The End of Isolation: Britain, Germany and Japan, 1900–1902 (The Alexander Prize Essay)

1963 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 103-121
Author(s):  
G. W. Monger
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
The United States ◽  
Great Power ◽  
The Novel ◽  
New Developments ◽  
Great Pressure ◽  
Prize Essay

At the end of the nineteenth century the British Empire was under great pressure. Several factors had combined to produce this: the Franco-Russian Alliance of 1894, which had united her two most dangerous antagonists; the growth of powerful new fleets like the Russian, German and American; the decline of ancient non-European monarchies like China, Persia and Morocco, and the appearance in their place of a power vacuum. But none of these new developments would have been so threatening without the novel interest of the great continental nations, and of the United States, in Imperial and naval expansion. Before, Britain had been the only Great Power able or willing to give such issues priority in the formation of her policies. Now she was no longer alone, and the new competition seemed to threaten the very existence of her Empire.

Thinking About Scots Law

1996 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Rodger
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
Case Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
Memorial Lecture ◽  
University Of Edinburgh ◽  
The University

This article is the revised text of the first W A Wilson Memorial Lecture, given in the Playfair Library, Old College, in the University of Edinburgh, on 17 May 1995. It considers various visions of Scots law as a whole, arguing that it is now a system based as much upon case law and precedent as upon principle, and that its departure from the Civilian tradition in the nineteenth century was part of a general European trend. An additional factor shaping the attitudes of Scots lawyers from the later nineteenth century on was a tendency to see themselves as part of a larger Englishspeaking family of lawyers within the British Empire and the United States of America.

ATHEISM AND POLYGENESIS IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: CHARLES BRADLAUGH'S RACIAL ANTHROPOLOGY

2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 835-861 ◽  
Author(s):  
NATHAN G. ALEXANDER
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
British Empire ◽  
The United States ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
Orthodox Christian ◽  
Adam And Eve ◽  
The Earth ◽  
History Of

This article examines a previously unexplored chapter in the history of atheism: its close links with nineteenth-century racial anthropology. These links are apparent especially in many atheists’ interest in polygenesis, the theory that human races had separate origins, in contrast to the orthodox Christian doctrine of monogenesis that said all races descended from Adam and Eve. The article's focus is Charles Bradlaugh (1833–91), arguably the most important British atheist of the era, representing the radical working-class, secularist movement that emerged in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. The article charts the ways Bradlaugh and other atheists used the research on polygenesis from leading scientific racists in both Britain and the United States to critique Christianity. It also explores some of the contradictions of this use, namely the ways polygenesis clashed with Darwinism and a longer chronology of the age of the Earth. Finally, the article explores how polygenist ideas informed Bradlaugh's imperial worldview and notes that, despite his acceptance of polygenesis, Bradlaugh was a supporter of the rights of nonwhites in the British Empire, particularly in India.

Railroad Land Grants in an Incongruous Legal System: Corporate Subsidies, Bureaucratic Governance, and Legal Conflict in the United States, 1850–1903

2017 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 391-432
Author(s):  
Sean M. Kammer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Legal System ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Domain ◽  
Great Power ◽  
Land Grants

Near the end of the nineteenth century, English scholar James Bryce criticized Western railroad land grants as “often improvident” and as giving “rise to endless lobbying and intrigue, first to secure them, then to keep them from being declared forfeited in respect of some breach of the conditions imposed by Congress on the company.” Bryce also observed the extent to which grants of land to railroads allowed the beneficiary companies to exercise great power not only through their role as carriers of people and commerce, but also through their role as large landowners. This, he noted, brought them “yet another source of wealth and power” and “brought them into intimate and often perilously delicate relations with leading politicians.” From the perspective of the so-called “railroad tycoons” and their financial backers, the land grants became sources of wealth and power independent of and sometimes contrary to the interests of the railroad corporations themselves as carriers. Whereas Congress intended the railroad land grants to serve as a means to the end of railroad construction and the settlement of the federal government's expansive public domain, the railroads came to see them as an end in themselves: as independent sources of wealth and power.

