Search Results (118)

The Japanese scholar and art critic Okakura Tenshin traveled to colonial India from January to September 1902 and made three visits to the Buddhist holy site of Bodh Gaya. There, he attempted to purchase a piece of land from the landowner, the Mahant, to build a vihāra (resthouse) for Japanese Buddhist devotees. His purchase request was rejected by the British colonial authority for his foreigner status, despite no legal prohibition against land sales to foreigners under Bodh Gaya’s land management laws at the time. The year after his journey to India, Okakura Tenshin published The Ideals of the East, wherein the renowned declaration that “Asia is one” subsequently evolved to be the intellectual cornerstone of twentieth-century Asianism (or Pan-Asianism). How did Okakura’s Indian journey and his experience of the failed attempt to purchase land in Bodh Gaya catalyze his conception of “Asia is One”? This essay first traces the Buddhist revival movements in late nineteenth-century India and Japan, elucidating how Buddhism helped forge a sense of transnational solidarity between the two nations, which Okakura also embraced. It then examines Okakura’s trip to India and his plan to purchase land at Bodh Gaya, uncovering the underlying geopolitical struggle between the British Empire and the New Asian Power Japan. In this context, the analysis will show that Okakura’s frustrating experience of failed land purchase underscored for him the necessity for the solidarity between Japan and India and the need for a unitary idea of Asia to articulate that solidarity. Finally, a comparative textual analysis between The Ideals of the East (1903) and Okakura’s “History of Japanese Art” lectures given at the Tokyo Fine Arts School before his trip to India explicates how Buddhism, which was being revived by a collective of various groups in and outside its place of origin India, served as a cohesive discursive agent in Okakura’s construction of the narrative of an Asian unity. This Buddhist framework helped Okakura to reconstruct the interlinked cultural histories of India, China, and Japan into a unified notion of Asia within which he crystallized a unique and favored cultural identity for Japan. Full article

Research in the field of cultural heritage has grown due to the need to preserve cultural assets that serve as witnesses to history and culture. In conservation and restoration, research on traditional papers is extensive, but translucent papers have received less attention. These documents, of proteinaceous, cellulosic, or synthetic origin, achieve transparency through processes that modify their structure, which makes them more vulnerable to aging. Their degradation is aggravated by inadequate storage and handling, posing challenges because they do not respond well to conventional treatments. This study analyzes these issues using documents from the late nineteenth and primarily the twentieth century, sourced from the Provincial Historical Archive of Granada and the Archive of the Higher Technical School of Architecture in Granada. Through visual, photographic, and bibliographic study, a theoretical and graphic catalogue of the most significant deteriorations has been developed. Concurrently, a physicochemical analysis was applied using techniques such as colorimetry, X-ray Fluorescence Spectroscopy (XRF), and Fourier-Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR). These tools make it possible to relate the material composition of the documents to their state of preservation. This work provides deeper knowledge about the degradation mechanisms of these supports and lays the foundations for the development of specific restoration strategies for this documentary typology. Full article

The Russian empire’s displays of applied and decorative art at the Great Exhibition of 1851 and its immediate successors have long galvanised scholars for their semantic complexity. By contrast, Russia’s first selection of paintings for this fiercely competitive arena, shown at London’s International Exhibition of 1862, failed to ignite the public imagination and has largely evaded the historian’s gaze. While the three-dimensional artworks provided a recurrent source of wonderment for their superlative craftsmanship, stupendous materials, and often hyperbolic proportions, the paintings were apparently flat in every sense of the word: derivative, lacklustre, and incapable of capitalising on the opportunity that international exhibitions offered to present a national school. The dismissive comments they attracted set the tone for many later accounts, embedding the idea that Russian painting prior to the twentieth century was of limited consequence—a perception that would prove convenient to those asserting the originality of the avant-garde. Yet renewed consideration of Russia’s display of paintings in 1862 suggests that their critical reception speaks to concerns that went well beyond the pictures’ supposed obligation to represent a national school. Notably, a small but significant number of history and portrait paintings by academically trained and often well-travelled artists challenged notions of Russians as primitive and parochial. The technically adventurous of these parried the belief that Russian art was insufficiently mature to experiment in painterly effect. Most audacious of all, they broached unspoken national boundaries by daring to suggest that Imperial Russian artists could innovate in areas on which the success of British painting rested. The attitudes towards Russian painting in 1862 thus invite fresh scrutiny, revealing as they do a disruptive arena in which aesthetic rivalries and chauvinist sensibilities came to the fore. Full article

