John Lieder and his Mission in Egypt: The Evangelical Ethos at Work Among Nineteenth-Century Copts

The English Church Missionary Society (CMS) dispatched a contingent of missionaries to Egypt in 1825. This article analyses the methods and impact of that contingent. The schools that the CMS missionaries introduced are cast not as vehicles of enlightenment — as is frequently the case in mission historiography — but as technologies of power. Specifically, the article recounts how the head of the mission, the Reverend John Lieder, deployed Lancaster schools among the Coptic Christians of Cairo to effect not merely a spiritual, but further, a cultural conversion of this Orthodox community. Lieder, his predecessors, and his contemporaries in the Mediterranean field sought to instil in the Copts the "evangelical ethos" of industry, discipline, and order. The article links this CMS project of cultural conversion to the process of state-building in Egypt. Indeed, Lieder was a pioneer purveyor of technologies of power that would prove indispensable to late-nineteenth-century elites in their efforts to produce, in the subaltern strata of Egyptian society, industrious and disciplined political subjects resigned to their lowly positions in the Egyptian social order.     

Searching for Nineteenth-Century Farm Tenants: An Evaluation of Methods

Abstract

In tandem with a recent surge in interest in lynching in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, researchers in a number of fields have begun to use lynching data in new ways for a wide range of empirical investigations. A limited number of historical national lynching data series are available, have well-known flaws, and are nonetheless used. This article analyzes and compares these series, summarizes recent efforts to address their shortcomings, and identifies extensions that could aid in the construction a national database of confirmed lynching victims, whose broader applications are just beginning to be explored.     

The Politics of Caring for the Poor: Anglican Responses in 1890s Tasmania

Relieving poverty amongst skilled but unemployed workers during the Tasmanian economic collapse in the 1890s challenged both a conservative government's policy of avoiding public debt by initiating minimal relief and the limited financial and human resources of voluntary philanthropic agencies, the Anglican Church amongst them, whom the Tasmanian governments expected to carry the burden of delivering relief to those deemed to deserve it. With labour organisations too weak to lead, and amidst the silence of church leaders, it fell to individuals like the Reverend Archibald Turnbull to articulate a Christian socialist critique of government policies and values and to advocate the desperate plight of the poor. In this context, this study examines how contemporary government and Anglican Church leaders responded to Turnbull's political and pastoral initiatives in Hobart in 1893–96.     

Camouflaging Consumption and Colonial Mimicry: The Materiality of an Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Nipmuc Household

This article serves as an interpretation of Nipmuc history in colonial contexts by focusing on the engagement and survival of the “capitalist colonial” world by the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Nipmuc inhabitants of the Sarah Boston Farmstead Site in Grafton, Massachusetts. Ceramic analyses are drawn upon to argue that active consumer strategies and/or choices may potentially undermine the material and discursive markers of difference linked to notions of domesticity, class and race. The apparent homogenized or “insignificant” character of the Sarah Boston Farmstead ceramic assemblage is argued to in fact be quite significant, as its banality speaks to a degree of knowledgeable “mimicry”—tactical or not—that may have deflected (but not negated) inequality through the undermining of markers and discourses of difference.     

重估郎世宁的使命——将意大利绘画风格融入清朝作品

耶稣会士郎世宁于1715年至1766年供职于清廷内务府期间,将两种截然不同的艺术文化融合在一起:欧洲艺术风格是这位艺术家所受的基础训练,中国艺术风格则促成了他的职业成就。本文在分析郎世宁意大利基础训练及绘画知识的同时,也分析了其在清廷的代表作品,以提供这位画家在中国进行文化融合的基本框架。郎世宁的文化融合证明,他所接受的意大利基础训练与其后来作为宫廷画家所取得的成就之间,有着深远的联系。本文讨论了郎世宁全部绘画作品中不同元素之间相互关联的动态系统。这些相互关联的元素主要包含三方面的背景:绘画的、政治的以及感性的,分别与三种绘画流派有关——风景画、肖像画以及通景画,这一点对于理解郎世宁的事业至关重要。从更广义的角度讲,本文的目的在于通过展示郎世宁的艺术生涯,有助于我们勾勒出18世纪促成中国与欧洲文化艺术碰撞中的联结点。     

Crossing the Great Divides: Hans Aarsleff's Lessons for Nineteenth-Century Intellectual Historians

SUMMARY

This essay discusses Hans Aarsleff's long battle to demonstrate the importance of the French and British thinkers of the mid-eighteenth century to the development of modern linguistic thought. Contesting claims that German scholars were the first to develop historicised theories of language, Aarsleff, along with his Princeton colleagues Lionel Gossman and Anthony Grafton, helped pioneer longue durée studies of the history of philology and of historiography that cross national boundaries as well as the so-called Sattelzeit (stretching from about 1780 until 1820). Although the importance of his work was, for a long time, little appreciated by modern intellectual historians, this essay argues that it is time that we fully learned Aarsleff's lessons.     

Groping Toward Globalization: In Search of an Anthropology Without Boundaries

Donal B. Cruise O'Brien. Saints and Politicians: Essays in the Organization of a Senegalese Peasant Society. African Studies Series 15. New York and London: Cambridge University Press, 1975. 213 pp. Tables, bibliographies and index. $13.95.

Patrick Cole. Modern and Traditional Elites in the Politics of Lagos. African Studies Series 12. New York and London: Cambridge University Press, 1975. 297 pp. Bibliography and index. $17.50.     

Iran's Reform Movement: The Enduring Relevance of an Alternative Discourse

Given the surprise electoral victory in May 2013 of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, which was attained on a recurrent platform of reform and change, this article seeks to investigate Iran's reform discourse by looking at how it systematically developed under President Mohammad Khatami (1997–2005). Its chief purpose is to delineate the discourse in a retrospective analytical attempt to show why it has proven so resilient and persuasive in theory while briefly explicating the causes of its failure in practice under reformists, which set the stage for the rise to power of populist neo‐conservatives marshaled by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (2005–2013). Divided in two main parts, it thus seeks to tease out the domestic ideology of reform as theorized by Khatami and his men on the one hand, and the foreign policy of détente and dialogue as performed by the reformist administration on the other. In so doing, the article draws primarily on the original Persian sources produced during the respective period and afterward, including Khatami's own writings as well as theoretical formulations and articulations propounded by his political strategists. Finally, it anticipates that Rouhani's “moderation” project can face the same fate as Khatami's “reform” project if the former does not heed the hard‐earned historical lessons of the latter, even though it is operating in a different sociopolitical context.