Political Lessons of Chinese History

1883 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 205-229
Author(s):  
Richard Temple
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
The People ◽  
Political Lessons ◽  
The Way ◽  
Mongol Rule

Political and strategic geography of China — Mongol invasion turning-point in Chinese history — Early Chinese civilisation before that event — Gallant and patriotic resistance on the part of the Chinese against their Mongol invaders — Mongol conquest of China completed A.D. 1270 — Character of Mongol rule there — Restoration of native Chinese dynasty — Its decay after lasting two centuries — Local insurrection of a strange character arising — Prepares the way for accession of the Manchus — Origin of the Manchu Tartars — They overrun China after a noble resistance by the people — Their dominion established over China — Character of their rule up to the nineteenth century — Eminent sovereigns of their race — Beginning of their degeneracy.

Introduction

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. C. Smout
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
The People ◽  
Short Run ◽  
Political Scene ◽  
The Way

This book presents an overview of the first six decades of the Union of the Crowns. It also provides a picture of the uses to which judicial torture was put after 1660 and a summary of the straits in which Scotland found itself in the opening years of the eighteenth century. It then explores the problems which union posed to maritime lawyers of both nations, the dark reception that the Scots received in eighteenth-century England, and the way Enlightenment Scotland viewed the British unions. It examines the ambitions of Scottish élites in India, the frame for radical cooperation in the age of the Friends of the People and later, and the background for the sojourn of Thomas and Jane Carlyle in London. It finally outlined the Anglo-Scottish relations on the political scene in the nineteenth century. The parliamentary union did little in the short run for Anglo-Scottish relations. It is shown that Scots are indeed worried and worry a lot about Anglo-Scottish relations, but the English worried and worry about them hardly at all, except in times of exceptional crisis, as in 1638–54, 1703–7, 1745–7 and perhaps much later in the 1970s after oil had been discovered.

Longinus, on Sublimity

2000 ◽  
Vol 45 ◽  
pp. 43-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malcolm Heath
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
First Century ◽  
Third Century ◽  
The Third ◽  
Do So ◽  
The Way

Until the beginning of the nineteenth century the treatise On sublimity was universally attributed to the third-century critic, rhetorician and philosopher Cassius Longinus. Weiske's edition, first issued in 1809, marked a turning-point in the trend of scholarly opinion, and Longinus' claim to authorship is now generally rejected, often summarily. A variety of alternative attributions have been canvassed; most commonly the work is assigned to an anonymous author of the first century A.D. But a minority of scholars have resisted the consensus and defended Longinus' claim to authorship. This paper will argue that they were right to do so.To avoid ambiguity, I shall follow Russell in using the symbol ‘L’ as a non-committal way of designating the author of On sublimity; by ‘Longinus’ I shall always mean Cassius Longinus. So the question before us is whether L is Longinus. I begin by explaining why manuscript evidence (§2) and stylistic comparison with the fragments of Longinus (§3) fail to resolve the question. I then try to find a place for the composition of the treatise within Longinus' career (§4). This leads to a consideration of the final chapter, widely regarded as inconsistent with a third-century date; I shall argue that there is no inconsistency (§5). If so, the way lies open to a reassessment of the case in favour of Longinus' claim.

The Idea of ‘Character’ in Victorian Political Thought

1985 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 29-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Collini
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Classical Economics ◽  
The People ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Way

When in the summer of 1902 Helen Bosanquet published a book called The Strength of the People she sent a copy to Alfred Marshall. On the face of it, this might seem a rather unpromising thing to have done. Mrs Bosanquet, an active exponent of the Charity Organisation Society's ‘casework’ approach to social problems, had frequently expressed her dissatisfaction with what she regarded as the misleading abstractions of orthodox economics, and in her book she had even ventured a direct criticism of a point in Marshall's Principles. Marshall, then Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge and at the peak of his reputation as the most authoritative exponent of neo-classical economics in Britain, was, to say the least, sensitive to criticism, and he had, moreover, publicly taken issue with the C.O.S. on several previous occasions. But perhaps Mrs Bosanquet knew what she was about after all. In her book she had taken her text from the early nineteenth-century Evangelical Thomas Chalmers on the way in which character determines circumstances rather than vice versa, and, as the historian of the C.O.S. justly remarks, her book ‘is a long sermon on the importance of character in making one family rich and another poor’. Although Marshall can hardly have welcomed the general strictures on economics, he was able to reassure Mrs Bosanquet that ‘in the main’ he agreed with her: ‘I have always held’, he wrote to her, ‘that poverty and pain, disease and death are evils of greatly less importance than they appear, except in so far as they lead to weakness of life and character’.

