British Colonial Administration Research Articles

Judicial Intervention in Selected Colonial Boundary Disputes in South West Nigeria: Surveying the Provenance and Effects of Procedural Errors

Boundary disputes form an integral part of regular disputes commonly found across the world. There is no doubt that such disputes have occurred in both pre-colonial and colonial Nigerian societies, and more generally in both agrarian and nomadic economies around the African continent where land has been central to culture, political and family survival. Arguably, when these conflicts took place in pre-colonial polities of South-West Nigeria, they were settled. However, when the British colonial administration attempted to adjudicate in this kind of disagreement, they committed a number of procedural errors. This essay examines selected cases adjudicated by the colonial administrators who doubled as judicial officers during the colonial period with specific focus on these procedural issues. In some cases protocols were respected; but there were also cases where the procedures were relaxed in the interest of British colonial economy. It is argued here that where the procedures were followed, there was a fair resolution; whereas when procedures were relaxed, issues still remain unresolved very many years after.

The origins of policing institutions

This article examines the impact of colonial-era armed conflict on contemporary institutions. It argues that when British colonial administrators were faced with armed insurrection they responded with institutional reform of the police, and that the legacy of these reforms lives on today. Violent opposition prompted the British colonial administration to expand entrance opportunities for local inhabitants in order to collect intelligence needed to prosecute a counterinsurgency campaign. This investment in human capital and institutional reform remained when the colonial power departed; as a result, countries which experienced colonial-era conflict have more efficient policing structures today. I demonstrate how this worked in practice during the Malayan Emergency, 1948–60. Archival data from Malaysia show that local inhabitants were recruited into the police force in greater numbers and were provided with training which they would not have received had there been no insurgency. This process was consolidated and reproduced upon independence in path-dependent ways. To expand the empirical domain, I statistically explore new archival data collected from the UK National Archives on police financing across colonial territories. The results show that armed insurgency during the colonial era is associated with higher percentages of police expenditure during the colonial era and higher perceived levels of contemporary policing capacity.

Examination of the roles of foundations on Turkish education system of Cyprus

The foundation, to be recognized as a commodity which is used for the sake of humanity, is to remove from being a special commodity and to carry on and develop as a resource that could be benefited by society eternally for people’s service. After Cyprus was received by Ottoman Empire, some foundations were installed in order that people could meet their religious and social needs. British-Ottoman defense treaty in June 4, 1878 did not mortgage in any way any either Turkish people or assets in Cyprus. Foundation commodities and Land Registry Office were under the sovereignty and supervision of Ottoman Empire. No change was foreseen on immovable properties and especially status of immovable commodities belonging to the Foundations which are under the property of Ottoman Empire through this treaty. The British Colonial Administration changed the provisions of this treaty unilaterally, and developed a series of transactions towards invading the island. It firstly intervened in Foundations, and it settled an English administrator in pious foundation management. In 1914, it changed the island to be Royalty colony, namely; it acquired the island. Thanks to the royal charter enacted in November 30, 1915, the foundations started to manage with commissioners assigned to the management and benefit from the institution in order to control the commodities of the foundation. The foundations were transformed into Government Offices in 1928, and all of the foundation immovables were left to face the threat of intervention. The Turkish Cypriot foundation commodities and foundations management were exposed to continuous interventions, thus administrative and financial power of foundation institution were weakened. As a result of the changes in law that were made by British Colonial Administration, many lands belonging to the foundations and Varosha (Maras) Region which is the most important tourism center of Famagusta passed into the ownership of Greeks.

