Count Karl von Zinzendorf 's ‘New Accountancy’: The Structure of Austrian Government Finance in Peace and War, 1781–1791

This article examines various British proposals for co-operation with other European imperial powers to counter the rebellion of the American colonies or curb the pretentions of the new United States. Historians have paid little attention to these projects, mainly because none of them eventuated in the co-operation their authors envisaged. But their lack of success is not a reason to dismiss them as unimportant; their failure reveals much about British attitudes at the time.     

论洛阳古代墓葬的特点

洛阳古代墓葬在中国各地古代墓葬中的独特之处:一是皇家墓葬多,仅葬于此的帝王就有七个朝代40余位,在中国历史上堪称最多;同时,在皇家寝陵制度史上,洛阳帝陵每每有许多创新开风气的地方二是贵族和名人墓葬多,与皇家陵墓互相辉映,形成众星捧月之势。三是平民墓葬同王公墓葬交叉杂处,具有公共墓地的特点。四是洛阳墓葬被盗严重,可谓是“十墓九空”。五是洛阳墓葬出土文物多,影响大,被称为是实物的、石刻的中国历史。     

Early modern or late imperial philology? The crisis of classical learning in eighteenth century China

The discourses of classical scholars during the eighteenth century reinforced a shift from Song-Ming rationalism to a more skeptical and secular classical empiricism. By making precise scholarship the source of acceptable knowledge, Qing classicists contended that the legitimate reach of ancient ideals should be reevaluated through comparative delineation of the textual sources from which all such knowledge derived. This turn to empirically based classical inquiry meant that abstract ideas and rational argumentation gave way as the primary objects of elite discussion to concrete facts, verifiable institutions, ancient natural studies, and historical events. In general, Qing classicists regarded Song and Ming “Learning of the Way” as an obstacle to verifiable truth because it discouraged further inquiry along empirical lines. The empirical approach to knowledge they advocated placed proof and verification at the heart of analysis of the classical tradition. During this time, scholars and critics also applied historical analysis to the official Classics. Classical commentary yielded to textual criticism and a “search for evidence” to refortify the ancient canon. Representing a late imperial movement in Confucian letters, Qing classicists still sought to restore the classical vision. The early modern power of their philology, however, yielded the forces of decanonization and delegitimation as modernist trends, which went beyond the intellectual limits they had imposed on their own writings.     

Civil-military tensions during the Kangxi emperor��s first southern tour

Starting with a court debate which broke out in the spring of 1684, this essay explores the multivalent symbolism of the Kangxi emperor’s first imperial tour to Shandong and Jiangsu provinces in the fall of 1684. Some courtiers advocated treating the Kangxi emperor’s touring activities as a rite of conquest, while others saw them as an exercise in sagely rule and benevolent civil governance. Here I suggest that this ritual controversy revealed a tension between civil and military values within the political culture of the Qing court. Furthermore, this ideological tension became most acute and apparent during the Kangxi emperor’s “eastern” and “southern” tours of 1684, when the imperial procession approached and crossed certain culturally and symbolically significant locations. As such, we are reminded that the legitimization of Qing rule was never fully complete, but was rather an open-ended and ongoing historical process.     

天人合一述论

邹衍第一次把天人合一变成了系统的学说。从天地的形成谈起,融阴阳与五行为一体,用五行生克、阴阳消长和五德转移的理论解释一年四季的诸多变化和历史演进的规律,并进而规范人类、特别是王者的行为,是邹衍学说的实质和核心。但邹衍的天人合一理论和它所自出的巫术原理一样,归根结底是错误的和虚妄的。有人把天人合一等同于人和自然的和谐,完全是对古代文化的曲解。     

乾隆御制碑病害的现场检测与评估

为了研究首都博物馆乾隆御制碑病害及保存状况,采用数码相机、非金属超声波检测仪、胶带结合力测试条、便携式色差计、便携式视频显微镜等多种无损或微损检测手段,对石碑风化程度、碑体表面裂隙发育情况、石碑表面污染与变色等进行了现场、无损/微损检测与评估。检测结果表明,乾隆御制碑存在的主要表层病害为污染与变色,石碑表面部分位置轻微结壳、结垢、溶蚀与裂隙发育,石碑整体风化不严重,保存状况较好。检测结果可为后续保护提供依据。     

