Moral taste: aesthetics, subjectivity, and social power in the nineteenth-century novel

2008 ◽  
Vol 45 (05) ◽  
pp. 45-2467-45-2467
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Moral Taste

Imperial Pressures, 1800–1812

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Livesay
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
Interracial Relationships ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Institutional Pressures ◽  
High Class ◽  
Class Standing ◽  
Blacks And Whites ◽  
The Caribbean

This chapter chronicles the institutional pressures put on mixed-race migrants in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Although families continued to assist relatives of color—which included helping get them into the East India Company to advance their social standing—constricting notions of kinship and political wariness of African-descended people made it challenging for Jamaicans of color to thrive in Britain. Their attempts to assimilate were made more difficult by the growing calls of abolitionists and pro-slavery supporters to curtail interracial relationships in order to create a demographic separation between blacks and whites in the Caribbean. Within this abolitionist debate, Trinidad’s governor Thomas Picton went to court for having tortured a mixed-race girl named Louisa Calderon. Her arrival in Britain prompted a flurry of accusations that she had become pregnant by a Scottish protector, escalating the general public’s concern about mixed-race migrants and their impact on British demography. This chapter contends that by the early nineteenth century, high class standing and genetic connections to prominent Britons were losing their social power for Jamaican migrants of color.

A Powerful Sympathy: Terror, the Prison, and Humanitarian Reform in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain

1986 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 312-334 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randall McGowen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The People ◽  
Difficult Time ◽  
Administration Of Justice ◽  
Moral Taste

It is felt that men are henceforth to be held together by new ties, and separated by new barriere; for the ancient bonds will now no longer unite, nor the ancient boundaries confine. [J. S. Mill, “The Spirit of the Age” (1831)]I“The punishment of death shocks every mind to which it is vividly presented,” wrote Edward Gibbon Wakefield in 1832. It “overturns the most settled notions of right and wrong.” H. G. Bennet announced in Parliament in 1820 that he thought an execution “weakened the moral taste or sensibility of the people.” Such high-minded but platitudinous phrases frequently recurred in the early nineteenth-century debate over the criminal law, though historians have had a difficult time knowing what to make of them. Yet for all their vagueness such expressions do reveal a sensibility whose outline we can trace and whose influence we can measure. In drawing a connection between feeling and morality Wakefield appealed to social assumptions and values that were popular among humanitarians. Criminal law reformers proposed a new and exacting standard for the administration of justice: “Punishment,” argued James Scarlett, “ought to be consonant to the feelings and sympathies of mankind; and … those feelings ought to be enlisted on the side of the administration of justice.” They argued that the heavy reliance on the death penalty was a mistaken policy. The gallows aroused dangerous passions that signaled the existence of intractable social antagonism. They opposed such a spectacle with reforms that aimed at the promotion of a social union founded on shared feeling.

scholarly journals Brief History of Islamic Civilization from Its Genesis in the Late Nineteenth Century to Its Institutional Entrenchment

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 150-173
Author(s):  
Kevin Van Bladel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
General Education ◽  
Social Power ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
University Of Chicago ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Islamic Civilization ◽  
The University

This article sketches the early history of Islamic civilization from its genesis in the late nineteenth century to its institutionalization in the twentieth. Key moments include its enshrinement in journals and a monumental encyclopedia and the flight of European Semitists to the United States. Its institutionalization in the undergraduate curriculum at the University of Chicago in 1956 created a successful model for the subsequent dissemination of Islamic civilization. Working in a committee on general education (the core curriculum) in the social sciences at the University of Chicago, Marshall Hodgson inaugurated Islamic civilization as a subject of university study that was not just for specialists but available to American college students as fulfilling a basic requirement in a liberal arts education. Many other universities followed this practice. Since then, Islamic civilization has come to be shared by the educated public. Today it is an internationally accepted and wellfunded entity that confers contested social power but still lacks analytical power. 

Religion and Racial Violence in the Nineteenth Century

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Graber
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Critical Importance ◽  
Marginalized Communities ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Ongoing Development ◽  
Religious Lives ◽  
Religious Poetics

This chapter considers the ways in which racial violence in the nineteenth century proved formative to developments in the religious lives of people raced outside of whiteness. It draws on borderlands scholar Luís León’s description of marginalized communities transforming existing religious concepts and practices, as well as creating new religious options, a process he calls religious poetics. It also suggests the critical importance of debating and enacting racial violence for members of communities raced white. These actors engaged in a poetics of racial violence, in which they sought to interpret and reconfigure their worlds in relation to the violence that perpetuated America’s racial order. The chapter surveys justifications for and condemnations of racial violence, as well as responses to racial violence, in an effort to explore how religion and violence intersected in the ongoing development of racial classifications and the circulation of social power in nineteenth-century America.

