Imperial Hops

This roundtable documents emerging conversations on Indigenous politics and settler colonialism in Asia. It brings together a diverse group of emerging diasporic/Indigenous scholars from the Cordilleras, Surigao, Okinawa, and the Champa Kingdom to examine contemporary issues in Indigenous politics in Asia and their implications for broader conversations on Asian/American Studies and Global Indigenous Studies. This roundtable asks: how might the place-based and regional specificity of Indigenous politics in Asia expand global conversations on Indigenous movements for self-determination and decolonization? How might settler colonialism in Asia inform more transnational and global theorizations of Asian settler colonialism?

Travels and Travails of Settler Colonialism in Queer Natal

Between the 1860s and the First World War, all the indigenous inhabitants of southern and central Africa were brought under British rule. Historical writing on southern Africa, including what later became British Central Africa, began at the same time. Most English-speaking historians writing in South Africa after the First World War were certain that colonial expansion and white settlement were necessary for the economic uplift and civilizing of Africans, but highly critical of the racial policies being espoused by Afrikaner nationalists. With the British Empire virtually coming to an end in the 1950s and 1960s, and the transition to a multiracial majority-ruled Commonwealth receiving its greatest challenge in apartheid South Africa and federating Central Africa, Thompson’s contemporaries focused on the historical roles of white settlers and Imperial officials in bringing about division when there should have been unity. The writing of history has not flourished on campuses in the independent states, and the bulk of work done has been pursued in the universities of Europe and North America. In such circumstances, debate about the legacy of Empire will be as intense in the future as it has been in the past.

Personality traits and bitterness perception influence the liking and intake of pale ale style beers

Land, Liberation and Compromise in Southern Africa provides a novel framework for understanding the inherent volatility of the politics of land in contemporary Southern Africa. The link between the established political economy of settler colonialism, the role of liberation politics and the enduring impact of the transition to democracy in Southern Africa, key factors inhibiting attempts to embark on substantive agrarian reform after independence, are crucial to comprehending why the Zimbabwean crisis impacted so profoundly on regional politics. Furthermore, infusing these conditions with rhetorical and substantive power are a host of regional narratives in Southern Africa – drawn from the settler state era, the liberation struggle itself and implicit in neoliberal policies pursued by democratic governments after independence – which have shaped perceptions among elites, social groups and the wider population. By exposing the lingering contradictions in former settler states between society's heightened expectations of liberation movements and the constitutional and the ideological constraints that bind them to the past, this book offers a comprehensive regional perspective into the dynamics of the politics of land and their impact on democracy in Southern Africa.

The relation of anthropology to colonialism and became a burning issue for anthropologists in mid-1960s. As European colonies in Asia and Africa became independent nations, as United States engaged in war in South-east Asia and in covert operations in South America, anthropologists questioned their interactions with their subjects and worried about political consequences of government-supported research. By 1970, some spoke of anthropology as the child of Western imperialism and as scientific colonialism. Ironically, as link between anthropology and colonialism became more widely accepted within discipline, serious interest diminished in examining history of anthropology in contexts. This volume attempts a critical historical consideration of varying in which (and from which) ethnographic knowledge essential to anthropology has been produced. The essays comment on ethnographic work from middle of 19th century to almost end of 20th; they cover regions from Oceania through Southeast Asia, Andaman Islands and Southern Africa, to North and South America. The colonial situations also range from first contact through to establishment of power; from District Officer administrations through to white settler regimes; from internal colonialism to international mandates; from early pacification to wars of liberation; from expropriation of land to defence of ecology. The motivations and responses of anthropologists discussed are equally varied: romantic resistance of Maclay and complicity of Kubary in early colonialism; Malinowski's salesmanship of academic anthropology; Speck's advocacy of Indian land rights; Schneider's grappling with ambiguities of rapport; and Turner's facilitation of Kayapo cinematic activism.

