Nineteenth-century Europe Research Articles

Empiricist Fictions, Fictions of Empiricism

Empiricist Fictions, Fictions of Empiricism

Plantations and protected areas: a global history of forest management

Today, the world's forests are threatened by global warming, growing demand for wood products, and increasing pressure to clear tropical forests for agricultural use. Economic globalization has enabled Western corporations to export timber processing jobs and import cheap wood products from developing countries. Timber plantations of exotic, fast-growing species supply an ever-larger amount of the world's wood. In response, many countries have established forest areas protected from development. In this book, Brett Bennett views today's forestry issues from a historical perspective. The separation of wood production from the protection of forests, he shows, stems from entangled environmental, social, political, and economic factors. This divergence -- driven by the concomitant intensification of production and creation of vast protected areas -- is reshaping forest management systems both public and private. Bennett shows that plantations and protected areas evolved from, and then undermined, an earlier integrated forest management system that sought both to produce timber and to conserve the environment. He describes the development of the science and profession of forestry in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe; discusses the twentieth-century creation of timber plantations in the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Australia; and examines the controversies over deforestation that led to the establishment of protected areas. Bennett argues that the problems associated with the bifurcation of forest management -- including the loss of forestry knowledge necessary to manage large ecosystems for diverse purposes -- suggest that a more integrated model would be preferable.

Orthodox Christianity and nationalism in nineteenth-century southeastern Europe. Edited by Lucian N. Leuştean. (Orthodox Christianity and Contemporary Thought.) Pp. x + 277 incl. frontispiece. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. $55. 978 0 8232 5606 8

Orthodox Christianity and nationalism in nineteenth-century southeastern Europe. Edited by Lucian N. Leuştean. (Orthodox Christianity and Contemporary Thought.) Pp. x + 277 incl. frontispiece. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. $55. 978 0 8232 5606 8

The production of borders in nineteenth-century Europe: between institutional boundaries and transnational practices of space

The article proposes a synthesis of the major historical works on nineteenth-century European borders. Founded on an original methodological approach, the article advances a rethinking of the concept of ‘territoriality’ traditionally attributed to the rise of modern nation-states. The innovative method adopted is based on combining the focus on spatiality in recent historiography – especially in global history – with the categories and the ethnographic method developed within the border-studies field. The analysis is conducted in two directions. The first focuses on ‘borders’, specifically on some border-creation processes developing throughout the European continent. The second is more centred on European ‘borderlands’, conceived as trans-state and trans-national regions, mainly linked to the space's well-established social practices, familial and economic networks and religious experience. On the one hand, the article highlights how nineteenth-century borders were not simply the product of an institutional decision performed by emerging nation-states, but also the result of an interactive dialectic between state institutions and social actors inhabiting the borderlands. On the other, it shows how the borderlands as cross-border territorial entities continued to exist alongside the new territorial state limits, helping shape a more complex European spatiality than traditionally stated.

Frank Lorenz Müller and Heidi Mehrkens, editors.Sons and Heirs: Succession and Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century Europe.

Journal Article Frank Lorenz Müller and Heidi Mehrkens, editors. Sons and Heirs: Succession and Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Get access Frank Lorenz Müller and Heidi Mehrkens, editors. Sons and Heirs: Succession and Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century Europe. (Palgrave Studies in Modern Monarchy.) New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Pp. xiii, 288. $100.00. The American Historical Review, Volume 121, Issue 3, June 2016, Pages 1058–1059, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/121.3.1058c Published: 01 June 2016

Painted Lady: Aspasia in Nineteenth-Century European Art

Despite pioneering reclamation efforts, feminist rhetoricians have only scratched the surface of the multilayered historical reception and representation of Aspasia, a fifth-century BCE Milesian woman famous for the company she kept. Aspasia’s penchant for historical perseverance means that her recovery must extend far beyond the ancient world. Throughout the centuries roused by the so-called Woman Question, she was on the lips and brush-tips of many on the lookout for antecedent and analogous women to serve as models or antimodels. Focusing on nineteenth-century Europe, we illustrate her powerful presence in art. Our discussion showcases Aspasia conversing (Nicolas-André Monsiau), instructing (Honoré Daumier), and contemplating (Henry Holiday). In their work Aspasia resists attempts to mute her colors and reemerges as a painted lady.

