This article investigates the role that the arms trade connected to Hispanic American Independence Wars played in the transformations at the origins of 19th century globalization. It looks specifically at how arms supplies to governments encouraged the early post-mercantilist development of South American commerce, and some of the domino effects of such development. This turning point in economic history is analyzed through the biographical trajectories of merchants who were well positioned between geopolitics and trade, and who had “imperial” functions without being formally involved in imperialist projects. Business and political correspondence, notarial documents, and customs registers from archives in Europe and the Americas reveal the workings of networks and business affairs of global merchants whose companies were major arms importers in Buenos Aires during the years leading to Chile’s liberation. The threads of John McNeile’s (an important but neglected figure) and David DeForest’s networks hook onto the principal economic and political laboratories of the countries from whence most arms were imported: Great Britain and the United States. They reached Chile and Peru from Buenos Aires and remained crucial to the liberation campaigns, encouraging further commercial expansion along the American Pacific coast and toward Asia, and pioneering financial adventures. Relations between commercial houses active in Hispanic America and Asia reveal British and US transpacific networks and ties between Hispanic American and Asian commerce and economies. The article thus shows how, by bringing together fragmented and scattered sources from both sides of the Atlantic, the significance of the arms trade in South America as a driving force of globalization emerges.
This article aims to show the role of archaeological research and heritage enhancement in the political, social and economic development of the Sultanate of Oman. Although archaeological research in the Sultanate of Oman began well before the accession to the throne of Sultan Qaboos bin Said Al Said, it became a real political and social issue during his reign. Archaeological excavations were first entrusted to Western researchers (mostly from institutions located in the United States, Great Britain, France, Italy or Germany), thus contributing to the country's emergence on the international scene. The Sultanate now has its own archaeological service and trains Omani archaeologists. This archaeological research will not only shed light on the Prehistory and history of this territory, it will also define a heritage that will mark the identity of the Sultanate of Oman. The Omani heritage is highlighted by the inscription of five sites on the Unesco World Heritage List between 1987 and 2018. This heritage, unique in the Gulf region, is a response to the choice of high-end tourism development in order to diversify the country's economy. The Sultanate of Oman is thus building the image of an open and culturally rich country to which UNESCO, an internationally recognised institution, provides a choice guarantee. At the same time, university courses in the fields of culture and heritage are offered to encourage young Omanis to work in the tourism sector. The development of this sector has also contributed to the modernisation of the country and its infrastructure in order to link the most important sites to the capital, Muscat, thus opening up previously isolated regions.
With his picture books sold in tens of thousands of copies by publishers for young people, with his wallpapers intended for the nursery, Walter Crane created a work representative of the place taken by the child in Victorian society. He imagined these works for a specific editorial sector, for a restricted territory within the family and social space. His books for young people and their engravings could therefore appear as a separate production from the watercolors and paintings that this symbolist painter exhibited in London galleries and presented at various World Fairs, for example in Paris in 1878 and in Chicago in 1893. They could also be considered inferior to these because of their medium, their recipient and the specific social function assigned to them. The economic and educational place of cultural objects for children in Victorian society was not synonymous with literary or artistic consecration. The hierarchy which places the productions for the youth in situation of less aesthetic value overlaps that which distinguishes the fine arts from the arts known as "minor". Picture books would thus join the ceramics, textiles and mosaics designed by Walter Crane. Precisely, in his theoretical essays as in his practice, he worked in favor of a new configuration of the artistic field alongside William Morris. Leader of the second generation of Pre-Raphaelites and initiator of the Arts and Crafts movement, Morris advocated the abolition of the hierarchy between artistic practices in favor of the emergence of a homogeneous class of creators producing objects and artworks. As shown by his toy books and three square books published by Routledge, the former between 1865 and 1876, the latter between 1877 and 1887, it was by being located in the artistically and socially compartmentalized field of children’s publishing that Walter Crane best succeeded in creating and representing works that were apparently diverse but, in reality, conceived from the complementary angles of experimentation, totality and mise en abyme work.
The relations of the Russia and Britain with the self-declared state of Yettishar was a striking example of different approaches of two empires to the states and peoples of the Central Asian regions within so called Great Game, i.e. Russo-English rivalry in the 19th c. The trade treaties of Yattishar with the Russian Empire of 1872 and with the British Empire in 1874 became a legal reflection of these approaches and are of great interest within the context of the historical experience of the legal status of unrecognized states and positions of the rival world powers towards such states. The purpose of the article is a historical-legal analysis of above-mentioned treaties and comparative-legal analysis of them with the similar treaties signed by Russia and England with other Central Asian states during the same period. Author attempts to clarify if treaties of 1872 and 1874 confirmed recognition by both empires of Yettishar as a subject of international relations and how these legal documents reflected confrontation of Russia and England in the region. The study is mainly based on the formal-legal, historical legal and comparative-legal methods. Also author used the methods of legal anthropology and general history. The results of the research to a certain extant correlate with modern approaches in the policy of Russian and western powers in Central Asia in terms of political situation in the region as well as political, legal and cultural traditions of Central Asian states and peoples.