李流芳生平交游考略

李流芳为明未著名的文人画家,他不仅在绘画上取得了很大的成就,且诗文、书法、印章均擅,是一位具有多方面才能的艺术家。李流芳早年热心干科举,曾六次进京会试,但均铩羽而归。他晚年醉心于山水,和一些志同道合的友人浪迹江湖,创作了不少山水画佳作。由于李本人无画学专著,且诗文书画又散佚较多,故本文试图通过著录文献及其诗友的文集大致梳理出其生平及交游的情况。     

The Meaning of Things: Kipling’s Formative Journey ‘Home’ in 1889 and the Late Victorian Imperial Tour

The ‘seven years’ hard’ Rudyard Kipling spent as a journalist in north India are generally seen as the making of both his poetic and his politics. But, important as origin, community, identity and ‘my father’s house’ are to Kipling, he should also be seen as a wayfarer of no fixed abode. In 1889 he used his first royalties to return to metropolitan fame by the long way round: Burma, the Straits, Japan, the Pacific and a transcontinental journey past landmarks of his Americanophile boyhood reading. Both distressing and exhilarating, it was a journey that stimulated the productive tension in him between the parochial and the universal. If an upcountry Punjab station had impressed him with the necessity of colonial rule, it was this voyage that engendered his all-embracing imperial vision. If he had honed his eye for ‘local colour’, this trip intimated to him that his metier would lie in culturally translating disparate portions of the empire to one another. Anticipating Baden-Powell’s call to ‘look wider’, vagabonding proved to be an agreeable mode of existence, but metropolitan arrival was to hold its own unforeseen challenges and anxieties. At a time when English writers like Arthur Symons aestheticised their sensation of cultural rootlessness in the figure of the vagabond, Kipling sought to foreground his own vagabondism with a persuasive claim to belonging.     

Challenging the grammar of difference: Benoy Kumar Sarkar,global mobility and anti-imperialism around the First World War

The new imperial history has advanced our understanding of empires in many ways: it enhanced a networked interpretation of empires, brought space back into the discussion, and suggested a fresh reading of imperial careers to comprehend early forms of global inter-dependencies. This article discusses selected aspects of the life and work of Benoy Kumar Sarkar (1887–1949), a Bengali social scientist and political activist, to illustrate that anti-imperial biographies were simultaneously rooted in local as well as transnational spaces. They thus connected national struggles with globe-spanning processes. Biographies like this are underacknowledged in their meaning for how empires functioned and failed, and in their potential for understanding transnational actors. Sarkar’s efforts to challenge the legitimacy of the British Empire were the result of his life in a transnational social field, which was equally shaped by his extensive experience abroad and his continuous rootedness in local Bengali affairs. Sarkar’s anti-imperialism was enhanced by the mobility structures of the British Empire and resulted in new constellations of imperial, cosmopolitan, local and regional orientations and attachments. In this view, anti-imperialism was less the result of local struggles but of life practices reaching beyond the borders of the empire and a high awareness of acting in a global context that located its protagonists in numerous social and spatial contexts.     

‘Not a Position for a Gentleman’: Sir Matthew Nathan as Colonial Administrator: From Cape Coast Castle to Dublin Castle via Natal

This article examines the role of Sir Matthew Nathan, British permanent under secretary for Ireland at the time of the Easter Rising in April 1916, and how critical events in his career as soldier, colonial governor and civil servant shaped his conduct and reaction to events in Ireland as the Rising unfolded around him. The article raises issues of identities: namely Nathan's own identity as an English gentleman, when, given his Jewish background, he was an outsider to that caste. Nathan's brief military career and lengthier career as a colonial governor earned him high praise as a model bureaucrat. In this paper Nathan's track from the War Office through government houses situated in West Africa, Hong Kong and Natal to Dublin Castle is traced to illustrate the changes in his character from decisiveness to indecision. While Nathan clearly misread the volatile situation in Ireland over the 1916 Easter weekend, his actions demonstrated both indecision and bureaucratic delaying tactics. It is argued that his experiences with obdurate settler ministers in Natal played a role in shaping his hesitancy at the time of crisis in Dublin and that this hesitancy provided an opportunity for the direct action of the Irish Volunteers. The conclusion is that, at the time of the Irish crisis, Nathan failed to exercise the ‘power of the personal influence’ expected of an experienced governor.