Labor and World Development Through the Lens of Cotton: A Review Essay

Labor and World Development Through the Lens of Cotton: A Review Essay

The modern ordinary: changing culture of urban living in Egypt's traditional quarters at the turn of the twentieth century

ABSTRACTHaving experienced social and political structures of the nineteenth century Europe, western-educated Egyptian elite used public institutions to force new legislative structures and procedures that ruled out traditional housing forms and spatial systems. This essay detects direct and indirect impact of these changes that informed the spatial change of modern living in Egypt in the first quarter of the twentieth century. It offers analysis of socio-spatial practices and change in ordinary Cairenes’ modes of everyday living, using social routine and interaction to explain spatial systems and changing house forms during the first quarter of the twentieth century. In doing so, the essay utilized archival documents, accounts, formal decrees and novels of the time as well as conducting survey of house forms and spatial organizations in Old Cairo.

Political censorship of the visual arts in nineteenth-century Europe: arresting images

1. Irony, Derision and Magical Wit: Censors As a Spur to Russian Abstract Art Margaret Bridget Betz and Andrew M. Nedd, 2. France Robert Justin Goldstein 3. Austria-Hungary 1867-1914 Catherine Horel 4. Political Images and Censorship in Germany before 1914 Ursula E. Koch and Martin Loiperdinger 5. Censorship of the Visual Arts in Italy (1815-1915) Antonello Negri and Marta Sironi

The criminal corpse in pieces

For criminals the moment of death marked the beginning of a new social existence, in which their former identities disappeared in the magico-medical employments of their bodies. Blood, fat and bones were sought for by people as effective medicines or as protective charms. This paper aims to look at the survival of such traditions in nineteenth-century western Europe, discussing how a blend of learned notions and folk-beliefs nurtured the view of an untimely dead body as full of physical and spiritual usable powers.

‘We have to compliment the Aristocracy on the exhibition of their morals': the Ellenborough divorce case (1830) and the politics of scandal in pre-reform London and Vormärz Vienna

Using the 1830 divorce of Lord and Lady Ellenborough as a case study, this article sheds more light on the mechanisms of sexual scandal in early nineteenth-century Europe. It contrasts the publicity and political meaning given to the adultery of Lady Ellenborough and the Austrian envoy Felix zu Schwarzenberg in London and Vienna. Whereas radical and moderate reformers exploited the divorce to contest aristocratic leadership and to propagate a contrasting model of domesticity in the British press, the Austrian government went to great lengths to cover up the affair. Both Austrian diplomatic correspondence and British high-society letters and diaries from before and during the scandal show an awareness of the damage that disclosures about the private affairs of the elite could cause.

Grave Matters: Mediating Corporeal Objects and Subjects through Mortuary Practices

Grave Matters: Mediating Corporeal Objects and Subjects through Mortuary Practices

THE POLITICS OF HISTORICAL ECONOMICS: WILHELM ROSCHER ON DEMOCRACY, SOCIALISM AND CAESARISM

Wilhelm Friedrich Georg Roscher (1817–94) is generally remembered as a significant nineteenth-century German political economist and a contributor to the “German historical school of economics.” His work is usually placed in the context of a larger narrative about the development of economic thought. Yet intellectual historians have rarely noticed that, for Roscher, Staatswirthschaft or Nationalökonomie were subordinate to a larger science of politics, and few have engaged with the substance of his political thought (as opposed to his economics). The aim of this article is to provide an interpretation of Roscher as a political thinker, focusing especially on his account of the modern European state between the 1840s and the 1890s. In particular, it explores Roscher's concern that nineteenth-century Europe's economically advanced societies, characterized by an unstable combination of democratic sovereignty, deep socio-economic inequality and a centralized state apparatus, would soon find themselves at the mercy of “military tyranny” or “Caesarism.” It underlines the ways in which Roscher's preoccupation with ancient history fed into his estimation of nineteenth-century politics, and also examines his comparative assessment of democracy's prospects in Britain, France and the United States.

