Federal Administration, Rank, and Civil Strife among Bemba Royals and Nobles

Africa ◽  
1967 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard P. Werbner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil Strife ◽  
Strong Belief ◽  
The People ◽  
Opening Paragraph ◽  
Relations Of Power ◽  
Federal Administration

Opening ParagraphIn the latter half of the nineteenth century, a change came about in the hereditary régime of the Bemba kingdom during civil strife between members of the kingdom's royal and noble strata. The rulers of the kingdom, who shared in the Central African trade of slaves and ivory for guns and calico, fought to defend their positions and to meet the competition from opponents who could enter into new relations of power. Past conceptions of the kingdom in terms of centralization have obscured this, hindering understanding of the specialized structures of authority among royals and nobles, the differences among the ruling strata, and the variable interlocking of their federal administrations. Richards has argued, in somewhat contradictory fashion, that the kingdom, primarily unified through ritual beliefs, was nevertheless centralized owing to an apparent concentrating of control over territorial administration in the hands of royals:In Northern Rhodesia the kingdom of the Bemba was kept united by the strong belief of the people in the ritual powers of their king. All district chieftainships were filled by princes of the blood who moved in succession by genealogical seniority from one chieftainship to another. Clan leaders were unimportant politically and the king's favourites never held office. A royal dynasty in control of all territorial posts seem to have been sufficient to achieve centralization of a loose type.

Possible sources for the origin of gold as an economic and social vehicle for women in lamu (Kenya)

Africa ◽  
1987 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 364-376 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia W. Romero
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
Central Africa ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Ruling Class ◽  
The People ◽  
African Slaves ◽  
Southern Arabia ◽  
Opening Paragraph

Opening ParagraphLamu today is composed of several ethnic groups with an affinity for gold: the Afro-Arab old families who intermarried with the BuSaid ruling class from Oman and Zanzibar; Hadrami newcomers from southern Arabia; and the slaves of these groups, all of whom came from central Africa. In addition, there are Bohra Indians (only a few remain of the two hundred or so earlier in the century), two Parsees, and one remaining Ismaili family whose origins in India dictate a desire for gold. Other people, such as Bajuni, are now living in Lamu; but most are poor and the few who have gold are those who have gone to Mombasa or away to school, and then returned. Some of them have married into the heretofore closed ranks of the old Afro-Arab families precisely because they have made money or can be expected to, and will provide gold. There are numbers of other ethnic groups in Lamu, including Africans from the Kenya mainland across the bay from Lamu island. Land, not gold, is important to them. The people of concern here are mainly the Bohra Indians, Afro-Arabs, and the Hadramis – all of whom covet gold. Marriages in Lamu were arranged along ethnic, class, and family lines at least since the nineteenth century. Gold for brides was a necessity – especially for the upper-class Afro-Arab (mixtures of local Africans, African slaves, and Arab traders) families and among the various Indian groups (historically Hindu, Dauudi Bohra, Ithnasharia, Ismaili, and Goans) then living and trading there.

Tax and Travel among the Hill-Tribes of Northern Adamawa

Africa ◽  
1956 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 369-379 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. H. M. Kirk-Greene
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Heterogeneous Population ◽  
British Occupation ◽  
The People ◽  
Hill Tribes ◽  
Opening Paragraph ◽  
Slave Raids ◽  
The Hill

Opening ParagraphThe area under consideration consists of 1,100 square miles of the Madagali, Cubunawa, and Mubi districts of the northern touring division of Adamawa emirate, whose sub-headquarters at Mubi is responsible to the administrative capital at Yola on the River Benue. It is occupied by a heterogeneous population of fairly primitive pagans, and some 400 square miles of the area are still declared closed territory under the Unsettled Districts Ordinance. Though there is a steady, if unspectacular, movement down to the plains, a large proportion of the people remain in their mountain fastnesses whither they fled in the nineteenth century to seek safety from the marauding Fulani cavalry during the slave-raids that characterized the period between the jihad and the British occupation.

The History Of Modern Vaccination In Cooch Behar State In The Nineteenth Century

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 180-190
Author(s):  
Rajkumar Bind
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Vaccination Programme ◽  
West Bengal ◽  
The State ◽  
The People ◽  
Small Pox ◽  
Preventive Method ◽  
History Of

This paper examines the development of modern vaccination programme of Cooch Behar state, a district of West Bengal of India during the nineteenth century. The study has critically analysed the modern vaccination system, which was the only preventive method against various diseases like small pox, cholera but due to neglect, superstation and religious obstacles the people of Cooch Behar state were not interested about modern vaccination. It also examines the sex wise and castes wise vaccinators of the state during the study period. The study will help us to growing conciseness about modern vaccination among the peoples of Cooch Behar district.   

The Challenge of Mass Democracy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin A. Schupmann
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
The State ◽  
Parliamentary Democracy ◽  
The People ◽  
State And Society ◽  
Mass Democracy

Chapter 1 analyzes Schmitt’s assessment of democratic movements in Weimar and the gravity of their effects on the state and constitution. It emphasizes that the focus of Schmitt’s criticism of Weimar was mass democracy rather than liberalism. Schmitt warned that the combination of mass democracy, the interpenetration of state and society, and the emergence of total movements opposed to liberal democracy, namely the Nazis and the Communists, were destabilizing the Weimar state and constitution. Weimar, Schmitt argued, had been designed according to nineteenth century principles of legitimacy and understandings of the people. Under the pressure of mass democracy, the state was buckling and cannibalizing itself and its constitution. Despite this, Schmitt argued, Weimar jurists’ theoretical commitments left them largely unable to recognize the scope of what was occurring. Schmitt’s criticism of Weimar democracy was intended to raise awareness of how parliamentary democracy could be turned against the state and constitution.

