bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
“Such Confusion As I Never Dreamt”
Authors: Thrush Coll
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores how the the combination of animal domestication and widespread urbanization across Europe, Asia, and Africa had led to the development of epidemic diseases against which Indigenous peoples in the Americas and elsewhere had little or no natural resistance. It was this urban reality that had likely cost the lives of the Algonquian people who disappeared into the city and that had prevented four of the five Inuit from making it home. Meanwhile, in London, for all the improvements of the Enlightenment—new understandings of disease, inoculation, and advances in urban design—disease remained one of the most intractable and threatening of urban realities. What scholars have called ecological imperialism, the means by which biology facilitated Europe's imperial and colonial incursions, had its roots in the city.
A Hat Factory, circa 1875
Authors: Thrush Coll
Published: May 2017

Above a sea of chimneypotted and stovepiped men,four gargoyles perch in the Oxford Street skyline.Neither lions nor demons nor saints: beavers. They look down fromHenry Heath’s factory, where seventy men sew and blockVictorian manhood.Newly carved and ensconced, the beavers are already epitaphs...
A Notebook, 1929
Authors: Thrush Coll
Published: May 2017

Do you see this?He pins black cloth over his greatcoat,leaves his room in Warner Street and trundles his olding bonesdown to the Strandwhere Australia House corners the thoroughfare.The black cloth speaks indictment. Coveredin toy skeletons, it drapes his stooping shoulders,...
The First Victory
Authors: Stewart Andrew
Published: May 2017

This book presents a new account of the long-overlooked achievement of British-led forces who, against all odds, scored the first major Allied victory of the Second World War. Surprisingly neglected in accounts of Allied wartime triumphs, in 1941 British and Commonwealth forces completed a stunning and important victory in East Africa against an overwhelmingly superior Italian opponent. A hastily formed British-led force, never larger than 70,000 strong, advanced along two fronts to defeat nearly 300,000 Italian and colonial troops. This book draws on an array of previously unseen documents to provide both a detailed campaign history and a fresh appreciation of the first significant Allied success of the war. The book investigates such topics as Britain's African wartime strategy; how the fighting forces were assembled (most from British colonies, none from the U.S.); General Archibald Wavell's command abilities and his difficult relationship with Winston Churchill; the resolute Italian defense at Keren, one of the most bitterly fought battles of the entire war; the legacy of the campaign in East Africa; and much more.
War Comes to East Africa
Authors: Stewart Andrew
Published: May 2017

This chapter analyzes how the militarization of East Africa increased dramatically during May and June 1940 as British and Commonwealth forces continued to assemble in anticipation of war breaking out with Italy. The policy of ambiguity and confusion which had existed since before the war had led to British Somaliland effectively being offered up for occupation. The prospect of taking advantage of the dramatically changed strategic position became too great for the Italian General Staff to ignore. They concluded that an attack against this territory and a quick and spectacular success could strengthen the flanks of Italian East Africa and raise the morale of Italian people everywhere. In a territory larger than England and Wales, defended by fewer than 3,000 British and Commonwealth troops, the scene was set for the first major battle of the East Africa campaign.
Imperial Defeat
Authors: Stewart Andrew
Published: May 2017

This chapter narrates how the loss of British Somaliland marked the first redrawing of the British Empire's map since 1931 when a strip of land in Sudan had been ceded to Italy. Major-General Reade Godwin-Austen admitted that what had happened drove him on during the subsequent campaign to show the Italians “what being overwhelmed by numbers and superior armament felt like.” Hitler apparently referred to it as a hard blow to British prestige, but it was actually more an emotional setback than a military one. All the British had lost was the privilege of maintaining an expensive garrison in their least valuable colony. However, the chapter shows how the Italians had failed to exploit the opportunities presented to them, and within a matter of months, this high point of victory would seem futile.
Preparing for the Counter-offensive
Authors: Stewart Andrew
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on the development of General Archibald Wavell's vision of a grand strategy as plans to support the rebellion on the Gojjam plateau gathered pace. To bring these to fruition, he had appointed Colonel Daniel Sandford to play a leading part. Sandford proposed the establishment of “Mission 101,” named after the percussion-type Fuse 101 used widely by the Royal Artillery, as it was his intention that his activities would ignite the Ethiopian revolt. Meanwhile, anxiety was growing within the senior ranks of the Italian military. The Italian commander still believed the offensive from Kenya would be a secondary effort, entirely as Wavell had anticipated, and his deception plans were already proving too sophisticated for his opponents.
Second Front
Authors: Stewart Andrew
Published: May 2017

