The Early History of Ethiopia's Coffee Trade and the Rise of Shawa

1988 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Merid W. Aregay

This article draws attention to the possible importance of coffee exports from Ethiopia before the mid-nineteenth century. They may well have been a factor in attempts by Ethiopian emperors in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to develop trade in Yaman, in India and with the Dutch in Java. By 1690, coffee was being exported from Zayla, and perhaps by other outlets. In 1705 and 1737 there were unsuccessful attempts by Europeans to obtain coffee direct from Ethiopia, though meanwhile the growth of plantations in European colonies had rendered such effort superfluous. Nonetheless, Ethiopia contributed to the Red Sea coffee trade during the eighteenth century, and it seems likely that coffee was exported from Enarya as well as from Harar. The kingdom of Shawa was well situated to exploit the development of coffee exports from the south-western highlands, and they would have assisted Shawa's efforts to distance itself from upheavals further north during the Zamana Masafent. The coffee trade may therefore have been more significant in the rise of Shawa in the later eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries than historians have hitherto allowed.

1972 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 397-406 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. D. D. Newitt

The sultanate of Angoche on the Moçambique coast was founded probably towards the end of the fifteenth century by refugees from Kilwa. It became a base for Muslim traders who wanted to use the Zambezi route to the central African trading fairs and it enabled them to by-pass the Portuguese trade monopoly at Sofala. The Portuguese were not able to check this trade until they themselves set up bases on the Zambezi in the 1530s and 1540s, and from that time the sultanate began to decline. Internal dissensions among the ruling families led to the Portuguese obtaining control of the sultanate in the late sixteenth century, but this control was abandoned in the following century when the trade of the Angoche coast dwindled to insignificance. During the eighteenth century movements among the Macua peoples of the mainland and the development of the slave trade in the Indian Ocean laid the foundations for the revival of the sultanate in the nineteenth century.


1984 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 831-860 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Doyle

One of the most distinctive features of the French Ancien Régime was the sale of offices. Several European states resorted to this method of tapping the wealth of their richer subjects in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but nowhere did venality spread further through society than in France, and nowhere did its importance persist so long. Although the revolutionaries of 1789 abolished it, it reappeared for certain public functions in the early nineteenth century, and has not quite vanished even today. The origins and early history of the system have been authoritatively studied, but its eighteenth-century history has received very little attention. This is all the more curious in that France continued to be governed largely by holders of venal offices, they constituted the backbone of opposition to the government in the form of the magistrates of the parlements, and huge amounts of capital continued to be absorbed by office-buying. Even so, most historians consider that by this time the venal system was in decline. This seemed to be demonstrated by unsold offices remaining on the market, and above all by falling, office prices. For Alfred Cobban, indeed, these trends were symptoms of the decline of a whole class, the officiers. Here was ‘a section of society which was definitely not rising in wealth, and was barely holding its own in social status’ as falling office prices showed. ‘The decline seems to have been general, from the parlements downwards, though until the end of the eighteenth century it was much less marked in the offices of the parlements than in those of the présidiaux, élections, maréchaussées and other local courts.’ Resentment at this decline explained the revolutionary fervour of the officiers, whom Cobban had previously shown to be the largest bourgeois group in the National Assembly; and 1789 was largely the work not of a rising capitalist bourgeoisie, but rather of a declining professional one.


Author(s):  
Marcin Wodziński

This chapter covers the prominence of the Jewish Question in the political debates of the last years of the Commonwealth, as well as in the later journalism of the Duchy of Warsaw and the Kingdom of Poland regarding interests in hasidim. It analyzes the cradle of Polish Hasidism, Podolia and Volhynia, the south-eastern borderlands of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, where from the 1740s to 1760 the putative creator of the group, Israel ben Eliezer, also known as the Besht was active. Though Hasidism appeared in the lands of central Poland as early as the mid-eighteenth century, the governments that controlled these territories between 1772 and 1830 did not become aware of it until nearly the end of that period that the existence of hasidic groups became an issue in Jewish politics. It explains how the lack of official interest in Hasidism was caused by the very complicated general history of the states of central and eastern Europe at the start of the nineteenth century. The growing wave of interventions in issues related to Hasidism and the fact that the question of the legality of Hasidism became tied up with the issue of religious fraternities.


1960 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Priestley ◽  
Ivor Wilks

In studying the early history of the West African states, one of the difficulties encountered is that of establishing a reasonably precise framework of chronology. Eighteenth-century Ashanti, however, would appear to be an exception to this in that the reigns of its kings are dated, although with some degree of variation, in all the standard works dealing with the area. Their authors, from this point of view, have followed either Thomas Edward Bowdich or Joseph Dupuis, both of whom were in Kumasi, the Ashani capital, in the early part of the nineteenth century. In their treatment of traditions and customs, the writings of Bowdich and Dupuis are of great interest and value; the chronologies of the two authors, however, although they contain major differences, can in neither case be regarded as reliable. Fortunately there are in existence written records, hitherto little used, which make it possible to draw up a new and amended chart of the reigns of the eighteenth-century kings, and which furthermore give rise to interesting questions. These are the records of the various European companies engaged in trade on the coast, notably the English Royal African Company (1672–1750), its successor the Company of Merchants trading to Africa (1750–1821), and the second Dutch West Indies Company (1674–1791). Their agents in the forts and settlements were much interested in local developments especially in so far as trade might be beneficially or adversely affected. As a part of their duties, they kept diaries of events and dispatched reports, often of a very detailed nature, to their Companies in London and Amsterdam.