Forced Evictions as Urban Planning? Traces of Colonial Land Control Practices in Yangon, Myanmar

From 1852 to 1948, the British colonial government developed and relied heavily upon particular land control practices to enact forms of urban planning and population control designed to advance the economic development of Rangoon and maximize revenue for the colonial state. There are three main colonial land control policies with long-standing legacies: the annihilation of pre-conquest property rights, the intentional under-equipping and underservicing of Burman majority or outlying areas, and the use of forced evictions in urban development and city expansion. While these forms of state crime linked to the state organizational goal of land control began in the colonial period, their legacies continue in contemporary Yangon. However, the current social and structural issues in Yangon are not the fault of the British colonial government alone. Subsequent Burmese governments largely continued, borrowed from, or reverted to these state criminal practices at critical junctures to open further space for development, to change the demographic composition of particular areas or simply to control the population. Despite purported ideological differences, successive Burmese regimes have adopted urban planning and housing policies, especially with respect to the urban poor, that vary only slightly from the precedents set by the British colonial administration. Recent actions and pronouncements by the current government suggest that further forced evictions will occur and the National League for Democracy (NLD) will continue to follow colonial precedents in state policies towards forced evictions and the urban poor.

Xenocracy: State, Class, and Colonialism in the Ionian Islands, 1815–1864 by Sakis Gekas

Reviewed by: Xenocracy: State, Class, and Colonialism in the Ionian Islands, 1815–1864 by Sakis Gekas Evdoxios Doxiadis (bio) Sakis Gekas. Xenocracy: State, Class, and Colonialism in the Ionian Islands, 1815–1864. New York: Berghahn. 2017. Pp. xii + 368. Cloth $130. Sakis Gekas's Xenocracy is a significant contribution to the literature about British colonial rule in the Ionian Islands. The book makes an important contribution by focusing on the colonial administration through the Foucauldian lens of governmentality and by examining the emergence of a commercial, professional, and administrative bourgeoisie. The work is thoroughly researched, especially with regard to the records of the British colonial administration, and its economic focus makes it a unique and interesting companion to earlier works, such as Thomas Gallant's Experiencing Dominion (2002). The first chapter, "The First Greek State and the Origins of Colonial Governmentality," introduces the main themes, discussing the transformation of the Ionian islands from Venetian possessions to a British-controlled but nominally autonomous state. For the author, this transitional period (1797–1814) [End Page 215] was crucial in the development of Ionian governmentality regarding new approaches to governance. The second chapter, "Building the Colonial State," examines the foundation of British rule on the Ionian Islands. Colonial administration combined individual liberalism, meaning that individuals enjoyed certain constitutional rights and freedoms, with autocracy, since the powers of the British commissioners often trumped any constitutional liberties. Gekas situates Ionian governance within the British colonial system and compares it with other British-held territories, such as Malta, Quebec, and Mauritius. This comparative approach, which pervades the book, is one of its strongest points. Gekas's description of British ideas regarding the Ionian islanders is not necessarily new, since Gallant and others have also commented extensively on it, but the references to the British experience of governance in other parts of the globe give the discussion an important nuance for understanding British concerns and policies. Gekas contextualizes the discussion by referring to the reception of British Ionian rule in British society and Parliament, an often ignored facet of the complexities of British rule. The second chapter also discusses local resistance to British policies and taxation. Though brief, his discussion on British responses to the violence on the islands and the attempts to disarm the population is pertinent and tied to the revolutionary upheavals of the 1820s in Italy and Greece. Gekas draws an interesting parallel between the policies of the British administration and those of the Bavarian Regency in Greece (75), a comparison that he returns to at different times in his discussion. Chapter 3, "Laws, Colonialism, and State Formation," delves deeper into the idea of governmentality, examining how concepts of sovereignty and government applied to a supposedly independent state that was ruled by foreign officials. An interesting assertion regarding legal and economic reforms is that they should not be seen as "the product of colonial rule but a process of modernization" that drew much from local legal expertise developed under French rule and subsequent British colonialism (81). The chapter devotes significant space to the examination of the legal system with special focus on the police and criminal justice system. The reform of the criminal code as a process of "civilizing" (91) is discussed extensively and successfully augments earlier works on violence and criminal justice (Gallant 2002). Chapter 4, "Colonial Knowledge and the Making of Ionian Governmentality," discusses the emergence of a modern bureaucratic state under colonial paternalism. The chapter contains a fascinating discussion on the question of citizenship and nationality, tying it to questions of surveillance, immigration, and refugees. The arrival of Christian refugees from the Ottoman Empire even prior to the Greek War of Independence forced the authorities to address [End Page 216] the question of citizenship and the legal status of refugees, such as those from Parga. The same question pertained to immigrants from the adjacent Ottoman territories as well as those from places like Malta. The authorities' response to the problem of regulating mobility was to issue passports to those arriving on or departing from the islands (including seasonal migrants, Ionian merchants, Italian citizens), thus enhancing the government's ability to surveille and control the population. The next chapter, "A True and...