Joost Augusteijn and Eric Storm, eds, Region and State in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Nation-Building, Regional Identities and Separatism

Joost Augusteijn and Eric Storm, eds, Region and State in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Nation-Building, Regional Identities and Separatism

The Promethean Gap: Modernism, Machines, and the Obsolescence of Man

The Promethean Gap:Modernism, Machines, and the Obsolescence of Man Alberto Toscano (bio) It belongs to the essence of our modern world that it no longer seems to be what it is, that it does not manifest itself, that in a certain sense it has become invisible. —Günther Anders, After “Holocaust” 19791 Mr. Muddle thought highly of man and did not believe newspapers could be made better, whereas Mr. Keuner did not think very highly of man and believed newspapers could be made better. “Everything can be better,” said Mr. Keuner, “except man.” —Bertolt Brecht, Stories of Mr. Keuner2 The drive to transcend the human that pervades the modernist avant-gardes is a supremely equivocal, overdetermined one. The negation of the Christian and bourgeois images of man, of the figures of individuality, autonomy, reflection, and representation that together composed the ideology of the European nineteenth century, is as contradictory as the epoch that gave birth to it, roiled by imperialist conflict, the crisis of liberalism, and accelerating technological development, especially in the fields of communication (or reproduction) and warfare (or destruction). Invocations and allegories of the inhuman can be found in exhortations to colonial aggression and panegyrics to socialist brotherhood alike. The wish to break with the experiential limits of humanity, whether conceived naturalistically as species or historically as culture, can surface as a prominent [End Page 593] motif in works that do little to challenge a governing representational habitus; it can also permeate experiments in form whose avowed social or ethical content remains prima facie “humanist.” In a détournement of a crucial dictum from Louis Althusser’s autobiography, we could say that an aesthetic anti-humanism can sometimes serve as the prelude to a political humanism, just as a political anti-humanism can dress itself up in the trappings of aesthetic humanism. The most obvious and recurrent locus for modernism’s “inhumanism” is no doubt the machine. Yet our automatic identification of the machine with that which reduces, surpasses, or negates humanity risks occluding the plurality of figures and levels of machinism among the avant-gardes, as well as a more sustained investigation into the problems of agency, history, and representation that underlie the man-machine nexus. In order to sketch out an avenue for problematizing this machinic facet of modernist inhumanism, I want first to consider two instances of its articulation from politically opposite wings of the avant-garde, in Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Dziga Vertov. Having delineated the political polysemy of “the machine,” the rest of the article will draw on a largely neglected philosopher of technology, Günther Anders, to think through the deeper stakes of the abasement before the machine, and the aspiration towards it, that can be detected across modernism’s political spectrum. I will suggest that his conceptions of “Promethean shame,” but especially “the Promethean gap,” provide a unique angle through which to think of modernist inhumanism as the site of a discrepancy or conflict between our capacity to produce and our capacity to perceive. In conclusion, I will suggest that Anders’s localization of this lag in technology should be supplemented or sublated by a consideration of the capital-relation, but especially the problem of what Marx identified as the rising “organic composition” of capital—the tendency for human living labor to be overwhelmed by machinic constant capital—as the crux of a thinking of the origins of the politics and aesthetics of the inhuman. Marinetti and the Aerial Centaur The strident bombast with which Marinetti called for a fusion of man and machine seems to repel any interpretive nuance. Take his “Multiplied Man and the Reign of the Machine” (from Le futurisme, 1911), a text that broadcasts its “frank misogynist optimism” and organizes its breathless examination of mechanical beauty through a relentless eroticization and spiritualization of the machine and an equally insistent repudiation of all femininity, affection, and bodily gravity.3 Any psychoanalytic acumen would appear to be otiose when faced with declarations such as “The multiplied man of whom we dream will preserve his genital power until death, as one does one’s stomach, and will never know the tragedy of old age and impotence!” (92...

