Nineteenth Century Research Articles

A long view of social mobility in Scotland and therole of economic changes.

Changes in the social mobility of men in Scotland between the late-19th and the late-twentieth century are examined using new individual-level data from nineteenth-century censuses, linking records of men aged 0-19 in 1871 to their records in 1901, and then comparing their patterns with the social mobility of men aged 30-49 in 1974 and in 2001 as recorded in social surveys at these dates. The extent of social mobility in the nineteenth century was large. In particular, the social origins of people in the highest classes-the salariat-were very varied, indicating a society that was more open than is sometimes supposed. There was a slow growth in social mobility between then and 2001. In both periods, class inheritance-sons in the same social class as their father-was strongest in the economically declining sectors, which were agriculture and fisheries in 1901 and industry in 1974 and 2001. In the 1901 data, however, the transition to a non-agricultural economy induced strong outward mobility from agriculture.

САМОЗВАНЕЦ ИЛИ ВСЁ-ТАКИ ПРИНЦ? ПЕРКИН УОРБЕК В ИСТОРИЧЕСКОЙ ПАМЯТИ АНГЛИЧАН

In the XVI–XXI centuries, ideas about Perkin Warbeck made a full circle – from the perplexity of contemporaries, through the unconditional rejection of Tudor century, the first attempts to justify Warbeck of the XVII–XVIII centuries, sentimental novels and poems of the XIX century, scrupulous studies of the turn of the XX–XXI centuries, historians returned to the beginning. Аs well as contemporaries, they distrust the official, Tudor version of events and admit that the real prince, the rightful heir of the Yorks, was sent to the gallows. The image of Warbeck turned out to be so contradictory because the choice between an "impostor" and a "prince" did not always depend on objective, scientific calculations. Often the decision was determined by an assessment of the Tudor rule and of the preceding period of the Wars of the Roses (especially the personality and reign of Richard III). There were also non-scientific factors. To find an extra-political explanation for Warbeck's success, even under the Tudors he was turned into an immensely charming handsome man, a victim of intrigues. Artists, poets and novelists were happy to exploit and develop this emotional component; as the historical distance lengthened, the image of Warbeck became more and more touching and sentimental.

Social-Economic and Political Contexts of Georgian Romanticism

The given article explains Georgian Romanticism, its period of origin, and its influence not only on various directions of art (painting, music, architecture, etc.) but also on the socio-economic and political situation of the country. The article discusses the forms of Romanticism's manifestation in Georgia, which were conditioned by several processes, including geopolitical occasions and socio-economic determinants. Specific preconditions that influenced the formation of Georgian Romanticism are analyzed. In particular, the abolition of Georgia's statehood in 1801; the 1804 rebellion in Mtiuleti; the 1812 peasant uprising in Kakheti; the 1819 uprising in Imereti; the abolition of the autocephaly of the Georgian Church and others The article discusses the socio-economic and political situation of Georgia in the first half of the XIX century when the Georgian society was composed of the nobility, urban population, merchants, small entrepreneurs, and peasants. Their unbearable economic situation and the desire to fight for the country's freedom somewhat determined the emergence of outstanding representatives of Georgian Romantics, who used their creativity as a weapon against the governance of the Russian Empire, which served to restore Georgia's political independence and improve the socio-economic situation of the country. Keywords: Romanticism, statehood, rebellion, independence, social life,nobility, small entrepreneurs, economic condition, taxes.

Pokłosie powstania 1863–1864 r.: nieortodoksyjna refleksja

Today, in Lithuanian, Polish, Belarusian and even Ukrainian society, the January Uprising has become a symbol of the ‚ fight for freedom’. This article attempts to answer the question: did/do Polish, Lithuanian, Belarusian and Jewish societies really have anything to glorify? In other words, from the perspective of nineteenth and early twentieth century nationalisms (and therefore not from an academic perspective), was the uprising in any way useful to them? Or to put it another way, did it do more good or harm? For all non-dominant ethnic groups, the uprising brought new repression and discrimination (although sometimes discrimination against one group objectively benefited another group), and with the exception of the Poles, it is difficult to see the impact of this historical event as a positive image in the process of nationalising the masses until World War One. The fact that such an image was created later is simply an‚ invented tradition’. The fact that a positive image of the uprising was ‚invented’ later in Lithuanian or Belarusian societies does not mean that it did not (or does not now) influence the mobilisation of the masses, but it is not a direct consequence of the uprising, but a narrative constructed by later generations.