An Historical Trajectory of the Economic Transformation of the Southern Keiyo Community in Kenya

The paper examines economic opportunities and differentiation among the agro-pastoral households in Southern Keiyo in three ecological zones (the highland, escarpment and the valley). The basic assertation of study is that socio-economic processes in these areas are the product of inter-relationships of history, environment and culture. The goal of the people across the three zones is better living standards. At the community level, this will be reflected in roads, schools, hospitals and at the household level, in entrepreneurial activities, salaried employment and in the education of their children. Diversification of economic activities is the most common strategy employed in pursuing development. Apart from growing of crops and keeping animals for consumption and sale, the people also engage in off-farm activities, for example working for wages, running retail shops and performing casual labour. A theoretical construct has been employed to analyze and interpret the interaction that occurred between the environment, colonial and post colonial states on the one hand, and the response of agro-pastoral households in Southern Keiyo on the other. This is Talbott’s principal themes of innovation, diversification, adaptation and commercialization. The main argument is that diversification reduces risk and uncertainty, and thus can be the most rational economic path to choose. But the ability to diversify is neither equal among people of the same ecological zone, nor is it comparable across ecological zones because of social differentiation. History and environment have combined to create a much more favourable economic opportunity structure in the highlands. Unlike the rocky escarpment, the highlands receive more rainfall and have more moderate temperatures than the hot and dry Kerio valley. Therefore, the highlands are especially well suited for production of crops and livestock. The British colonial administration recognized these differences in agricultural potential and this affected their policies. Consequently, the highlands became the focus of most colonial development efforts, pattern that continued after independence both through government policy and the initiative of some people trying to achieve development. Although a few people on the escarpment and in the valley are able to progress, people in the highlands generally enjoy the most secure life. It is therefore, argued that contemporary socio-economic processes can neither be explained by a single variable, nor in synchronic perspective; instead they result from a dynamic combination of historical, environmental and cultural variables.

THE POLITICAL PARTICIPATION OF THE INDIGENOUS MUSLIM COMMUNITY IN LABUAN DURING THE BRITISH ADMINISTRATION, 1946-1963

The theme of the political participation of the indigenous Muslim community in Labuan is important to fill the gap in Labuan’s political history. The main questions which the study aimed to answer were: what political roles did the indigenous Muslim community play during the British colonial period from 1946-1963 in Labuan? What were the factors contributing to their political involvement and what were the reactions of the British? The study’s three main objectives were: to describe the political participation of the indigenous Muslim community in Labuan from the period of 1946-1963, to analyse their roles in the British colonial administration, and to examine the British policy towards the involvement of the Muslim leaders in the political process. The study was mainly carried out through qualitative approach, involving archival research and in-depth interviews. Internal and external criticism methods were also applied in assessing, interpreting and analysing the primary, secondary and oral sources. All the key themes were presented in descriptive and chronological manner. The political participation of the indigenous Muslim community in Labuan can be divided into two phases: the first phase from 1946-1960 and the second phase, from 1961-1963. During the first phase, their political participation was essentially driven by their desires to safeguard their religious rights (Islam), ethnic identity and their collective ethnic interests. Throughout the second phase, the indigenous Muslim leaders were motivated by the Muslim community’s political rights and Labuan’s independence under the Malaysia proposal. The British attitudes towards the increased political awareness among the indigenous Muslim community leaders were generally accommodative. The indigenous Muslim community leaders were given opportunities to take part in the political activities. However, the political participation of the indigenous Muslim community was rather limited as Muslim leaders were incapacitated from playing greater political roles in the British colonial administration.Keywords: political participation, indigenous Muslim community, Labuan, British, Malaysia.