This chapter illustrates how the opening shots of the East African offensive actually began on the northern front. The advance by British and Commonwealth troops that started from the Sudanese border saw some of the heaviest fighting and the most resolute defense conducted by the Italians, not just in this campaign but in any of the entire war. In many respects, it was what Wavell had anticipated from his earliest strategic reviews: that the Red Sea would prove an attractive draw to his opponents, who would place many of their best units in Eritrea and northern Ethiopia. Once the safety of the Red Sea was guaranteed, the United States could once again permit their merchant ships to use this route, which meant that more of the hard-pressed British shipping would be available for use elsewhere.
Conclusion
Authors: Stewart Andrew
Published: May 2017

This concluding chapter discusses how the campaign in East Africa was a great success both for the British and Commonwealth forces and the commanders who led them. A massive pincer movement through Italian Somaliland and Ethiopia converged with another that had advanced through Eritrea, and ended with a final series of assaults against a remote Italian mountain fortress. With a speed and comprehensiveness that was not foreseen in the original plan, an eventually significant victory came about gradually through the development of events and the overwhelming of a confused and progressively shattered opponent. This was the unanimous view of the small number of published eyewitness accounts where it was described as a military masterpiece of its time, whilst another conclusion stated that the campaign would go down in military history as a classic.
Introduction
Authors: Marques Leonardo
Published: May 2017

The introduction shows some of the main theoretical and historiographical approaches that are explored by the author. It also provides an outline of the main themes and sources discussed in the book.
Transitions, 1808–1820
Authors: Marques Leonardo
Published: May 2017

Chapter 3 discusses the impact of the slave trade act of 1807 and the multiple forms of U.S. participation in the slave trade during the 1810s. It shows how some forms became predominant over that period while others nearly disappeared. It also explores some of the broader political implications of the persistence of the slave trade after 1808 and the Missouri Crisis.
The Consolidation of the Contraband Slave Trade, 1820–1850
Authors: Marques Leonardo
Published: May 2017

Chapter 4 discusses the national political configurations that allowed the emergence of a contraband slave trade in Cuba and Brazil and its suppression in the United States. It also looks at the broader geopolitical and economic contexts that allowed the transatlantic slave trade to survive.
Slave Trading in the Slaveholding Republic, 1851–1858
Authors: Marques Leonardo
Published: May 2017

Chapter 6 assesses the multiple forms of U.S. participation in the slave trade to Cuba. It shows how the abolition of the slave trade in Brazil led to a reconfiguration of slave trading networks and a stronger integration of U.S. resources in the traffic. It also discusses the transformation of New York into one of the main slave-trading ports of the Americas during the 1850s.
Introduction: Sincerity, Memory, Marketing, Media
Authors: Rutten Ellen
Published: May 2017

This book examines present-day sincerity rhetoric and its global outlines by focusing on Russia, a country that has historically maintained an excessive interest in the concept of sincerity. Over the past few years, the phrase novaia iskrennost'—the Russian equivalent of “new sincerity”—has been used by bloggers, politicians, and cultural critics to explain nostalgia for the Soviet era, Vladimir Putin's media policy, and the Russian interventions in Ukraine. Internationally renowned artist Oleg Kulik, for example, places a “new sincerity” at the heart of a new phase in contemporary Russian art and praises it in the work of Alla Esipovich, among others. Using the analytical perspective of a cultural historian, this book argues that in today's Russia, debates on sincerity and its inevitable contemporary twin, postmodernism, are always and inevitably debates on sincerity after Communism. It focuses on one social stratum within Russian society, cultural workers or creative professionals, with special attention to those working in the fields of Russian new media, cultural criticism, and literature.
“I Cried Twice”
Authors: Rutten Ellen
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the controversy surrounding Vladimir Sorokin's “sincere turn” in order to elucidate post-Communist thinking about artistic self-expression and commodification. Having gained fame as a nonconformist writer in the late Soviet era, Sorokin had acquired the status of a postmodernist Russian classic by the turn of the twenty-first century. At this point he astounded his public with a prose trilogy that revolved wholly around the need for human sincerity and for “speaking with the heart.” From an outright dismissal of socioethical commitment, Sorokin now moved to classic literary self-fashioning models to which openness and truth telling are imperative. The chapter proposes a nonessentialist approach— one that is inspired by recent theorizations of sincerity by Rosenbaum and like-minded scholars, who advocate a reading of the concept that accepts the tension between sincerity's moral charge and an artist's inevitable involvement in market mechanisms. It considers how sincerity rhetoric works in Sorokin's public self-fashioning and reception and describes thinking on post-Soviet creative life.
“So New Sincerity”
Authors: Rutten Ellen
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the relationship between sincerity and digitization and how sincerity relates to such central concepts in the sincerity-and-media debate as amateurism, imperfection, and craft. It considers the many online “produsers”—media expert Axel Bruns's term for denoting that, online, “distinctions between producers and users of content have faded into comparative insignificance”—who use online self-publishing tools to publicly share their views on sincerity. The chapter problematizes existing notions of mediatization and authenticity and discusses current debates about our “mediated” world. It calls for a move beyond Western paradigms and more transcultural sensitiveness in the academic debate on new media, reality, and honesty. It also looks at existing studies' near-exclusive emphasis on authenticity, sincerity's conceptual twin. It shows that in post-Soviet space, those who reflect on the impact of new media on our lives show a special interest not in authenticity but in sincerity.
Conclusion: Sincerity Dreams
Authors: Rutten Ellen
Published: May 2017

