Corpus cartographique pour l'histoire de Damas,Syrie, à la fin de la période ottomane (1760–1924)

Abstract

De manière générale, la cartographie des villes de l'empire ottoman est peu abondante. Au dix‐neuvième siècle, malgré plusieurs réformes administratives, l'autorité publique ne recourait pas à des documents cartographiques pour organiser les travaux d'édilité tandis que les étrangers rencontraient les plus grandes difficultés pour établir des représentations de ces villes. Damas constitue une exception à ce tableau. On dispose de plusieurs cartes antérieures à l'établissement du mandat français (1920) qui sont de qualité inégale. Les auteurs étrangers sont les plus nombreux et les plus fiables; le plus souvent archéologues ou historiens, ils ont dressé des documents partiels par toujours faciles à évaluer. Cependant, et malgré la faiblesse de son volume (sept documents), le corpus des premières cartes de Damas constitue une source essentielle pour l'histoire du développement spatial de la ville entre le milieu du dix‐neuvième siècle et l'établissement du pouvoir mandataire.     

Edwardian Conservatism and the Constitution: The Thought of Lord Hugh Cecil

This article presents an analysis of the political thought of Lord Hugh Cecil. It argues that in order to understand Cecil's thought it is necessary to emphasize the role of the constitution in his thinking. There are three reasons for this. First, his opposition to Chamberlain's tariff reform campaign was rooted in a view of the detrimental effects the policy would have on politics, evidence for which Cecil saw in the tactics used by the tariff reformers. Second, because his opposition to the Parliament Bill and to the home rule proposals, which lay behind the removal of the house of lords' veto, was similarly rooted in what he saw as the unconstitutional nature of these measures. Third, because Cecil was an active proponent of constitutional reforms that were designed to ensure that the second chamber could still exercise a restraining influence on government and so stand up for the interests of what he saw as the moderate majority of the people.     

The split between Gall and Spurzheim (1813–1818)

An acerbic footnote in Volume 3 (1818) of the five-volume great work of Franz Joseph Gall and Johann Gaspar Spurzheim, Anatomy and Physiology of the Nervous System in General and of the Brain in Particular with Observations on the Possibility of Understanding the Many Moral and Intellectual Dispositions of Man and Animals by the Configuration of Their Heads, marked the end of the collaboration between Gall, the founder of organologie, and Spurzheim, promoter of phrenology. We discuss the background of this note and the nature of the rift that marked the end of Gall and Spurzheim’s collaboration.     

The “Greenberg Controversy” and the Interdisciplinary Study of Global Linguistic Relationships**

This paper examines the controversy that followed the 1987 publication of Joseph Greenberg's book, Language in the Americas, attending to the role of language and linguistic research within overlapping disciplinary traditions. With this text, Greenberg presented a macro-level tripartite classification that opposed then dominant fine-grained analyses recognizing anywhere from 150 to 200 distinct language families. His proposal was the subject of a landmark conference, examining strengths and weaknesses, the unpublished proceedings of which are presented here for the first time. For specialists in the anthropological and comparative-historical study of Indigenous American languages, Greenberg's intervention highlighted the tension between language, conceived as an abstract object of study, and languages, understood to be carriers of specific cultural knowledge. For physical anthropologists and archaeologists, his theory was initially fortuitous on programmatic, substantive, and methodological grounds. The essay will show how interdisciplinary appeals were figured by supporters as a virtue, and by critics as a vice. The essay further highlights ethical reasons for integrating historical narratives of science and the humanities.     

Joseph Priestley on metaphysics and politics: Jonathan Israel's ‘Radical Enlightenment’ reconsidered

This article probes Jonathan Israel’s theory about ‘Radical Enlightenment’ inaugurating political modernity by way of explicating the thought of Joseph Priestley. In Israel’s view, despite the inconsistencies plaguing Socinian thought, Priestley, a monist, emerged as an ardent supporter of religious toleration and democratic republicanism. This article seeks to restore the fundamental coherence of Priestley’s theological and metaphysical views, arguing that they were produced as parts of a system founded on the simultaneous adherence to providentialism and necessitarianism. Prized as a prerequisite of the unfolding of the divine plan, the unobstructed expression of religious opinions was the centre of the conception of civil society and civil liberty that Priestley articulated based on these premises and his forays into politics aimed to secure its permanence. A comparison of Priestley’s stance on the issue of manhood suffrage with that of Richard Price reveals not the materialist Priestley, but Price, a dualist, as an advocate of democratization and casts into doubt the applicability of Israel’s scheme in the case of England. The article closes with some suggestions towards reappraising the relationship between Enlightenment and modernity.     

