Colonial Agents Research Articles

Disciplined Subjects: Schooling in Colonial India by Sutapa Dutta

Reviewed by: Disciplined Subjects: Schooling in Colonial India by Sutapa Dutta Subhadipa Dutta Disciplined Subjects: Schooling in Colonial India. By Sutapa Dutta. London and New York: Routledge, 2021. xii + 254 pp. Cloth $160.00, e-book $44.05. Over the last few decades, a growing body of scholarship has dedicatedly sought ways to understand the history of colonial knowledge formation in India. The history of colonial educational ideologies in the subcontinent has also received extensive scholarly attention in the recent past. The book, Disciplined Subjects by Sutapa Dutta, shows ingenuity in juxtaposing these two historiographical trends in a remarkable fashion. It specifically sheds light on the politics of knowledge structures and their implementation within institutional learning in colonial India. In other words, it explores how the complex mode of construction and subsequent dissemination of knowledge impelled order and molded and directed the psyches of subjected young learners. In doing so, it outlines the production and percolation of knowledge through the center-periphery model—one that acknowledges the journey of specific wisdom from the imperial heartland to the colonial rimland and vice versa. The book situates the procedure of forming the physical, material, and intellectual content of colonial education within a sphere of intercultural encounter between the Britons and the Indians—a sphere where both the local catalysts (such as the colonial authority, missionaries, educationalists, native stakeholders, School Book Society, Fort William College, Serampore Mission Press, and Asiatic Society of Bengal) and the external spurs (such as the British Foreign School Society, Charity Schools, and cottage societies of Great Britain) played crucial roles. Disciplined Subjects consists of three major parts that focus on myriad discourses of educational policies and associated sociocultural changes at the turn of the eighteenth century to the early decades of the twentieth century. The first part outlines three main colonial educational dynamics: the shift of public interest and funds from traditional learning to modern schooling, grants in aid for setting up more seminaries, and emphasis on wider diffusion of knowledge. These new trends ushered in the construction of a body of colonial knowledge—one that drastically affected the very structure within which young pupils were conventionally taught to think. The author reveals that the institutionalization of modern education to reform the colonized was a crucial part of the imperial civilizing mission. This turned out to be a dominant site to establish differences, inequalities, and segregations based on race, class, and gender. From the late [End Page 462] eighteenth century, British middle-class investment in mass education implied an epistemological attempt to mask, rationalize, and legitimize structural social hierarchies and privileges. The pedagogies and curriculum of education for the lower class were designed to instill piety, obedience, and discipline into poor students. The cultivation of such virtues was expected to keep the progenies of the lower class in their place and mold them to become useful for others in the future. In order to generate loyal native subjects, the educational enterprises in colonial India were also guided by such "pedagogic despotism" (47), which in turn formulated a "racial-civilizational location of Indian subjectivity" (45). Within the interactive colonial milieu, Indian elites were neither the unconscious beneficiaries nor hapless victims. The second part of the book underscores the importance of indigenous agency, which variously consented to, resisted, or overlapped with colonial knowledge production. Such complex local responses portrayed a contested terrain of experimentations and conciliations—a terrain within which native children were assumed to be unquestioning consumers who were essentially subjected to the cultural hegemony of the powerful. Through careful examination of a plethora of textbooks produced by colonial agents, the book highlights the epistemological means to control school-going children. It identifies these elementary textbooks as the psychological and cultural instruments that intended to validate the political, cultural, and racial supremacy of the colonizers. Through a comparative analysis of the content and context of study materials used in the imperial metropole and in the colonial periphery, the author further locates the broader impact of the texts: an intercultural negotiation of multiple identities. She argues while the early nineteenth-century textbooks chiefly reflected "the British forging a national identity and the Britishness of their Empire" (223), the late nineteenth...