The historical role of European farming in Southern and Central Africa has received a great deal of attention among scholars over the years. A striking consensus exists in the Scholarly literature, namely that the success or failure of European farming in Southern Africa was to a large extent dependent upon the colonizers' access to and control over cheap labour, which they in turn could only access through strong support of the colonial state. Yet, these propositions have so far not been systematically and empirically tested. This article is a first attempt to do that by analysing the ‘wage-burden’ European settler farmers faced. The wage-burden is identified by measuring wage shares (total amount paid in the form of wages as a share of total profits) on European farms in colonial Africa. Based on archival documents, we construct time-series for value of output, transportation costs, investments in agriculture, and wages paid for the European tobacco and tea sector in colonial Malawi. Our results contradict both previous research on settler colonialism in Africa and the historiography of Nyasaland. Our estimates show that settler farming did not collapse in the 1930s as commonly assumed. On the contrary, the value of production on both tobacco and tea farms increased significantly. And so did the settler farmers' capacity to capture the profits, which was manifested in a declining wage share over time. In contrast with previous research, we argue that the declining wage share cannot be explained by domestic colonial policies but rather through changes in regional migration patterns, and global commodity markets. Migration patterns had a significant impact on the supply of farm labour and global commodity markets influenced value of production. Market forces rather than colonial policies shaped the development trajectory of settler farming in Nyasaland.

Plants moved between locales, and connected points across, the Atlantic world from Antiquity to the Early Modern period. While the role of plants as the portmanteau biota of colonial settlements in the Americas underscored their instrumentalization by Europeans, historians now see the interplay of African, Indigenous, and even Asian plants in the Atlantic world. Plant humanities scholarship in history, geography, anthropology, archaeology, and other disciplines provides a sense of diverse human-plant relationships, and this article collects research that focuses on plants as food, medicine, cultural emblems, scientific specimens, and aesthetic objects. These varied kinds of socio-floral engagements are reflected in equally disparate scholarship from researchers investigating North and South America; the Caribbean; West, West Central, southern, and eastern Africa; and western Europe. Numerous studies of Mesoamerican cultures conducted by anthropologists and archaeologists point toward the rich botanical traditions of Maya, Mexica, and other Central American societies in “pre-Hispanic” periods. However, the contact between Europeans and Mesoamericans largely still serves to divide studies on plants, particularly since many sources reflect the hybridization of plant knowledge. A number of monographs and articles are included here; however, more research is necessary on earlier cultures and periods, such as the Olmecs. Likewise, for Atlantic African and African diaspora studies, much of the scholarship remains regionally divided between West Africanists and scholars of West Central and southern Africa. Exceptions to this trend are evident in Caribbean-focused research that emphasizes the relative dynamism of plant-derived medicine as knowledge crisscrossed among Africans, Indigenous Amerindians, and Europeans. An epistemic challenge remains for historians of science and medicine and economic or cultural historians regarding whether to write about plants as culturally embedded actants or as emergent commodities moving along chains of production, supply, and consumption. One example of this involves the history of High John the Conqueror root, both a material plant and a spiritual being who appears in African American literature as a trickster. John’s commodification over time in the United States, as Carolyn Morrow Long has shown, into an accepted pharmaceutical, involves his transformation from a black spirit into a white kingly figure. This further touches on the complex racialization of plants, an issue likewise related to the de-Africanization or de-Indigenization of plants by settler colonialism. Linguistic challenges pose problems for researchers as well, as a number of plant collections remain untranslated and understudied, such as plants collected at slave castles where captives spoke a multitude of languages and dialects. Vagueness and anonymity within primary sources that mention “an Indian” or a “Negro Dr.” further frustrate efforts to identify and build up narratives of Amerindian and Atlantic African intellectual traditions due to the historical construction of the archive itself.

