in favour of a modern education either in government schools or missionary schools. At home, women were taught to read religious scriptures and to read and write the vernacular language, although the focus was on learning home crafts and subjects of domestic and practical utility.

Palaeoenvironment and bio-events of the Cretaceous sediments of the Cauvery Basin, India

The Cauvery Basin is an important rift margin basin on the east coast of India. Its long research history began in the mid-nineteenth century with the pioneering work of H. F. Blanford. While much of the Cretaceous succession in the basin is fault-controlled, some of the recorded events represent global sea level changes, especially in the mid-Cretaceous. Macrofossils (ammonites, bivalves, etc.) and foraminifera are abundant throughout, and there is an important occurrence of fossil wood and ‘log-grounds’ in the Turonian–Coniacian. The basin is subdivided into a series of sub-basins (known as depressions in earlier literature), which, in places, have their own distinctive depositional history. The results of our collective fieldwork have provided a re-assessment of the lithostratigraphy, biostratigraphy and the tectono-stratigraphical history of the Ariyalur outcrop. Three sedimentary units have been identified: the syn-rift Gondwana Group (of early Cretaceous age), the syn-rift Uttatur Group (of Albian to Coniacian age) and the post-rift Ariyalur Group (of Santonian to Maastrichtian age). Both microfossil and macrofaunal information have been integrated in order to construct a biostratigraphical framework for the basin and develop a tectono-stratigraphical model. Structures exposed onshore, which have occasionally been interpreted as Albian reefs, are thought to be irregularly shaped limestone olistoliths and olistostromes produced by significant intra-Cretaceous faulting and slumping within the basin.