Herman Merivale and the Native Question, 1837–1861

1977 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 359-384 ◽  
Author(s):  
David McNab
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native Peoples ◽  
Material Condition ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
Native Populations ◽  
Scientific Rationale

One of the most important consequences of the granting of colonial self-government in the British Empire in the early and mid-Victorian period was that it created complex problems for the Colonial Office concerning the future of native populations. In the nineteenth century this imperial dilemma was termed the “native question.” Natives were regarded as a lower class, like the Irish or the poor in Britain, and British liberals sought to better the material condition of these people by means of the panaceas of education and religion. Their object was humanitarian and their methods were usually paternalistic. Herman Merivale, in his role as a commentator on the native question, was both naive and at times Utopian in his attempts to find a solution. As an imperial administrator he was involved in the ineffectual attempts to implement the schemes of “amalgamation” (gradual union leading to assimilation) and “insulation” (reservations). British native policies failed largely because of resistance by native peoples and the weaknesses of imperial administration rather than British racial attitudes.For Merivale “race” was a cultural idea derived from early nineteenth century ethnography, not a pseudo-scientific rationale which determined that native peoples were physically and, therefore, intellectually and materially inferior. Until the 1860's, at least, his ideas on this subject were not very different from those of his British contemporaries and were derived from a wide variety of written sources rather than direct observation.

scholarly journals An Illustrated Shiʿi Pilgrimage Scroll in the Collections of the Royal Asiatic Society

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
ULRICH MARZOLPH ◽  
MATHILDE RENAULD
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Visual Narrative ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Asiatic Society ◽  
Material Condition ◽  
Visual Dimension ◽  
History Of ◽  
Initial Survey ◽  
Royal Asiatic Society

Abstract The collections of the Royal Asiatic Society hold an illustrated pilgrimage scroll apparently dating from the first half of the nineteenth century. The scroll's hand painted images relate to the journey that a pious Shiʿi Muslim would have undertaken after the performance of the pilgrimage to Mecca. Its visual narrative continues, first to Medina and then to the Shiʿi sanctuaries in present-day Iraq, concluding in the Iranian city of Mashhad at the sanctuary of the eighth imam of the Twelver-Shiʿi creed, imam Riḍā (d. 818). The scroll was likely prepared in the early nineteenth century and acquired by the Royal Asiatic Society from its unknown previous owner sometime after 1857. In terms of chronology the pilgrimage scroll fits neatly into the period between the Niebuhr scroll, bought in Karbala in 1765, and a lithographed item most likely dating from the latter half of the nineteenth century, both of which depict a corresponding journey. The present essay's initial survey of the scroll's visual dimension, by Ulrich Marzolph, adds hitherto unknown details to the history of similar objects. The concluding report, by Mathilde Renauld, sheds light on the scroll's material condition and the difficulties encountered during the object's conservation and their solution.

Negotiating medical welfare

2018 ◽  
pp. 69-104
Author(s):  
Steven King
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Moral Hazard ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Poor Law ◽  
Core Business ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Poor

This chapter foregrounds the concept of pauper agency. Using the largest corpus of letters by or about the poor ever assembled, it argues that sickness was the core business of the Old Poor Law by the early nineteenth century. Rather than paupers being simply subject to the whim and treatment of the parish, the chapter argues that they had considerable agency. Despite problems of moral hazard and the idea that sickness could be faked, paupers and officials agreed that ill health and its treatment was an area of acceptable contestation.

Social Pretensions in Architecture and Ancestry: Hall House, Sawbridge, Warwickshire and the Andrewe Family

1996 ◽  
Vol 76 ◽  
pp. 51-72
Author(s):  
N. W. Alcock ◽  
C. T. Paul Woodfield
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Architectural Analysis ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Status ◽  
Country Houses ◽  
Social Importance

That architecture makes social statements is obvious in grand buildings from Norman castles to country houses. In smaller houses, such statements are often muted by our ignorance of their historical context and their date. This paper examines a small but sophisticated medieval house in which the combination of precise dating and informative documentation surmounts simple architectural analysis, to reveal something of its social importance to the family who built it. In the early nineteenth century, the status of Hall House, Sawbridge, was the lowest possible. It belonged to the Sawbridge Overseers of the Poor and was rented to families receiving parish support; later it became farm labourers' cottages. Most of the stages in the decline of the elegant medieval house to this lowly state can be documented, and links established to the only family in fifteenth-century Sawbridge with pretensions to sophistication. These clues lead to the identification of John Andrewe as the builder of Hall House in 1449, and to the recognition of it as a concrete expression of a family pride that was also being fostered by the invention of a distinguished ancestry.

scholarly journals Negotiating Independence: Manliness and Begging Letters in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Scotland

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katie Barclay
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Regional Variation ◽  
Charitable Giving ◽  
Social Relationship ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Hierarchies ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of

Begging letters provide a rich source for historians of the poor, who have used them to explore their lives, constructions of identity, and regional variation in charitable giving. The rhetoric of benevolence and gratitude that pervades them, however, has often been dismissed as ‘inauthentic’ or as interfering with our access to the words of the poor. This chapter explores how Scottish beggars used the language of gratitude in their letters to patrons, contributing to both a history of letter-writing and masculinity amongst the poor. It highlights the way that an emotional-charitable language placed patron and client in a hierarchical social relationship that brought benefits to both parties. It argues that, rather than being an unmanly act, begging could provide space for poor or subordinate men to articulate their masculine identities within a society where social hierarchies were normal and understood as key to social order.

Introduction

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Máire ní Fhlathúin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
British India ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Material Conditions

This study explores the crystallising of a colonial literary culture in early nineteenth-century British India, and its development over the course of the Victorian period. It focuses on a wide range of texts, including works of historiography, travel writing, correspondence, fiction, and poetry, produced by amateur writers as well as writers who were better known and more professionalised. Its aim is to delineate the parameters and operations of a literary culture that is both local, in that it responds to the material conditions and experiences specific to colonial British India, and transnational, in that it evolves from and in reaction to the metropolitan culture of Britain. The writers I discuss were British, and lived and worked in British India (anglophone writing by Indians falls outside the parameters of this study). They often published their work for limited circulation within the colonial marketplace, but also with an eye to the more extensive readership of ‘home’. While individual authors’ works may be inconsequential or ephemeral, and sometimes apparently derivative of metropolitan texts and genres, the corpus in total constitutes a significant body of literature with its own concerns, themes and formats....

Causes and combinations in the long nineteenth century

2019 ◽  
pp. 57-75
Author(s):  
Nicholas Owen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Chapter 4 develops, through a historical illustration, the arguments concerning motivation presented in chapter 3. It makes a distinction between causes—movements made up of adherents motivated (disjointly) by others’ gains—and combinations—movements made up of constituents motivated (conjointly) by their own gains. This distinction is applied to three British historical cases from the long nineteenth century, to explain why—and with what consequences—the place of adherents differed between the metropolitan antislavery movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the Chartists of the mid-nineteenth century, and movements of and for the poor (“neighboring” and “charity”) in the Victorian slums in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Western Science in India before 1850

1962 ◽  
Vol 94 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 62-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. J. C. Larwood
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Science Education ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Western Science ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
European Science ◽  
Growth Of Science

The establishment and consolidation of the British Empire in India occurred at a time of expanding interest and achievement in science in Europe. In India there was certainly an appreciation of the importance of this European science, for the growth of science education there in the early nineteenth century compares not unfavourably with that in England. But what kind of scientific interests and activities were to be found in India up to about 1850, and who were the men who pursued them ?

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