Chiefs and the Management of Urbanization in Colonial Bathurst, Gambia 1939-1960

The colonial administration in British Gambia was concerned with the growth of the major urban centre of Bathurst, now Banjul, and with managing the negative impact of urbanization such as overcrowding, unemployment, homelessness and food security. This is especially clear in the government policy of reclamation of a large portion of Bathurst in the early 1930s to create room for the burgeoning population. The initial lack of restriction on new arrivals into the town from the Protectorate was motivated by the need for cheap labour by Bathurst-based European firms, and exemplifies the tolerance of the British colonial administration of immigration into the colony. This study seeks to assess the impact of urbanization in Bathurst during war and its immediate aftermath (1939 to 1960) and especially how colonial officials used chiefs in an effort to remedy some of the negative effects of the influx of people into Bathurst. The study ends by proposing that urbanization and the challenges it posed in Bathurst, had by the late 1950s, become so pronounced that it became a political weapon which the People's Progressive Party (PPP) used to wrest power from the colonial rulers (Editorial Committee, The Story of the PPP, 1992:7). Another conclusion is that by their active involvement in remedying the negative impact of urbanization, chiefs were able to strengthen their roles in colonial society and gain more weight in the pre-independence political negotiations. The relevance of this study for today's Gambia lies in the fact that the country is grappling with various measures to foster food security amidst a burgeoning urban and peri-urban population engaged in little or no agriculture, a trend which dates to the period under study.

The eunuch archive: Colonial records of non-normative gender and sexuality in India

ABSTRACTThis essay explores the quotidian, mundane colonial archive of sexuality. It is particularly concerned with accounts of colonised peoples’ sexuality that were produced at the local level of colonial administration and were deposited at the margins of official archives. In the 1860s and 1870s, British colonial administrators in north India compiled district registers of ‘eunuchs’ that recorded brief notes on the lives of local people who challenged a binary understanding of gender and were understood as sexually ‘perverse.’ The British were particularly anxious about the transgender hijra community, whom they labelled ‘habitual sodomites’ and ‘criminals.’ This essay builds on Anjali Arondekar’s analysis of sexuality and colonial archives, but argues that there are some limitations to her approach. In particular, this article argues that attention to practices of record keeping, circulation and archiving reveals contested and contradictory forms of knowledge about ‘eunuchs’ in colonial archives.

Fulani pastoralists’ transformation process: a sustainable development approach in the Western Highlands of Cameroon

The Fulani pastoralists of the Western Highlands of Cameroon are a subgroup of the Fulbe, a wider pastoral group whose members are dispersed across Sub-Saharan Africa. They migrated and settled in the region in the early twentieth century at different times in migratory waves. Since arriving in the region, they have experienced different stages of transformation due to changing socioeconomic, political and ecological conditions influencing their nomadic lifestyle. The Fulani pastoralists have moved from a purely nomadic lifestyle that involved permanent seasonal migration with their herds and families to a semi-nomadic lifestyle involving return to their previous settlements at the end of each transhumance season, and they finally have adopted a more sedentary community lifestyle that involves only the seasonal movement of herdsmen and their cattle during dry periods. This pastoralist transformation process was motivated by the hospitality of native farming communities, the British colonial administration and postcolonial government of Cameroon, population growth and environmental degradation in the Western Highlands of grazing and cultivable land. This transformation has been beneficial to both pastoralists and native farming groups by improving local community development through increased agro-pastoral production and the realization of communal development projects in education and non-agro-pastoral economic activities. Several challenges have confronted this Fulani pastoralist transformation and its community development in the Western Highlands of Cameroon: landuse competition involving farmer–herder conflicts and inter-tribal wars; climate change, including rainfall variability; and environmental degradation including the disappearance of agro-pastoral lands. This paper, based on field research, investigates the various approaches, benefits and challenges involved in Fulani pastoralists’ settlement transformation in the Western Highlands of Cameroon.