Rahul Sankrityayan, a twentieth-century Indian polymath, is known for his contributions to Buddhism, Marxism, and Hindi literature. While his writing has been analyzed for its engagement with Buddhism and Tibet, he is also credited with inaugurating Hindi travel-writing. Though his contributions to this genre are well-recognized, one crucial work—ghummakaṛa śāstra (1945; lit. The Treatise of a Wanderer)—has received insufficient scholarly attention. This article investigates the intersection of religion, travel-writing, and satire in two chapters of Sankrityayan’s treatise: athāto ghummakaṛa jijñāsā (lit. Thus, the Curiosity of a Wanderer) and dharma aur ghummakaṛī (lit. Religion and Wandering). It argues that Sankrityayan employs the figure of the Wanderer to critique religions, religious ideals, and religious figures in two key ways. First, by framing his work as a śāstra (treatise) in the classical sense, he appropriates authoritative discourse to contest religious ideas. Second, the Wanderer functions as a transcendental subject who pervades history. Blending satire with polemic, the text subverts traditional religious hermeneutics. Through close analysis, this paper demonstrates how Sankrityayan’s unconventional form—a dialogic interplay between treatise and satire—invites readers to interrogate religious authority, offering a model for engaging with religion beyond doctrinal frameworks. Full article

This article examines the intersecting forces of gender, class, and education in early twentieth-century Britain through a feminist reading of Pip Williams’ historical novel The Bookbinder of Jericho. Centering on the fictional character Peggy Jones—a working-class young woman employed in the Oxford University Press bindery—the study explores how women’s intellectual ambitions were constrained by economic hardship, institutional gatekeeping, and patriarchal social norms. By integrating close literary analysis with historical research on women bookbinders, educational reform, and the impact of World War I, the paper reveals how the novel functions as both a narrative of personal development and a broader critique of systemic exclusion. Drawing on the genre of the female Bildungsroman, the article argues that Peggy’s journey—from bindery worker to aspiring scholar—mirrors the real struggles of working-class women who sought education and recognition in a male-dominated society. It also highlights the significance of female solidarity, especially among those who served as volunteers, caregivers, and community organizers during wartime. Through the symbolic geography of Oxford and its working-class district of Jericho, the novel foregrounds the spatial and social divides that shaped women’s lives and labor. Ultimately, this study shows how The Bookbinder of Jericho offers not only a fictional portrait of one woman’s aspirations but also a feminist intervention that recovers and reinterprets the overlooked histories of British women workers. The novel becomes a literary space for reclaiming agency, articulating resistance, and criticizing the gendered boundaries of knowledge, work, and belonging. Full article

There is an ongoing debate about whether Christian theology has had positive or negative effects on the natural environment. Included in this debate is the role of Christian missions acting in colonial environments. This article investigates the relationship between Protestant agricultural missions and their environments, using the documents of the first World Missionary Conference (Edinburgh 1910) and the third World Missionary Conference (Tambaram 1938), as well as several related documents. Although the history of agricultural missions can be backtracked into the 19th century, they were not regarded as an independent branch of missions until the early twentieth century. In 1910, neither the home boards of Protestant missions nor the older generation of missionaries had any vision for agricultural missions, and traditional culture—including agriculture—was seen as superstitious and full of heathen beliefs. However, agricultural missions developed rapidly in the decades between Edinburgh and Tambaram and broadened into rural missions due to a change in vision. The deplorable rural areas of the younger Christian churches called for ‘rural reconstruction’, and rural missions were welcomed as the most important agents to undertake this challenge. The environment of the church and countryside was enlarged and, by 1938, included economic and social environments, known as the fourth dimension of the church and missions after preaching, education, and medical care. Full article

