Baumwolle, Elfenbein und Glasperlen. Perspektiven österreichischer Reisender auf die Errichtung eines „informal empire“ im Sudan des 19. Jahrhunderts

THIS ONE-DAY CONFERENCE on 18 April 1986 at the University of Birmingham, jointly sponsored by the Royal African Society and the Department of Extra-Mural Studies, Birmingham, brought together 57 participants drawn from public life, business, the academic world, journalism and the diplomatic service to discuss current problems and future prospects for relations between South Africa and her neighbours in the Southern African Development Co-ordination Conference. The special focus was on the possible impact of sanctions on the states. The conference was opened by Douglas Rimmer, Vice-Chairman of the Council of the Royal African Society. He thanked Ian and Willie Henderson for their initiative in calling the conference, and urged that the meetings should be used not to provide an outlet for the passions which South African affairs provoke, but to examine objectively the oppositions of ideologies, economic interests and political forces in the region. He called for reali-sm in a spirit of free enquiry and rational debate. The day was divided into four sessions, the first of which provided a historical perspective to the formation of SADCC in 1980. Ian Henderson's paper reviewed South Africa's relations with the region from 1910 to 1975, reminding participants that Smuts's objectives in seeking afronding (rounding-off) of the Union's frontiers in the years after 1910 by the incorporation of the High Commission Territories were similar to the goals of detente in the 1970s: to structure the politics and the economies of southern Africa so that the Union/Republic defined development ob jectives for her neighbours in the interests of white South Africa. In one sense, South Africa's regional diplomacy in the 20th century was highly unsuccessful, Namibia being the only addition to the frontiers of 1910. But in a more important sense, South Africa's 'informal empire' in the region expanded in a silent but effective process about which little has been written. Responding to the theme that South Africa had failed by diplomacy to achieve direct political control over the hinterland, Willie Henderson looked at the origins of SADCC, not so much as a set of written agreements produced by the front-line states at the height of the war in Rhodesia but as a search for effective regional diplomatic alliances pre-dating the front-line brotherhood. Seretse Khama's key role in picking up and developing the

The emphasis of the twelve essays in this well-deserved Festschrift in honour of Rhoads Murphey is on the history of Ottoman Greece and Cyprus between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries. This is not only appropriate—Rhoads was a member of the Centre for Byzantine, Modern Greek and Ottoman Studies in the University of Birmingham from 1992 until his retirement—but also very welcome. As the editor points out in the cogent introduction to his own contribution (‘Between the Porte and the Lion: identity politics and opportunism in seventeenth century Cyprus’), it is only recently that historians have begun not simply to question but to abandon the nationalist paradigm which had effectively prevented any intelligent study of the tourkokratia. This volume continues on this pioneering path. The first essay in the volume, by Hasan Çolak, does not discuss the ‘Greek lands’ in particular, but is rather a study of the persistence and transformation of Byzantine titulature in the Ottoman Empire (‘Tekfur, fasilyus and kayser: disdain, negligence and appropriation of Byzantine imperial titulature in the Ottoman world’), whether applied to the Byzantine emperors before 1453 or adopted by the Ottoman sultans themselves after the fall of Constantinople. Still in the early Ottoman period, Konstantinos Moustakas presents a study of Ottoman slave labour (‘Slave labour in the early Ottoman rural economy: regional variations in the Balkans during the 15th century’), largely in the areas of Thessaly and south-eastern Macedonia which saw large-scale Muslim settlement in the immediate post-conquest period. The major sources for this study are the surviving tahrir defters of the region, which unexpectedly reveal the existence—although with an infuriating lack of detail—of slave-holding peasants in the area. The defters also form one of the sources for Ourania Bessi’s investigation of the development of Ottoman Dimetoka, from the time of Murad I (1362–1389) to the sixteenth century (‘The topographic reconstruction of Ottoman Dimetoka: issues of periodization and morphological development’). Dr Bessi takes as her starting point Gilles Veinstein’s description of what he saw as the characteristics of a ‘typical Ottoman town’, showing how Veinstein’s observations apply to Dimetoka, and demonstrates how the Ottomans transformed the Byzantine town with the settlement of the wealthier inhabitants in the area outside the walls (varoş), rather than in the citadel as had been the case in Byzantine times. The study is amply illustrated with maps, historic photographs and tables, extracted from the defters, showing the tax-paying population of each quarter between 1485 and 1570. From the sixteenth century, the articles in the volume covering the tourkokratia skip to the time of the Greek war of independence. Katerina Stathi’s ‘The Carta Incognita of Ottoman Athens’ is an account of the author’s chance discovery of an Ottoman map of Athens in the Hatt-i hümayun collection in the Başbakanlık Archives in Istanbul, and a description and an analysis of the map itself, leading her to the conclusion that it was produced for the use of the Ottoman military during the siege of the Acropolis in 1826-7. Sophia Laiou’s article (‘Entre les insurgés reaya et les indisciplinés ayan: la revolution grecque et la réaction de l’État’) is, as the title suggests, as much about the Ottoman authorities’ reaction to the rebellion of the Samiots and their plundering of the coasts of Anatolia, during the Greek war of independence, as it is about the rebels themselves, showing how it was, in most cases, the protection of their own lands and revenues that guided their actions in the face of insurgency. The last paper with a Greek theme is Michael Ursinus’ ‘Regional reform as an ambition: Charles Blunt Sen., His Majesty’s consul in Salonica, during his early years in the Ottoman Empire (1835–39)’. Describing the consul’s service in Salonica in the years immediately before the announcement of the Tanzimat reforms, the article demonstrates the close involvement of a foreign consul in the affairs of an Ottoman region, and what might be described as the mutually dependent relationship between the consul and the local authorities in effecting administrative improvements. As an example of how the British attempted to establish an ‘informal Empire’, the article is as much of interest to English, as it is to Ottoman, historians.