This conclusion reflects on today's dreams of renewing or revitalizing sincerity and rejects the notion that they are outdated or do not deserve any of our attention. It cites the work of several scholars to show that sincerity is anything but obsolete in twenty-first-century popular culture. Indeed, today's strivings to renew sincerity have not been neglected by scholars such as R. Jay Magill Jr., Epstein, and Yurchak. The rhetoric on new sincerity has been addressed in thoughtful analyses of contemporary culture that have helped the author in crafting a comprehensive and geographically inclusive analysis of present-day sincerity rhetoric. In post-Communist Russia, debates on a shift to late or post-postmodern cultural paradigms are thriving with at least as much fervor as—and possibly more than—in Western Europe or the United States. This conclusion discusses the newly gained insights which the author's sincerity study offers.
Introduction
Authors: Lake Jessica
Published: May 2017

In 2015 Lastonia Leviston successfully sued rapper ’50 Cent for breach of privacy after he uploaded a sex tape of her without consent. She relied upon statutory laws forged in 1903 in the wake of a case brought by young Abigail Roberson to prevent the use of her pretty face in advertisements. This chapter introduces a new interdisciplinary history of the evolution of privacy law that places the legal activism of individual women front and center. The invention of a legal ‘right to privacy’ in the United States did not begin nor end with Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis’ famous Harvard Law Review article in 1890. The advent of photography and cinema in the mid to late 19th century caused new harms to individuals, particularly women. A right to privacy became the discourse for protesting the unauthorised circulation and publication of women’s images, as contemporary debates concerning the 1888 Bill to Protect Ladies demonstrate. This chapter also connects the gendered history of ‘a right to privacy’ to current issues concerning the regulation of the unauthorised circulation of women’s nude or otherwise explicit images online, known as revenge pornography or non-consensual pornography.
Setting the Scene
Authors: Lake Jessica
Published: May 2017

This chapter offers an analysis of the changes in visual technologies that were occurring in the nineteenth century and the ways in which photography and cinema radically altered the experience of seeing and being seen by others. For the picture taker, photography offered many pleasures; for the pictured subject, however, it created an acute tension between feelings of identification and alienation. I argue that the invention of photography and its fashioning as an amateur pastime (led by George Eastman and the Kodak company) from the 1880s, together with the development of cinema at the end of the nineteenth century, occasioned the potential for new harms to pictured subjects (especially women) for which existing laws provided inadequate redress. This chapter discusses the popularity of ‘detective’ cameras and surreptitious photography and the ways in which the camera became a gendered device – with advertisements and news commentary employing camera-as-firearm associations and casting young men as ‘hunting’ for pictures of ‘pretty girls’. It also demonstrates the potential discomfort of becoming a subject upon the silent screen in early film history and how film studios appropriated people’s personal narratives in their drive for sellable stories.
Medical Men and Peeping Toms
Authors: Lake Jessica
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines cases in which a right to privacy was invoked by women to protest against violations of their bodies or the bodies of their newborn babies. This chapter offers a history of the right to privacy that charts the ways in which the law traditionally “protected” women’s bodies by treating them as male property and confining them to the home. The advent of the camera, its ability to penetrate physical and temporal boundaries, and its creation of movable as well as moving images, brought into question the efficacy of laws such as trespass and nuisance (grounded in physical structures) to protect personal privacy. To highlight the new invasions inflicted by the camera, I compare the cases of DeMay v Roberts and Feeney v Young, which involved the optic violation of a woman’s reproductive body by a stranger’s eyes and a camera respectively. Using a series of medical cases, I argue that many women invoked a right to privacy to protest against the transformation of their bodies (and the bodies of their dead deformed infants) into voyeuristic spectacles of “monstrosity”.
Privacy, the Celluloid City, and the Cinematic Eye
Authors: Lake Jessica
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on the cinematic camera’s recordings of women in urban public space. It examines claims to a right to privacy in relation to early nonfiction film in the form of cinema advertising, newsreels and documentaries. The cases discussed are significant for their contribution to the development of privacy law, and to the study of early film history. They offer insights into the discomfort experienced by those caught unknowingly in a motion picture during this period. The plaintiffs (all women) tell vividly of their shock and distress at becoming the object of a mass gaze, with their movements and mannerisms looming larger than life on the big screen. These women fought for restrictions on the practices of early filmmaking, but the cases also reveal the limits of the doctrine of privacy when used in this context. Courts tended to frame the issue in terms of the gendered public/private dichotomy (so entrenched within the law), usually privileging the masculine “public interest” in nonfiction filmmaking (for news, documentary or ethnographic purposes) over a woman’s individual right to privacy.
Conclusion
Authors: Lake Jessica
Published: May 2017