The Languages of Petitioning in Early Colonial India

2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 581-597 ◽  
Author(s):  
James A. Jaffe
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Western India ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
The Public ◽  
The People ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
The Social ◽  
Different Levels

With relatively few exceptions, personal petitions from individuals have received much less attention from historians than those from groups in the public political sphere. In one sense, personal petitions adopted many of the same rhetorical strategies as those delivered by a group. However, they also offer unique insights into the quotidian relationship between the people and their rulers. This article examines surviving personal petitions to various administrators at different levels of government in western India during the decades surrounding the East India Company’s conquests. The analysis of these petitions helps to refine our understanding of the place of the new judicial system in the social world of early-nineteenth-century India, especially by illuminating the discourse of justice that petitioners brought to the presentation of their cases to their new governors. The conclusion of this article seeks to place the rhetoric of personal petitioning within the larger context of mass political petitioning in India during the early nineteenth century.

Inventing Laziness

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melis Hafez
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Transformation ◽  
Civic Culture ◽  
Exclusionary Practices ◽  
The Public ◽  
Ottoman History ◽  
The People ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
Shifting Boundaries ◽  
Modern Era

Neither laziness nor its condemnation are new inventions, however, perceiving laziness as a social condition that afflicts a 'nation' is. In the early modern era, Ottoman political treatises did not regard the people as the source of the state's problems. Yet in the nineteenth century, as the imperial ideology of Ottomanism and modern discourses of citizenship spread, so did the understanding of laziness as a social disease that the 'Ottoman nation' needed to eradicate. Asking what we can learn about Ottoman history over the long nineteenth-century by looking closely into the contested and shifting boundaries of the laziness - productivity binary, Melis Hafez explores how 'laziness' can be used to understand emerging civic culture and its exclusionary practices in the Ottoman Empire. A polyphonic involvement of moralists, intellectuals, polemicists, novelists, bureaucrats, and, to an extent, the public reveals the complexities and ambiguities of this multifaceted cultural transformation. Using a wide variety of sources, this book explores the sustained anxiety about productivity that generated numerous reforms as well as new understandings of morality, subjectivity, citizenship, and nationhood among the Ottomans.

Who Ran the British Empire 1830-1850?

1965 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-121 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Taft Manning
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Colonial Administration ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
The People ◽  
Mother Country ◽  
The Government ◽  
Colonial Office

Patterns of historical writing are notoriously difficult to change. Much of what is still being written about colonial administration in the nineteenth-century British Empire rests on the partisan and even malicious writings of critics of the Government in England in the 1830s and '40s who had never seen the colonial correspondence and were unfamiliar with existing conditions in the distant colonies. The impression conveyed in most textbooks is that the Colonial Office after 1815 was a well-established bureaucracy concerned with the policies of the mother country in the overseas possessions, and that those policies changed very slowly and only under pressure. Initially Edward Gibbon Wakefield and Charles Buller were responsible for this Colonial Office legend, but it was soon accepted by most of the people who had business to transact there. Annoyed by the fact that the measures proposed by the Wakefield group did not meet with instant acceptance, Wakefield and Buller attacked the Permanent Under-Secretary, James Stephen, as the power behind the throne in 14 Downing Street and assumed that his ideas of right and wrong were being imposed willy-nilly on the unfortunate colonists and would-be colonists.The picture of Stephen as all-powerful in shaping imperial policy was probably strengthened by the publication in 1885 of Henry Taylor's Autobiography. Taylor was one of Stephen's warmest admirers and had served with him longer than anyone else; when he stated that for a quarter of a century Stephen “more than any one man virtually governed the British Empire,” historians were naturally inclined to give credence to his words.

State Intervention in Mid-Nineteenth Century Britain: Fact or Fiction?

1983 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
P.W.J. Bartrip
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
State Intervention ◽  
State Regulation ◽  
Individual Freedom ◽  
The Third ◽  
The People ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
Government Interference ◽  
Laissez Faire

The question of the degree of state intervention in nineteenth-century Britain has interested generations of scholars since the beginning of the present century. Did mid-nineteenth century England constitute an “age of laissez-faire” which gave way to an “age of collectivism,” or did an “age of mercantalism” merge into one of state regulation during which process, even in the early and mid-Victorian period, the state exercised considerable control over the day-to-day lives of its citizens? These are two of the questions over which there has been extended debate.The term laissez-faire has been employed in a variety of ways by different writers, by no means all of whom have troubled to define their understanding of the expression. Recently Professor Perkin has argued that during the nineteenth century two distinct meanings were attributed to it (and seven to the related, though antithetical, concept, collectivism!). For the purposes of this paper the term is taken to mean the philosophy, policy and, above all, the practice of minimal government interference in the economy.The most influential case for an “age of laissez-faire” was presented by Dicey in Law and Public Opinion. In this Dicey identified three overlapping legislative phases: Quiescence (1800-1830), Individualism (1825-1870), and Collectivism (1865-1900). The first consisted of an absence of legislation, the second of “constant” parliamentary activity to abolish restraints on individual freedom and the third of state intervention “for the purpose of conferring benefit upon the mass of the people” at the expense of some loss of individual freedom.

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