The term “informal empire” has become established in historiography from the 50s and is most often applied to the British Empire in the 19th century and its relations with dependent regions and nations that were not formally its colonies. Moreover, the apologists of empire (N. Ferguson, C. Carrington, the authors of the Cambridge History of the British Empire) insist that the British initially preferred “informal” relations, “gentlemanly” principles. In fact, the main instruments of British colonialism were bloody wars, annexations of territories, monstrous violence, and genocide of the population. The “informal empire” appeared in Latin America not in the least as the result of the good will of the British, but as a consequence of the largest military defeats on La Plata in 1806—1807. Its main elements in Latin America were: extraterritoriality (the norms and laws of the host countries did not apply to the British); unequal trade and economic relations, including the financial dominance of British banks, investments in the interests of maintaining the monocultural structure of the economy, the seizure and ruthless exploitation of the main centers of extraction of raw materials, the establishment of “price scissors” in foreign trade.

This article discusses the validity for historians of the concept of a pax britannica (a reminiscence, of course, of the pax romana), which Britain would have imposed during the 19th century, when she was the only superpower. Admittedly, from 1815 to 1914, there was no general war, even though ‘small’ wars broke out in Europe and overseas. The superior economic and naval power of Britain obliged France to avoid open conflict; Russia was also constrained, but not without the Crimean war. On the other hand, the influence of Britain in Europe had its limits, and eventually the British panicked before the rise of a strong German navy and this was a significant factor in the origins of World War I. Thanks to peace in Europe, Britain could devote her energies to overseas expansion. Besides her Empire stricto sensu, which grew relentlessly, she had a vast ‘informal Empire’ where the ‘imperialism of free trade’ prevailed. Altogether, the notion of pax britannica is most legitimate within the ‘formal’ empire. To her subject peoples Britain brought law and order, honest and efficient government, some economic development and a fast demographic growth. Pax britannica was both myth and reality, but it evaporated as Britain lost her economic and naval ascendancy.

