We are expanding the circle of our international partners to include one of the most renowned research and database projects in the world. We are happy to announce that the Prize Papers and Slave Voyages databases will be linked in future.
The Best of All Possible Worlds: Mathematics and Destiny
Optimists believe this is the best of all possible worlds. And pessimists fear that might really be the case. But what is the best of all possible worlds? How do we define it? Is it the world that operates the most efficiently? Or the one in which most people are comfortable and content?
In this 1671 painting from Hubert van Ravesteijn we see an exclusively designed paper packet leaning against a clay pipe, ready for consumption in a tavern.
In order to sell small units of tobacco, paper was needed: used papers and freshly printed papers. Zoom in:
Marquis de Lafayette, 18
James Monroe, 18
Gilbert Stuart, 20
Aaron Burr, 20
Alexander Hamilton, 21
Betsy Ross, 24
James Madison, 25
Thomas Jefferson, 33
John Adams, 40
Paul Revere, 41
George Washington, 44
Samuel Adams, 53
Ben Franklin, 70
@historikerinnen@histodons
But what about #emdiplomacy? There are some very impressive examples, of course. For example the fate of a giraffe (ok, not quite a common pet, we have to admit) (2/6)
In 1487, Lorenzo de Medici received the giraffe as a gift by Sultan Qā’itbāy of Egypt who thereby showed his support in Lorenzo’s fight against the Ottomans. The animal was presented to the Florentine republic by the Egyptian ambassadors at the market place so that everyone could marvel the giraffe. Unfortunately, it died only a few months after its arrival breaking its neck while being transported in its box. (3/6)
But the afterlife of the giraffe was much longer. It had been the first giraffe in Europe since the 13th century and it remained so for many centuries coming. Thus, one should not wonder that it was commemorated in literature and paintings, such as the painting by Giorgio Vasari (1556 / 1558). There are many other figurative representations of this giraffe, such as the famous frescos in the Tornabuoni Chapel by Domenico Ghirlandaio (1485-1490). (4/6)
In fact, Giorgio Riello argues that “it was not Lorenzo’s real animal but its representation in Ghirlandaio’s fresco that kept the visual imagination of giraffes alive in Europe”. This points us to another topic for another day: the visual representation of #emdiplomacy. (5/6)
Giorgio Riello: Spot the Giraffe: The Material Culture of Animals Found, Lost and Painted. In: Tina Asmussen, Eva Brugger, Maike Christadler, Anja Rathmann-Lutz, Anna Reimann, Carla Roth, Sarah-Maria Schober, Ina Serif (ed.): Materialized Histories. Eine Festschrift 2.0, 17/05/2021, https://mhistories.hypotheses.org/?p=1788. (6/6)
One of the biggest mysteries I am having right now is the #mixtec#sabre
Every #mesoamerica or #aztec#history person I ask have either never seen this thing or only seen it shown in Mixtec codices and certain papers call it a sabre.
Mexicolore has a panel of experts and said they know nothing about it.
Codices often represent real weapons in them, but they can also be symbolic of something else.
Does anyone know more about this design of #sword ?
Today is the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. Stop rolling your eyes, this isn't a patriotic post! You know me better than that.
This is about spilling the tea... about the British East India Company's spilled tea, and what that had to do with Bengal, textile workers, and famine.
See, BEIC was using its private armies to open markets around the world to their trading policies, and to install local rulers who would keep the goods and money flowing. They did this in Bengal, one of the world's biggest producers of textiles in the mid-1700s.
Then, in 1768, drought hit Bengal and crops failed. People began to go hungry, but the BEIC's puppet rulers and agents just continued to collect taxes--and, in some cases, to profiteer off the sale of food. Over the next two years, these practices exacerbated the food shortages, leading to the Great Bengal Famine of 1770, in which 7 - 10 million people are estimated to have starved to death. That's at least 25% of the entire Bengali population of the time.
This put a big dent in the profits of the BEIC (oopsie, who knew famine profiteering could have negative economic impacts?), leading to a financial crisis in England. This is also why BEIC was unloading tea for cheap in the American colonies, to get some of those revenues back.
So yeah, "no taxation without representation" was the rallying cry, but isn't it interesting that we (USians, I mean) were never taught that the REASON colonists were worried about this is because they felt they had something in common with starving Bengalis: namely, the vulnerability to a multinational corporation which clearly demonstrated its depraved indifference to human suffering in pursuit of profit.
Couple of little nuggets I left out because I'm trying to be concise (ha), but they're so interesting:
The BEIC was able to unload tea in the American colonies because the English parliament, rather than let the company fail, bailed it out. Part of the bailout conditions were that they got a monopoly over tea sales in the colonies. Same as it ever was, eh?
BEIC agents who wrote letters and contacted the media (such as it was) to spread the word, and the outrage, about the completely unnecessary famine, were possibly the world's first whistleblowers.
"This article seeks to understand mercantilism not as an elite philosophy, but as a process of interaction between private interests that stretched beyond London across England and the wider world, in which contribution to the public interest was asserted primarily by the capacity of a trade to support domestic employment in an increasingly global economy."
"I argue that inclusion of Occam's razor is an essential factor that distinguishes science from superstition and pseudoscience. I also describe how the razor is embedded in Bayesian inference and argue that science is primarily the means to discover the simplest descriptions of our world."
A Tudor Christmas Carol
As I outrode this enderes night.
From the Pageant of the Shearmen and Tailors, one of the Coventry Mystery Plays.
