The Jewish community in nineteenth century Palestine: evidence from the Montefiore censuses

Initial findings from five recently transcribed censuses of the Jewish community in nineteenth century Palestine, commissioned by Sir Moses Montefiore. This article discusses each census and presents uncorrected population figures. It describes how the Jewish community was rapidly changing: the population increased almost fourfold between 1839 and 1875, primarily due to immigration from Ashkenazi countries. The Jewish community was majority Ashkenazi by 1875. Analysis of the census data gives us detailed information about the community, such as the fact that Ashkenazim were significantly more likely than Sephardim to be engaged in full-time Torah study, whereas individuals who had immigrated to the land of Israel were slightly less likely. It also suggests that immigrations occurred at all ages, although the average age of an immigrant when they came to Palestine was 36.     

English constitutional law in Austrian popular legal literature of the nineteenth century

‘Popular legal literature’ is a source that has been widely disregarded by historians as well as legal historians until the present day. The following article provides an outline with basic information about this literary genre and its typology with regard to its motivation, style, contents and authors. After this general overview the article then proceeds to show the nature of the information about English constitutional law that can be evidenced from Austrian popular legal literature books of the nineteenth century, and comparisons are made with other sources.     

German influence on Italian jurists' perceptions of the British constitutional model in the late nineteenth century

In Great Britain, the Magna Carta of 1215 was regarded as the guarantor of parliamentary sovereignty for centuries. During the nineteenth century the Charter continued to be interpreted in law schools, particularly through William Blackstone's 1759 edition. By the mid-nineteenth century, both politicians and lawyers proceeded with a revision of the law, and provided the first Statute Laws Revision Act of 1856. Two further acts followed in 1861 and 1863, repealing hundreds of obsolete laws; subsequent legislation abrogated much of Magna Carta and, by the 1880s, even more chapters of the Charter were revoked. In the rest of Europe throughout the nineteenth century, eminent continental scholars were authoritative voices regarding the interpretation of the English juridical system. By examining historical, legal and political-theoretical aspects of the continental, particularly the German, reception of the English concept of law, the aim of this article is to contribute to a wider understanding of European constitutionalism of that time, since the nineteenth century can be considered a constitutional era. Various aspects of constitutional history both within and outside of continental Europe are examined from a comparative, juridical and historical perspective. In Italy, German studies on English constitutional and parliamentary history were translated and commented on. This article is a working hypothesis about the influence, or the rejection, of the legal system in place across the Channel. The essays by distinguished German jurists interpreting the English institutional inheritance were translated into Italian. These translations and, in particular, the comments thereon, reflect the road taken by Italian legal thought to reach a constitutional model and to gain an insight into what lessons Germans drew from the English legacy in order to form their own doctrinal opinion.     

Famines in 19th century Indian history: A materialist alternative to ecological reductionism

This article charts the ways in which gender politics have featured within political landscape of contemporary Singapore. It is shown that there has been remarkable consistency in the approaches of the Singaporean government to women and gender relations in the post-independence period. Gender policies have consistently been interventionist and proactive, and have revealed the willingness of the government to subordinate the interests of women to those of the state. Fluctuations in policy regarding women are traced, and shown to be related to such factors as changes in Singapore's position within the global economy, the putative invasiveness of Western culture and perceived ethnic imperatives of Singapore's dominant ethnic group, the Chinese.     

The East European agrarian reforms of the middle of the nineteenth century in a new historical perspective

Organizational change processes involve many stakeholders, but the roles of capital owners and managers have not received enough attention in research on organizational change. Exploratory research results in Estonia elucidate how the interplay of owners and managers influences strategic change efforts in an organization operating in a rapidly changing transition economy. In addition to linking theoretical approaches to organizational change and development to corporate governance challenges in transition economies, this article uses data from interviews with 26 prominent decision-makers in Estonia to highlight the differences between foreign and domestic owners in controlling managers in the strategic change processes.     

The role of the pristavstvo institution in the context of Russian imperial policies in the Kazakh Steppe in the nineteenth century

The institution of pristavstvo was introduced in the Kazakh Steppe in the first decade of the nineteenth century. This institution had different meanings and functions, from an individually held position (e.g., a pristav to the khān of the Junior Horde in 1820; the pristavs who accompanied the Kazakh delegation to Saint Petersburg in the first half of the nineteenth century) to an administrative-territorial structure (e.g., the pristavstvo of the Senior Horde; the Mangyshlak and Zaisan pristavstvos). Though the political structure of the Russian empire had included institutions analogous to the pristavstvo, it was not a conventional component of the Russian administrative system. Studying the features of the pristavstvo institution in the territory of Kazakhstan and analysing the transformation of the pristav's function provide new insights on how the multi-ethnic Russian empire was managed. They will also help scholars to better understand the forms and methods the Russian authorities employed to manage their nomadic populations.