In this article, I have tried to measure the distance that separates us from Kafka by trying to register both the things that we still have in common with him and his time, and the many things that have changed in between. The first section is an analysis of the story “A Visit to a Mine” in terms of the new accident prevention techniques instituted by the welfare state at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries. The second section deals with the new concepts of time and space that emerged in the age of electric and electro-magnetic media. And the third section is an attempt to write a short history of imitation from Descartes to Darwin, Kafka, Turing, and, finally, to the Large Language Models that we now call Artificial Intelligence. Full article

This essay examines the role of sophistic practices in elite French humanistic education, specifically “omniloquacity”, the ability to speak about any given subject. Drawing together intellectual history, cross-cultural comparisons, and educational testimonies, the essay elaborates a “pedagogical” version of sophistry in this French context that differs from more traditional “vocational” sophistries. Although I focus on the mid-twentieth century, I also consider earlier upheavals and Jesuit influences that shaped an agonistic culture of sophistic performances, challenging competitions, and ultimately, a certain esprit français associated with elite humanistic education. The history of rhetoric in France does not end with the demise of the rhetoric class in 1902, and takes on new meanings when considering the sophistic practices that outlived its nominal death. Full article

The history of religions during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been closely tied to the classification of Indigenous religions. However, recent scholarship in the field of religion has increasingly drawn on the work of subaltern and postcolonial historiography as a way of disrupting the European canon and dislodging Indigenous and non-western ways of knowing and being from the tyranny of the classical taxonomies of religion. Recent approaches to religious diversity have been challenged for reproducing imperial hierarchies of religion—assuming an accommodationist approach to Indigenous religions while also rendering invisible the internal diversity, fluidity, and adaptive orientations within Indigenous religions. In this paper, I contend that in the postcolonial context, Indigenous religions uncouple themselves from traditional taxonomies of religion, and, in particular, I propose religious complexity as a suitable framework and approach for accounting, contending with, and reporting on religious change in postcolonial South Africa. I explore questions about how to account for, ‘classify’, or ‘measure’ change related to everyday African Indigenous religious efforts and practices in the aftermath of and in response to colonialism, where conventional ideas about religious authority and affinity are displaced by Indigenous practices that can variously be described as simultaneously vital, viral, or feral. Full article

Throughout the twentieth century, U.S. American evangelicals engaged in an ongoing series of definitional debates over the contours and limits of a distinctly evangelical approach to theology. Developed as an explicit counter to theological liberalism—and often signaled by strict adherence to biblical inerrancy—American evangelical theology might conceivably have made common cause with Karl Barth, whose infamous rebellion against his liberal teachers became one of the founding events in the story of twentieth-century Christian theology. Despite Barth’s putative anti-liberalism, evangelical theologians never fully embraced Barthian theology, consistently vilifying it as un-evangelical and beyond the pale. In this essay, I recover the history of U.S. American evangelical theologians wrestling with Karl Barth and his legacy, highlighting how an enduring aversion to Barthianism became a key feature of evangelical theology. Full article

In recent years, scholars have increasingly recognised the ways that colonialism, and related racism, embedded intergenerational trauma within families and communities. The role of domestic violence within families is widely accepted as important, but often treated separately. This article uses a case study from Western Australia, the life and death of Annie Grigo Dost, to explore the dynamics of both issues. Importantly, it also critiques the presentation of complex colonial family histories within a range of digital platforms, especially Ancestry.com. Such platforms obscure complex family dynamics, enforcing normative (often Westernised and highly gendered) digital frameworks for data, and consequently for stories about the past. This article offers an important critique of the ways that Ancestry.com in particular seems to actively sanitise family history, and the ways that they may be doing a disservice to their customers, who may want to acknowledge a more complex, critical family history. Full article

This essay is a chapter excerpted from my forthcoming book, Who Gets to be Indian: Ethnic Fraud and Other Difficult Conversations about Native American Identity The chapter shows the ways that Indianness, framed as Indian or Native American “identity”, is inseparable from state subjectivity based on the history of political relations between tribes and the United States. It argues that tribes’ political status and relationship to the state are central to how Native American identity is shaped, rejecting the understanding of Native identity as race-based. The term “Indigenous” is discussed as not being equivalent to “Native American” and is not a racial formation in international fora. Social changes during the twentieth century brought new ways to diffuse and co-opt Nativeness through disaggregating it from political status and reinforcing racialization with the rise in urban pan-Indianism and neo-tribalism. Distinguishing Nativeness as political status from racialization is critical given ongoing attacks on tribal sovereignty in Supreme Court challenges based on alleged violations to the equal protection principle. Native American “identity” is inextricable from tribal nationhood and state formation, and thus cannot simply be dismissed as a colonial construct. Full article