In the conclusion, I discuss the implications of privacy’s gendered history – did this doctrine reinforce traditional ideals of femininity or did it assist in women’s struggle for equal citizenship? Did the legal community initially frame the question of whether individuals should have rights to their images as one of ‘privacy’ because women brought the majority of the claims? Would it have been framed differently, such as an issue of property rights, if men brought cases in equal or greater numbers? The concluding chapter also comments upon the ways in which this history relates to and informs contemporary debates about the circulation and publication of naked or sexually explicit images of women on the Internet. I argue that current attempts by women and their advocates to address the phenomenon of revenge pornography or nonconsensual pornography echo the earlier struggles for image rights and the recognition of a right to privacy that began in the first years of the 20th century. I also reflect upon the importance of emphasising the experiences of plaintiffs as well as the outcomes of cases in legal history; and the benefits of interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersections of law, film studies and women’s history.
The Indian State’s Capacity to Get Things Done
Authors: Ganguly Sumit , Thompson William R.
Published: May 2017

This introductory chapter assesses state capacity in India. There is little question, as many boosters of India's rise have argued, that the Indian state has exhibited considerable ability to tackle diverse challenges since its emergence from the collapse of the British Indian Empire. It has, for the most part, successfully fended off external challenges to its territorial integrity; it has worn down a series of secessionist insurgencies and has managed to cope with the many fissiparous tendencies of ethnic, class, and religious cleavages that some analysts thought would tear the country apart in the 1960s. However, state capacity remains paradoxical in India. India does not possess a weak state, but neither does it have a strong state. Its state capacity falls in between the conventional weak-strong continuum. As a consequence, the Indian state manifests both strengths and weakness, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes intermittently.
Ascending Major Powers
Authors: Ganguly Sumit , Thompson William R.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the ascent of states conventionally accorded great power status in the past century and a half. These states include Italy, Germany, the United States, and Japan. What is clear from the survey of previous ascents is that strong states are not a prerequisite for achieving elite status in world politics. Yet the absence of this institutional capacity may constitute a major domestic constraint. Continued economic growth and resource mobilization hinge on effective state interventions. Thus, problems with state capacity should be expected to hinder the rise of states to great power status. Similarly, once higher status has been achieved, problems with state capacity should be expected to get in the way of operationalizing an elite position in world politics.
Conceptualizing and Measuring State Strength
Authors: Ganguly Sumit , Thompson William R.
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on conceptualizing and measuring state strength. Measuring anything in politics, let alone state strength, is never straightforward. By and large, state strength measurements usually arise in analyses of civil war and in studies discussing failed states. Multiple indicators have been used to capture three different emphases on state capacity or strength: military, bureaucratic/administrative, and political institution quality and coherence. Military capacity refers to the standard Weberian focus on the state's monopoly of the use of legitimate force within the state's boundaries. Bureaucratic/administrative capacity stresses the ability of the state to monitor problems and to address them in a way that is considered to be fair and unbiased. Lastly, in political institution quality and coherence, the measurement emphasis has usually been placed on assuming that regimes that are neither consolidated autocracies nor democracies are likely to be less coherent and to be characterized by poor-quality institutions.
Infrastructure
Authors: Ganguly Sumit , Thompson William R.
Published: May 2017

This chapter looks at infrastructural problems that underpin or hamper economic growth and improved quality of life. There is ample circular causation at work in Indian infrastructure. As a consequence, it is hard to expect improvements in one area without improvements across the board. Yet it is also hard to imagine radical improvements across the board taking place quickly or soon. Roads, trains, and ports all compete with one another. Water and health interact tremendously. Energy and education impose major constraints on what can be done within the economy. Legal system constraints interfere with taking care of disputes within both the society and the economy. All of these systems interact. All add up to an infrastructure that holds back economic growth and improvements in lifestyle.
Inequality
Authors: Ganguly Sumit , Thompson William R.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the state of income inequality in India. A vigorous debate is currently underway in India and abroad about the question of economic inequality, especially in the wake of spectacular economic growth in the aftermath of the country's embrace of liberal economic policies. The debate has focused on whether or not growth should be seen as the principal engine for reducing inequalities. Atul Kohli, a noted political scientist, proffers a third view. He focuses on the shift to more market-oriented policies and their myriad shortcomings. According to Kohli, the persistence of poverty and the growth in inequality stem from the policy choices of a number of regimes, starting in the 1990s, to favor corporate entities at the cost of addressing public and social needs.
Democratic Institutions
Authors: Ganguly Sumit , Thompson William R.
Published: May 2017