This article aims to critically analyze the persistence of Portuguese influence in Timor and Solor after the collapse of the State of India in Southeast Asia in the 17th century. Challenging the traditional narrative of a terminal decline after the loss of Malacca (1641), this study proposes the concept of an “empire by delegation,” or “informal empire.” It argues that Portuguese sovereignty in the region was, in fact, delegated to a local and creolized power, the Topasses (“Black Portuguese”), who operated based on their own interests. Through an analysis that integrates Leonard Y. Andaya’s concept of “informal empire” with Hans Hägerdal’s indigenist perspectives, the article demonstrates that the strength of these hybrid agents stemmed from their ability to manipulate multiple sources of legitimacy – both European and local. The analysis concludes that the influence of the Topasses was not only Portugal’s survival mechanism in the region, but also the matrix that forged the unique cultural and political identity of Timor-Leste, offering a more decentralized and nuanced view of the adaptive nature of the Portuguese empire. We will also revisit the meritorious work of António Manuel Hespanha (2019), Os Filhos da Terra (The Children of the Land), as a synthetic revisiting of Portuguese historiography on mixed-race identities in the Portuguese empire, especially in distant Southeast Asia.

This study tries to re-interpret ‘AgwanPacheon’ with the concept of an ‘informal empire’ based on the imperial periphery theory. The author points out the cooperation of local Anglo-American diplomats and the cracks in the foreign policy of the home country, which was overlooked in the previous study. 19th century western diplomats were the pioneers, trying to seek interests and markets, taking advantage of rapidly changing political situation in Seoul. And the Foreign Ministry of the home country reprimanded if the results were unfavorable, but if the results were advantageous, it recognized “unintentional expansion.” The Russian and Anglo-American diplomats internationalized AgwanPacheon and assigned 8 western advisers to 9 departments. The imperial powers needed collaborators to encroach economical sectors, thus formed pro-western network by establishing and helping ‘Independent Newspaper’, ‘Foreign Language School’ and pro-American party.BR The author then compared the powers and activities of western advisers to those of Egypt. On the whole, the political and economical situation between the two countries took similar turn. That the western powers acted like supervisors and exerted direct and indirect influence to King Gojong and the Cabinet, thus Korea at that time could be called as the “informal empire” of the West.

This article investigates the practices of colonial science through a study of one plant collector working for the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, an institution of Britain’s informal empire in China. Further, the article situates this collector and his work in the context of the boom in popular gardening in Britain at the time. Popular garden writing in the late 19th and early 20th century helped fold China’s temperate plants into the canon of “natural” British plants. I argue that garden writers used a “temperate imagination” to encourage readers to imagine the connections between their own gardens and the temperate realms of Britain’s empire. These authors, and the plants they described, helped bring empire home to amateur gardeners in Britain.

I It ought to be a commonplace that Great Britain during the 19th century expanded overseas by means of “informal empire” as much as by acquiring dominion in the strict constitutional sense. For purposes of economic analysis it would clearly be unreal to define imperial history exclusively as the history of those colonies coloured red on the map. Nevertheless, almost all imperial history has been written on the assumption that the empire of formal dominion is historically comprehensible in itself and can be cut out of its context in British expansion and world politics. The conventional interpretation of the 19th-century empire continues to rest upon study of the formal empire alone, which is rather like judging the size and character of icebergs solely from the parts above the water-line.

This article aims at exploring the role played by Freemasonry in displaying, promoting and celebrating the British Empire. It argues that Masonic lodges held centre stage in the Indian colonial public sphere. They organized processions, cornerstone laying ceremonies, and banquets on an unequalled scale, which all became an integral part of imperial display. Masonic ritual, therefore, held centre stage in the dramaturgy of colonial power in India, and also played a leading role in fostering the cult of Empire, which emerged in the last decades of the 19th century. In that respect, Freemasonry offers a stimulating venue for articulating the local and the global, the material and the cultural, formal and informal Empire. It also offers an interesting insight into imperial circulations.

I It ought to be a commonplace that Great Britain during the 19th century expanded overseas by means of “informal empire” as much as by acquiring dominion in the strict constitutional sense. For purposes of economic analysis it would clearly be unreal to define imperial history exclusively as the history of those colonies coloured red on the map. Nevertheless, almost all imperial history has been written on the assumption that the empire of formal dominion is historically comprehensible in itself and can be cut out of its context in British expansion and world politics. The conventional interpretation of the 19th-century empire continues to rest upon study of the formal empire alone, which is rather like judging the size and character of icebergs solely from the parts above the water-line.