When Sex Threatened the State: Illicit sexuality, nationalism, and politics in colonial Nigeria, 1900–1958 by Saheed Aderinto

Reviewed by: When Sex Threatened the State: Illicit sexuality, nationalism, and politics in colonial Nigeria, 1900–1958 by Saheed Aderinto Oluwakemi A. Adesina When Sex Threatened the State: Illicit sexuality, nationalism, and politics in colonial Nigeria, 1900–1958 By Saheed Aderinto. Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2015. In his 241-page book, Saheed Aderinto looks at the historical significance of illicit sexuality and the structures put in place by the British colonial administration in Lagos, Nigeria to control the obnoxious practice. This book is an important contribution to Sexuality Studies and the colonial history of Nigeria. This work, the first full book dedicated to researching sexuality in colonial Nigeria, is centred on sex, sexuality, sexual politics, class conflicts, urbanisation, and gender. When Sex Threatened the State analyses Nigerian responses to British sexuality laws and the contradictory ways in which the British and African reformers advocated for the regulation and/or prohibition of prostitution. Aderinto builds on earlier works of scholars like Luise White's The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in colonial Nairobi, George Mosse's pioneering study on Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle-class morality and sexual norms in modern Europe and Phillipa Levine's Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing venereal disease in the British Empire. The book is divided into seven chapters and an epilogue. In the introduction, the author incisively engages with the issues of prostitution and corruption. The introduction examines sexual politics, the criminal justice system as it affects prostitution, and girl trafficking. Aderinto carefully details the historical evolution of Lagos—the environment under which prostitution flourished. The author asserts that corruption was devised by officers of the Nigeria Police force, officers of the Colony Welfare Office (CWO) and sex workers as an escape route from the severity of criminal justice system, thus affirming the notion that corruption is a postcolonial problem is ahistorical "given the spate of corruption during the 1940s." (3). In the second chapter, he "unveils" the gendered narrative of prostitution that elicited concerns from the colonial government and the nationalists. Aderinto provides compelling arguments that established the link between prostitution and juvenile delinquency, exemplified by the boma and jaguda boys, as a "mutually constitutive and symbiotic" relation (69). The author emphasizes the relevance of newspaper articles as a veritable source for the writing of colonial history while citing the story of the Lagos prostitute Segilola: Eleyinju ege, whose story was published as a novel and serialised in Akede Eko (Lagos Herald) in 1930 and which provided the author with a vivid image of the social life in colonial Lagos (53). This novel has recently been edited, translated and introduced by Karin Barber.1 Most important in this chapter is his emphasis on "adult prostitution" as distinct from "child prostitution" (72). It is interesting to note that the colonial experiences in Lagos are replicated elsewhere on the continent. Whilst Aderinto documents the incidence of child prostitution in colonial Lagos (120–21), Luise White also highlights the prevalence of juvenile prostitution in colonial Nairobi.2 The third chapter of the book illustrates the "moral degeneration" of society as "criminally minded adults" introduced underage girls to prostitution. This development drove new interventionist initiatives from the colonial state, with the establishment of the Colonial Welfare Office (CWO) (74) and child prostitution laws. However, the claim by the author that "the age of consent in Nigeria was thirteen, meaning that an individual legally ceased to be a child at this age" (75) needs further clarification because there is no reference to any document to corroborate this assertion. The questions this raises are: Given the fact that Nigeria is a multi-ethnic society, is this age of consent applicable to all ethnic groups? In what areas of life is this age of consent employed? Also, is this age of consent gendered? Chapter Four deals with the concomitant of "illicit sexuality": the "sexual scourge," that is, venereal diseases, and how they permeated society and the measures proffered to stem the tide of the menace. This issue was salient in the age (before the late 1940s) when the army, a strong colonial institution, discouraged marriage and expected soldiers not to have strong family ties or responsibilities that could militate...