Indigenous Textual Cultures: Reading and Writing in the Age of Global Empire ed. by Tony Ballantyne, Lachy Paterson, and Angela Wanhalla (review)

Reviewed by: Indigenous Textual Cultures: Reading and Writing in the Age of Global Empire ed. by Tony Ballantyne, Lachy Paterson, and Angela Wanhalla Savannah Esquivel (bio) Indigenous Textual Cultures: Reading and Writing in the Age of Global Empire edited by Tony Ballantyne, Lachy Paterson, and Angela Wanhalla Duke University Press, 2020 INDIGENOUS TEXTUAL CULTURES examines literacy practices and communication technologies in Indigenous societies impacted in particular by British and French intrusion in the nineteenth through twenty-first centuries. Literacy has often been examined from the point of view of imperial agents or anti-colonial leaders. Indigenous Textual Cultures shifts focus by highlighting the potency of orality and auditory practices. It contends Indigenous societies used alphabetic literacy to intervene in emergent transregional communication networks, often sustaining Indigenous knowledge practices through a "symbiotic relationship" between literacy and orality (149). A range of studies examines how Indigenous textual literacy exposed contradictions within colonial matrices of power, undermined the authority of the written or printed word, and compelled colonial agents to rethink material and discursive contours of mass literacy campaigns. The volume delivers a nuanced picture of how Indigenous mobilizations of literacy created new intellectual forums in an increasingly interconnected world. Indigenous Textual Cultures presents a range of approaches for uplifting the writing and reading practices of Indigenous societies from models that place literacy and orality in opposition. On the one hand, contributors deftly engage canonical debates about literacy and orality to establish a framework for delinking settler-colonial perspectives and historiographical antecedents from analyses of writing and reading in Indigenous communities. By showing that Western notions of literacy do not align with the Indigenous knowledge traditions inscribed on paper or recorded on cassette tapes, the authors in this collection underline the necessity for new interpretative approaches that address the push-pull dynamics of literacy and incorporate the perspective of Indigenous writers, readers, and listeners. On the other hand, the volume's meticulous examination of the sonic contours of a range of "texts" in imperial and ancestral languages—from grief chants to pidgin-language newspapers, didactic narratives to radio broadcasts—opens up new avenues for analysis of the performative and imaginative [End Page 195] dimensions of Indigenous literacy practices. Indeed, examining Indigenous writing through the lens of the "durability of orality" (196) reminds us that colonial impositions could serve as potent vehicles for expressing Indigenous priorities. Organized thematically into four parts, Indigenous Textual Cultures intersects with recent work on textual media and communication systems often engaged on a hemispheric level. The volume's twelve chapters and introduction focus on southern Africa, Australia, North America, and the Pacific Islands. Notably, the collection enfolds scholarship on imperial and vernacular literacies in Africa, initiating a conversation that transcends disciplinary and geopolitical boundaries. The first part, "Archives & Debates," engages the underutilized archive of Indigenous-language sources in the Pacific. Studies demonstrate Indigenous societies actively participated in writing and used textual practices and technologies for the intergenerational exchange of knowledge embedded in oral culture. In particular, Lachy Paterson stresses the "interplay of oral and textual forms" (92) when documents were read out loud as a reminder that nonwriters were nevertheless active participants in literacy culture. The second part, "Orality and Texts," examines how Indigenous communities maintained a "primacy of orality" (136) alongside new communicative practices, technologies, and skills. The introduction of writing fostered auditory practices that bolster Indigenous historical memories and oral recitation structures. The third part, "Readers," focuses on the creation of new publics, notably centering societies for whom colonization and the introductions of writing and reading is a living memory. Here, studies of literacy transmission reveal Indigenous peoples engaged with newspapers in vernacular and imperial languages, Christian radio broadcasts, and missives in unexpected ways, compelling missionaries and bureaucrats to reformulate strategies to accommodate the preferences of new Indigenous publics. The fourth and final part, "Writers," considers how Indigenous literacy intervenes in colonial textual regimes that erase and rework Indigenous texts. By examining how Indigenous writers take a "portfolio approach to authorship" (247), the authors posit an expansive notion of literacy to encompass the dynamic social relations embedded in the practices Indigenous writers mobilized when writing for their own communities. The most compelling chapters in Indigenous Textual Cultures...

