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The substantive and methodological contributions of professional historians to development policy debates was marginal, whether because of the dominance of economists or the inability of historians to contribute. There are broadly three ways in which history matters for development policy. These include insistence on the methodological principles of respect for context, process and difference; history is a resource of critical and reflective self-awareness about the nature of the discipline of development itself; and history brings a particular kind of perspective to development problems . After establishing the key issues, this book explores the broad theme of the institutional origins of economic development, focusing on the cases of nineteenth-century India and Africa. It demonstrates that scholarship on the origins of industrialisation in England in the late eighteenth century suggests a gestation reaching back to a period during which a series of social institutional innovations were pioneered and extended to most citizens of England. The book examines a paradox in China where an emphasis on human welfare characterized the rule of the eighteenth-century Qing dynasty, and has been demonstrated in modern-day China's emphasis on health and education. It provides a discussion on the history of the relationship between ideology and policy in public health, sanitation in India's modern history and the poor health of Native Americans. The book unpacks the origins of public education, with a focus on the emergency of mass literacy in Victorian England and excavates the processes by which colonial education was indigenized throughout South-East Asia.
following questions. How did the chasm between popular and highbrow reading come about, in a nation that in the nineteenth century could produce Balzac, Sand and Zola, whose fiction gripped the ordinary reader while stretching the form and scope of the genre? How have the French conceptualised, discussed and attempted to shape the nature of the ‘popular’ in the context of literature? How has this changed – and remained consistent – since the gradual development of mass literacy in the nineteenth century? What are the textual and narrative strategies that appeal to and
tuberculosis at the age of forty-two2), listed them by each of the 324 Registration Districts of England and Wales (PP 1846: xxviii-xxx, 35–41). It thus became possible to draw in close detail the map of writing abilities across England and Wales (and by a separate process Scotland) and to measure its change year by year. In this chapter I want to explore the significance of counting communication skills in one of the earliest societies to achieve mass literacy.3 Much of the debate around the achievement of the Millennium Development and World Education Forum Goals in
The first collection of its kind, Chartist Drama makes available four plays written or performed by members of the Chartist movement of the 1840s. Emerging from the lively counter-culture of this protest campaign for democratic rights, these plays challenged cultural as well as political hierarchies by adapting such recognisable genres as melodrama, history plays, and tragedy for performance in radically new settings. A communal, public, and embodied art form, drama was linked for the Chartists with other kinds of political performance: the oratory of the mass platform, festival-like outdoor meetings, and the elaborate street theatre of protest marches. Plays that Chartists wrote or staged advanced new interpretations of British history and criticised aspects of the contemporary world. And Chartist drama intervened in fierce strategic arguments within the movement. Most notably, poet-activist John Watkins’s John Frost, which dramatises the gripping events of the Newport rising of 1839, in which twenty-two Chartists lost their lives, defends the rebellion and the Chartist recourse to violence as a means for the movement to achieve its aims. The volume’s appendices document over one hundred Chartist dramatic performances, staged by activists in local Chartist associations or at professional benefits at some of London’s largest working-class theatres. Gregory Vargo’s introduction and notes elucidate the previously unexplored world of Chartist dramatic culture, a context that promises to reshape what we know about early Victorian popular politics and theatre.
create a dominant shared sense of ethnic shared identity made possible by mass literacy, education and other aspects of modernity. This IrishIreland nationalism came symbolically to dominate the new state from the 1920s to at least the 1960s. After independence Irish-Ireland cultural nationalism served to promote both cultural and economic isolationism. In 1932 a Fianna Fáil government was elected on a platform of economic isolationism. Éamon de Valera, the dominant political figure for the next two decades, preached a doctrine of economic self-sufficiency, preventing
figures for Australia are comparable); in this study 11 out of 13 (85 per cent) had not had a child by their 30th birthday. 10 For all the women here, whether they were professional novelists, journalists or biographers, or whether they were enthusiastic amateurs, writing was axiomatic in their construction of self and in the development of their creativity. Growing up during the early days of mass literacy, they certainly benefited from living through a time when, as F. R. Leavis somewhat regretfully declared, ‘a deluge of printed matter pours over the world’. 11 As
, Methuen, London, 1982; ‘Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought’, Gerd Bauman (ed.), The Written Word: Literacy in Transition, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1986; Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole, The Psychology of Literacy, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1981; David Vincent, The Rise of Mass Literacy. Reading and Writing in Modern Europe, Polity, Cambridge, 2000, pp. 92–94. 6 W. H. Auden remembered his childhood rehearsal of the Catechism when in 1961 he wrote that ‘The purpose of all educational institutions, public or private, is utilitarian and can
a nineteenth-century cultural ‘revival’ that had itself constituted a modernization of belonging. Ernest Gellner’s prerequisites for nationalism as a basis of social cohesion include mass literacy and school-inculcated culture along with a codification of the past into a national history (Gellner 1987, p. 15). What is referred to as the ‘Irish- Ireland’ phase of political nation-building persisted for several decades after independence. The Irish Free State became increasingly isolationist. Its education system was preoccupied with the intergenerational
to understand, represent and change reality has been central to France’s sense of its own mission in the world since the nation’s earliest days, and the written word is thus the site of particular passion and controversy. Diana Holmes traces a short history of the popular novel since mass literacy and new technologies democratised reading in the mid-nineteenth century, and she interweaves with this a study of how popular reading tastes have been depicted, judged and shaped by public discourses, from parliamentary debates to state and Church policies, marketing
think, any more than Elizabeth Hands thought, that ‘heroick’ verse was not for them, or an irreducibly elite form.32 Poetry offers historical evidence, says Roy Harris, that in pre-literate cultures there was awareness of subtle patterns of rhythm, rhyme, and assonance among poets and their audiences.33 A charwoman’s, a field labourer’s, and a domestic servant’s poetry offers evidence of a related kind: that in a culture in transition to mass literacy, as was the one they inhabited; in a partially literate society in which the oral and the literate had been so long