The first permanent African residents of the new towns established by whites in southern and eastern Africa at the end of the 19th century were female. These towns were new social spaces, existing where no towns had existed before. The residents had to invent the rules for living: new forms of urban identity emerged over time. For white settlers, the towns were intended to mirror familiar European urban spaces. For Africans, little was recognizable, but there were many opportunities to adapt familiar social relationships to the new contexts. African women’s lives in the early years of these white settler towns seem paradoxical. They were permanent residents, but officially they had no rights of residence at all. They had very limited economic opportunities, being pushed into prostitution and beer brewing, yet they ended up being powerful property owners with independent wealth. They can appear as both victims and liberated agents. Their lives were complicated. But part of the paradox arises from trying to interpret their lives through European lenses, in which terms such as “prostitute wife” seem oxymoronic. Their lives perhaps made more sense to these women pioneers than they have to the academics who have attempted to reconstruct them.

Geist und Materie (Interkulturelle Theologie, III), by Walter J. Hollenweger.LOSS AND GAIN: The Way of Polemic and Dialogue in Post‐Colonial Asia: Donald Nicholl taught History and Religious Studies for a quarter of a century in Britain and the USA.Western Colonialism in Asia and Christianity, edited by M.D. David.Themes in Hinduism and Christianity. A Comparative Study, by Roger Hooker.Love Meets Wisdom. A Christian Experience of Buddhism, by Aloysius Pieris, SJ. Maryknoll.Social and Historical Change: An Islamic Perspective, by Ayatullah Murtaza Mutahhari. (Translated from Persian by R. Campbell).ASPECTS OF THE CHURCH'S IDENTITY AND TASK IN AFRICA: John Mbiti comes from Kenya.World Christianity: Southern Africa, edited by Marjorie Froise.Liberation Theology in Tanzania and South Africa, by Per Frostin. Lund, Sweden: Lund University Press.An Experience of Pastoral Theology in Southern Africa, by Eugene Lapointe.The Meaning of Religious Conversion in Africa, by Cyril C. Okorocha.Africa: the Gospel Belongs to Us, by Valentino Salvoldi and Renato Kizito Sesana.

This essay compares the Zionist movement with other settler colonialist movements in Palestine and West Africa. The historical context, the formative years, the ideological infrastructure, the symbolic world, and activities on the ground are examined in three cases: the Zionist movement, the Templers' movement, and the Basel Mission. Particular focus is given to the relationship with a mother country or metropole in order to find out how unique the Zionist case study was in the history of colonialism. The comparative approach validates the need to further examine Zionism as a settler colonialist phenomenon, despite its unique origins and chronological timing. This scholarly orientation was shunned for many years and was not properly attempted due to ideological considerations. This essay is an addendum to the important recent attempts by a few critical Israeli sociologists to introduce the paradigm of colonialism into the study of Israel and Zionism.

devastating rebellions which recently occurred in South Africa, leaving untold numbers of blacks either dead or wounded are a painful and tragic, yet necessary reminder of the human stakes in the Southern African situation. As the tempo of the southward movement of the revolution heightens and the issues in Namibia, Zimbabwe and Azania come clearly into focus, it should be underlined once again, that both in terms of the classic dimensions of political analysis and the specific conditions of these African peoples, the southern African situation is a revolutionary situation. The fresh rebellions inside South Africa are evidence of the existence of revolutionary activity. If the level of struggle against white repression were left at this crude stage we could not understand the relationship between the rebellions and a continuing revolution. However, the existence of African political parties, and African military forces in the contested areas illustrates that the activity we witness is not based on mere reformist opposition to the practices of the regimes, but upon the fact that blacks have raised up African nationalism to combat white settler nationalism with the ultimate objective being the replacement of one for another. The resort to violent revolution as a means to achieve African self-determination is a legitimate strategy, but perhaps has been most necessary where colonialism from a European country was administered through a significant white settler community such as in Algeria, Kenya, Angola, Rhodesia and South Africa. In all of these places, a repressive colonialism, combined with an intransigent and ruthless local settler community has fostered nationalism expressed by a revolutionary movement. The fact which concerns us, however, is that although on the one hand, the white settlers of Rhodesia and South Africa fear the use of revolutionary tactics by blacks, they are also bolstered in their opposition and intransigence by powerful third party states such as the United States. U.S. policy is, therefore, critical to understand as an element in the response of white settler regimes to the revolutionary situation in Southern Africa.

