Problems with record keeping in early eighteenth century London: Some pictorial representations of the state paper office, 1705–17061

1979 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 219-226 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth M. Hallam
Author(s):  
Nandita Sahai

This chapter examines documentary culture in eighteenth-century Rajasthan through an exploration of the legal archive—the Sanad Parwana Bahis—of the kingdom of Jodhpur. More particularly, it studies the petitions that were written in the course of a series of protracted disputes during which the ceremonial and ritual claims made by low-caste Sunars were contested by upper castes. The increasing importance of the written record in the administration and courts both caused, and was an outcome of a nascent “literate mentality” that existed even amongst those social groups like the Sunars who were not traditionally associated with scribal work. What is particularly telling is the shift from oral testimonies to written evidence as verifiable and authentic, both in the royal courts and in lower assemblies like caste councils. The pervasive culture of record keeping, and the significance of writing both for the state and its subjects at this time allows us to interrogate any easy bifurcation between the modern and the premodern.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-52
Author(s):  
Suraj Bhan Bhardwaj

During the latter half of the seventeenth and the early eighteenth centuries, the widespread practice of assigning ijāra or farming out of revenue-collection rights over territories within the jāgīrs of imperial Mughal manṣabdārs to various political entities in North India, notably the Kachhwaha Rajput chiefs of Amber, led to heavy fiscal exactions that were deeply resented by the peasants and provoked them to revolt. These revolts gave rise to a number of ambitious zamīndārs, who emerged as ‘saviours’ of peasants against the excesses of the state or were perceived as such by the peasants. Notable among such local zamīndārs was Churaman, a Jat zamīndār in the Braj region who capitalised on his popularity among the peasants and their support to mount a formidable challenge to the Mughal court and the Amber state and carve out a significant sphere of authority in North India (parts of present-day eastern Rajasthan and western Uttar Pradesh) through a combination of military successes against the Amber state, tactics of intimidation and persuasion in relation to the imperial manṣabdārs, and deft manoeuvres to exploit the intense factional politics of the late Mughal court. Drawing chiefly upon Rajasthani archival sources, this essay seeks to bring out the various dimensions of Churaman’s leadership, while tracing his rise and role as a popular Jat peasant leader, the socio-economic bases of his power, the Mughal and Rajput perceptions about him, and the crucial linkages between his role in establishing the Jats as a formidable force in North Indian politics and in the formation of a Jat state.


2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (6) ◽  
pp. 499-518 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Robert Krenzke

Abstract This study focuses on the methods that brewers in London employed to mitigate the increasing burden of taxation from the state in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and how those methods came to shape the collection of the excise. Brewers employed a multitude of strategies to mitigate their tax burden, from hiding raw materials and products, to bribing excise officials, to the most successful strategy used by brewers, brewing an extremely strong beer concentrate that would be watered-down by consumers. It argues that the resistance of brewers and consumers in London to the state’s ability to interfere in the industry through excise taxation was vital to the creation of a professionalized excise establishment in the early eighteenth century and helped to shape the preference for eighteenth-century London’s preferred beverage, porter.


2016 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 353-380
Author(s):  
ROSS CARROLL

The Third Earl of Shaftesbury has been celebrated for his commitment to free public discourse regulated only by standards of politeness, a commitment exemplified by his defence of the freedom to ridicule. This article complicates this picture by tracing Shaftesbury's response to the early eighteenth-century crisis of public speech precipitated by the demise of pre-publication censorship and growing uncertainty about intellectual property in the print trade. Shaftesbury, the article shows, was a determined opponent of pre-publication censorship through licensing, but he was also aware of the dangers posed to religious liberty by, in particular, clerical attacks on toleration, and sought ways to curb them that included corrective action by the state. When the Whigs opted to impeach the High Church cleric Henry Sacheverell, whose supporters had capitalized on an unregulated print market to disseminate his sermons ridiculing Whig principles, Shaftesbury expressed satisfaction with this use of state power to silence him. But he did not stop there. The article reads Shaftesbury's 1710Soliloquy, or Advice to an Authoragainst the backdrop of the Sacheverell controversy, and shows how the earl used it to undercut Sacheverell's claim that clerical speech enjoyed special status.