Contextualizing Maurice Courant, Pioneer of Korean Studies in Europe

The main purpose of this article is to identify the role Courant played in early European understanding of Korea by examining his writings of Korea-Japan relations and locating them in the intellectual context in which they were produced. The main body of this article has been divided into three separate parts. The first examines Courant’s writings of ancient Korea-Japan relations focusing on the theory of Mimana that Japan ruled southern Korea roughly from the fourth to the sixth centuries through the intermediary of Mimana. The second part takes a look at Courant’s description of the Korean envoys to Japan and the Japanese settlement in Pusan in the early modern period and his view of the overall relationship between the two countries during this period. The last analyzes Courant’s publications on the contemporary issues and problems of Korea and in doing so tries to trace how his attitude toward Korea and Japan’s advance into the Korean peninsula changed over time. Courant’s importance, this article will argue, is not limited to his bibliography of Korean literature but lies in his disrupting the established epistemic system that produced and circulated knowledge of Korea in late nineteenth-century Europe.

The Gilded Age and the Commodification of the Medieval: George Barrie's American Edition (1880) of Michaud's History of the Crusades

The Gilded Age and the Commodification of the Medieval:George Barrie's American Edition (1880) of Michaud's History of the Crusades Mark Johnston Modern manifestations of medievalism exist in almost every American urban environment. Around Chicago, where I live, they range from the neo-Gothic fantasy of the former Scottish Rite Masonic Cathedral at 935 North Dearborn Street to the ersatz experience of indoor jousting at Medieval Times in suburban Schaumburg. And sometimes, the modern medieval materializes in unexpected ways and places . . . 1 Last year, my wife was helping a friend clear debris from the flooded basement of a late-Victorian three-flat in the Chicago neighborhood of Bridgeport. In the basement's mid-century "party room," standing on the bottom shelf of two bookcases flanking a faux fireplace, was a somewhat water-damaged copy of the first and only American edition of Joseph-François Michaud's Histoire des Croisades, translated into English by William Robson and illustrated by Gustave Doré. The two massive tomes (each measuring 15 by 11 inches and almost three inches thick) demanded rescue, and my attention. Despite my long career studying the European Middle Ages, I was, to be honest, almost completely ignorant of Michaud (1767–1839) and his work.2 Little research was necessary to learn that his Histoire des croisades was a monument of Romantic medievalism, a "major landmark in European crusade historiography," in the words of Elizabeth Siberry.3 Originally released in a series of seven octavo volumes between 1812 and 1822, Histoire des croisades was a best-seller, reprinted at least twenty times in nineteenth-century France. It also sold throughout Europe, thanks to translations into English, German, Italian, Norwegian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and even Turkish.4 The English version by the prolific British translator William Robson (1785–1863), first published at London by Routledge in 1852, remains today the only one available for Anglophone audiences. [End Page 23] Thanks to the wide dissemination of Michaud's work, Jonathan Riley-Smith considers it directly responsible for fostering several enduring conceptions of the Crusades, like those enumerated in Andrea and Holt's Seven Myths of the Crusades. According to Riley-Smith, Michaud helped shape, above all, representation of the Crusades as "proto-colonialist experiments,"5 motivated as much by economic opportunism as by religious zeal. For Michaud, this was not a bad thing: he presented the medieval Crusades as an example for nineteenth-century Europe to emulate, in a final triumph of Western Civilization over Oriental Barbarism. Christopher Tyerman's characterization of Michaud's ideology is almost as histrionic as Michaud's own florid prose: Michaud's crusades, for all their horrors, follies, and blunders, were in essence events to be wondered at, central to the development of the global supremacy of western European civilization. An obvious academic challenge, this altered the terms of engagement. The crusades became politicized in an immediate partisan and national fashion inconceivable a century before. Concurrently, riding and encouraging the tide of popular medievalism, Michaud's Histoire asked its readers to share the crusaders' hopes, aspirations, and fears, to enter their world. One of his cleverest tricks was to pretend that he was writing from an objective, carefully researched, contemporary medieval perspective; that his empathy stemmed from understanding not prejudice. In fact, purple passages of invented imaginative narrative and sculpted analysis according with early nineteenth-century sensibilities and politics drew readers in. Few western European writers on the crusades after the 1830s could entirely be free from a popular backdrop that owed something to Michaud.6 Although Tyerman and other modern scholars may deplore Michaud's failings as a historian, he did in fact research his Histoire des croisades with extensive consultation of primary sources, many gathered in his four-volume Bibliothèque des croisades. He also helped establish one of the most important serial collections of crusade source materials, the Recueil des historiens des croisades. And he actually visited the Middle East from 1830 to 1831, seeking further source materials to amplify his work. Giles Constable has praised the "scholarly impulse" of these endeavors.7 Unfortunately, Michaud died without revising his Histoire, although he did manage to complete an abridged version for young readers...