This chapter looks at Indian democratic institutions. Contrary to popular belief, the British did little or nothing to promote the growth of democratic institutions in India. Instead, Indian nationalists from the late nineteenth century onward successfully appropriated liberal-democratic principles from the United Kingdom and infused them into the Indian political context. Under the influence of Mohandas K. Gandhi in the 1930s, these beliefs and principles were disseminated to a broad swath of India's population via the Indian National Congress, the leading nationalist political party. As this was occurring, the British colonial regime was losing few opportunities to thwart or at least contain the growth of democratic sentiment and practice in India. The Indian nationalists can justifiably claim that each step toward self-rule and democratic governance was the result of sustained and unrelenting political agitation against authoritarian colonial rule.
Grand Strategy
Authors: Ganguly Sumit , Thompson William R.
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses changes in India's grand strategy over time and weaknesses associated with its future plans. India has long had a grand strategy and a largely stable set of goals. One of its most consistent features has been the quest for great power status. It initially sought to achieve this through the pursuit of an ideational foreign policy. Ideational foreign policies stress leadership in promoting ideas such as nonalignment or third-world solidarity. Subsequently, India's grand strategy adopted a mix of ideational and material approaches in pursuit of those ends. In the wake of the Cold War, it has tilted quite significantly toward acquiring the requisite material capabilities to pursue that goal. Nevertheless, a segment of its policy-making apparatus seems unable and indeed unwilling to completely shed its attachment to some ideational concerns, however atavistic and very possibly counterproductive to its goal of achieving great power status.
Defense and Security Policies
Authors: Ganguly Sumit , Thompson William R.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines defense policies and movements toward acquiring capabilities that will permit India to project its influence over longer distances than has previously been the case. Despite institutional slackness and bureaucratic hurdles, India is acquiring significant military might to cope with a range of threats. It is also developing a power-projection capability, as can be inferred from some of its military acquisitions. Unfortunately, cost overruns, poor results, and persistent deals characterize the vast majority of its domestic military programs. Even its foreign-weapons-acquisition process evinces a process that is extremely cumbrous and unwieldy. Nevertheless, India has managed to suppress, or at least contain, all domestic challenges to its security and territorial integrity.
Ascending India–Its State-Capacity Problems and Prospects
Authors: Ganguly Sumit , Thompson William R.
Published: May 2017

This concluding chapter focuses on India's state-capacity problems and prospects. Its population may become the world's largest, its economy is becoming one of the world's largest, and its military power will probably move along at least a similar upward trajectory. Yet just about everything concerning India is characterized by developmental handicaps of one sort or another. Too many people are poor, infrastructure is lacking, and demands on the state for action to remedy these problems are multiplying. The Indian state, on the other hand, is characterized by a mixture of strengths and weaknesses. It scores high on its democratic attributes but much less so on its overall effectiveness. It has been and continues to be plagued by peripheral insurgencies and separatist movements. Moreover, its extraction capacity has improved but still has a long way to go, given the tasks the state needs to undertake.
The Fleet
Authors: Storrs Christopher
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses Philip V’s creation of a royal fleet. It also considers the expansion of that fleet. Associated with this was a major reorganisation of the fleet. A larger fleet required new measures to ensure a supply of seamen. Equally, an officer corps must be available. Despite advances of the state, sea power remained dependent on substantial private sector involvement.
Finances
Authors: Storrs Christopher
Published: May 2017

This chapter considers how Philip V funded a succession of costly foreign expeditions and interventions, in the context of contemporary interest in the “fiscal-military state.” It discusses the proportion of income and expenditure devoted to army, navy and other war-associated costs and relates growth in both to war abroad. It considers the way revenues were maximised and the importance of credit, or debt.
Government and Politics
Authors: Storrs Christopher
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses both the overhaul of central and local government in Philip V’s Spain and the elements of continuity with the Habsburg era. It also discusses the role of king, queen, and ministers. It further discusses the existence and importance of constitutional restraints, political life, opinion, and opposition in the context of Philip V’s foreign revanchism.
Foral Spain
Authors: Storrs Christopher
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses the relationship between Philip V’s subjection of the territories of the kingdom of Aragon and his Mediterranean adventures. It argues for greater participation of those territories in Philip’s projects. It also suggests that despite greater centralisation and integration, Philip’s Spain remained a very diverse, or “composite,” polity.
Spain’s Resurgence, 1713–1748
Authors: Storrs Christopher
Published: May 2017

This chapter draws the arguments of the preceding ones to a final conclusion. It summarizes the conclusions of the individual chapters. It also poses the question of the implications of Philip’s achievement for the much denigrated reign of his predecessor, Charles II.
Perceptions of Failure
Authors: Wu Albert Monshan
Published: May 2017