An Exploration of the Canon of Hausa Prose Fiction in Hausa Language and Translation: The Literary Contest of 1933 as a Historical Reference

The paper premises that the literary contest of 1933 has been a very important historical reference and a determining condition for the emergence of the canon of Hausa prose fiction (Furniss, 1991, 1996). As a consequence, my exploration is going to be directed first toward the role of the British colonial administration as the organizer of the literary contest and then toward the role played by the university critics in transforming the winning essays into a corpus of literary masterpieces, thus creating some of the conditions for the emergence and consolidation of the canon of the Hausa prose fiction in both the Hausa language and in translation into English.

Tanah Rata and the Development of the Cameron Highlands, 1925–2030

The Cameron Highlands is named after William Cameron, a surveyor working for the British colonial administration who explored the region in the mid-1880s. In 1931 a township site was selected for Tanah Rata, with designated areas for public buildings, residential use, the armed forces, and recreation. Planning for the town was based in part on the garden city movement, whose supporters included Charles Compton Reade, the first town planner of the Federated Malay States. Economically, the town depends on income from agriculture and from tourism, both of which are expanding and creating environmental problems.

The Christians of Jerusalem during the British Mandate, 1917–48

This study sheds a light on the history of the Christians of Jerusalem during the period of occupation and the British Mandate, 1917–48. It relies on a set of sources and references, among the most important of which are reports, telegrams, messages and letters exchanged between the British leadership in Palestine and the British Foreign Ministry as well as the Ministry of British Colonies (British Colonial Administration); in addition to Palestinian daily and weekly newspapers; as well as modern sources, studies and memoirs.

The “Mau Mau” Legal Hearings and Recognizing the Crimes of the British Colonial State: A Limited Constitutive Moment

This paper considers the changing capacity of law to hear cases of “historical injustice,” in particular crimes of colonialism, and the role of the hearing of these claims in law in provoking or supporting limited constitutive change. In 2009, the British law firm Leigh Day & Co. brought a civil action for damages for personal injuries on behalf of five Kenyan claimants, for harms suffered in detention under the British colonial administration in Kenya between 1952 and 1960. The action was brought against the British government, through the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, for their part in the creation and maintenance of the system of torture during the period of the “Emergency” in Kenya. Heard in the High Court of Justice in the United Kingdom, the hearing determined that the case could proceed to trial, yet was settled in 2013 by the British government. The paper considers how we may understand this hearing as part of a moment of limited constitutive legal and social change in the recognition of the injustice of the system of the British Empire, and considers the case within the context of the current discussions in Britain around British colonial responsibility for the broader harms of Empire, together with broader reparations claims for slavery and colonialism.

Song History in Kowloon and Loyalist Classical Poetry: Chen Botao, Sung Wong Toi, and Autumn Chants on the Terrace of the Song Emperors

Abstract Just a few years after the overthrow of China's last imperial dynasty, the Qing dynasty loyalist Chen Botao 陳伯陶 (1855–1930) assembled scholars at the Terrace of the Song Emperors 宋王臺 (Song Wang Tai, or Sung Wong Toi) in Hong Kong Kowloon to compose and recite poetry as a tribute to the adherents of the Song dynasty 宋 (960–1279) that sought refuge in Kowloon more than six centuries before. The poetic odes to Sung Wong Toi, compiled in the 1917 collection Song tai qiu chang 宋臺秋唱 (Autumn Chants on the Terrace of the Song Emperors), construct a dialectical tension between Kowloon as a place of exile in Chinese history and the lyrical symbolism of its representation in the compilation's classical poetry. More than merely a commemoration to a long-lost past, Chen's efforts instigated a collective response from loyalist scholars that created a literary space in early republican-era Hong Kong for them to express their commitment to the fallen dynasty and at the same time defined the historical and cultural significance of place and history in Hong Kong Kowloon. In the context of the British colonial administration, these scholars' historical narratives and lyrical poetics effectively nurtured a discourse on loyalism in Hong Kong literature.