[The better known 'Coventry Carol', "lully lulla, thou little tiny child" comes from the same source.] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39AA6kFmpWY&ab_channel=Passamezzo
At the University of Milan we are seeking a research fellow to participate in the “MetaLing Corpus: Creating a corpus of English linguistics metalanguage from the 16th to the 18th century” project: https://expertise.unimi.it/resource/project/PRIN202223AANDR%5F01
Through archival research and corpus compilation, the project aims to assess the genres and text-types involved in the circulation of linguistic knowledge, and to throw light onto unconventional texts and voices besides the major works and figures on which scholarship has naturally concentrated. The project is divided into three phases 1) collection of texts, 2) building the corpus, 3) lexical extraction and database creation, combining human and computational tools. The core part of our study will involve the analysis of the terminology, discursive strategies and descriptive metaphors used to describe and compare languages in English, in diachronic perspective.
The successful applicant will work with the project team to identify relevant primary materials and build an electronic corpus of texts. The post is for someone with a postgraduate degree in Linguistics, English, Computer Science or related discipline. Candidates may or may not have a doctorate at the time of application. The researcher will have the opportunity to contribute to the project database, work in archives, and develop academic writing in individual and joint papers.
Post: Postdoctoral research fellow, Early stage researcher or 0-4 yrs (Post graduate)
Location: Milan (on-site)
Duration: 18 months, fixed-term/contract
Salary: EUR 21,888 per annum
Closes: 4th January 2024
Interview date: 16th January 2024
We'd appreciate if you boost or forward to any potentially interested candidates. In case of questions or difficulties with understanding Italian (language or bureaucracy), do get in touch with me or the provided contacts. Further details in the attached file.
#history#reference / Peretz, Dekel. 2022. Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine. De Gruyter.
Introducion: Zionism for the Diaspora: Bridging the Gap between German
and Zionist Historical Narratives [p. 6]
An important step towards interlinking these narratives is to contextualize Oppenheimer and like-minded Zionists in a period when Germany’s colonial and imperial aspirations were peaking. It seems to go without saying that historical research needs to consider contemporaneous geographical, political and intellectual conditions. Yet this basic staple of the historian has been often neglected by researchers of German colonialism and of German Zionism in respect to the correlation between these two coetaneous affairs. It is not the purpose of this book to examine the causes of this neglect. Nevertheless, I would like to make some hypothetical suggestions.
First, Germany did not have a long-established colonial apparatus of the size and quality of France and England. There were certainly fewer Jews active within the German colonial service and, apart from a few prominent protagonists mentioned in this book, research into this matter is sparse. However, the lack of active service within the colonial bureaucracy alone is not indicative of the level of enthusiasm and advocacy of German colonial ambitions among German Jewry. There were other spheres in which support for colonial undertakings could manifest themselves
Second, due to the racialist and outright racist aspects of colonialism as well as the ultimate devastation that German colonial and imperial ambitions brought on the Jews during the Second World War and the Holocaust, it retroactively seems unfathomable that Jews could have ever been involved in any way with
German colonialism.
Third, the Zionist narrative is shaped by a teleological perspective. The focus of Zionist historiography on the contributions made to building the state of Israel, together with the ideology of diaspora negation¹⁷ – preaching total separation and distancing from Europe – blurred out conceptions of Zionism in which the establishment of Jewish sovereignty did not contradict a continued Jewish life in Europe or even envisioned realizing this sovereignty in places other than Palestine. During the First World War, Oppenheimer and his Zionist contemporaries proposed the establishment of Jewish cultural sovereignty or autonomy within (Eastern) Europe, in remarkable affinity with the anti-Zionist Bundism prevalent in Eastern Europe, revealing the diversity of opinions within early German Zionism. Furthermore, the Balfour Declaration and the subsequent British endorsement of Zionism overshadowed earlier attempts by German Zionists to integrate
Zionism into a broader German colonial scheme.
Fourth, further clouding the vision is the tension in Zionist historiography between the depiction of the intellectual origins of the Zionist movement within the context of European nationalism on the one hand, and the conceptualizing of Zionism as an anomaly of nationalism with independent roots in the ethnic, messianic character of Judaism on the other. The international nature of the movement makes it from the start a difficult object for comprehensive study.¹⁸ Finally, and probably most importantly, the negative association of colonialism with violent subjugation, foreign transgression, and unjustifiable occupation made it an unlikely candidate for integration by a Zionist historiography charged with constructing the national narrative of a Jewish state in a long-running conflict with indigenous and neighboring populations.
#emdiplomacyAdventCalendar (18/24)
It is the season for mulled wine. The negative side effects of too much alcohol are well described in #emdiplomacysSources as this example shows: The drunken staff of Swedish ambassador Oxenstierna at the #WestphalianPeaceCongress dislocated a horse’s leg.
"Experts have been selected to create a multidisciplinary volume with a thematic approach to the vast subject, tackling administration, army, economy, law, mobility, religion (local and imperial religions and Christianity), social status, and urbanism. They situate the phenomena of Latinization, literacy, bi-, and multilingualism within local and broader social developments and draw together materials and arguments that have not before been coordinated in a single volume."
"Experts have been selected to create a multidisciplinary volume with a thematic approach to the vast subject, tackling administration, army, economy, law, mobility, religion (local and imperial religions and Christianity), social status, and urbanism. They situate the phenomena of Latinization, literacy, bi-, and multilingualism within local and broader social developments and draw together materials and arguments that have not before been coordinated in a single volume."
"Experts have been selected to create a multidisciplinary volume with a thematic approach to the vast subject, tackling administration, army, economy, law, mobility, religion (local and imperial religions and Christianity), social status, and urbanism. They situate the phenomena of Latinization, literacy, bi-, and multilingualism within local and broader social developments and draw together materials and arguments that have not before been coordinated in a single volume."