A Visit to the Exhibition of All Nations: The Chicago World’s Fair and the United States in Vasily Sidorov’s Travel Writing

The Chicago World’s Fair represented a continuity of the World’s Fairs as key international events of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which were widely covered, including in travelogues for home readership. The Russian Empire showed considerable interest in participating, especially after Americans organized a relief campaign during its famine a year ago. While the Russian government supervised the exhibits and sent specialists to study the American economy and society, many Russians visited the Fair individually, and some published travel accounts. This article explores the account titled America. Travel Notes and Impressions (1895) written by novelist and botanist Vasily Sidorov. Traveling with a group of European tourists, he admires American nature and praises American technological progress, mobility, and freedoms that could be potentially borrowed but shows uncertainty about major cities and excesses of industrialization and technological development, to a degree repeating what was pointed out by earlier Russian visitors. He evaluated the Fair and most of what he saw through the image of Europe which was also employed to emphasize his sense of cultural superiority.

Slavery as a Social Institution Gleaned from Tarisappalli Copper Plates

Slavery as a universal social evil had its origins in time immemorial. Slavery was a part of the social life of Kerala society until the second half of the nineteenth century. According to the mythical story embodied in Keralolpathi, Parasurama reclaimed Kerala from the Ocean by throwing his axe. On this divine gift of the Arabian Sea, Parasurama settled the Brahmins as the lords and brought the indigenous people as cultivators and enslaved people. The story is indicative of the origin of agrestic slavery in the land. Several documents discovered from various parts of Kerala throw light on the existence of slavery in Kerala. The first inscriptional evidence of slavery as a social institution in Kerala belongs to the ninth century (AD 849). It is named the Tarisappalli Copper Plate, Syrian Christian Copper Plate, and Kollam Copper Plate. This inscription is the only document from ancient Kerala that gives proper knowledge about the existence of ‘Adimakasu’ or slave levy. The Venad Raja Ayyan Adikal Tiruvadikal granted certain privileges to the Nasranis or the Syrian Christians of Quilon. The institution of slavery existed among the Syrian Christians, and the origin of the slave levy can be traced from these copper plates. The Tarisappalli plates are, of course, not only crucial for the Syrian Christians of Kerala but hold an essential position in the history of Kerala because it is one of the oldest records with detailed evidence of the existence of slavery and also about the extensive trade with Arabs, Portuguese, Persians, and Jews. This article attempts to trace the institution of slavery from the early records of the Tarisappalli copper plate.

A quadrifid typology of frontier ideologies a typology of frontier ideologies based on some Hungarian examples from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

ABSTRACT The geopolitical situation of a state located on a frontier between two (or more) cultures affects both its foreign policy and its warfare ideologies. Frontier ideologies are inextricably linked to this particular geopolitical situation, and one of the most prominent among these is that of the Bastion of Christianity. It should be noted, however, that this is not the only representative example. This article presents a typology of frontier ideologies, which can be divided into four categories: ideology of unidirectional mediation of culture; bastion ideology; the finger between the doorjamb and the door ideology; and ideology of bidirectional mediation of culture. This typology is supported by Hungarian ideas from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which represent the heyday of Hungarian frontier ideologies.

Origins of British reservoir safety legislation 1850–1930

One hundred years ago in 1925, there were two dam failures with significant loss of life, and following these disasters, the 1930 Reservoirs (Safety Provisions) Act was enacted. Catastrophic failures in the nineteenth century had produced demands for government action but legislation had been much delayed by changes of government at critical times and by concerns about inadvertently reducing the legal liability of reservoir owners. Also, there was a marked lack of enthusiasm within the civil engineering profession for a government inspectorate. The key feature of the 1930 Act was that reservoir owners were required to appoint qualified civil engineers to inspect their reservoirs and, following such inspections, to implement measures required in the interests of safety. Post-1930 legislation, which it is intended will be the subject of a further paper, has done much to enhance public safety but the fundamental importance of independent qualified civil engineers has not diminished.

Church funds used for credit in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century rural Sweden

ABSTRACT Private lenders are still considered to have been the dominant lenders in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, although various types of institutional lenders appeared from the late 1700s onwards. This paper analyses one of the earlier and probably underestimated institutional lenders in northern Europe, the Church, using Sweden as a case study. As late as 1834, the Swedish church lent about the same amount of money as all other credit institutions combined. Using a government survey from 1857 with data from 400 parishes, and accounts from 14 parishes 1770–1890, we can show that all parishes had funds, with about 80–90 per cent of the capital in loans. The funds were growing in size and lending was extensive, primarily for constructing new church buildings. However, the funds also played an important role in the local economy. The largest funds and most extensive lending were found in areas with landed estates and high levels of urbanisation, while funds in poorer areas were considered to be poor relief funds. Lending from church funds declined after the 1860s, but not rapidly. The church was probably seen as an attractive option when money was needed, located close by and controlled by the parishioners.