This article examines the role that conversations between children and adults play in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850), and late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century adaptations of it for a child audience. First, I show conversation as an important vector in Dickens’s exploration of child and adult knowledge in the original novel. The rules of conversation are suspended in mixed-age companies, as is most powerfully expressed in my titular example: an adult joke turning on the child David’s non-comprehension of a remark by Mr Murdstone. Nonetheless, other conversations show sensitive adults mitigating power differentials between child and adult, and present the child David as unusually perspicacious (in line with his overall characterization). Second, I turn to juvenile adaptations of David Copperfield by writers including Dickens’s granddaughter Mary Angela Dickens. I argue that these works minimize not just the number of conversations in direct speech, but also the process by which David makes conversational inferences; the (now third-person) narrator often fills conversational gaps for the child reader. In the final section, I argue that the relative unimportance of conversation in the adaptations, as opposed to Dickens’s novel, cannot be attributed to concerns with suitability or intelligibility alone. Instead, Dickens’s preoccupation with conversations between adults and children relates to David Copperfield’s original status as a crossover or cross-written text that would have been read by a mixed-age audience. Once this dual address is removed in the adaptations, age-levelled knowledge positions are of much less concern. As such, conversation in David Copperfield metaphorizes the labour (and ethical responsibilities) of the cross-writer.
Für den FIEC-Kongress in London 2019 wurde im Rahmen einer Diskussion über die Geschichte der Roman Society der Autor aufgefordert, über das Thema Development of Roman Studies in Britain from an Overseas Perspective zu sprechen. Die Thematik wurde an der Verwendung der prosopographischen Methoden seit der Publikation der Prosopographia Imperii Romani erörtert, wie sie sich overseas und in Großbritannien entwickelt haben. Dabei wurden die verschiedenen Methoden der Auswertung solcher Daten in Deutschland und Frankreich mit denen in England verglichen und deren wichtiger kritischer Beitrag seit den späten 30er Jahren bis zur Veröffentlichung der Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire hervorgehoben.
At the FIEC 2019 Congress in London, as part of a panel discussion about the history of the Roman Society, the author was asked to speak on ‘The Development of Roman Studies in Britain from an Overseas Perspective’. In this paper, which stems from that presentation, the topic is discussed through a focus on the development of prosopographical methods since the publication of the Prosopographia Imperii Romani, both overseas and in Great Britain. The different methods of evaluating such data in Germany and France are compared with those in England, and the important critical contribution of British historiography from the late 1930s until the publication of the Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire is given special attention.
This article concerns the re-writing of an Irish historical moment within the short story genre, focusing on the renowned Irish writer Seán O’Faoláin (1900-1991). O’Faoláin, it is argued here, attempted to alleviate the “trauma” of the Irish Civil War (1922-1923) through his writing. This piece offers a comparative analysis of O’Faoláin’s treatment of the Civil War in his autobiography, Vive Moi! (1993), and in two short stories, “Fugue” and “The Bomb Shop”, from the collection Midsummer Night Madness (1932), examining his re-writing of several key episodes from the Civil War. As this article demonstrates, O’Faoláin re-wrote these so that they became part of a less contentious War of Independence narrative.
The status of George Bernard Shaw as an opera critic—a position he filled under the pen-name ‘Corno Di Bassetto’ in different periodicals such as The Star and The World—has been somewhat overlooked in the canon of late Victorian journalism. However, his critique of the 1880–1890 opera performances stands alone in its own right as the most influential early modern critical discourse on music drama in the British milieu. In the wake of his early enthusiasm for Wagner—a trait that pervades his writings on music during the late 1800s but nonetheless declines with the turn of the century—Shaw’s opera criticism suggests a new theory of music drama the author applies methodically to sundry opera traditions. However, this theory changes dramatically when Shaw addresses French authors, ranging from Léo Delibes, Jules Massenet and Georges Bizet to Charles Gounod. This essay examines how Shaw’s vision of the genre changes after his development of the Life Force theory, which, in turn, compels the reader to reassess Shaw’s understanding of the French opera tradition in the late 1880s and 1890s. This probing into Shaw’s evaluation of French music drama will serve to determine its actual influence on Shaw’s opera criticism.
In this paper I propose to study Mycroft Holmes’s club in the Sherlock Holmes stories: the Diogenes Club is rather close to an oxymoron as the golden rule is that the members are not allowed to speak to one another. I will show how this textual detail, that eminently Doylian delicious paradox, can read as a rather elaborate parody of the ambivalence of Victorian clubs, where the ideal of sociability cohabits with a more dissident taste for secrecy and seclusion. It can also read as a metatextual clue to the strategic importance of silence in Conan Doyle’s text. That famous inquisitive text, a positivist celebration of the powers of logos, also makes room for a crucial vindication of silence, and creates the paradoxical possibility for the text to escape the very paradigms it powerfully establishes.