The value of glass beads to archaeologists has increased dramatically in the 21st century thanks to the development and improvements of methods to analyze the chemical composition of the glass used to make them. In addition, the amount of data accumulated from glass analysis has grown to the point that it is often possible to trace the probable origins of various glasses based on elements and trace elements present in the sands or quartz pebbles and sometimes the fluxes used to make the glass. But glassmaking and beadmaking are usually two separate professions, and raw and recycled glass were frequently traded even continents away. Thus, knowledge of bead manufacturing techniques and where they were practiced is needed to help determine where the beads might have been made and how they were traded. Beads found in archaeological assemblages in sub-Saharan Africa between the 7th and 17th centuries ce were made of several glasses from different regions, including the Near East, the eastern Mediterranean, North Africa, South Asia, Central Asia, and China. Sometimes, beads of the same glass type are found right across the continent (particularly in the early period, 7th–10th centuries); but usually, bead assemblages in West Africa are different from those on the eastern side of the continent, and the East Coast and southern Africa are seldom in sync. Southern Africa usually received beads from only one source in any given period, beginning in the 7th century with glass beads from Mesopotamia, then India, followed by beads made from Central Asian glass but an unknown region of production, and finally a return to India. Beads found on the eastern seaboard, from Kenya to Madagascar, came from diverse sources: beginning in the 7th century with beads from South Asia (probably Sri Lanka) and others from Mesopotamia (like those in the south). These were followed by beads from India along with a few from Egypt or the eastern Mediterranean. In the early 15th century, a scattering of beads from China appeared, possibly brought as gifts by the fleet of the Chinese admiral Zheng He. Then a century later, more Chinese beads are found, but they were probably brought by early European traders. West Africa began, like the other regions, with beads of glass from Mesopotamia, which were followed by similar beads, but they were made of glass produced in the Levant or Egypt. After the 11th century, the region received very small numbers of beads from India and ones made of glass from Central Asia, but the most interesting were beads made of glass that was produced in Ile Ife, Nigeria—the only known primary glass production center in sub-Saharan Africa.

The analysis embraced 253 beads and numerous small fragments of highly corroded glass found at the cemetery of Bodzia. Glass beads were found in 10 graves, 9 of which represent the first phase of the cemetery dated to the late 10th-early 11th century. Only one feature (D 154 ) containing glass beads comes from the second (later) phase of the use of the Bodzia cemetery, dating to the late 11th-12th century or the turn of the 11th and 12th centuries. The glass beads discovered in that Grave E86 4 /II were mainly made by the drawn technique which consists in cutting drawn glass tubes into sections. The results of the tests conducted on the beads discovered at Bodzia determined that they were made with either of the two basic techniques: drawing and winding. Drawn beads make up the majority of the glass ornaments discovered in the Bodzia cemetery. Keywords: 11th century; 12th century; Bodzia cemetery; drawing technique; drawn beads; glass beads; winding technique

The earliest glass beads in the archaeological record in West Africa dates to the 7th through 5th centuries bce, predating the Islamic trade in the region. By early 2nd millennium ce, the occurrence of glass beads had increased exponentially following the influx of goods and people. Thus, glass beads on the subcontinent are traced to outside sources. Compositional analysis has revealed that most glass beads in West Africa were made from soda-lime-silica glass fluxed with either mineral soda or plant ash. A group with soda-lime-alumina and another with high concentration of lead have also been identified. The origins of the glass beads of these compositional groups have been traced to the Middle East, Mesopotamia, the Levant, the Eastern Mediterranean, South Asia, and medieval Europe connecting West African to the global interactive system. Archaeological investigations since 2010 at Ile-Ife, Southwest Nigeria have revealed the existence of the first-known West African primary glassmaking workshop dated to early 2nd millennium ce. The workshop at Ile-Ife mass-produced glass beads and became a regional center supplying glass beads to the trade network. Three techniques of glass bead manufacture are common in West Africa: drawn, wound, and molded/powdered. While drawn and wound beads have early occurrence in West Africa, molded/powdered beads appeared later, popular from the 16th century. Morphologically, glass beads of all colors, shapes, size, and diaphaneity have been recovered from archaeological context. Glass beads are ubiquitous materials in West Africa. They are materiality of globalized world, insignias of power and status, indicators of West African ingenuity and creativity, and emblems of social, political, and religious complexity.