Ferdinand Oyono's Une vie de boy on the World Literary Stage

PMLA ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 128 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-111
Author(s):  
David Chioni Moore
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
The United States ◽  
Barack Obama ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Central Figure ◽  
The World ◽  
Data Point

Some of you know that my grandfather was a cook for the British in Kenya, and though he was a respected elder in his village, his employers called him “boy” for much of his life.—Barack Obama, president of the United States, speaking to the Parliament of Ghana, Accra, 11 July 2009How do you say khaki in fourteen languages? assuming that the answer is, in most cases, more or less khaki, what might that word mean? This question occurred to me three years ago as I was sitting in my Minnesota office with a student—a brilliant sophomore economics major from Hanoi—trying to understand a thorny text from Cameroon. The text before us was the Vietnamese translation of Ferdinand Oyono's landmark 1956 francophone anticolonial novel Une vie de boy, which I had been pondering for years. A central figure in the novel, the village's French commandant, was often depicted in “son short kaki” (“his khaki shorts”). Though I don't speak Vietnamese, I could make out enough of its modified Latin alphabet to recognize kaki several times in the 1997 translation. In seeking its Vietnamese meaning, I knew that at least six languages were already in play: kaki came to Oyono's French from English, which got the word in the mid-nineteenth century from Hindi-Urdu (where it means dust-colored), which got it from the Persian (transliterated “khakeh”), meaning dust (“Khaki”). What is more, Oyono's novel purports to be translated from the Ewondo, where kaki certainly meant something too. But in Vietnamese? My instinct was that khaki, at least in Vietnam, would signify what it did in Cameroon: the iconic colonial oppressor's fabric. But when my student, Phuong Vu, saw the word in Vietnamese, she immediately searched for an image on her laptop, then showed me a photo of the great anticolonial leader of Vietnam: the khaki-wearing Ho Chi Minh. Seeking a further data point, I asked my dean, the Somali scholar Ahmed Samatar, what khaki meant in his mother tongue. His reaction, too, was instant: “my grandfather was the first man in our village to wear khaki: it signifies modernity!” Khaki: one word, worldwide. But clearly not a monosignifying word, since it means, at minimum, dust, dust-colored, modernity, colonization, and anticolonial resistance. To paraphrase Langston Hughes, what kind of a translation can you make out of that?

“A Better Civilization” through Tourism

2015 ◽  
Vol 70 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-237
Author(s):  
Adam Ochonicky
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Cultural Appropriation ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Art Objects ◽  
Cultural Sites

Adam Ochonicky, “‘A Better Civilization’ through Tourism: Cultural Appropriation in The Marble Faun” (pp. 221–237) This essay argues that Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun: Or, The Romance of Monte Beni (1860) is an attempt to situate the United States within a lineage of “great” nations via the depiction of tourism abroad in the nineteenth century. In The Marble Faun, Hawthorne suggests that the historical legacies of nations are dependent on the production of art objects, literature, and cultural sites that demonstrate the sophistication of a given national identity. As such, the novel’s narrative revolves around the experiences of a pair of American artists, Hilda and Kenyon, during their stay in Rome. Hawthorne continually emphasizes the duo’s remarkable skills as evaluators and copyists of Italian art in order to legitimize their—and, by proxy, the United States’—appropriation of Italy’s culture and historical stature. Throughout the novel, Hawthorne disparages the degraded state of then-contemporary Rome, while elevating the comparatively youthful United States as the rightful inheritor of Italy’s illustrious past. Essentially, by situating critical work on the nineteenth-century “realm of leisure” alongside twenty-first-century theories of tourism, this essay provides a framework for understanding the complex interconnections between transnational tourism and the development of American cultural identity in The Marble Faun.

Will Japan Become a Global Power?

2007 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 340-351
Author(s):  
Richard Brown
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
World Bank ◽  
The United States ◽  
Great Power ◽  
The World Bank ◽  
Global Power ◽  
The World ◽  
International Systems

AbstractMany have argued that Japan will soon emerge as one of the world's greatest powers. During the nineteenth century, Japan had pressed for pre-eminence in Asia and beyond. Does this earlier military expansion and more recent economic dynamism indicate Japan's desire and capacity to play the role of a great power? Japan's regional economic and diplomatic activity, her prominence in such international bodies as the IMF and the World Bank, her status as a leading creditor and technological innovator, all suggest that she does. Just as Britain and the United States created and dominated international systems when they were leading creditors, perhaps Japan in its turn will become a global power.