The introduction begins with examples of German missionaries and mission societies who started as cultural chauvinists in the nineteenth century but had cast such beliefs aside by the 1930s. It lays out the broader arguments and questions of the book: German missionaries, propelled by their sense of failure in the missionary field, began to repudiate their former beliefs. The German missionary encounter produced new reflections not only on the relationship between Europe and China, but also on the nature of Christianity itself. The introduction also explores how a study of the German missionary encounter with China intersects with three broader scholarly literatures: the history of modern China, modern German religious history, and the history of global Christianity. It also sheds light on broader conceptual concerns, such as secularization, globalization, and cross-cultural encounters.
The Missionary Impulse
Authors: Wu Albert Monshan
Published: May 2017

This chapter investigates the broader global context that generated the nineteenth-century missionary revival, which laid the foundation for missionary organizations like the Protestant Berlin Missionary Society (BMS) and the Catholic Society of the Divine Word (SVD). Witnessing the rise of revolutionary anti-clerical forces swell in the late eighteenth century, the founders of both missionary societies lived during a period of deep anxiety about the fate of Christianity. Missionary leaders channeled these anxieties. They recruited pious young men and sent them across the globe with the hopes of winning new converts as a way to combat the forces of secularism. This chapter argues that anxiety and optimism formed the dual pillars that propped up the nineteenth- century German missionary mind.
Responding to Failure
Authors: Wu Albert Monshan
Published: May 2017

This chapter explains how the confidence that permeated the missions field in the middle of the nineteenth century quickly dissipated and how missionaries responded to perceptions of their failures. The rapid missionary expansion in the nineteenth century inspired violent response, particularly in China, which continued to outlaw Christian evangelization. Not just in China, but worldwide, Christian missions faced slow growth, and missionary leaders grew impatient. This chapter examines the participation of German missionaries at a series of international conferences held in Liverpool, Shanghai, and the Vatican in the second half of the nineteenth century. Spurred by these conferences, German missionary leaders argued that creating a Chinese church was a crucial component of missionary work. The chapter also examines how national rivalries prevented missionaries from creating a united front in China.
Unfulfilled Promises
Authors: Wu Albert Monshan
Published: May 2017

This chapter asks: If by the 1920s, both German missionary societies had embraced the impetus to transfer control to Chinese church leaders, why did independence still remain such a slow and arduous process? The chapter argues that persistent political, social, and economic instability hindered the missionaries from giving their Chinese Christian leaders more power. The Chinese themselves also thought that they were not ready for church independence. Ultimately, a series of catastrophic political events—the escalation of the Sino-Japanese War in the 1930s and the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany in 1933—catalyzed the Germans to relinquish their power.
Failure and Success
Authors: Wu Albert Monshan
Published: May 2017

The conclusion offers some suggestions for the broader implications of studying the German missionary enterprise in China. It argues that the German Protestant and Catholic models of missionary work, with the stress on individual conversion, devoid of direct social and political critique, look remarkably similar to the type of Christianity driving religious conversion in China today. The debates between liberal and conservative approaches to indigenization within the German missionary enterprise in the 1920s also continue to exist within the global Christian community. The chapter concludes by comparing the trajectories of two individual German missionaries, one Catholic and one Protestant, as a way to illuminate the broader arguments in the book.
Syria and the Middle East on the eve of civil war
Authors: Phillips Christopher
Published: May 2017

This chapter sets the historical context for the book. It sketches out the international relations of the Middle East on the eve of the Syrian civil war, considering how the perception of US hegemony impacted the Middle East and how that began to change after the 2003 Iraq war. On the eve of civil war, Syria and the Middle East appeared deceptively stable. Regionally, Barack Obama's proposed engagement with former enemies Iran, Russia, and Syria suggested a less militaristic approach to the region than that of his predecessor. However, the Bush administration's policies, particularly the 2003 Iraq war and its aftermath, had already set about transforming the regional order. Against this backdrop in Syria, President Bashar al Assad had come through an uneasy first decade in power.
A legitimate representative? Supporting and subverting Syria’s political opposition
Authors: Phillips Christopher
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses the anti-Assad states' support for political opposition groups. It outlines the evolution of the Syrian opposition and charts how the main external supporters contributed to its weakness, particularly Saudi Arabia. Underestimating the Assad regime's durability was a costly error by its international opponents, but as damaging was the overestimation of Syria's opposition and its ability to form a united and effective force. In 2011, the traditional opposition to Assad was weak and fragmented, divided along multiple fault lines; including between insiders and exiles, and between Islamists and secularists. However, foreign states' pursuit of their own agendas combined with a frequent lack of ability actually helped to keep the opposition fragmented and ineffective.
To the hilt: Assad’s allies dig in
Authors: Phillips Christopher
Published: May 2017