The cause of the systematic daily march of barometric pressure in the tropics, notably the late morning and late evening peaks seen almost every day at all locations, was a puzzle that persisted through the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries. The efforts to explain the physics of the prominent 12-h solar tidal variation helped inspire some of the earliest developments in theoretical atmospheric dynamics and ultimately led in the 1960’s to a satisfactory dynamical theory for the atmospheric tides. These important theoretical developments followed the observational discoveries, which date to the late 18th and early 19th centuries, of the surprising character of the barometric daily march and of its resolution into solar and lunar period cycles. These important, if simple, discoveries emerged primarily from the efforts of European scientists to systematically study the environment in remote areas of the globe. The two key figures in initially advancing the scientific community’s understanding of the character of barometric tides were the great German polymath Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) and the French naturalist Robert de Lamanon (1752–1787), who each made their discoveries on their most famous and colorful scientific expeditions of their respective careers. This paper examines the history of the early observations of the barometric tide. Full article

In the histories of both colonial and postcolonial Malawi, there have been cases of religious-related violence, both in its physical and non-physical forms. Such cases have led to the deaths of the “perpetrators” of violence and ‘innocent’ believers, destruction of property, prison detentions, and even the forced removal of citizens from the country. This paper analyzes two case studies, one in which private citizens perpetrated the violence, led by a preacher called John Chilembwe, of the Providence Industrial Mission (PIM), challenging British colonial authorities during the second decade of the twentieth century. In the second case, the focus is on the independent Malawi government, which used violence against members of the Jehovah’s Witness (JW) religious sect from the early 1960s to the early 1990s, owing to the Witnesses’ disassociation from the demands of the secular state. Using data primarily drawn from various archives and other published studies, this paper argues that the use of ‘religious-based violence’ is not just a domain ‘reserved’ for those experiencing oppression, exclusion, and marginalization. Rather, authoritarian governments, like the one that emerged in postcolonial Malawi and other parts of Africa, also resorted to using ‘religious-based violence’ to serve as a tool for eliminating ‘non-conforming’ religious sects and organizations. In doing so, this paper contributes to the various fields of scholarship, including the relationship between religion and violence in modern Africa and the dynamics and operations of the state in both colonial and postcolonial Africa. Full article

Coniolo and Brusaschetto, are two small towns located in the Monferrato area of the Alessandria Province, northern Italy. These communities have similar histories related to development and subsequent abandonment of marl quarry activity that began more than a century ago and continued until recently. Quarrying occurred until soil conditions, water infiltration, and excessive depth made cost of extracting and7 lifting material prohibitive. Quarries consisted of tunnels located directly beneath the towns at about 150 m below ground surface. Collapse of the tunnels led to surface subsidence and destruction of overlying homes and much of the municipal infrastructure. In the early Twentieth Century, regulations pertaining to mine and quarry safety were typically deficient, entirely absent, or not followed. Extractive activities of non-energy mineral resources from quarries and mines were and continue to be widespread in Italy, which currently ranks fifth among what are now countries of the European Union (EU). Mining sites are present in all regions of Italy, particularly in the northern part of the country and along coasts, often in areas of geohydrogeological risk. Consequences of anthropogenic pressures that alter the natural environment, such as the physical size of aquifer drawdowns, are linked to issues for a number of extractive sites across the country. This report analyzes historical and technical documents, conducts a geomorphological analysis of hilly slopes surrounding these communities, and examines urban planning and geophysical surveys to determine the impact of subsurface quarrying activities on the overlying ground surface. The study highlights significant problems that are applicable to other localities globally. This research demonstrates: (a) the importance of geological considerations to development and abandonment of mining activity in inhabited areas; (b) the importance of establishing and following safety protocols; and (c) the manner in which economic interests can take precedence over the well-being and lives of those employed to extract resources. Full article