Where Diasporas Met: Hunanese, Cantonese, and the State in Late-Qing Guangxi

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Steven B. Miles

Abstract Drawing on physical and textual records of Hunanese and Cantonese active in Guangxi, as well as state archival sources, this article traces the expansion of these two diasporic cohorts in Guangxi from the early nineteenth century, through the mid-century wars, and into the postwar era, when they reintegrated this southwestern frontier province into the late-Qing empire.

Author(s):  
Paul Stock

Chapter 6 discusses late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century geography books’ sustained focus on the political states of Europe. The books present states both as organic communities with multi-faceted jurisdictions, and as increasingly centralized governmental authorities. They usually specify that monarchy is the definitive form of European government, and that European states share a propensity for ‘liberty’, broadly defined as respect for law and property, and the maintenance of the balance of power in Europe. Some geographical texts talk about ‘nations’, but ideas about European polities remain reliant on established notions of governmental structures.


2019 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-42
Author(s):  
Soni

AbstractTo this day, the history of indigenous orphans in colonial India remains surprisingly understudied. Unlike the orphans of Britain or European and Eurasian orphans in the colony, who have been widely documented, Indian orphans are largely absent in the existing historiography. This article argues that a study of “native” orphans in India helps us transcend the binary of state power and poor children that has hitherto structured the limited extant research on child “rescue” in colonial India. The essay further argues that by shifting the gaze away from the state, we can vividly see how non-state actors juxtaposed labour and education. I assert that the deployment of child labour by these actors, in their endeavour to educate and make orphans self-sufficient, did not always follow the profitable trajectory of the state-led formal labour regime (seen in the Indian indenture system or early nineteenth-century prison labour). It was often couched in terms of charity and philanthropy and exhibited a convergence of moral and economic concerns.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 82-116
Author(s):  
Floris Solleveld

Abstract What happened to the Republic of Letters? Its history seems to stop at the end of the eighteenth century. And yet, in the nineteenth century, there still existed a community gathered in scholarly societies, maintaining a transnational correspondence network and filling learned journals. The term indeed becomes less frequent, but does not go entirely out of use. This article traces the afterlives of the Republic of Letters in the early nineteenth century. Specifically, it investigates texts that attempt to (re)define the Republic of Letters or a cognate, the wider diffusion of the term, and the changing role of learned journals in that period. While most attempts to reinvent the Republic of Letters failed miserably, they indicate a diagnosis of the state of learning and the position of scholars in a period of transition, and in doing so they contradict an ‘unpolitical’ conception of the Republic of Letters.


2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-107
Author(s):  
Ying-kit Chan

Abstract The exponential growth of the population from the founding decades of the Qing Dynasty to the early nineteenth century placed tremendous stress on the local bureaucracies, which increasingly depended on county clerks and runners and the nondegree-holding literati to reduce costs within the Qing Empire. This article investigates the life of Lin Shumei 林樹梅 (1808–1851), a private secretary, or muyou 幕友, from Jinmen who had served in semiofficial capacities in Taiwan and Xiamen, highlighting the kind of opportunities that were available to him in the imperial bureaucracy. By plotting the career trajectory of Lin Shumei, the article shows that the defence, governance and settlement of the frontier regions of the Qing Empire depended more on the expertise of ‘men on the spot’ such as Lin than on policies devised in the imperial and provincial capitals.


2021 ◽  
pp. 341-373
Author(s):  
Mark Knights

The chapter charts a shift in attitudes to the sale of office, from the Jacobean period, when it seems to have been relatively commonplace, to the early nineteenth century, when the practice was formally banned for most offices (except those in the army). This reflected a shift away from the idea of office as personal property towards office as a public duty, and away from the idea of office as generating informal, personal profit beyond the public, formal remuneration decided by the state or corporation. But the shift was a protracted and messy one, with an ongoing contest between different ways of thinking about venality. For some it was a pragmatic issue, often related to customary norms, that did not imperil the morality or the smooth running of the state; for others, it represented an immoral pursuit of self-interest and avarice that posed a dangerous threat to the polity.


Author(s):  
Margarita Diaz-Andreu

There was no return to the Ancien Régime after Napoleon’s downfall in 1815. Firstly, the early nineteenth-century economy was increasingly strengthened by the industrial, imperial and trading expansion of the European powers throughout the world (Chapters 5 to 10), which helped to stimulate Western Europe’s financial growth. Adding immeasurable impetus to this movement was the territorial expansion of Russia and the US, and later in the century other countries such as Japan contributed by broadening their frontiers manifold (Chapters 9 and 10). Factors such as these accelerated the enlargement and aspirations of the middle classes, who were precisely the group leading most of the revolutionary activity in the first half of the nineteenth century. Secondly, the reforms in administration made the state machine more efficient than that of the Ancien Régime and this impeded a full restoration of the old order. Also, for the efficient functioning of the state, the enthusiasm with which educated individuals identified with the nation was extremely important to ensure their loyalty. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century socio-political revolutions had brought a series of new meanings to concepts such as conservatism, liberal, democrat, party, and the distinction between left and right (Roberts 1996: 21). For example, liberalism was a doctrine that favoured ‘progress’ and ‘reform’. It was also linked with the type of nationalism that the French Revolution had promoted with the sovereignty of nations and the belief that all citizens were equal in the eyes of the law (although at this time ‘citizenship’, as propagated by the proponents of this doctrine, mainly meant the prosperous classes and male citizens). For progressive liberals, it was not only the established states that had the right to be a nation. The nationalist sentiments and claims by Greeks, Slovaks, Czechs, Brazilians, Mexicans, Hungarians, and a myriad of would-be nations, illustrate the growth of the widespread notion of nationhood that reached to other people with distinctive pasts and cultures. Liberals also had to confront, or negotiate with, the reactionary forces that brought down Napoleon in 1815. They were mainly made up of the nobility, and also supported by conservative intellectuals.


1989 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 137-163 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leanne Langley

Between 1800 and 1845 some 30 periodicals devoted to music were launched in Britain, nearly all of them attributing their appearance to a current ‘general’, ‘wide’, ‘perfect’ or ‘increasing’ cultivation of the subject. But the real flurry of activity seems to have been in publishing rather than music. The average lifespan of a single musical journal in this period was only about two years and four months; most lasted a year or less and died from financial distress. From this record, one might question not only the state of genuine musical cultivation in early nineteenth-century England but also the rationale of editors, printers, publishers and proprietors who continued to produce for a marginal, certainly elusive, musical audience.


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