Author(s):  
Mark Migotti

In this chapter, the author attempts to establish what is philosophically living and what is philosophically dead in Schopenhauer’s pessimism. Against the background of the intriguing the history of the terms “optimism” and “pessimism”—in debates about Leibniz’s theodicy in the early eighteenth century and the popularity of Schopenhauer in the late nineteenth century, respectively—the author points up the distinction between affirming life, which all living beings do naturally, and subscribing to philosophical optimism (or pessimism), which is possible only for reflective beings like us. Next, the author notes the significance of Schopenhauer’s claim that optimism is a necessary condition of theism and explains its bearing on his pessimistic argument for the moral unacceptability of suicide. The chapter concludes that Schopenhauer’s case for pessimism is not conclusive, but instructive; his dim view of the prospects for leading a truly rewarding, worthwhile human life draws vivid attention to important questions about how and to what degree an atheistic world can nevertheless be conducive to human flourishing.


Author(s):  
Susanne Wagini ◽  
Katrin Holzherr

Abstract The restorer Johann Michael von Hermann (1793–1855), famous in the early nineteenth century, has long fallen into oblivion. A recent discovery of his work associated with old master prints at the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München has allowed a close study of his methods and skills as well as those of his pupil Ludwig Albert von Montmorillon (1794–1854), providing a fresh perspective on the early history of paper conservation. Von Hermann’s method of facsimile inserts was praised by his contemporaries, before Max Schweidler (1885–1953) described these methods in 1938. The present article provides biographical notes on both nineteenth century restorers, gives examples of prints treated by them and adds a chapter of conservation history crediting them with a place in the history of the discipline. In summary, this offers a surprising insight on how works of art used to be almost untraceably restored by this team of Munich-based restorers more than 150 years before Schweidler.


BJHS Themes ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Suman Seth

Abstract In the course of his discussion of the origin of variations in skin colour among humans in the Descent of Man, Charles Darwin suggested that darker skin might be correlated with immunity to certain diseases. To make that suggestion, he drew upon a claim that seemed self-evidently correct in 1871, although it had seemed almost certainly incorrect in the late eighteenth century: that immunity to disease could be understood as a hereditary racial trait. This paper aims to show how fundamental was the idea of ‘constitutions selection’, as Darwin would call it, for his thinking about human races, tracking his (ultimately unsuccessful) attempts to find proof of its operation over a period of more than thirty years. At the same time and more broadly, following Darwin's conceptual resources on this question helps explicate relationships between conceptions of disease and conceptions of race in the nineteenth century. That period saw the birth of a modern, fixist, biologically determinist racism, which increasingly manifested itself in medical writings. The reverse was also true: medicine was a crucial site in which race was forged. The history of what has been called ‘race-science’, it is argued, cannot and should not be written independent of the history of ‘race-medicine’.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Ella Sbaraini

Abstract Scholars have explored eighteenth-century suicide letters from a literary perspective, examining issues of performativity and reception. However, it is fruitful to see these letters as material as well as textual objects, which were utterly embedded in people's social lives. Using thirty manuscript letters, in conjunction with other sources, this article explores the contexts in which suicide letters were written and left for others. It looks at how authors used space and other materials to convey meaning, and argues that these letters were epistolary documents usually meant for specific, known persons, rather than the press. Generally written by members of the ‘lower orders’, these letters also provide insight into the emotional writing practices of the poor, and their experiences of emotional distress. Overall, this article proposes that these neglected documents should be used to investigate the emotional and material contexts for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century suicide. It also argues that, at a time when the history of emotions has reached considerable prominence, historians must be more attentive to the experiences of the suicidal.


Author(s):  
Nguyễn Quang Ngọc

Vietnam is a country of an early history establishment with three archaeological centres: Dong Son in the North, Sa Huynh in the Central, and Oc Eo in the South. In the long history, these three centres unite and gather into a unified block, step by step, becoming a mainstream development trend. By the eleventh century, Thang Long capital (Hanoi) is a typical representative, the starting point for the course of advancement to the South of the Vietnamese. Later, Phu Xuan (Hue) from the fourteenth century and Gia Dinh (Saigon) from the seventeenth century directly multiply resources, deciding the success of the course of territory expansion and determining the southern territory of the nation Dai Viet – Vietnam in the middle of the eighteenth century. The Tay Son movement at the end of the eighteenth century starts unifying the country, but the course is not completed with numerous limitations. The mission of unifying the whole country is assigned back to Nguyen Anh. Nguyen Anh continually builds Gia Dinh into a firm basement for proceeding to conquer the imperial capital of Hue and the citadel Thang Long, completing the 733-year journey to expand the southern territory (1069–1802) and unifying the whole country into a single unit. Hanoi – Hue – Saigon in the relationship and mutual support has become the three pillars that determine all successes throughout the long history and in each stage of expansion and shaping of territory and unification of the country.


2021 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 255-269
Author(s):  
Waïl S. Hassan

Abstract According to a well-known narrative, the concept of Weltliteratur and its academic correlative, the discipline of comparative literature, originated in Germany and France in the early nineteenth century, influenced by the spread of scientism and nationalism. But there is another genesis story that begins in the late eighteenth century in Spain and Italy, countries with histories entangled with the Arab presence in Europe during the medieval period. Emphasizing the role of Arabic in the formation of European literatures, Juan Andrés wrote the first comparative history of “all literature,” before the concepts of Weltliteratur and comparative literature gained currency. The divergence of the two genesis stories is the result of competing geopolitical interests, which determine which literatures enter into the sphere of comparison, on what terms, within which paradigms, and under what ideological and discursive conditions.


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