Mkwawa and the Hehe Wars

1968 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 409-436 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Redmayne
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Attempted Suicide ◽  
Lake Tanganyika ◽  
Early History ◽  
The Other ◽  
Central Plateau ◽  
Political Unity ◽  
The People ◽  
German Authority ◽  
The Way

The Hehe now live mainly in the Iringa and Mufundi districts of Tanzania. Little is known of their early history before the mid-nineteenth century, when chief Munyigumba of Ng'uluhe extended his rule over the other chiefdoms of the Usungwa highlands and central plateau of Uhehe. By his death in ca. 1878 he had also won important victories against the chiefs of Utemikwila, Usangu and Ungoni.After Munyigumba/s death the Hehe suffered a temporary set-back when Mwambambe, who had been a subordinate ruler under Munyigumba, tried to usurp the chiefship, killed Munyigumba's younger brother and caused one of his sons, Mkwawa, to flee to Ugogo. However, eventually Mwambambe was killed in battle against Mkwawa, and his surviving followers, whom he had recruited from Kiwele, fled. By 1883, when Giraud visited Uhehe, Mkwawa was the unchallenged ruler of his father/s lands, and under him the Hehe, who had only recently acquired political unity, had extraordinary military success. Their most important raids were on the caravan route which ran from Bagamoyo on the coast to Lake Tanganyika. By 1890 these raids were a threat to German authority and a major obstacle in the way of colonization and the development of trade. In spite of the Germans' effort to make peace with them, the Hehe persisted in attacking caravans and the people who had submitted to the Germans so, in 1891, a German expedition was sent to Uhehe. This was ambushed and defeated by the Hehe, who then continued their raids, causing the Germans to return in 1894 with a larger expedition and destroy the Hehe fort. Chief Mkwawa may have attempted suicide in the fort, but he was persuaded to flee and then maintained his resistance to the Germans until 1898 when he shot himself to avoid capture. The Hehe then submitted to the Germans. Mkwawa's own determination not to surrender was a very important factor in the long struggle. During this war the Germans acquired a respect for the Hehe which has affected the way that the Hehe have been regarded and treated ever since.

Land and Politics in England in the Nineteenth Century

1965 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 23-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. M. L. Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Conservative Measure ◽  
Previous Generation ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The People ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Way

In every generation since the pace of economic and social change began to accelerate in the late-eighteenth century the wildest hopes, aspirations and fears of the previous generation have been realized. The revolutionary prospect of heeding the will of the people in the 1790's became the conservative measure of 1832. The terrifying demands of the Chartists were well on the way to enactment by 1885, and with the payment of M.P.s in 1911 were substantially achieved, apart from the silliest of all the demands, that for annual parliaments.

The Vote and the Transfer of Power: A study of the Bengal General Election, 1912–1913.

1962 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-181 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. H. Broomfield
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
General Election ◽  
Representative Government ◽  
The People ◽  
The Way

Representative Government was an institution dear to the hearts of nineteenth-century Englishmen. It was their pride and, they affirmed, the source of their national strength that they lived under this form of constitution. They were eager that others, especially their colonies, should enjoy its benefits. There were few obstacles in the way of the establishment of representative institutions in the white colonies: the land was different but the people were the same. But in India neither the land nor the people resembled those of England. Nonetheless, the British determined to train an educated, Westernized elite which would make possible the establishment of representative institutions there.

