A turn to empire Pitts, Jennifer
2005., 20090411, 2009, 2005, 2005-01-01, 20050101
eBook
A dramatic shift in British and French ideas about empire unfolded in the sixty years straddling the turn of the nineteenth century. As Jennifer Pitts shows in A Turn to Empire, Adam Smith, Edmund ...Burke, and Jeremy Bentham were among many at the start of this period to criticize European empires as unjust as well as politically and economically disastrous for the conquering nations. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the most prominent British and French liberal thinkers, including John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville, vigorously supported the conquest of non-European peoples. Pitts explains that this reflected a rise in civilizational self-confidence, as theories of human progress became more triumphalist, less nuanced, and less tolerant of cultural difference. At the same time, imperial expansion abroad came to be seen as a political project that might assist the emergence of stable liberal democracies within Europe. Pitts shows that liberal thinkers usually celebrated for respecting not only human equality and liberty but also pluralism supported an inegalitarian and decidedly nonhumanitarian international politics. Yet such moments represent not a necessary feature of liberal thought but a striking departure from views shared by precisely those late-eighteenth-century thinkers whom Mill and Tocqueville saw as their forebears.
An innovative study of contemporary photography in France
This compelling publication traces the broad arc of photography’s development in France from the 1970s to the present day. A decade-by-decade ...account reveals unexpected points of convergence between practices that are not usually considered in a comparative perspective. These include photographic practices in contemporary art, documentary, photojournalism, and fashion. Author Olga Smith sets these practices in dialogue with French philosophy – the writings of Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, and Jacques Rancière – to produce an innovative study of the intersections between the photographic image, text, practice, and theory. This analysis is guided by an understanding of photography as deeply engaged with historical, cultural, and intellectual events that defined French national experience in the contemporary period. Landscape provides a particular focus to study issues of key significance, including national identification, colonial past, legacies of modernization and environmental breakdown.
This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).
This tale of great achievements and great disappointments offers a fresh perspective on the interplay between scholarship and political sentiment in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
...Lazăr Șăineanu (1859-1934), linguist and folklorist, was a pioneer in his native Romania, seeking out the popular elements in culture along with high literary ones. He was the first to publish a study of Yiddish as a genuine language, and he uncovered Turkish features in Romanian language and customs. He also made an index of hundreds of Romanian folktales. Yet when he sought Romanian citizenship and a professorship, he was blocked by powerful figures who thought Jews could not be Romanians and who fancied the origins of Romanian culture to be wholly Latin. Faced with anti-Semitism, some of his friends turned to Zionism. Instead he tried baptism, which brought him only mockery and shame.
Hoping to find a polity to which he could belong, Șăineanu moved with his family to Paris in 1900 and became Lazare Sainéan. There he made innovative studies of French popular speech and slang, culminating in his great work on the origins of that language. Once again, he was contributing to the development of a national tongue. Even then, while welcomed by literary scholars, Sainéan was unable to get a permanent university post. Though a naturalized citizen of France, he felt himself a foreigner, an “intruder,” into his old age.
Between 800 and 900 a new convention entered musical practice: by the end of the century the recording of musical sound using newly-invented music scripts had become standard, the meanings of those ...scripts familiar to many. In the history of European music this was a momentous transformation, offering new possibilities of organization and control. But the change was not accomplished quickly, nor were singers who read from books without musical notations entirely without written guidance. In Sounding the Word of God, those ways in which Carolingian scribes made instructions for readers and singers visible through script, and consequent changes in the material culture represented by books, are explored. From books of the late eighth and early ninth centuries in which chant was codified in a manner that relied heavily on unwritten knowledge, Rankin traces a path to books that attempted to record aspects of the delivery of ecclesiastical chant more thoroughly.
Men at the Center Jordan, William Chester
2012, 20121115, 2012-09-10
eBook
Three portraits of men who were at the very center of governance in thirteenth-century France—men who strove in the shadow of King Louis IX (Saint Louis) to impose a redemptive regime on the ...realm. Professor Jordan treats them as individuals, but in a sense they are also types: Robert of Sorbon, a churchman; Etienne Boileau, a bourgeois; and Simon de Nesle, an aristocrat. Robert was the founder of the Sorbonne; Boileau was the prévôt or royal administrator of Paris; and Simon was twice co-regent of the kingdom. Thinking about them and their relations with Louis IX opens up a new and altogether sobering vista for exploring the nature of the king’s rule and the impact of his rule on his subjects.
The writing and reading of history in the early Middle Ages form the key themes of this 2004 book. The primary focus is on the remarkable manifestations of historical writing in relation to ...historical memory in the Frankish kingdoms of the eighth and ninth centuries. It considers the audiences for history in the Frankish kingdoms, the recording of memory in new genres including narrative histories, cartularies and Libri memoriales, and thus particular perceptions of the Frankish and Christian past. It analyses both original manuscript material and key historical texts from the Carolingian period, a remarkably creative period in the history of European culture. Presentations of the past developed in this period were crucial in forming an historical understanding of the Greco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian past and, in subsequent centuries, of early medieval Europe. They also played an extraordinarily influential role in the formation of political ideologies and senses of identity within Europe.
Black France, White Europe
illuminates the deeply entangled history of European
integration and African decolonization. Emily Marker maps
the horizons of belonging in postwar France as leaders ...contemplated
the inclusion of France's old African empire in the new
Europe-in-the-making. European integration intensified longstanding
structural contradictions of French colonial rule in Africa: Would
Black Africans and Black African Muslims be French? If so, would
they then also be European? What would that mean for republican
France and united Europe more broadly?
Marker examines these questions through the lens of youth, amid
a surprising array of youth and education initiatives to stimulate
imperial renewal and European integration from the ground up. She
explores how education reforms and programs promoting solidarity
between French and African youth collided with transnational
efforts to make young people in Western Europe feel more European.
She connects a particular postwar vision for European unity-which
coded Europe as both white and raceless, Christian and
secular-to crucial decisions about what should be taught in African
classrooms and how many scholarships to provide young Africans to
study and train in France. That vision of Europe also informed
French responses to African student activism for racial and
religious equality, which ultimately turned many young francophone
Africans away from France irrevocably. Black France, White
Europe shows that the interconnected history of colonial and
European youth initiatives is key to explaining why, despite
efforts to strengthen ties with its African colonies in the 1940s
and 1950s, France became more European during those years.
Britain and France have developed substantially different policies to manage racial tensions since the 1960s, in spite of having similar numbers of post-war ethnic minority immigrants. This book ...provides the first detailed historical exploration of race policy development in these two countries. In this path-breaking work, Bleich argues against common wisdom that attributes policy outcomes to the role of powerful interest groups or to the constraints of existing institutions, instead emphasizing the importance of frames as widely-held ideas that propelled policymaking in different directions. British policymakers' framing of race and racism principally in North American terms of color discrimination encouraged them to import many policies from across the Atlantic. For decades after WWII, by contrast, French policy leaders framed racism in terms influenced largely by their Vichy past, which encouraged policies designed primarily to counter hate speech while avoiding the recognition of race found across the English Channel.
