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18962 results in Cambridge Histories

Page 893 of 949

  • 1 - European Trade with India

  • from XIII - Foreign Trade
  • Edited by Tapan Raychaudhuri, Irfan Habib
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Economic History of India
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    01 April 1982, pp 382-407

  • Summary

    In so far as the foreign trade of the Indian sub-continent is concerned, the aspirations and the activities of the Estado da India represented several institutional innovations. As a result of the Portuguese naval watch, at the end of the sixteenth century few Indian ships could venture to east Africa, the Spice Islands, or to China and Japan unless, the shipowners entered into indirect partnerships with Portuguese officials or merchants in Goa. Both the coast of Coromandel and the Gujarat plains in western India produced a wide variety of patterned cotton fabrics which found specialized markets in the islands of south-east Asia. During the eighteenth century, India's foreign trade underwent a considerable expansion as a result of the tripartite participation of the Dutch, English, and the French. It is inconceivable that European trade with India, in general for that matter, could have been sustained on a large scale for any length of time without the discovery of American silver-mines.

  • 2 - Maharashtra and the Deccan

  • from X - Non-Agricultural Production
  • Edited by Tapan Raychaudhuri, Irfan Habib
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Economic History of India
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    01 April 1982, pp 308-315

  • Summary

    There was a fairly uniform pattern of rural industries based on the caste system in the Deccan throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The most important of the urban industries were cotton and silk-weaving. Especially during the 1660s the Dutch merchants on Coromandel were in such a great need of pig-iron, iron bands, iron bars and cannon balls, that they organized a manufactory system of production for these items in their factories. In the first half of the eighteenth century when the Marathas achieved their zenith of power, urban industries in the western Deccan seem to have further developed, and brassworks of Kalyan, ornamental paper and silk-works of Aurangabad, and ordinary paper of Newasa were some of the most reputed. There were several large-scale industries in the Deccan, which were distinct from the ordinary urban industries. These were shipbuilding, diamond mining, and royal factories (karkhanas).

  • 1 - Mughal India

  • from XV - Standard of Living
  • Edited by Tapan Raychaudhuri, Irfan Habib
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Economic History of India
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    01 April 1982, pp 458-471

  • Summary

    This chapter discusses the standards of living of the ruling classes to the common people in India during sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Owing to the marked division of seventeenth-century Indian society into classes and strata with great differences in income, customs and patterns of consumption, it will be convenient to treat separately the standards of living of the peasantry, the city poor, the middle strata and the nobility. Famine and epidemics were two major scourges in the lives of the villages. The employment of large numbers of servants and attendants by the upper classes was a characteristic feature of Indian society of the time. The upper classes in Mughal India consisted of the nobles, the autonomous chiefs and rajas, and the wealthy merchants in the towns. There were many rich merchants particularly in the coastal towns who rivalled nobles in luxurious living. Mughal centralization led to the growth of a remarkable degree of cultural synthesis among the upper classes.

  • 3 - Non-Agricultural Production and Urban Economy

  • from III - Northern India under the Sultanate
  • Edited by Tapan Raychaudhuri, Irfan Habib
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Economic History of India
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    01 April 1982, pp 76-93

  • Summary

    The economy of the Delhi sultanate seems to be marked by a considerable expansion of the money economy, accelerating particularly during the first half of the fourteenth century. Among the metals, iron ore of an exceptionally high grade was mined in India and was used to produce damascened steel which had a worldwide reputation. Among precious stones, diamonds were mined in the Deccan. The pearl fishery off Tuticorin in south India is described by Marco Polo. The shawl industry of Kashmir had been equally firmly established much before the thirteenth century. The arrival of the ' Saracenic' architecture represented something more than a change in the appearance and design of buildings. Indian metallurgy enjoyed a worldwide reputation in the fashioning of swords. Alā'ud'dīn Khaljī's price-control measures enticed the historian BaranI not only into giving us important price data, but also into reflections as to the factors which govern prices and the relationship between prices and wages.

  • 2 - Maharashtra and the Deccan

  • from XV - Standard of Living
  • Edited by Tapan Raychaudhuri, Irfan Habib
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Economic History of India
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    01 April 1982, pp 471-477

  • Summary

    There was a considerable economic differentiation among the peasantry in the medieval Deccan. The small peasants who held the land below 10 acres or so as well as the village artisans and servants may be regarded as the rural poor. Zamindārs and other large ināmdārs may be regarded as rural aristocrats. Domestic slaves owned by urban residents and government labourers, artisans, ordinary soldiers and the like, may be considered the urban poor. During the eighteenth century in Maharashtra there was a custom for the private as well as government slave to be paid a ser of coarse grains a day per head. Despite a great difference in the standard of living among different classes both in the rural and urban areas, the routine life of the people in the medieval Deccan was marked by a degree of stability in normal times. But this stability was often gravely disturbed by the sporadic famines, wars, and other calamities.