This chapter investigates Assad's allies, particularly Iran, and their support for the regime. From the beginning of Syria's civil war, Assad's allies were more willing to ensure the regime's survival than those states that wished to hasten its fall. For the first four years, Iran was by far Assad's most important ally. Major General Qassem Suleimani led a major reorganisation of the regime's forces, brought in Hezbollah and other Shia militias, and directed key aspects of military strategy. Financial and military support prevented the regime from collapsing under pressure, while Iran and Hezbollah's role significantly contributed to sectarianising the conflict. Such deep involvement by Assad's allies greatly impacted the shape of the Syrian civil war.
Introduction
Authors: Marglin Jessica M.
Published: May 2017

This introductory chapter presents the Assarraf family as the focal point of study, before providing an overview on the Jewish, Islamic, and international legal background of this family and that of many other such families in Morocco. It brings up the intersections inherent in the legal system that Jews in Morocco have enjoyed, highlighting the potential for this subject for further academic study. In particular, the Assarrafs' movement between Jewish and shariʻa courts is relevant to Jewish, Middle Eastern, and legal historians, for somewhat different reasons—and as the chapter shows, contrary to prevailing opinion, the Jews were not isolated within their own legal system.
The Legal World of Moroccan Jews
Authors: Marglin Jessica M.
Published: May 2017

This chapter offers a topography of courts, notaries, and judicial officials, including both how they functioned and how they fit together. It describes how Jews in particular—as subordinate subjects with increasingly international clout—were received in these institutions. The chapter first focuses on the Jewish quarter where the Assarrafs lived, before exploring the notaries public and Jewish courts that together made up the main institutions applying Jewish law. It then turns to the heart of Fez, where the city's main Islamic legal institutions were situated, before expanding this map to include legal networks on a national and international scale. The map drawn in this chapter thus serves as a reminder of how the different legal orders functioning in Morocco stood in relation to one another.
The Law of the Market
Authors: Marglin Jessica M.
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on the Assarrafs and the ways in which they engaged Muslim notaries public and shariʻa courts to sustain their quotidian business dealings. It shows that Jewish merchants like Shalom and Yaʻakov Assarraf used local Islamic legal institutions frequently because of their extensive commercial relations with Muslims. The absence of a formal banking system and the increasingly short supplies of cash, especially in rural areas, meant that Jewish merchants sold most of their wares on credit. In order to ensure that extending credit would be profitable, Jewish merchants relied on shariʻa courts to document and enforce the debts they accumulated. Islamic legal institutions were thus central to how Jewish merchants did business.
Breaking and Blurring Jurisdictional Boundaries
Authors: Marglin Jessica M.
Published: May 2017

This chapter looks more closely at the interplay between Jewish and Islamic courts. It discusses instances in which Jews chose to bring cases to Islamic legal institutions even when they could have remained in Jewish courts, and when Muslims similarly chose to use Jewish legal institutions rather than stay in Islamic ones. The chapter also argues that Jews' and Muslims' movement across jurisdictional boundaries caused judicial officials from both communities to accommodate the realities of legal pluralism. Islamic law and Jewish law converged toward each other—Islamic law by accommodating the existence and validity of Jewish legal institutions, and Jewish law by accommodating the presence of Muslims in Jewish courts.
Appeals in an International Age
Authors: Marglin Jessica M.
Published: May 2017

This chapter utilizes four case studies to illustrate how Jews increasingly saw foreigners—both diplomats and international Jewish organizations—as a resource when they believed they had been victims of abuse. Yet while Jews wrote more and more petitions to powerful figures in Europe and the Americas, they also continued to demand their rights from the Makhzan; outside intervention did not replace Jews' appeals to Moroccan government officials, but it did expand the number of options to which Jews had access and thus change their legal calculus. Similarly, as increasing numbers of Jews acquired foreign protection or nationality, the numbers of Jews using consular courts rose.
Epilogue
Authors: Marglin Jessica M.
Published: May 2017

This concluding chapter returns to the Assarraf family, tracing some of the descendants' trajectories out of Morocco and across the Moroccan-Jewish diaspora to France, Israel, and the United States. In reflecting on the departure of the vast majority of Morocco's Jews for Israel, Europe, and the Americas, the chapter reinserts law into the broader story of Jews' experience in modern North Africa. The far-flung traces of Jews' legal lives in nineteenth-century Morocco tell a story about mobility in the context of inequality, about integration in the face of high social and legal barriers, and about the deceptions of colonial modernity. The chapter also considers how these stories make us rethink the nature of interreligious relations and the place of law in both transcending and reinforcing hierarchies of difference.
Anna and Tranquillo
Authors: Stow Kenneth
Published: May 2017

