Urbanization, place of experiment and how the electric fish was caught by Emil du Bois-Reymond

Laboratories, along with the researchers, organisms, instruments, and experiments associated with these places of investigation, are not isolated from the world beyond their physical and institutional boundaries. Both laboratories and the cities in which they are embedded are subject to change, as was most dramatically apparent in their dynamic and far-reaching transformation during the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century. Using the example of Berlin and the institutionalization of experimental physiology by Emil du Bois-Reymond, in this paper I study experimental work on frogs and fish in order to demonstrate how a city and a laboratory cooperate in the production of knowledge. Emil du Bois-Reymond's research on electric fish illustrates how an exotic organism and a laboratory came together in a city and how the research was driven by innovation and development in urban and industrial technology. Ongoing changes in the urban landscape entered du Bois-Reymond's workplace and became part of the material culture of his experimental physiology and his attempts to demonstrate that the electric fish discharge is fundamentally similar to the excitation of nerve and muscle.     

Urbanization,Place of Experiment And How the Electric Fish Was Caught by Emil Du Bois-Reymond

Laboratories, along with the researchers, organisms, instruments, and experiments associated with these places of investigation, are not isolated from the world beyond their physical and institutional boundaries. Both laboratories and the cities in which they are embedded are subject to change, as was most dramatically apparent in their dynamic and far-reaching transformation during the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century. Using the example of Berlin and the institutionalization of experimental physiology by Emil du Bois-Reymond, in this paper I study experimental work on frogs and fish in order to demonstrate how a city and a laboratory cooperate in the production of knowledge. Emil du Bois-Reymond's research on electric fish illustrates how an exotic organism and a laboratory came together in a city and how the research was driven by innovation and development in urban and industrial technology. Ongoing changes in the urban landscape entered du Bois-Reymond's workplace and became part of the material culture of his experimental physiology and his attempts to demonstrate that the electric fish discharge is fundamentally similar to the excitation of nerve and muscle.     

Wrinkles in Time: Old Age,Gender and Temporality in Nineteenth-Century Germany

This article explores one of the classic questions in the history of old age: what happened to the status of the elderly in the nineteenth century? How do we explain the emergence of the modern notion of an old age defined by ‘declines’ of every sort (cognitive, physical, financial)? The article focuses on Germany, then and now a global leader on this issue, and it focuses on women, whose ageing was more widely discussed than that of men. It shows that the great nineteenth-century debate about the elderly was not about industrialisation, labour, health or social policy. It was a debate about time. The cultural understanding of the elderly changed because the culture of temporality did. The focus on futurity and the youth around 1900 is well known, as modern Germany became convulsed with imperial fantasies and electric urban life. This had, it turns out, negative repercussions for older Germans. No longer the accretions of a long past of wisdom and experience, they were identified instead with their short future of corporeal decline and death. The social attitude towards older people is therefore related to the broader social attitude towards time, history and change: a finding that might apply in other times and places, including our own.     

Into the Spiral of Problematic Perceptions: Modern Anti-Semitism and gebildetes Burgertum in Nineteenth-Century Germany

This article attempts to relate modern anti-Semitism to theincreasingly close interactions of Jews and non-Jews in an ageof political emancipation and social integration. It arguesthat the changing mutual perceptions of Jews and Protestantsin the German educated bourgeoisie are of central importancein this regard. In nineteenth-century Germany, literature movementssuch as realism, and various human sciences such as anthropology,Protestant theology or philology provided ample material fordiscussing the Jewish character. These fields suggest four waysof perceiving Jews: the Jew as parvenu, as Talmudist, as materialistand as nomad. Indeed, bourgeois Jews themselves contributedto these literary and scholarly debates. Their discussions werefrequently shaped by the attempt to confront anti-Jewish misconceptions.Moreover, they propagated their own interpretation of the Jewishcharacter: the figure of the humanistic Jew. This Jewish interpretation,which identifies a universal mission, proves to have a twofoldnature: it is not only a counter-attack against anti-Semiticpolemics, but also a particular result of the peculiar Jewishadaptation of bourgeois culture. As the article argues, however,this humanistic perception of Jewish identity caused concernon the Protestant side, which led to further polemics and thusfurther Jewish defence. The resulting spiral of problematicperceptions was the consequence of the growing social intimacyof bourgeois Jews and Protestants in nineteenth-century Germany.Modern anti-Semitism, it is thus argued, can be interpretedas a specific form of rejection of ambivalence and the establishmentof neat binary codes in the confusing closeness of Jews andnon-Jews.     

Governing the Bottle: Alcohol,Race and Class in Nineteenth-Century India

Following a series of aggressive military campaigns across India, by the early nineteenth century, the East India Company had secured a more definitive political space for itself in India. However, in taking over the administration of the diwani, or administration and revenue collection duties in Bengal, the Company gained responsibility for the taxes that governed the production and sale of alcohol and drugs—the abkari system. The abkari duties represented an opportunity and challenge for the colonial state. What followed changed the social landscape of India as the Company developed a series of regulations to govern alcohol in both military and civil space. These laws quickly moved beyond earlier Mughal dictates on alcohol, revealing the state’s intent to mould society through taxation.

This article frames these colonial taxes on alcohol as a tool of governmentality. It argues that the state utilised the abkari department not simply as a means of generating revenue, but as a means of managing social relations and economic life in nineteenth-century India. It explores the path that the colonial state sought to forge between arguing for the ‘moral uplift’ of drinking populations and securing reliable revenue for Company (and later Crown) coffers. The laws themselves were often race- (and class-) specific, suggesting, for example, the pre-disposition of certain peoples to particular drinks. Moreover, the drinks themselves, whether toddy or ‘European’-style distilled spirits, were assigned a racial identity. While European observers viewed toddy as ‘natural’ and even beneficial when drunk by poor Indian labourers, in the throats of European soldiers it was labelled ‘dangerous’ or even lethal. Conversely, later Indian campaigners warned that ‘alien’ distilled spirits, such as whisky or rum, were completely foreign to India and that their introduction suggested a darker, less benevolent, side to India’s colonial rule. As such, these colonial controls on alcohol, and the debates that swirled around them, illuminate the ways in which the colonial state both understood and attempted to shape its subjects and servants.