2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 276-308 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rudi Matthee

This essay analyzes the incontrovertible weakening of the Safavid state in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century by putting it in a larger context. It does so by comparing various manifestations of Iran’s “decline” at the time to conditions and developments in the adjacent Ottoman and Mughal states, where similar processes were playing out in the same period. In order to arrive at a measured and balanced view of similarities and differences between these three early modern Islamic empires, it singles out and focuses on four areas: geographical/environmental and economic conditions, political developments, the state of the army, and ideological characteristics.


2006 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER TEMIN ◽  
HANS-JOACHIM VOTH

We document the transition from goldsmith to banker in the case of Richard Hoare and his successors and examine the operation of the London loan market during the early eighteenth century. Analysis of the financial revolution in England has focused on changes in public debt management and the interest rates paid by the state. Much less is known about the evolution of the financial system providing credit to individual borrowers. We show how this progress took time because operating a deposit bank was new and different from being a goldsmith. Learning how to use the relatively new technology of deposit banking was crucial for the bank's success and survival.


1993 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-121 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Stuart-Fox

The writing of Lao history presents peculiar problems, not because of the quantity and quality of sources available (though these leave much to be desired for certain periods), but because of the difficulty in deciding what is meant by “Lao history”. There is a problem in identifying the object of study. Is Lao history the history of those territories inhabited by ethnic Lao, or of the state of Laos as it has existed at various times under various names? The Lao have spread far beyond the geographical boundaries of present-day Laos: many more ethnic Lao live in Thailand than in Laos. Moreover the Lao state ceased to exist as a unitary entity in the early eighteenth century. What was reconstructed by the French nearly two centuries later and exists today is but a fragment composed of territories belonging to former principalities inhabited by diverse peoples, many of whom are not ethnic Lao. They are divided into three broad groups: the Lao Loum, or Lao of the valleys, comprise not only ethnic Lao but also upland Tai and account for about 65 per cent of the population; the Lao Theung, or Lao of the mountain slopes, speaking Mon-Khmer languages, account for around 25 per cent; while the Lao Soung, or Lao of the mountain tops, speaking Tibeto-Burman languages, number perhaps 10 per cent. The terms Lao Loum, Lao Theung and Lao Soung will be used to refer to these groups in this paper.


2021 ◽  
Vol 101 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 357-375
Author(s):  
William Cook Miller

Abstract Sometime in the early eighteenth century, an Anglo-Dutch woman named Theodora Wilkin began translating into English an important Mennonite devotional work, Jan Philipsz Schabaelje’s Wandelende Ziele met Adam, Noach, en Simon Cleophas. Her translation (or, better, adaptation) survives in a manuscript of about one thousand pages. Wilkin’s text sheds considerable light on the state of intellectual history and literary adaptation in the early eighteenth century. Specifically, Theodora Wilkin’s Wandering Soul foregrounds three concerns. 1) It demonstrates the centrality of women to providential history. 2) It reconciles biblical wisdom and natural philosophical knowledge. 3) It closely considers the Ancients, both insofar as they reflected divine truth and promulgated idolatry.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-38
Author(s):  
Sushruti Santhanam

The Pallaki Seva Prabandhamu is a geya nataka (musical play) in lyrical Telugu language composed in the early eighteenth century by Sahaji Bhonsale II (r. 1684‐1712), the Maratha king of the Tamil-speaking region of Thanjavur. Using its most current iteration, the production of a digital album in 2012, as the locus, the article explores the historical vicissitudes of music construction in Carnatic music. The continuous recasting of old repertoire like the Pallaki illuminates the intangible agencies and exigencies of this process of historical record-keeping in southern Indian music. This article showcases the many historical and epistemic locations through which the Pallaki has passed, in the process exposing some critical gaps and misses in historical writing on the southern Indian musical repertoire. It also proposes an alternative, more direct engagement with musical material, in order to write about historical contexts of music and pushes the historian of music to yield more agency to the musician in co-writing the histories of music. The article raises two methodological possibilities: a critical inclusion of ‘performed repertoires’ as an archive of music history; and the inclusion of publishing, notating and other conventional archival of manuscripts within a larger conceptual framework of performance of text.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document