PRIMARY SOURCE ANALYSIS
10 points
Choose ONE of these four quotations. Analyze the quotation and the primary source from which
it is taken. Give the historical context, referring to lectures and readings. What combination of
social, religious, political, and economic factors coincided with the production of the source and
in what ways do they relate to it? Who is the author and what is his/her background and agenda?
What is the author’s perspective on the events/phenomena described in the primary source? Do
not limit your analysis to the specific quotation. Think about the entire primary source that the
quotation comes from. Comment on the significance of the primary source. In what ways is it
important and why? Why is this particular quotation from the source significant? Refer to at least
two keywords from the first half of the semester. Note at the start of your answer the letter (A, B,
C, D) of the quotation you are analyzing. (WORD LIMIT: no more than 500 words)
Quotation A
“Our celestial empire rules over ten thousand kingdoms! Most surely do we possess a measure of
godlike majesty which ye cannot fathom! Still we cannot bear to slay or exterminate without
previous warning, and it is for this reason that we now clearly make known to you the fixed laws
of our land. If the foreign merchants of your said honorable nation desire to continue their
commercial intercourse, they then must tremblingly obey our recorded statutes, they must cut off
for ever the source from which the opium flows, and on no account make an experiment of our
laws in their own persons! […] Let your highness immediately, upon the receipt of this
communication, inform us promptly of the state of matters, and of the measure you are pursuing
utterly to put a stop to the opium evil. Please let your reply be speedy. Do not on any account
make excuses or procrastinate.”
Commissioner Lin Zexu, Letter to Queen Victoria (1839)
Quotation B
“It is evident that the Europeans, by the introduction of English articles into India, have thrown
the weavers, the cotton dressers, the carpenters, the blacksmiths, and the shoemakers, &c., out of
employ, and have engrossed their occupations, so that every description of native artisan has
been reduced to beggary. But under the Badshahi Government the native artisans will
exclusively be employed in the services of the kings, the rajahs, and the rich; and this will no
doubt ensure their prosperity. Therefore these artisans ought to renounce the English services,
and assist the Majahdeens, engaged in the war, and thus be entitled both to secular and eternal
happiness.”
The Azamgarh Proclamation (1857)
Quotation C
“A nation is a living soul, a spiritual principle. Two things, which in truth are but one, constitute
this soul, this spiritual principle. One is in the past, the other in the present. One is the common
possession of a rich heritage of memories; the other is the actual consent, the desire to live
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together, the will to preserve worthily the undivided inheritance which has been handed down.
[…] A nation is then a great solidarity, constituted by the sentiment of the sacrifices that its
citizens have made, and of those that they feel prepared to make once more. It implies a past; but
it is summed up in the present by a tangible fact – consent, the clearly expressed desire to live a
common life.”
Ernest Renan, “What Is a Nation?” (1882)
Quotation D
“1. We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness. 2. Courage,
audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry. […] 7. Except in struggle, there is
no more beauty. No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece. Poetry must be
conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate them before man. 8. We
stand on the last promontory of the centuries!… Why should we look back, when what we want
is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We
already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed. 9. We will
glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of
freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.”
F. T. Marinetti, The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism (1909)