  • 25 - Persius

  • from PART V - EARLY PRINCIPATE
  • Edited by E. J. Kenney, W. V. Clausen
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Classical Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    18 March 1982, pp 503-510

  • Summary

    This chapter explores the satires of Persius that are preceded by fourteen choliambic lines. The lines form a single piece and were intended to serve as a prologue, not as an epilogue. The literary texture is also very rich. Several expressions recall the language of Propertius, a repulsive slave-dealer is satirized through a parody of Virgil, and Ennius is directly quoted. This is learned satire for a sophisticated audience; there can be no question of general reform. According to the Vita some lines were removed from Sat. 6 to give the impression of completeness; then the poems were handed over to Caesius Bassus, who produced the first edition. The poet's interest in Stoicism had some bearing on his choice of themes, and it helps to explain his earnest tone and his rather intolerant attitude to human failings.

  • 3 - The genesis of poetry in Rome

  • from PART II - EARLY REPUBLIC
  • Edited by E. J. Kenney, W. V. Clausen
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Classical Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    18 March 1982, pp 51-59

  • Summary

    For centuries the Romans had achieved considerable political sophistication, and that involved public debates with carefully composed speeches. This chapter discusses the genesis of poetry in Rome. The word carmen was adopted by Augustan poets as the generic term for their own compositions. This meaning of poem and poetry was a specialization imposed on a word whose meaning was originally much wider. The most extensive surviving carmen is a prayer quoted by the elder Cato. Early in the nineteenth century, the great German historian Niebuhr, anxious to give a basis to his reconstruction of the early Roman tradition, revived the theory that legends such as that of Horatius or Verginia had been preserved by oral tradition in great families in the form of heroic lays. The ancient Roman custom was to set a man's titulus over his grave. L. Cornelius Scipio Barbatus's consul in 298 BC has epitaphs in Saturnian verse.

  • 18 - The Aeneid

  • from PART IV - THE AGE OF AUGUSTUS
  • Edited by E. J. Kenney, W. V. Clausen
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Classical Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    18 March 1982, pp 333-369

  • Summary

    Virgil's Aeneid was conceived and shaped as a national and patriotic epic for the Romans of his day. Certainly the Romans hailed it as such, and it rapidly became both a set text in education and the natural successor to the Annales of Ennius as the great poetic exposition of Roman ideals and achievements. One of the fountains of the Aeneid's inspiration was the national aspiration of Rome in Virgil's time; another, of equal if not greater importance, was the epic poetry of Homer. The Iliad and the Odyssey represented in the classical world the highest achievement of Greek poetry, and the admiration universally felt by the Romans for Homer was for the great national poet of the Greek world whose literature they revered. The Olympian deities enabled Virgil to enter in description the mythological world which delighted Ovid in his Metamorphoses.

  • 17 - The Georgics

  • from PART IV - THE AGE OF AUGUSTUS
  • Edited by E. J. Kenney, W. V. Clausen
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Classical Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    18 March 1982, pp 320-332

  • Summary

    The misery of the years following Julius' murder are recalled in Virgil's next work, the Georgics, in the magnificent rhetoric of the finale of Book I, 466-514, which represents the chaos as continuing and the young Octavian as the only hope. Seneca said pertinently that Virgil was interested in what could be said most gracefully, not most truthfully, and wrote not to teach farmers but to delight readers. In Virgil the technically didactic matter is eclectic, yet it forms too large a part of the poem for it to be taken as purely symbolic. In the case of a poem whose excellence depends on a variety of features the best, perhaps the only, way of doing justice to it is by a running commentary, in terms of structure. To several sensitive critics the Georgics has suggested a musical composition, a symphony with four movements and various themes enunciated and then harmoniously interwoven.

  • 40 - Learning and the past

  • from PART VI - LATER PRINCIPATE
  • Edited by E. J. Kenney, W. V. Clausen
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Classical Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    18 March 1982, pp 762-769

  • Summary

    Macrobius Ambrosius Theodosius, apparently an African, is probably to be identified with the Theodosius who was Praetorian Prefect of Italy in 430. The picture painted by Macrobius of late fourth-century senatorial society is the very antithesis of that provided by Ammianus Marcellinus. But it is probably going too far to suggest that the desire to rebut Ammianus was high among Macrobius' motives. Wooden and mechanical as much of it is, the Saturnalia is a touching picture of the nostalgia of a class which had been overtaken by events, not the least among which was the conversion to Christianity of the great bulk of the Roman aristocracy. Martianus writes a baroque and convoluted Latin often of extreme obscurity. Throughout the period under review grammar, in its Hellenistic sense of the systematic study of language and literature, continued to form the main content of the education of those who proceeded beyond mere practical ability to read and write.

