Examinations in Nineteenth Century England: State Power versus Private Control

1965 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 220 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. P. C. Roach
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
State Power ◽  
Private Control

Review of Friedrich Meinecke, Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d’état and its Place in Modern History (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957)

2021 ◽  
pp. 317-318
Author(s):  
Martin Wight
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
International Relations ◽  
International Politics ◽  
Personal Responsibility ◽  
State Power ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Human Thought ◽  
Raison D’État ◽  
Historical Life

Wight praised Meinecke’s Die Idee der Staatsräson, translated as Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d’état and its Place in Modern History, as ‘by any odds the most important and enduring book on international relations published in the 1920s, and perhaps between the wars’. It is, Wight wrote, ‘an essay in the historiography of human thought, a study of how Machiavelli’s principles infiltrated into European statecraft, how thinkers and politicians who most strenuously repudiated him found it necessary to borrow from him, and how the idea of raison d’état developed to guide the greatest statesmen from Richelieu to Bismarck, until it was swamped by the ignorant popular passions of 1918’. Meinecke was preoccupied, Wight observed, with (in Meinecke’s words) ‘that tragic duality which came into historical life through the medium of Machiavellism—that indivisible and fateful combination of poison and curative power which it contained’. Moreover, Wight added, the tension between ‘necessity’ and ‘moral traditions’ has been recognized by some statesmen ‘as the central experience of international politics’. Wight noted that ‘Meinecke, despite his honourable retirement under the Nazis, was infected with the German heresy of idealizing State power and fatalistically abdicating personal responsibility. … Yet it was easier for a Burckhardt or an Acton, in the security of nineteenth-century Switzerland or Britain, to condemn power as evil without qualification.’

scholarly journals Learning to Labour: “Native” Orphans in Colonial India, 1840s–1920s

2019 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-42
Author(s):  
Soni
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
State Power ◽  
Child Labour ◽  
The State ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
History Of ◽  
State Actors ◽  
Poor Children

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.

The Sovereign and the Sage

2020 ◽  
pp. 218-242
Author(s):  
James Pickett
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Life ◽  
State Power ◽  
The State ◽  
Islamic State ◽  
Military Elite

This chapter assesses the ulama's relationship with state power. By the long nineteenth century, the ulama stood as a pillar of the state, limited though that state was. Islamic scholars systematically deployed their diverse Persianate skill set and leveraged Islamic knowledge on behalf of the Turkic nobility. Nevertheless, the ulama still envisioned the state as an Islamic state, and they carefully guarded their moral prerogative to speak for the religion both groups agreed had a total monopoly on politics and social life. Although in certain instances evidence exists of this most important of prerogatives — the authority to legitimately speak for religion — shifting in favor of the Turkic military elite, the ulama cultivated a spirit of moral independence and superiority to the state.

Seeking a Balance of Power through a Neutral Third Party Mechanism

2017 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-152
Author(s):  
Frida Osorio Gonsen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Latin America ◽  
State Power ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
Institutional Innovation ◽  
Third Party ◽  
The Political ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
America Latina ◽  
Conservative Power

The Atlantic constitution-making processes, including the ones undertaken in Latin America in the early nineteenth century, were marked by the quest for a balanced state power that would allow State unity. This article focuses mainly on the efforts of Mexican constitutionalists to define an institutional framework that would avoid the fragmentation of the political structure of the State. I discuss how they introduced an important institutional innovation: the Supreme Conservative Power (Supremo Poder Conservador), a neutral third-party mechanism, to manage conflicts between the three branches of government. This is the only case in the Hispanic world where a mechanism of this kind was established in a republican regime. The aim of this article is to gauge the breadth and limitations of this mechanism. Los procesos constituyentes derivados de las revoluciones Atlánticas, incluyendo aquellos que se llevaron a cabo en América Latina, estuvieron marcados por la búsqueda de un diseño constitucional que garantizara a la vez el equilibrio entre los tres órganos de gobierno y la unidad del poder del Estado. Este artículo analiza los esfuerzos realizados en México para elaborar un diseño constitucional que evitara la fragmentación de la estructura política del Estado mexicano. Se concentra en el estudio de un innovador dispositivo constitucional: el Supremo Poder Conservador, que fungió como tercera parte neutral y cuya finalidad fue mediar en un eventual conflicto entre los tres poderes del Estado. La importancia del Supremo Poder Conservador consiste en el hecho de haber sido el único dispositivo de esta índole en el mundo Hispánico que fue establecido en un régimen republicano. El objetivo principal en este artículo es indagar los alcances y los límites de tal mecanismo.