19th Century British Imperialism and the Transregional Geopolitics of an Omani Patricide

In February 1866, Sultan Thuwaini bin Said Al bu-Said of Muscat and Oman was murdered by his son, Salim. This royal patricide had clear destabilizing effects, triggering a series of events beyond the sultanate. It had important geopolitical repercussions across the western Indian Ocean, from the East African coast to Persia and India. These shaped British policy in this maritime region during a period of administrative reshuffling after the dissolution of the East India Company in 1858. Examining British responses to Thuwaini’s death in the context of wider transformations since the mid-1850s becomes an avenue for exploring a range of increasingly regulated maritime connections, from piracy to slave trading, and the ways in which these were interpreted at a British imperial level. Reading colonial records, I advance an argument for considering this episode and its multifocal repercussions as geopolitical in nature, giving an impetus for the British to redefine the terms of their presence using a language of “threat”. The events following the murder, I argue, are telling of a larger issue of administrative crisis, which forced colonial agents to renegotiate the terms of British imperialism in the late 19th century western Indian Ocean.

Empires of Antiquities: Modernity and Discovery of the Ancient Near East, 1914–1950

Empires of Antiquities: Modernity and Discovery of the Ancient Near East, 1914–1950

The Challenges of 190 Years of the Spanish versus British Pre-Colonial and Colonial Manipulations of Equatorial Guinea/ Fernando Po / the Bight of Biafra 1778-1968

The main focus of this paper is to illustrate how the Spanish gained control of Equatorial Guinea during the late 18th and what prompted the British to mark their presence briefly for the continuation of Spanish lucrative imperialistic ambitions in the African Gulf of Guinea. That those European challenges in the zone lasted till the Second half of the 20th Century brings out the main pre-colonial and colonial agents which were appointed by the Spanish and British Monarchical and Republican Governments with a total of 110 appointed in different portfolios to manipulate the destiny of the Africans and looted resources for their home countries in their mission of the so-called civilization of the Black Africans in the forested zones. This is because the young generation of African historians who are shortsighted and thinking of demanding colonial crimes from their main Western European actors of the time have to know which of their agents were appointed and more research can been done on periodical considerations in order to rate the degree of atrocities and colonial crimes committed coupled with the looting of African extracted natural resources for the construction of Europe to the detriment of the African countries and Kingdoms they subdue even larger than their homeland. In 1778, the Spanish gained control of Equatorial Guinea via the Treaty of El Pardo which was an agreement between the Spain Empire and the Kingdom of Portugal. From 1778 to 1810 Spain directed Spanish Guinea through the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, based in present-day Argentina. This marked the effective beginning of Spanish strength in the African territory and the British once more passed through Fernando Po, linking to the Bight of Biafra to show their presence in this part of the Gulf of Guinea in the name of British suzerainty. The scrutinized of diverse specialized sources and documents enable us to engage on historical method in our analyses using clear statistical table to censor

Mali from the Empire of the Lion’s King and Kings to the Hands of Fifty Four Diplomatic Colonial Agents in the Appellation of French Sudan, Federation 1235-1960

This paper focuses on the identification of different French colonial agents whom in their portfolios were able to show their strength and hegemony in one of the former greatest African Empire known as Mali Empire with outstanding Lion King Sundiata Keita and other Kings from 1235 until it’s collapsed. The lucrative economic and commercial activities of the empire called for the attention of different actors in the later centuries at the time thereby making the history of the present day Mali very important to Africa. The French pre-colonial and colonial era dating from 1880 through the Berlin colonial conference of 1884-1885 to the granting of independence in 1960 opened the doors and mechanisms of neo-colonialism characterized with pre-crisis era which became serious challenges to that country till the 21st Century denunciations of French activities in that country. The scrutiny of specialized sources and other related scientific works enable the use of historical approach by bringing the highlights of the Mali Empire before identification of the main European agents. This study is very important because the young generation of historians can open other research activities concerning those specific colonial agents during their tenure of office and any colonial claims still waiting by Africans can be very important with concrete evidences.