This text presents an historical interpretation of the diary of an eighteenth-century Jewish woman who resisted the efforts of the papal authorities to force her religious conversion. After being seized by the papal police in Rome in May 1749, Anna del Monte, a Jew, kept a diary detailing her captors' efforts over the next thirteen days to force her conversion to Catholicism. Anna's powerful chronicle of her ordeal at the hands of authorities of the Roman Catholic Church, originally circulated by her brother Tranquillo in 1793, receives its first English-language translation along with an insightful interpretation in this book of the incident's legal and historical significance. The book's analysis of Anna's dramatic story of prejudice, injustice, resistance, and survival during her two-week imprisonment in the Roman House of Converts—and her brother's later efforts to protest state-sanctioned, religion-based abuses—provides a detailed view of the separate forces on either side of the struggle between religious and civil law in the years just prior to the massive political and social upheavals in America and Europe.
The Diary
Authors: Stow Kenneth
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines how Anna del Monte lived closed within ghetto walls; and like all other Jews in that city, she was constantly pressed to renounce Judaism and accept Christianity. Conversionary activities in Anna's day were intense and sometimes violent. She left a record of her experiences, which her brother Tranquillo del Monte heavily edited and began to circulate in a handwritten copy in 1793, years after Anna's death. This record, properly titled Anna's Ratto—her kidnapping, but often called her diary—furnishes unique testimony to Roman Jewry's late eighteenth-century plight. Through his correspondence with other Jewish communities, Tranquillo had learned of the enormous gap separating the increasingly desperate straits of Roman Jewry from the vast improvements in rights and civic standing recently won by the Jews of Western Europe and the new United States.
The Roman Ghetto
Authors: Stow Kenneth
Published: May 2017

This chapter analyzes the Roman Jewry's political condition—the scene of the drama, its setting, and its background—and draws a picture of the core of Roman Jewish life: the Roman Ghetto. By the eighteenth century, the ghetto had become a wretched place. What had set the decline in motion were policies begun in 1555 by Pope Paul IV and continued by his successors, often with greater rigor. Over hundreds of years, there was an incremental hardening of limitations on Jews that the canon law of the Church had established as early as the eighth and ninth centuries. The bull Cum nimis absurdum set policy not only for Rome, but also for all places under direct papal rule, which meant most of central Italy. It also put pressure on adjacent principalities to follow suit.
The Jews’ Defenders
Authors: Stow Kenneth
Published: May 2017

This chapter argues that studying the case of Anna del Monte reveals the perplexity of forward legal process hindered by confessional priorities. Fixated as they were on “enlightening” those still living in what they considered “darkness,” the Churchmen of eighteenth-century Rome were consumed with fulfilling the promise of John 10:16—that one day there would be one flock and one pastor, whose place was being held for the time being by God's Vicar on earth, the pope. Reassurance that the process was already in motion came from each individual conversion. The Church's leadership was apparently convinced that conversion would prove more than anything else that the ship of the Church had not foundered.
Jewish and Christian Awareness
Authors: Stow Kenneth
Published: May 2017

This chapter describes how the Jews of Rome were perfectly aware of the forces that governed their existence. Accordingly, when legal, spiritual, cultural, and social distinctions of persons were removed under Napoleonic rule, the Jews hastened to respond optimistically. However, the Jews did not need to await Napoleonic liberation to appreciate how contradictory and absurd had been their condition. Scholars such as Giovanni Battista de Luca, Carlo Luti, and Giuseppe Sessa openly questioned, or were at least uneasy about, the paradox of Jews being simultaneously cives yet still denied full civic rights. The persona of Anna del Monte as Tranquillo fashioned it is that of “a figure on the seam.” Anna's story encapsulates the winds of the past, but it was no less a prologue to a sometimes precarious future.
A Spiritual Economy
Authors: Blanton Thomas R. , Welborn Larry L
Published: May 2017

Utilizing theories of gift exchange from Seneca to Marcel Mauss and beyond, Thomas Blanton explains the operation of the gift economy at work in the letters of Paul of Tarsus. The book shows how Paul adapted discourses and practices of gift exchange to motivate the transmission of goods and services based on an ethic of reciprocity. In an economy of symbolic goods, Paul posited that gifts proceeding from the god of Israel could be incompletely reciprocated through the donation of money, material goods, labor services, or the extension of hospitality: “spiritual” benefactions were reciprocated by the donation of material goods and services. But the idea of “spiritual gifts” was also instrumental in orchestrating sociopolitical hierarchies. Paul claimed a relatively high status as an “apostle,” or mediator of heavenly gifts, and was able even to effect an inversion in the “normal” system of social evaluation whereby wealthy and educated persons held higher status than did manual laborers and craftsmen, such as Paul himself. Overturning some of the conventions associated with patronage, Paul asserted that the material goods supplied by patronal figures could only inadequately reciprocate the “spiritual gifts” that Paul mediated. In this way, he was able to lay claim not only to material goods and labor services but also to a relatively high status as a mediator of gifts that were valued highly within early Christian groups. The book’s development and elaboration of theories of gift exchange are pertinent to the fields of anthropology, sociology, and religious studies.