Nationalism, Modernity, and the “Woman Question” in India and China

2013 ◽  
Vol 72 (2) ◽  
pp. 273-297 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sanjay Seth
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
State Power ◽  
Woman Question ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Western Power ◽  
India And China

The nationalist struggle to bring about the end of colonial rule in India, and the Republican and communist struggles to arrest and reverse the humiliation and the “carve-up” of China by foreign powers, were both closely allied to the struggle to become modern. Indeed, the two goals were usually seen to be so closely related as to be indistinguishable: a people had to start becoming modern if they were ever to be free of foreign domination, and they had to gain sovereignty and state power in order to undertake the laborious but necessary task of building a strong, prosperous, and modern nation. Thus in India, as in China, political movements from the latter nineteenth century sought to found a sovereign nation free from domination by a Western power or powers, and also sought to make this putative nation and its people “modern,” both as a necessary means towards the nationalist end and as an end in itself.

Domestic reform and international change: the Gorbachev reforms in historical perspective

1993 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valerie Bunce
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
International System ◽  
State Power ◽  
Downward Mobility ◽  
International Stability ◽  
The Common ◽  
Russian Politics ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Domestic Reform

Two rounds of stagnation and reform in Russia have occurred: from Nicholas I to Alexander II (1825–81) and from Brezhnev to Gorbachev (1964–90). A comparison between them reveals striking similarities in the sources of stagnation, the approach to reform, and the international and domestic consequences of the reforms. What emerges in particular is a pattern wherein international stability, Russian conservatism, and expanding Russian power in the international system (all of which describe developments during the regimes of Nicholas I and Brezhnev) give way to instability in Europe, liberalization of Russian politics, and Russian downward mobility in the international system (the pattern exhibited during the Alexandrine and Gorbachev eras). These similarities suggest at the very least that we should question the common assumptions about the unique properties of the postwar order, Soviet socialism, and Gorbachev's revolution. The parallels also imply certain revisions in our understanding of the relationship between domestic and international change, the nature of the European order in the nineteenth century, and the determinants of state power in the international system.

‘Putting down a common enemy’: Piracy and occasional interstate power in South China during the mid-nineteenth century

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 697-712
Author(s):  
C. Nathan Kwan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Hong Kong ◽  
South China ◽  
State Power ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
Interstate Cooperation ◽  
Chinese Waters ◽  
Common Enemy ◽  
Extension Of State ◽  
British State

Piracy was considered a crime in international law, and British authorities felt its suppression justified the extension of state power into Asian waters. Only after the Opium War and the colonisation of Hong Kong, however, did Britain gain an interest and the wherewithal to act against pirates off the coast of South China. Ships of the Royal Navy, enforcing British ideas of international and maritime law in Chinese waters, together with the criminal justice system in Hong Kong, proved limited in their capacity to deal with piracy in South China in the mid-nineteenth century. Agents of British state power on the coast of China thus sought the assistance of their international counterparts, culminating in an international punitive expedition to Coulan. This article examines interstate cooperation in the effort to suppress piracy and the light this sheds on the relationship between piracy and state power. It argues that such collaboration required compromises between different understandings of piracy and the jurisdiction that different states had over it, and that interstate power was ultimately limited in its impact on the activities of pirates in South China.

Legal Pluralism in Postcolonial, Postnational, and Postdemocratic Times

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eve Darian-Smith
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
State Power ◽  
Legal Pluralism ◽  
Legal Anthropology ◽  
Units Of Analysis ◽  
Colonial Legacies

Since the nineteenth century anthropologists have been fascinated by law and legal practices in far-off cultures and lands. Legal anthropology, as a subfield of the discipline, has contributed enormously to contemporary sociolegal analyses of legal pluralism across the academy. Be that as it may, this chapter suggests that anthropology’s contribution is ultimately limited by the enduring analytical framing of legal pluralism within colonial/postcolonial contexts. Moreover, this analytical constraint prevents scholars from seeing other forms of legal pluralism of immense importance in analysing contemporary societies in which genealogies of colonialism and modernist units of analysis and assumptions of state power are not so evident or significant. The essay calls for anthropologists to think about legal pluralism in terms, and along lines of inquiry, that move beyond the discipline’s colonial legacies and conventional sites of research and to appreciate the global contexts in which all legal pluralism should be analysed.

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