Taming Cannabis: Drugs and Empire in Nineteenth-Century France by David A. Guba, Jr

Reviewed by: Taming Cannabis: Drugs and Empire in Nineteenth-Century France by David A. Guba, Jr Richard C. Keller David A. Guba, Jr. Taming Cannabis: Drugs and Empire in Nineteenth-Century France. Intoxicating Histories. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020. x + 302 pp. $37.95 (978-0-2280-0120-1). Cannabis occupies a curious cultural and legal space in France. The nation has the highest rate of cannabis consumption in the European Union, with a whop-ping 42 percent of French adults using the drug at least once per year. Yet it also has among the EU’s strictest penalties for possession and use, including heavy fines and prison time, with landmark legislation that resulted from fears of out-of-control youth in the aftermath of the 1968 uprisings. Even as most Western countries are liberalizing their policies toward the drug, France remains resolute [End Page 274] in its harsh approach. Moreover, Muslims in France bear a disproportionate brunt of zealous policing and prosecution for cannabis offenses: although Muslims number less than 10 percent of the population, they constitute roughly half of those imprisoned for drug violations. As David Guba tells us in his well-researched and carefully argued book, there is little that is new here. A look to the history of French fears and fascinations about cannabis in the nineteenth century—and in particular, about cannabis in its nineteenth-century empire—sheds significant light on discourse about the drug in the French metropolitan present. The book details the evolution of French cannabis policy’s fits and starts from Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign through the implementation of the code de l’indigénat, a brutally discriminatory legal policy, in Algeria in 1881, demonstrating clear connections between medical and political attitudes toward cannabis and the broader historical context of French empire. Perhaps most important, Guba offers compelling links between the history he explores in the book and contemporary French legal approaches to the drug. Guba is particularly adept at showing the agency of cannabis. For example, although Napoleon is erroneously considered to have enacted France’s first interdiction of cannabis in Egypt, Guba reveals a far more complex story, in which Jacques François “Abdallah” Menou, the general in chief of Egypt after Napoleon’s departure, who had converted to Islam and married into a prominent Sunni family, enacted the ban as a means to develop an alliance with Sunni elites who lamented cannabis use. But the most prominent use of cannabis was as a rhetorical tool that French physicians and policymakers used to construct a particular form of North African Islam that required aggressive rule. The “taming cannabis” of the book’s title refers not only to horticultural efforts to distinguish intoxicating strains of the plant from hemp (on which there is a fascinating chapter that exposes Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s engagement in the debate), nor merely to the seesawing criminalization and medicalization of the drug, but also to the effort to control the violent criminal disposition the French believed to govern North African Muslim consciousness. Beginning in the early nineteenth century, French intellectuals, physicians, and colonial agents worked tirelessly to “orientalize” cannabis (chap. 3). In 1809, the orientalist translator Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy gave a speech in which he asserted a linguistic link between hashish and the Islamic Assassins, drawing on Marco Polo’s highly fictionalized account of the group to argue that their violent methods were the result of their constant indulgence in cannabis. This rapidly became a trope in colonial and postcolonial discourse about North African Muslims, providing fodder for generations of psychiatric treatises about the so-called Muslim psyche. At the same time as many sought to use the Muslim’s propensity for hashish consumption as a justification for excessive policing, others saw in cannabis, and hashish in particular, a miracle drug. In a period of largely unregulated consumption in metropolitan France, doctors claimed the drug could cure cholera, plague, and—somewhat paradoxically—mental illness. Later in the nineteenth century, however, as contagionist theories of infection grew in influence, these ideas fell out of favor, with prominent psychiatrists such as [End Page 275] Alexandre Brière de Boismont seizing on the evils of...