Hunting Foreigners

Manhunts ◽  
2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Grégoire Chamayou ◽  
Steven Rendall
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Foreign Workers ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Political Program

This chapter discusses the hunting of foreigners. It argues that the hunt for foreigners is a hunt for foreign workers. Xenophobic hunts arise from competition for wages. Their logic involves interpredation: the exploited against the exploited, the poor against the poor, workers against workers. Although capitalism did not invent xenophobic violence, it has channeled it toward the powerful interpredatory dynamics that characterizes it. In so doing, it has also endowed it with a redoubtable social power. Certain political movements soon understood this. Over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century, the conservative and nationalist right sought to extend protectionism from products to workers to transform popular xenophobia into a political program.

Water for Europe: The Creation of the European Water Framework Directive

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Kaika
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Water Supply ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
Water Resource Management ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Engineering Problem ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
The One ◽  
The City

When the French politician Clemenceau visited Athens in 1899, he was taken on a tour of the city and briefed on the social, political, and economic problems facing both the city and the young Greek state. Afterwards, he addressed the local political and intellectual elites, starting his speech by exclaiming: ‘The best politician amongst you shall be the one who will bring water into Athens’ (Clemenceau 1899, cited in Gerontas and Skouzes 1963: in). Indeed, water supply was one of the most important and intricate political and social issues of the nineteenth century. Although water supply and management is today often presented as a purely technological and engineering problem, it remains, as we shall see, a deeply political issue, implicated in relations of social power (Reisner 1990; Postel 1992). Indeed, today, more than a century onwards from Clemenceau’s comment, his aphorism still holds true. Despite the fact that Western economies have undergone a period of ‘fierce modernization’ during the twentieth century, and despite technological advances and innovation, water supply and management remain major socio-technical issues at the heart of the political agenda (Bank 1992). Whilst contemporary Europe is not faced with severe water shortages (although many areas, particularly but not exclusively in the European South still face disruptions in water supply during dry months (ETC/IW 1996; ICWS 1996)), water supply and management remain amongst the most important political issues at the European and international level (Hundley 1992; Faure and Rubin 1993; Gleick 1993). Today, if anything, the political ecology of water has become more complex, and more important politically than in the nineteenth century. With the increasing internationalization and complexity of water resource management, with the emergence of an increasingly larger number of actors and institutions involved in this process, with the newly vested economic interests in water supply, and with the increasing concern and sensitivity towards environmental protection, if Clemenceau were alive today, he would probably maintain his aphorism— rephrasing it for the contemporary era: ‘The best politician amongst you shall be the one who will bring clean water into Europe, while keeping happy all the parties involved in water supply, use, and management, at the local, regional, national, and European level.’

RETHINKING EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY ASYLUM REFORM

2006 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 425-452 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHAEL BROWN
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Medical Practitioners ◽  
Cultural Ideologies ◽  
The Social ◽  
Lunatic Asylums ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Historical Issues

This article seeks, through the medium of a case study of the York Lunatic Asylum scandal of 1813 to 1815, to rethink aspects of the existing historiography of early nineteenth-century asylum reform. By moving away from the normative medical historical focus on ‘madness’ and ‘custody’, it relates the reform of lunatic asylums to the wider social, cultural, and political currents of the early nineteenth century. In particular, it demonstrates how the conflict over the administration of the York Asylum represented a clash between different conceptions of social power and public accountability which were rooted in mutually opposed cultural ideologies. In addition, by bringing more recent work on identity and performance to bear on a classic set of historical issues, it also seeks to investigate how the reform of lunatic asylums, and the cultural shifts which they embodied, impacted upon the social identities of medical practitioners engaged in the charitable care of the sick and mad.

The Smell of Drugs

2019 ◽  
pp. 88-105
Author(s):  
William Tullett
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Materia Medica ◽  
The World ◽  
Medical Marketplace ◽  
Medical Writers

The new consensus that smells were tiny material effluvia emitted by all objects served to demystify odours and some of their former powers were questioned. Where sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers had believed that odours could be nutritious, by the early nineteenth century medical writers no longer believed this to be the case. In the world of materia medica doubts were also raised about the ability of odours to communicate medical powers and the capacity of smelling to divine the medical efficacy of materials. This was partly encouraged by a new medical marketplace in which, partly to render medicines palatable to all consumers, drugs were marketed as odourless. Smell was separated from medical efficacy. Yet the materiality and agentive nature of smells meant that their social power was rendered far more significant.

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