REVEALING CONTINGENCY THROUGH SHUN'S 舜 ASCENSION TO THE THRONE

Early China ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
pp. 61-92
Author(s):  
Youngsun Back
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
Human Control ◽  
Pure Chance ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
Political Succession ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
Political Lessons ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
The Way

AbstractThis article examines the story of Shun's 舜 ascension to the throne. This story has drawn considerable attention throughout Chinese history because of its significance with regard to political succession. However, in this article, I shed light on a different dimension of the story: its relevance to the issue of contingency. I investigate four texts, two excavated and two transmitted: Qiongda yi shi 窮達以時 (Failure and Success Depend on Times), Tang Yu zhi dao 唐虞之道 (The Way of Yao and Shun), the Mengzi 孟子, and the Xunzi 荀子. At one extreme, Qiongda yi shi highlights that Shun became a king by pure chance, while at the other extreme, Xunzi interprets the event as a necessary one, emphasizing that Shun cannot but succeed Yao. The other two texts fall somewhere in between the two extremes. I use these four texts to showcase different ways of thinking about areas over which humans are believed to lack control. My claim is that these four texts offer different accounts of the same event—Shun's ascension—because they see the event from different perspectives: from a perspective of the chosen, from a perspective of the chooser, from a mise-en-scène, and from a perspective of not of this world, respectively. I argue that the diverse perspectives of these texts entail the different understandings of several related issues such as the degree of human control over the event, the important features of the event, and the content of the moral and political lessons that we draw from the event.

Counterrevolutionary Traditionalism

Tocqueville ◽  
2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucien Jaume
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
Social Bond ◽  
General Interest ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
Forms Of Life ◽  
The Way

In the counterrevolutionary school, it remained an article of faith from the time of the Directory to the end of the nineteenth century that individualism is destructive of the social bond, that it is impossible to create a society from individual atoms. This chapter argues that Tocqueville did not believe that one could simply say that individualism destroys the social bond. Although he conceded the point to a certain extent, he was also impressed by the way in which individualistic Americans joined together to form associations, linking their particular interests to the general interest and ultimately creating a society with sovereignty of the people. In contrast to Bonald (who argued that democratic republics are not “constituted”) and de Maistre (who held that a democratic republic is a society without sovereignty and therefore without solidity), Tocqueville thus recognized that society could be constituted in new ways: associations linking public and private, forms of life created by decentralization, avowed or implicit religions, and so forth. But he aimed his criticism primarily at an idea that de Maistre had made famous: “the generative principle (principe générateur) of political constitutions.”

Liberalism and Conservatism in the Writings of Aurel C. Popovic

2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (Special Issue) ◽  
pp. 99-118
Author(s):  
Andrei Sabin Faur ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Representative Government ◽  
Critical Approach ◽  
The People ◽  
Political Activist ◽  
The Way

"In our study we wanted to analyze how the Romanian political activist and ideologist Aurel C. Popovici (1863-1917) perceived liberalism and conservatism, two of the most important ideologies of the nineteenth century. For this purpose, we studied three of his main writings: Principiul de naţionalitate (The Nationality Principle), Statele Unite ale Austriei Mari (The United States of Great Austria) and Naţionalism sau democraţie: o critică a civilizaţiunii moderne (Nationalism or Democracy: a Critical Approach to Modern Civilization). We studied the way in which the renowned Banatian author perceived liberalism, but also the way he percieved several main principles of this ideology: the defense of liberty, the sovereignty of the people, representative government, the refusal of absolutism and pluralism. By analyzing these topics in Aurel C. Popovici’s writings, we identified several paradoxes of his thinking, which we tried to explain by appealing to other sources, like personal letters or memoirs belonging to friends or admirers. Keywords: liberalism, conservatism, Aurel C. Popovici, democracy, Austria-Hungary, nationalism "

Lord John Russell and the Origins of the Committee of Council on Education

1977 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 395-415 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. L. Alexander
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Popular Education ◽  
Privy Council ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Government Growth ◽  
The People ◽  
Political Narratives ◽  
Executive Agency

In February 1839 Lord John Russell put before the House of Commons a set of proposals for governmental action in the field of popular education. It was a contentious move by the Home Secretary, and the bitter political tussle which it provoked was predictable. In the context of a flagging ministry facing an opposition already scenting office, it seems almost cavalier. The well-known outcome was the formation of a new executive agency for the management of the state's role in the education of the people, the Committee of Privy Council on Education. The whole incident attracts notice in several dimensions of historical commentary. Social and political narratives must record it; students of Whiggery, Russell, reform or radicalism, must give it place and plausibility; it is a turning point for the historian of education; and it provides a case study for the investigation of government growth in the nineteenth century.

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