The Same in All but Name? The Intersections of Marriage and Slavery in Sierra Leone, 1890–1930

ABSTRACT In the historical records of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Sierra Leone, there is uncertainty regarding the classification of women as either wives or enslaved people. This was not simply a product of colonial biases and misconceptions. Colonial agents strategically invoked distinctions between marriage and slavery to mask the continued legality of slavery which was only abolished in 1928. In the archival record, the uncertainty over the relationship between marriage and slavery also points to tensions over reproductive and productive labour control. Slavery was not necessarily a separate identity from other forms of servitude, but instead needs to be understood in terms of household dynamics which saw marriage and slavery intersect in different ways. The ‘household’ was more than a physical space where individuals lived and are critical to analysing how gender relationships were reinforced and challenged as colonial rule expanded. While it is possible to draw a conceptual distinction between marriage and slavery, relationships viewed in a historical context often fell along a continuum, making differences harder to discern for external observers. Different actors and institutions would attempt to manipulate these areas of overlap and uncertainty between slavery and marriage to advance their interests.

Displaying encounters: Jaime Cortesão’s São Paulo exhibition and indigenous knowledge in Brazilian history

The paper explores how indigenous knowledge and hybridity were displayed at the exhibition to celebrate the fourth centennial of São Paulo city in 1954. The exhibition was curated by the Portuguese scholar Jaime Cortesão, who spent seventeen years exiled in Brazil and actively participated in intellectual controversies about territorial exploration and colonial encounters. Considering Cortesão's mobilities and his dialogues with Brazilian scholars, the paper proposes a critical and decolonial gaze to texts, images and objects selected to depict encounters in São Paulo exhibition. Drawing on sources from the National Library of Portugal and media reports published in the Brazilian press, the paper explored two categories incorporated in Cortesão's curation work to reconcile local, national and colonial identities: Tupi and Bandeirante. By exploring how Cortesão used these categories to reinforce Portuguese colonial agency in Brazilian territorial exploration, this paper suggested that critical studies of hybridism could provide essential insights for contemporary postcolonial and decolonial scholarship.

Empire of the Senses: Bodily Encounters in Imperial India and the Philippines by Andrew J. Rotter

Reviewed by: Empire of the Senses: Bodily Encounters in Imperial India and the Philippines by Andrew J. Rotter Timothy Yang Empire of the Senses: Bodily Encounters in Imperial India and the Philippines. By andrew j. rotter. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. 392 pp. ISBN 9780190924706. $41.95 (hardcover). The British and Americans who colonized Asia in the latenineteenth and early-twentieth centuries often could not stand the sight and smell of those they colonized. Or, for that matter, the sound of their native tongues, the touch of their skin, or the taste of their food. They chafed (both literally and figuratively) from the heat and humidity of tropical climes. Conversely, colonial subjects often found themselves repelled by the odors and confounded by the habits of their rulers. Such sensory perceptions are the focal points of Andrew Rotter's fascinating comparative study of colonial India and the Philippines, Empire of the Senses. According to Rotter, Britain and the United States both took part in a project of liberal imperialism, of "nations intent on bettering the conditions of their subjects and certain that the imposition of their institutions would do so" (p. 49). Sensory perceptions of colonial agents and subjects were vital to this civilizing project. Constructing an empire was not just top-down, planned from above, but an "embodied experience, for both its agents and subjects" (p. 2) imbricated in quotidian, asymmetrical encounters on the ground, which were visceral, tactile, and pungent. And the more the colonizers [End Page 179] and colonized came into contact through their shared colonial experience, the more their perceptions of each other changed. Empire of the Senses makes two valuable historiographic contributions. First, it builds on the study of empire as a comparative and shared process involving ideas in motion. British and Americans engaged in a "transimperial exchange of information" in which "imperial agents were sharing ideas about how to address common problems, among them how to combat disease such as malaria, cholera, and tuberculosis, what to do about lepers, how to manage sewage, how best to educate Indians and Filipinos, and more generally what to do with their puzzling and refractory Asian subjects" (pp. 5–6). "Sensory stereotypes, preferences, and practices" were "portable and powerful, well-sharpened instruments" that traveled from the far-flung fringes of empire to the metropoles and vice versa (p. 7). Second, it makes a crucial contribution to study of the history of everyday life; according to Rotter, "empires were held together by everyday patterns: how rulers and subjects interacted, how they saw, heard, smelled, felt, and fed each other. The name of the cultural formation of empires was civilization" (p. 4). Empire of the Senses builds on the cutting-edge work in the history of the senses by scholars such as Mark Smith and Alain Corbin, and is theoretically informed by anthropologists and sociologists including Mary Louise Pratt, Clifford Geertz, Pierre Bourdieu, and Norbert Elias. Rotter's work also contributes to the burgeoning global scholarship on settler colonialism by arguing that empire can only be fully understood on the ground. The chapters of the book are mostly thematically organized. After two table-setting chapters—one that describes the importance of the senses to empire's civilizing project and the other that outlines how bodies came into contact through war—the remaining chapters cover each of the five major senses. Rotter argues that one sense, above all, has held hegemony over the others: sight. As James Scott has famously argued, states govern by rendering their subjects legible; cadastral surveys allow for the taxation of land, just as population registers allow for conscription and public health measures. If sight is the dominant sense of rational governance, then sound, smell, taste, and touch provide what is missing: a window into the irrational. "Empires are emotional communities," Rotter writes, "and emotions are triggered by the senses" (p. 265). To Rotter, the problem is that sight has often been analyzed separately from the other senses in historical scholarship. Sight alone does not provide the full picture (pun [End Page 180] intended): a picture may be worth a thousand words, but thousands more can be written if you add the ability to scratch and sniff...