Estranging Ireland: The underground self of the Irish free state in Joseph O’Neill’s Land Under England

Land Under England is an out of print, rarely-cited Irish science fiction novel by the author Joseph O’Neill. Written at a time of crisis in Irish society in the 1930s, the novel has been relatively ignored in studies of the literature of the period. Although critics of science fiction tend to situate the novel as a purely anti-fascist work, taking its cues from events happening in Europe, this article places the novel firmly within its postcolonial Irish context, opening up the text to alternative readings based on the writings of Irish historians, as well as Marxist, cultural materialist and postcolonial critics. The article also utilises documents such as work written by O’Neill in his capacity as a civil servant, letters to the author from the controversial author Francis Stuart, and reviews contemporary to the publication of the novel.     

Saussure and his intellectual environment

SUMMARY

The present study paints the intellectual environment in which Ferdinand de Saussure developed his ideas about language and linguistics during the fin de siècle. It sketches his dissatisfaction with that environment to the extent that it touched on linguistics, and shows the new course he was trying to steer on the basis of ideas that seemed to open new and exciting perspectives, even though they were still vaguely defined. As Saussure himself was extremely reticent about his sources and intellectual pedigree, his stance in the lively European cultural context in which he lived can only be established through textual critique and conjecture. On this basis, it is concluded that Saussure, though relatively uninformed about its historical roots, essentially aimed at integrating the rationalist tradition current in the sciences in his day into a new, ‘scientific’ general theory of language. In this, he was heavily indebted to a few predecessors, such as the French philosopher-psychologist Victor Egger, and particularly to the French psychologist, historian and philosopher Hippolyte Taine, who was a major cultural influence in nineteenth-century France, though now largely forgotten. The present study thus supports Hans Aarsleff's analysis, where, for the first time, Taine's influence is emphasised, and rejects John Joseph's contention that Taine had no influence and that, instead, Saussure was influenced mainly by the romanticist Adolphe Pictet. Saussure abhorred Pictet's method of etymologising, which predated the Young Grammarian school, central to Saussure's linguistic education. The issue has implications for the positioning of Saussure in the history of linguistics. Is he part of the non-analytical, romanticist and experience-based European strand of thought that is found in art and postmodernist philosophy and is sometimes called structuralism, or is he a representative of the short-lived European branch of specifically linguistic structuralism, which was rationalist in outlook, more science-oriented and more formalist, but lost out to American structuralism? The latter seems to be the case, though phenomenology, postmodernism and art have lately claimed Saussure as an icon.     

Screw Threads on the SS Xantho Engine: a Case of Standardisation in 19th Century Britain

A former RN gunboat horizontal trunk engine taken from the SS Xantho (1848–1872) in 1985 was totally disassembled by May 2004. All the threads on the engine were examined and the majority were found to be British Standard Whitworth (BSW). This provides material evidence of the spread of standardisation at a time when the Royal Navy commissioned the first mass-produced marine engines and fitted them to the 'Crimean War Gunboat' types. The study also provides a pointer to the use of screw threads as a diagnostic tool in maritime archaeology.
© 2004 The Nautical Archaeology Society     

Ghost hands,hands of glory,and manumission in the fiction of Sheridan Le Fanu

This essay corrects a critical blindspot in the study of Anglo-Irish literature through contextualising meanings of the hand as they appeared in the fiction of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–73). From stylised fetish object in ‘An Authentic Narrative of the Ghost of a Hand’ (1863), to symbol of the author's presence in the text in Wylder's Hand (1864), to centrepiece of a dizzying referential system in ‘The Haunted Baronet’ (1870), Le Fanu's fiction demonstrates significant indebtedness to the legend of the ‘hand of glory’. Le Fanu used this rich reference point to express the terminal insecurity of the social masters who are not free, who are in fact themselves enslaved and stupefied for reasons beyond their control. With the spectre of Catholic resurgence in mid-nineteenth-century Ireland, the impossibility of manumission from the hands that haunt functioned as a reminder of the weight of the past in Le Fanu's literary imagination.     

Identity Formation at a French Colonial Outpost in the North American Interior

Identity formation is a central issue in colonial and post-colonial studies. The ways in which people defined and expressed their identities along multiple dimensions have material implications that are archaeologically accessible. For social archaeologists, material variation is actively constituted and the archaeological record is the residue of a system of signs that individuals used in the construction of class, status, gender, race, and ethnic relations. In the context of French and Native interactions, social identities were fluid, situational, and malleable. The interactions engendered by the fur trade and colonialism in New France had material consequences for identity formation that are being investigated at Fort St. Joseph, an 18th-century frontier outpost in the western Great Lakes.