Human lorries: carriers in the British Southern Cameroon’s economy and re-ordering of road communications, 1916 – c.1955

Britain took over one fifth of German Cameroon following the First World War. Like her predecessor, Germany, one of the first challenges she faced was how to improve and speed up the transportation of private and public goods in a territory where modern forms of transport was nil. She did this according to her whims and caprices. Carriers were enlisted to bear the burden. This ‘professional corps’ during the period of British colonial administration had long existed on the continent before the colonial encounter but coming under the employment of a European country now made them different in the society. This article looks at the crucial role of the carriers in the development of modern road communication networks in the territory by exploring the archival records in the Buea National Archives of Cameroon. It also explores how the carriers symbolised the beginnings of a middle class in the eyes of their kith and kin. Colonial reports of the carriers showed their extra-ordinary physical strength and also the difficulties and challenges which they faced and negotiated such as distances, peaks to ascend and descend, flooded streams and their astounding commitments to carry imperial goods from place to place. Clouded in these colonial reports, lay a history of regulations and governmentality of the carriers, a story of the making of modern road communication network and a middle class. This entails an effort to rationalise the system, which involved ensuring the regularity of the supply of carriers and the enforcement of contracts. This essay aims at understanding the logic of these changes and the implications of these regulations in modern day Northwest and Southwest regions of Cameroon.

PERKEMBANGAN PERKHIDMATAN KERETAPI DI SABAH, 1881-1963: SATU TINJAUAN

Social development in Sabah, including the construction and upgrading of railways, was important for the state’s economic activities. The economic and social needs prompted the British colonial administration to improve the railway facilities. This article discusses the development of railways in Sabah under the British colonial administration between 1881 and 1963. This study seeks to determine if the building of railways in Sabah involved the building of new railway lines or merely the upgrading of existing ones. This study has found that the railways development is evident under the British North Borneo Chartered Company (SBBU) and then rose slowly but consistently under British colonial rule. The length of railways increased considerably as a result of upgrading works by the British after the Second World War. The upgrading of railways contributed to socioeconomic change in Sabah which was visible in the increased agricultural productivity and improvements in the industrial sector. The building of railways also contributed towards economic growth as evident in the increase in new settlement areas, employment opportunities and demographic change in Sabah.

A key moment in history, anthropology and IslandMelanesia. Hviding, Edvard and Cato Berg (eds) (2014)The Ethnographic Experiment: A.M. Hocart and W.H.R Rivers in IslandMelanesia, 1908.New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 320 pp., US95.00,hbk, ISBN: 9781782383420.