The United States and the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the Americas, 1776-1867

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonardo Marques
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Trading Networks ◽  
The U.S

This book explores U.S. participation in the transatlantic slave trade to the Americas from the American Revolution to the U.S. Civil War. It shows how U.S. citizens engaged in multiple forms of participation in the slave trade and how these forms changed over time. The book discusses the emergence of a U.S. branch of the transatlantic slave trade in the aftermath of independence and its quick dismantling in the early nineteenth century. It then looks at the forms of U.S. participation in a highly internationalized contraband slave trade that supplied captives to Brazil and Cuba in the mid-nineteenth century. The growth of these forms of U.S. participation resonated in the U.S. public sphere, contributing to growing tensions around the slavery issue in the 1850s, and in the international arena, stimulating frictions between the British Empire and the United States. This work explores these national and international tensions and the role of slave-trading networks in exploiting and prolonging them.

scholarly journals Obstacles and opportunities: labour emigration to the ‘British World’ in the nineteenth century

2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (01) ◽  
pp. 43-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marjory Harper
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Working Conditions ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World ◽  
Selection Of

AbstractLabour emigrants in the nineteenth century had ever-increasing access to a global employment market. Many of those who left Great Britain looked beyond Europe, to the British Empire and the United States. They took advantage of improvements in transportation, and followed a wide variety of occupations. Decisions to emigrate were often shaped by their involvement in trade unions and were based on concerns about living standards and working conditions. This study considers a selection of globetrotting British settlers and sojourners who went to Canada, the United States and Australia between 1815 and the 1880s. The article analyses the historiography of labour migration; carries out an empirical study constructed around four pieces of analytical scaffolding; and closes by identifying recurring threads in the multi-hued tapestry of labour emigration, highlighting how concerns and traditions about recruitment, wages and working conditions, which had emerged in the nineteenth century, created legacies that persisted into the period after the First World War.

Revolutionizing Sentiment

2020 ◽  
pp. 172-204
Author(s):  
Maria A. Windell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Slave Resistance ◽  
The People ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Racial Discourses

In Chapter 5, sentimentalism becomes event-oriented as possibilities for revolt resonate throughout the Caribbean and the United States. Questions of violence, hemispheric politics, and community collide in narratives of slave resistance, including Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave (1853), Victor Séjour’s “The Mulatto” (1837), Cuban author Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab (1841), and Martin R. Delany’s Blake (1859–62). Each text engages the racial, gendered, and economic exploitations of slavery while contemplating sentiment’s role in organized acts of slave violence; together these fictions highlight transamerican structures of enslavement and racialization that complicate US racial discourses. The chapter culminates in a discussion of Blake’s construction of a militarized affective abolitionism, which builds on prior nineteenth-century fictions’ challenges to slavery and racism. As the novel insists upon a sentimentalism that works at the level of “the people,” it makes sentiment revolution-ready.

The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume III

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
The United States ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
History Of ◽  
Negative Identity ◽  
Constitutional Identity

The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume III considers the Dissenting traditions of the United Kingdom, the British Empire, and the United States in the nineteenth century. It provides an overview of the historiography on Dissent while making the case for seeing Dissenters in different Anglophone connections as interconnected and conscious of their genealogical connections. The nineteenth century saw the creation of a vast Anglo-world in which Anglophone Dissent reached its apogee. Featuring contributions from a team of leading scholars, this collection presents Dissent as a political and constitutional identity, which was often only strong where a dominant Church of England existed to dissent against, but also as a cluster of distinctive attitudes to Scripture, spirituality, and culture which persisted even as they changed in different settings. The volume illustrates that in most parts of that Anglo-world the later nineteenth century was marked by a growing enthusiasm for the moral and educational activism of the state, which plays against the idea of Dissent as a static, purely negative identity.

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