Agents of settler colonialism?: childhood, time and exclusion in the fairbridge scheme, 1913–1924

ABSTRACT Drawing from Kingsley Fairbridge's writings, this article explores the first Fairbridge Farm School from its establishment in 1913 until Fairbridge's death in 1924. Fairbridge's scheme sought to turn poor, urban British children into agriculturists who would occupy contested land in the colonies. Fairbridge attempted to instil the children with ‘love of the land’ by determining their conditions of existence in quite complete ways. I draw from the history and philosophy of childhood to understand how Fairbridge – much like A O Neville – targeted childhood as a distinctive site of ideological intervention. At his first farm school, Fairbridge sought to exclude the person that each child was going to become. But this explicit repression of existing urban identities often failed; most of the first thirty-five farm school alumni elected to live in Australian cities. Just one member of that group ran a successful farm, and only one other worked as a farm hand into middle age. Ultimately, though, the children's escape from the life that Fairbridge attempted to impose on them did not mean escaping the settler colonial structure; most remained in Australia throughout their lives. Nonetheless, many felt the loss of family and the person they might have been.

5 - Transformations in Beliefs and Practices of Ecological Inviolability: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Mamfe- Akuapem Sacred Forest in Ghana

Sacred forests, also known as ethnoforests or forest groves, in Africa are a part of the construction of the cosmology of Africans and their effort to seek ecological harmony and biodiversity equilibrium. In sum, sacred forests are sites of deities and ancestors; ritual discourse and genealogical affirmations; and superstructures of social formations, ontology and eschatology. Much of what we know about sacred forests in Ghana and their significance comes from botanists, environmentalists, agriculturalists, anthropologists and archeologists. For their part, historians have shied away from studying sacred forests because of the paucity of written sources: colonial reports and Euro-Christian missionary accounts did not have cogent narratives on sacred forests. At best, colonial agents and Christian missionaries marginally framed African sacred forests in pejorative connotations and dismissed them as atavistic monuments of fetishised sites. What is not in doubt, based on oral history and oral tradition, in fact, major historical sources, is that African sacred forests have utilitarian uses as sites of sustained conservation. This article examines the history of transformation in beliefs and practices associated with a 150-year old sacred forest in Mamfe Akuapem, Ghana. The central thesis that informs the study is that African sacred forests, broadly framed as forest conservation, were closely intertwined with deification of land reserved for biodiversity and shaped by ontological beliefs.