Hviding and Berg's collection of essays explores a key moment in the history of anthropology: the 1908 Solomon Islands and Vanuatu fieldwork of the British scholars A.M. Hocart, W.H.R Rivers and G.C. Wheeler as the Percy Sladen Trust Expedition. This expedition has not had the scholarly attention of its predecessor the 1898 Cambridge Torres Strait Expedition (where Rivers undertook his first ethnographic research) or the subsequent fieldwork undertaken by Malinowski. Hviding and Berg have rectified this neglect in this fine volume. The book explores Hocart and Rivers's intellectual legacy in their development of ethnographic fieldwork methods and kinship theory, in their influence on colonial interpretations of depopulation in Melanesia; and in the material objects and photographs from the expedition that remain with the Cambridge University Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology and have been given little attention since they were collected (explored in detail in the chapter by Tim Thomas). This range of interests reflects the expertise of the nine contributors to the volume. Drawn from anthropology, archaeology, geography and history, all are mature scholars who have conducted fieldwork in the very region studied by Hocart and Rivers. Hocart and Rivers were products of their time, even as they experimented with new approaches to the study of unfamiliar peoples and places They had their failings, as several contributors make apparent, yet they also had moments of insight that are still valued today. Each of the chapters notes various ways in which the material collected by Rivers and Hocart provides a valuable archive for contemporary research, even if the old analyses have now been found to be less useful. Assessing the legacy of past scholars is a delicate art. Christine Dureau's chapter reflects on the problem of how best to assess these ambiguities by drawing out an analogy with her contemporary Simbo informants who also share an ambiguous relationship to their pre-Christian ancestors. Rivers and Hocart were deeply implicated in the British imperial project, but their research included friendships with key informants that were deeply respectful of the individuality of particular persons, taking careful note of their relative place in society. Hocart and Rivers did not reduce their Melanesian interlocutors into the all-too-familiar colonial stereotypes of simple ‘natives’ or bloodthirsty ‘savages’ that echo loudly into the present day. They were cognisant of differences of opinion and practice within the communities they studied and did not claim a paternalistic ‘ethnographic authority’. This sensitivity to the life worlds of their informants allowed them to embrace what Hviding's chapter refers to as ‘inter-island practice’, a recognition of the deep interconnections between the island communities of the Western Solomons. Hviding and others draw out the contribution of the expedition to the now discipline-defining ethnographic method of participant observation. Hocart also pioneered a form of what would now be called multi-sited ethnography, not only in his collection of data from multiple places but in his ability to see the profoundly regional nature of life in the New Georgia group. The expedition aimed to demonstrate how (older) matrilineal societies develop into patrilineal, an evolutionary theory that was already losing credibility. The irony of the expedition is that Rivers failed to realise that Vella Lavella was the very kind of society that might have provided him with the evidence he sought. This omission puzzles many of the volume's authors. Nevertheless, in their chapter, Rio and Eriksen argue that Rivers's short-comings are not fatal and that his work on ‘mother right’ and ‘father right’ can be usefully applied in contemporary analysis of gendered social life in Ambrym. Both Kolshus's and Bayliss-Smith's chapters underscore the importance of good ethnography as the grounds of theory. Kolshus is highly critical of Rivers's extrapolations from his brief visit to the Banks Islands and Tikopia. Bayliss (following Hocart and some of Rivers's students) uses Rivers's data from Simbo and Vella to show how inadequate the ‘psychological factor’ was in explaining population decline in Melanesia. Rivers argued that the impact of colonialism was a disruptive trauma for Melanesian societies that sapped the collective will to live and to reproduce. As Bennett shows in her chapter, this theory became very influential among British colonial administrators until replaced by biomedical explanations of depopulation as a result of the lack of resistance to introduced diseases. The Ethnographic Experiment redeems the Percy Sladen Trust Expedition from obscurity, exploring its legacy and shortcomings. The tightly focused collection of scholarship in this volume provides a compelling resource for those interested in Island Melanesia, colonial history and the development of anthropology, both as a distinctive discipline and in the global history of ideas.

Reflection of History and Struggle in Modern African Drama: A Reassessment of the Historical and Dramatic Characters in Emeka Nwabueze’s The Dragon’s Funeral

Historical facts evidently have often time provided source materials for the modern African playwright in creating his story. The committed playwright combines the fact of history, blends it with artistic ingenuity and presents a dramatic experience of a people. This combination of facts of history with fiction could be referred to as “faction”. The facts of history may include struggle for emancipation, war, famine, outbreak of a disease, political instability, fashion, terrorism, natural disaster, colonialism, imperialism, neo-colonialism, etc. It is in view of this that this paper surveys the struggle by Nigerian women during the colonial period for their emancipation out of the evils of colonialism and economic exploitation. The gallant Nigerian women of Aba in 1929, who vehemently challenged the British colonial administration of heavy tax imposition on Nigerians, have been represented in dramatic form by Emeka Nwabueze in his play The Dragon’s Funeral. This work has done a reassessment of the major characters in the play. The aim is to see how these dramatic characters in the play conform to the actual historical characters. For the purpose of dramaturgy, the playwright seems to have added some dramatic techniques; like the aesthetics of storytelling to provide a more vivid dramatic experience. The representation of historical characters in the play provides obvious evidences of the reflection of history and struggle in modern Africa drama and also emphasises the efficacy of modern African plays as viable tools for the documentation of history.