  • 12 - Sallust

  • from PART III - LATE REPUBLIC
  • Edited by E. J. Kenney, W. V. Clausen
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Classical Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    18 March 1982, pp 268-280

  • Summary

    Sallust was the first recognized classic amongst Roman historians, avidly read, admired and abused, immensely influential on many diverse writers, and cited more often than any Latin prose author, Cicero alone excepted. Oratory at Rome reached its maturity a generation or more before history. That simple fact largely explains why Cicero's remarks about history are prejudiced and condescending. Sallust may more fairly be criticized, in his Catiline at least, for die disproportionate bulk of introductory matter in a comparatively short composition. Ancient critics recorded the most distinctive features of his style: archaism, brevity, abruptness, and novelty. The brevity which Sallust pursued and often attained made a great impression on Roman readers, to judge by the numerous references to it. Sallust's outspokenness and self-will commanded the attention of contemporaries and posterity. He puts over his personality, real or assumed, very forcefully: witness the violent opening words of the lugurtha.

  • 24 - Challenge and response

  • from PART V - EARLY PRINCIPATE
  • Edited by E. J. Kenney, W. V. Clausen
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Classical Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    18 March 1982, pp 495-502

  • Summary

    The first century of the Christian era has often been termed the' age of rhetoric'. Tacitus Dialogus is a valuable witness to the attitudes and aspirations of the first century. The arguments of Vipstanus Messalla have been cited to prove the corrupting effects of rhetorical education. For a professional poet in need of patronage the recitation must have been of some assistance. Statius, for instance, at one point refers to the fact that senators were in the habit of attending his readings and Juvenal, in sarcastic vein, confirms their success, though denying that they brought Statius any financial benefit. To see the literature of die first century in perspective, it seems best to bear in mind a number of disparate but possibly cumulative factors, educational, social, political and philosophical, all of which are, to a greater or lesser degree, relevant to die whole picture.

  • 16 - Theocritus and Virgil

  • from PART IV - THE AGE OF AUGUSTUS
  • Edited by E. J. Kenney, W. V. Clausen
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Classical Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    18 March 1982, pp 301-319

  • Summary

    Theocritus of Syracuse, who invented the pastoral, was a Hellenistic poet, a contemporary of Callimachus and Apollonius. A proud claim, made with all the delicate force of which pastoral rhetoric is capable: the claim, that is, of being the first Latin poet to imitate Theocritean pastoral; and made at the beginning of an eclogue which owes little or nothing overtly to Theocritus. Virgil's imitation of Theocritus is restricted mainly, and not surprisingly, to the pastoral Idylls, with the notable exception of Idyll, Simaetha's incantation, a most unpastoral song which Virgil managed to translate into a pastoral setting. The publication of the Book of Eclogues is an epoch in Latin poetry. Virgil's Eclogue may be taken as a personal expression of a public attitude. Time is a relation of experience, and much had happened in the few urgent years during which Virgil was meditating his book.

  • 15 - Uncertainties

  • from PART IV - THE AGE OF AUGUSTUS
  • Edited by E. J. Kenney, W. V. Clausen
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Classical Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    18 March 1982, pp 295-300

  • Summary

    Cicero was murdered by the soldiers of Antony and Octavian in December of 43 BC. In the following year, according to the ancient tradition, Virgil began to write the Eclogues. In the work of Virgil and Horace it seems that the process of assimilation has achieved a happy equilibrium: the most characteristic monuments of Augustan poetry display a formally and aesthetically satisfying fusion of new and old, native and alien elements. For the first time since the classical age of Greece the competing claims of technique and inspiration were again harmonized. After the elimination of Octavian's last rival at Actium in 31 BC the Roman world entered on an unexampled period of peace and prosperity. Naturally the official author of these blessings expected his achievements to be reflected in contemporary literature. A tradition of court poetry going back through Theocritus and Callimachus to Pindar and beyond offered obvious models.

  • 13 - Caesar

  • from PART III - LATE REPUBLIC
  • Edited by E. J. Kenney, W. V. Clausen
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Classical Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    18 March 1982, pp 281-285

  • Summary

    Julius Caesar's surviving output comprises seven books on the Gallic Wars and three on the Civil Wars. This chapter presents the literary background to the Commentaries on the Gallic Wars and on the Civil Wars. The publication of the Commentaries was timed to assert his claim on the gratitude of his fellow-countrymen and to display his dignitas, the Roman quality of achievement which merits recognition by high office. The Gallic Wars was a statement of Caesar's achievements. Caesar's motive is principally simplicity, but the comparison with Livy shows that he is also influenced by concern for purity or propriety of diction. Language had always been a study of interest to him. The style and presentation follow the pattern of the Gallic Wars. The Bellum Hispaniense is one of the very few works written in a predominantly un-literary Latin, and is a very valuable source for the knowledge of the language.

Page 893 of 949