Venture and Faith in the Commercial Life of the Ottoman Balkans, 1500–1650

British America; Edward L. Cox     

Welfare Systems and the Parish Nurse in Early Modern London, 1650–1725

Abstract

This article argues that the part played by parish nurses in the capital's welfare system requires radical reassessment. Such women were playing a central role in the lives of the poor by the early 18th century. It will demonstrate that, at least in some of London's large suburban parishes, there existed a surprisingly sophisticated network of parish nurses who played an important part in the overall care package delivered to paupers. Such nurses, often operating on a very substantial scale, were running what were in effect nursing homes for the homeless and sick poor. These women were running multi-functional enterprises. In addition to caring for the sick poor, they looked after abandoned and orphaned children, pregnant women and lunatics. The existence of these individuals has not been hitherto identified in the metropolis, has been almost completely missed by those interested in the history of women's work, and hardly features in the small but growing literature on nursing in early modern England. Such neglect is not surprising, because, as the article concludes, such 'multi-functional' parish nurses, in all probability, only existed in the metropolis for a relatively short period of time. The metropolitan workhouse movement undermined many functions of the London parish nurse. By the mid-18th century, the roles and responsibilities of 'the parish nurse' had become restricted largely to the rearing and nursing of children and infants.     

Caribou,Petroleum, and the Limits of Locality in the Canada–US Borderlands

This article discusses Karsten Heuer’s 2006 book Being Caribou in light of debates in ecocriticism and border studies about how to define the local in the context of environmental problems of vast range and uncertain temporality. It explores how Heuer’s book about following the Porcupine Caribou herd’s migration engages in multiple forms of boundary crossing—between countries, between hemispheric locations, and between species—and shows how insights from Indigenous storytelling complicate the book’s appeal to environmentalist readers by asserting a prior, transnational Indigenous presence in the transboundary landscapes of present-day Alaska and the Yukon.     

Japan in Early Modern Scholarly Journals, 1665–1750

This article aims at exploring Japan and its cultural and symbolic representation in the Republic of Letters from the end of the seventeenth century until the mid-eighteenth century. In order to do this, the article focuses on early modern scholarly journals, as they were the most comprehensive and up-to-date instruments of communication for the international community of scholars during that time. By analysing the journals’ content we will see which topics were more commonly connected to Japan and understand the role Japan played in the development of the increasingly comprehensive and methodical knowledge of the early modern savants. This article provides a picture of the heuristic and rhetorical role of Japan in the shaping of new, expanded representations of the world. On the one hand, connections between the cultural representations of Japan and other extra-European lands are highlighted; on the other hand, Japan's peculiar and unique features within the cultural and scientific discourses of the Republic of Letters are examined. Finally, how the representations of Japan relate to the divisions and identities within the Republic of Letters itself is considered.     

Freedom,Religion and the Making of the Modern State in Japan, 1868–89

This paper rethinks the article of religious freedom of the Meiji Constitution of 1889 and calls into question the liberalist paradigm employed to understand the Constitution and modern Japanese history. In this liberalist framework, the Constitution manifests the peculiar and authoritarian nature of the pre-war Japanese state. In particular, the 28^th article, which provides for the conditional freedom of religious belief, is seen as no more than a cover for social control by the state. This paper examines the histories of the ideas of religion and freedom, and the religious freedom article, and argues that the most appropriate task is not to measure how much religious freedom the Meiji Constitution failed to guarantee against a de-historicised liberalism, but rather to consider the function of the very inclusion of religious freedom in the Constitution. I argue that the inclusion of religious freedom as a generic type of liberty in the Meiji Constitution was instrumental in the creation of the private modern individual as a subject-citizen. It is through this private individual citizen that the modern state as a public, secular authority was created.