Introduction: The languages of scientists

Much of the scholarship in the history of science has undervalued the significance of the debates around language choice and language use. After surveying various historiographical trends characterizing the relationship of science to language, this introduction explores the role of language-choice in nation-building, education, publication and transnational exchanges. It concludes with a brief summary of the four case studies in this special issue, which explore the German, Greek, English and Russian languages in the context of the sciences in nineteenth-century Europe.

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

Orchestral Conducting in the Nineteenth Century ed. by Roberto Illiano and Michela Niccolai (review)

Orchestral Conducting in Nine - teenth Century. Edited by Roberto Illiano and Michela Niccolai. (Speculum Musicae, 23.) Turnhout: Brepols, 2014. [xiv, 441 p. ISBN 9782503552477. i110.] Music examples, illustrations, index.As stated in foreword, the purpose of this volume is to study orchestral direction during period of its greatest transformation, which editors consider phenomenon of early nineteenth century (p. xi). The volume contains eighteen out of twenty-six papers presented at international conference held in La Spezia, Italy, 14-16 July 2011, organized by Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini (Lucca) and Societa dei Concerti della Spezia in collaboration with Palazzetto Bru Zane - Centre de musique romantique francaise (Venice) (pp. xiii- xiv).A word on languages: publisher and editors apparently believe that educated reader would have a working knowledge of English, French, and Italian. While lengthy quotes in German have Italian translations in footnotes, French quotes in English and Italian papers or Italian quotes in French papers do not. The footnotes refer freely to works in these languages, normally without translations. Further, book would have been enhanced considerably if editors had insisted that authors provide abstracts of their articles, as required in Journal of American Musicological Society ( JAMS) and Journal of Society for American Music ( JSAM). This would have been particularly helpful for those articles in French, Italian, and Spanish, especially if abstracts were in English, language implied by book's title. (Translations throughout this review are my own.)The papers are divided into five sections. The first four papers concern Conductors and Conducting in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Fiona M. Palmer, in Conductors and Conducting in 19th-Century Britain: The Liverpool Philharmonic Society (1840-1895), describes work of five conductors, Jacob Zeugheer Herrmann, Alfred Mellon, Sir Julius Benedict, Max Bruch, and Charles Halle, in developing role of conductor and raising that orchestra from a gentleman's amateur ensemble to a fully professional one. Naomi Matsumoto, in Michael Costa at Hay - market: The Establishment of Modern Role of 'The Director of Music,' recounts how Costa was able to take on many administrative and musical functions at King's Theater (later Her Majesty's Theater), Haymarket, thereby establishing essential tasks of modern 'Director of Music,' which became indispensable to musical and theatrical achievement of opera as a modern art form (p. 49). Costa's activities at Haymarket (1830- 47) included assuming some of work of impresario, engaging composers and performers, and selection of repertoire, in addition to conducting performances, duties traditionally split between keyboard player and first violinist. Four tables include duties and personnel of King's Theater, a list of concerts Costa conducted between 1830 and 1845 when he moved to Covent Garden, and surviving autograph letters to or from Costa from 1829 through 1884. Etienne Jardin, in Les chefs d'orchestre dans les concerts parisiens de 1794 a 1815 (Conductors in Parisian concerts 1794-1815), found that in that brief period there were many terms for those in charge of instrumental concerts in newspaper announcements-chef, conducteur, directeur, la tete de l'orchestre- and that terms were basically synonymous, sometimes even carrying contradictory meanings. He includes a table of fortyfive musicians designated as dir. in papers, most important being Jean- Jacques Grasset, Rodolphe Kreutzer, Pierre- Nicolas Le Houssaye, and Theodore Lefevre. All were violinists, so presumably directed while playing (pp. 66-67). Jardin admits limitations of his study: there is no identifiable leader for a quarter of concerts held in Paris between 1794 and 1815, and names in his table may be misleading, in that conductors and soloists of major opera houses are not represented. …