The United States never sought to build an empire in Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries, as did European nations from Britain to Portugal. However, economic, ideological, and cultural affinities gradually encouraged the development of relations with the southern third of the continent (the modern Anglophone nations of South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Namibia, the former Portuguese colonies of Mozambique and Angola, and a number of smaller states). With official ties limited for decades, missionaries and business concerns built a small but influential American presence mostly in the growing European settler states. This state of affairs made the United State an important trading partner during the 20th century, but it also reinforced the idea of a white Christian civilizing mission as justification for the domination of black peoples. The United States served as a comparison point for the construction of legal systems of racial segregation in southern Africa, even as it became more politically involved in the region as part of its ideological competition with the Soviet Union. As Europe’s empires dissolved after World War II, official ties to white settler states such as South Africa, Angola, and Rhodesia (modern Zimbabwe) brought the United States into conflict with mounting demands for decolonization, self-determination, and racial equality—both international and domestic. Southern Africa illustrated the gap between a Cold War strategy predicated on Euro-American preponderance and national traditions of liberty and democracy, eliciting protests from civil and human rights groups that culminated in the successful anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s. Though still a region of low priority at the beginning of the 21st century, American involvement in southern Africa evolved to emphasize the pursuit of social and economic improvement through democracy promotion, emergency relief, and health aid—albeit with mixed results. The history of U.S. relations with southern Africa therefore illustrates the transformation of trans-Atlantic racial ideologies and politics over the last 150 years, first in the construction of white supremacist governance and later in the eventual rejection of this model.

Robert Moffat's period of service in southern Africa between 1817 and 1870 coincided with the rise of the Boer power in the Orange Free state and the Transvaal; the eruption of the Bantu tribes in the mfecane; the emergence of the Matabele into the Transvaal and (what is now) Southern Rhodesia; the missionary struggle to keep open the road to the north and to prevent it falling under Boer control; the first white settlement in Southern Rhodesia, and the beginnings of the Christian faith amongst the Bechuana and the Matabele. Moffat's establishment of his farthest north base at Kuruman (now in the Northern Cape) was the key to his influence, and the pattern of mission activity he created there was copied as the Christian frontier expanded northwards. Kuruman was the centre from which radiated the lines of Christian communication to the north, the base from which the expansion plans operated; and, in particular, was the focus point of the colleagueship of Moffat with his son-in-law, David Livingstone, which this study examines in detail. As a pioneer traveller in southern Africa, Moffat undertook five long journeys between 1829 and 1859 into the then unexplored areas of the Transvaal, Bechuanaland, and Southern Rhodesia. His journals and letters are primary evidence of conditions amongst the tribes, and in particular of the close friendship between himself and the Matabele chief, Moselekatse. Moffat's mastery of Sechuana; his translation of the Bible, singl-handed; and his printing enterprise at Kuruman, all have the marks of pioneering originality which made Livingstone admire him more than any other man in southern Africa. The influence of the Moffat family to-day in Central African affairs is a continuation of the liberal tradition in race relationships which Robert and Mary Moffat began during their fifty years in southern Africa.

Broadly speaking, the conference presentations dealt (though not exclusively) with three major themes: (a) the institutionalisation and professionalisation of veterinary medicine and its practitioners; (b) the function and impact of state policy, regulation and intervention upon the practice of animal husbandry, especially in the colonial context; and (c) the relationship between certain environments and certain diseases. In southern Africa, the control and prevention of livestock diseases has been an important state function at least since the appointment of the first government veterinarians during the 1870s (Natal in 1874, with the Cape Colony following in 1876), although regulations to control animal disease existed before that. In Britain, Europe and colonial Asia, outbreaks of an extremely contagious and virulent disease known as 'cattle plague' or rinderpest periodically ravaged livestock populations.