The study of history of the region's economy in the 18th - first half of the 19th centuries seriously advanced in the post-soviet Russian historiography. Profound monographic studies on the history of business, industry, trade and crafts were published. There was a need for generalization of research results. The author offers a synthesis of the experience. The article presents an outline of the development of industry, crafts and trade in Siberia in the 18th century - the first quarter of the 19th century, when the region experienced the first results of the transition to the industrial era. At this time crafts predominated, but factories became commonplace. A feature of the manufacturing industry of Siberia was the complete domination of the feudal entrepreneurship of the Treasury, the Cabinet, the nobility and the monasteries, the displacement of private capital in the sphere of trade and crafts. The imperial family took possession of the most profitable non-ferrous metallurgy, depriving plants and mines to private entities for fiscal debts. Mining areas of Altai and Transbaikalia became major suppliers of non-ferrous metals in Russia. During the 18th and 19th centuries their successful operation was due to a unique combination of three factors: the area was rich in ores, in forests for fuel and building materials and in fertile land that could attract and concentrate the peasant population which was used as a workforce. Salt plants that belonged to monasteries were confiscated by the state, iron works were taken over by the Treasury for debt. Distilleries provided for the state wine monopoly. Extraction and production of salt was also the subject of official monopoly. For maintenance of military units, there worked a textile factory in Omsk, Telminsky and Taltzy industrial complexes near Irkutsk. Feudal industry operated on the forced labor of convicts, exiled workers, workmen and bonded peasants. At the beginning of the 19th century, there were signs of the feudal business crisis. Private capital, which worked with the use of hired labor, concentrated in the marine industry, in fishing and fur trade, in craft and trade. Large private capital could only be formed in trade. The exchange of goods between European Russia and Siberia was carried out through a network of fair traders, wholesalers. Merchants sold or lent industrial goods purchased at the Nizhny Novgorod and Irbit fairs at regional urban fairs, from which, in turn, they went to county and local trades in more or less large settlements. Instead, Siberian raw materials and furs were gathered. Domestic trade remained in the form of fairs due to the seasonality of tradeways. In foreign trade, Siberia served as a mediator between European Russia and China. Trade with China through Maimaicheng was of great significance for the Russian trade.

• This paper shows the importance of trace elements such as B, Li and REE for the study of early glass production and trade. • The data challenges the assumption that high Ce glass were exclusive to Italian assemblages of the 9 th -8 th centuries BC. • They establish similarities between bird-shaped glass beads from Tsaishi (Georgia) & Cuma (Italy), both being high Ce glass. • It confirms the presence of a new group of glasses with high Mg K P contents as early as the beginning of the 8 th century BC. • It suggests that Colchis was inserted in a broad glass beads distribution network both to the south and the west. We present the analytical results obtained by LA-ICP-MS from a set of 38 glass beads of various colours dating from the 8th to the first half of the 7th century BCE, found at Tsaishi cemetery, located in the central area of historical Colchis (Georgia). Through the comparison with published analytical data of coeval, earlier and later glass samples, the aim of this study is to investigate the provenance of Tsaishi assemblages in order to highlight the cultural influences and trading networks of the Colchis community between the 8th and the 7th centuries BC. Tsaishi glass beads predate previously studied glass beads from Brili necropolis, located in the mountainous part of Colchis (North-west Georgia). In contrast to the compositions of the Brili glasses, the measurements of the Tsaishi glass beads do not allow for the identification of the well-established Iron Age compositional groups. Furthermore, in contrast to the other Early Iron Age sites, they do not appear to indicate the presence of typical Egyptian or Syro-Palestinian natron glass productions. Although our assemblage shows considerable compositional variability, it highlights the existence of a new group of glass recently identified in Italy and characterised by a positive cerium anomaly, as well as a group of high boron and lithium glasses. However, despite the large variation in contents for minor elements, colourless and purple glass are all part of the same group. Comparison with other Early Iron Age glass studies points to a fairly complex situation, probably due to small scale production of raw glass and glass beads, the multitude of production sites and the diversity of recipes used by glass workers at the beginning of the first millennium B.C.