Ukraine in Mental Geography of the Educated Spanish Elites in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century

Ukraine in Mental Geography of the Educated Spanish Elites in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century

Physician Burnout: The Making of a Crisis.

This essay places contemporary efforts to understand and respond to the crisis of physician burnout in historical perspective, proposing that the origins of such efforts lie in nineteenth century concerns over "nervous exhaustion," well before the term "physician burnout" was coined by social scientists in the early 1970s. Only very recently, however, have physician-scholars started to bring more sophisticated tools to bear in conceptualizing the problem, moving from a "systems approach" to the most recent efforts to frame the issue as a problem of corporate culture. The essay proposes that these different approaches to physician burnout illustrate the changing self-images of the medical profession over the last century and a half. Because such self-images are embedded in normative assumptions, contextualizing physician burnout in these terms reveals the crisis to be as much social and political as professional.

Retelling as Resistance: Translating Niz̤āmī’s Ḳhusrau o Shīrīn in Colonial India

Abstract Urdu literature written in the second half of the nineteenth century in North India has often been characterised in terms of rupture, reshaping, and loss of the legacies of the past. In this essay, I argue that such literary-historical framing not only limits our understanding of thriving Urdu aesthetic production in colonial North India, but also misrepresents a vibrant literary culture that continued to resist the colonial aesthetic valuations by drawing on the legacies of the past much more aggressively. To demonstrate this, I examine here Munshī Gobind Prasād Faẓā’s striking Urdu retelling of Niz̤āmī Ganjavī’s Persian poem, Ḳhusrau o Shīrīn, in the larger context of the colonial aesthetic politics. Through examining Faẓā’s maṡnavī (a poem in rhyming couplets) in the framework of anti-colonial resistance, I argue that Urdu maṡnavī writers engaged the notion of temporality through drawing on the deep memory of the Persianate past in the form of the maṡnavī and presented it as a counter-narrative to the poetics of orphaned newness that were becoming a gold standard in other literary forms at the time. In this essay, I highlight the unique cultural work that the form of Urdu maṡnavī did in addressing, and even overcoming, the proverbial death of a literary culture that remained thriving till deep into the twentieth century.

Writing Travelogues in the Early Nineteenth Century: The Story Behind Mary Holderness’s Travel Account of Journeying from Riga to Crimea via Kyiv

Writing Travelogues in the Early Nineteenth Century: The Story Behind Mary Holderness’s Travel Account of Journeying from Riga to Crimea via Kyiv

The politics of voluntariness in modern history: introduction

ABSTRACT The introduction to the theme issue on the Politics of Voluntariness in Modern History starts by discussing the origins and uses of the liberal discourse on voluntariness in the seventeenth century. It was during this period that philosophers and politicians began to present voluntariness as specific to liberalism. By the same token, voluntariness and authoritarian rule have been declared incompatible. This introduction and the papers in the theme issue critically discuss the exclusive linkage of voluntariness and liberalism – an interpretation that fails to capture authoritarian governing in its entirety, while ignoring compulsory and exclusionary practices in liberal societies. This theme issue shows voluntariness to be essential to policies and political practices in both liberal and illiberal societies. Political practices are at the core of our articles: amid a web of actors, institutions, discourses, and expectations, the individual means and capacity to act voluntarily, make choices, and overcome constraints are historically and socially variable. The introduction and the theme issue explore this variability to illuminate how voluntariness operates as a driving force for political practices in liberal and illiberal societies, drawing on case studies from German, Swiss, and U.S.-American history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The stakes of “Imitation”: debating modern poetics and national identity in late ottoman literature

ABSTRACT In the late nineteenth century, Ottoman culture witnessed a concerted effort to develop a national literature on par with modern European literature and culture. This was also the time when Ottoman intellectuals began to develop a systematic approach to literary analysis. Debates on the imitation, translation, and adaptation of Western forms were central to this period. This article examines the evolution of the concept and practice of imitation as part of these debates. This detailed analysis of the theoretical discourse surrounding the concepts of imitation and authenticity contributes to the broader field of literary theory and comparative literature. By introducing the theoretical rigor inherent in Ottoman-Turkish intellectual practice and highlighting its specific conceptual tradition, the article not only bridges the gap of non-Western critical thought in contemporary literary history, but also offers a fresh perspective on the much-debated East–West paradigms and cross-cultural approaches in literary studies and beyond.

From Flowers to Plants: Plant-Thinking in Nineteenth-Century Danish Flower Painting

Abstract In the nineteenth century, flower painters in Denmark shifted from depicting arranged, cut flowers to showing plants within their ecosystems. This article explores this shift by examining four paintings by the artists Christine Løvmand and Anthonore Christensen. According to Michael Marder and Emanuele Coccia, important philosophers in critical plant studies, plants have been overlooked as world creators. Coccia highlights the nineteenth century as a particularly low point, in this regard, but seeks exceptions and points to significant nineteenth-century articulations of how plants move in, sense, and create their environment. An investigation of Danish art and botany reveals similar articulations, as several significant artists made growing rather than cut plants the theme of some of their paintings and botanists explored the wild flora and the agency of plants. This nineteenth-century shift in focus from flowers to plants disseminates notions of plants that can inspire and help us reorient our relationship with the natural world.

In our Time: A Timeline of Adult Education, from the Mechanics’ Movement to Birkbeck

This document has been compiled to clarify the historical origins of three strands of adult education in the nineteenth century that contributed to the experiment of their conflation at Birkbeck in two decades of the twentieth century, from 1988 when the University of London’s Department of Extra-Mural Studies joined the college, through to its finale in 2009, when Extra-Mural was integrated into the college, and its extensive outreach programme across London abandoned.

Lady Caroline Lamb and Miss Elizabeth Spence: Limits of Femininity in Early Nineteenth-Century Salon and Album Culture

In November 1825 middle-class salon hostess and travel writer Elizabeth Spence contributed a short poem titled ‘M.S. Lines on Lady Caroline Lamb’ to Anna Birkbeck’s album. Spence’s choice of subject, Lady Caroline Lamb, was, in many ways, unusual. Coming from a very different world to Spence, the aristocratic Lamb was a household name, most well known for her much publicized personal life, which included a disastrous love affair with Lord George Gordon Byron. Through a close reading of Spence’s poem, this article interrogates the ‘friendship’ between these two women of differing classes and backgrounds and considers the complex gender and social dynamics at play informing Spence’s ambiguous poem. The album, like the salon, existed within the space between the masculine/public and the feminine/private worlds. It is in this space that it is possible to explore the limits of femininity in the early nineteenth century, as its semi-public position enables a view of the fringes of what society deemed acceptable, and what provoked dissent for overstepping. As one famed for her overstepping, Lamb demonstrated the risks and the penalty for pushing these boundaries, but Spence’s poem offers a more complex, and even contradictory, picture of Lamb and by extension the limitations which condemned her.

Spiritual Exaltation in Timeless Places of Worship: Insights from the New Maimonides Central Sephardic Synagogue, Hadera, Israel

The deep emotion we feel when entering any timeless place of worship—a synagogue, a church, or a Buddhist temple—stems from the patterns of space that generated them. These are patterns that reflect the innate patterns printed in our minds from the outset and that are thus common to us all as human beings of any culture or religion. In designing the Maimonides Central Sephardic Synagogue I endeavored to capture the timeless spiritual exaltation one experiences in the places of worship where Maimonides prayed, such as the Iben Denan Synagogue in Fez, Morocco or the Ben-Ezra Synagogue in Cairo, Egypt, and to revive the traditional patterns based on Maimonides’ halachic rulings—the laws he set down in his book Hayad Hahazaka, as passed on to me in the synagogues of Tzfat, the holy Kabbalah city of Galilee, birthplace of Judaism’s mystical strand, and hometown of my family since the early nineteenth century.

A middle-class nation? The middle class and its moral boundaries in post-dictatorial Uruguay

AbstractIn this article, I examine the middle class as a contested category in contemporary Uruguay and the role of moral boundaries in its formation and maintenance. I contend that amidst the economic fragility experienced by the middle class, both individuals and the state grapple with the precarious position of the middle class. In this scenario, moral boundaries function as a crucial mechanism for navigating this uncertainty. Through an analysis of parliamentary debates and public statements of politicians, I redraw how, in these discourses, the middle class emerges as a moralized national and cultural identity centering around work ethic and colonial history. Central to my analysis is an examination of the historical material and symbolic struggles that have shaped the emergence and evolution of the middle class in Uruguay. Thus, I pay attention to its formative role during the early nineteenth century in the emergence and stabilization of the nation, as well as to the impact of the dictatorship (1972–1985). Finally, I show how these notions intersect with conceptions of (un)deservingness, ultimately legitimizing increasing punitivism.