Not Made by Slaves: Ethical Capitalism in the Age of Abolition by Bronwen Everill

Reviewed by: Not Made by Slaves: Ethical Capitalism in the Age of Abolitionby Bronwen Everill Rebecca Shumway (bio) Slavery, Capitalism, Free produce, Abolition, Trade, West Africa Not Made by Slaves: Ethical Capitalism in the Age of Abolition. By Bronwen Everill. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020. Pp. 328. $39.95.) The transatlantic relationships that developed among Europeans, Africans, and Americans during the formation of the Atlantic world changed in important and complex ways at the dawn of the nineteenth century. The most widely noted of those changes stemmed from Britain and the U.S.A.'s abolition of the trade in captives from Africa; the Haitian and [End Page 151]other Atlantic Revolutions; and technological innovations associated with industrialization. Other profound changes in intercontinental transatlantic relations were less visible, and, in many respects, less linear in their evolution. This is especially true of ideological changes among Europeans and Americans with regard to Africa and unfree labor. In Not Made by Slaves, Bronwen Everill delves into these murkier waters surrounding abolitionist ideologies, so-called legitimate commerce, the formation of racialized nationalist identities, and proto-imperial positioning by the governments of Britain and the U.S.A. vis-a-vis West Africa. The book shows how present-day notions about the ethics of consumerism, including "fair-trade" commodities, socially conscious corporate practices, and considerations of inequity in the relationships between producers and consumers, originated in this era in tandem with other better-known transformations within the connective tissues of the Atlantic world. The book's seven chapters are organized thematically and discuss topics such as important commodities of transatlantic trade in this period (tobacco, cotton, sugar), commercial brands and branding, credit and debt, and nationalism. Everill's Introduction describes the vast historiography relevant to the study as well as some of the principal places, individuals, and trading firms discussed in the text, and summarizes each chapter. While the precise argument of the book remains somewhat elusive here, the Introduction clearly links the book's subject matter to the modern-day issue of ethical consumption. Similarly, the Epilogue stops short of drawing specific conclusions about the historical matter covered in the book but reviews the contradictions and complexities described in previous chapters and stresses that these are inherent in both past and present attempts to make international commerce simultaneously ethical and profitable. Not Made by Slavesstands out from other scholarly studies of nineteenth-century abolitionism and economics by deliberately including a West African perspective on the commercial, political, and ideological changes associated with the ending of the transatlantic slave trade and the development of new export streams from West Africa. While Everill's analysis of West African historical developments is rather slim compared to her discussion of how British and American abolitionists envisioned what ethical trade with Africa might look like, she provides concrete examples of antislavery sentiment and consumer consciousness among West Africans during this era. In the mostly Islamic hinterland of Senegambia, for [End Page 152]instance, some African rulers prohibited the sale of enslaved people to Europeans because they opposed trading with Christians. They sometimes also stamped out the market for imported alcohol and tobacco for religious reasons. In Sierra Leone and Liberia, a variety of settlers, missionaries, and colonial agents pursued antislavery agendas. They called international attention to the widespread use of slave labor in producing and transporting the "legitimate" African trade goods upon which British and American commerce there depended. Everill provides even more significant insight into the African side of this story when explaining the ideological shift that occurred toward the middle of the nineteenth century among Britons and Americans regarding unfree labor. As white people in these countries invested more and more in the belief that they were both culturally and biologically superior to other people, they also became more comfortable with the notion of "domestic slavery" in Africa and other places inhabited by people of color. Political and business leaders in Britain, in particular, were committed to the notion that overseas commerce was an important and necessary means of expanding Christian influence and what they considered "civilization" to what they considered the more "barbaric" parts of the world. This belief, in turn, fueled...

Online dating profiles, shifting intimacies and the language of love in Papua New Guinea

AbstractIn this paper, I explore the privileging of the language of ‘love’ on dating profiles established by Papua New Guineans active on online dating sites. In Papua New Guinea (PNG), recent accessibility to the internet has led to people going online, with the aim of attracting partners and initiating relationships based on affection. I note that companionate ideals and the vocabulary of love are central to online dating, but also reflect a wider re‐imagining of intimate relationships across the country. The articulation of the vocabulary of love has a complex history in PNG, however, encompassing engagements with colonial agents, models of Christian intimacies, as well as the potent use of ‘love magic’. In this context, love can signify ambiguity or coercion as much as affection, companionship or romance. At the same time, the vocabulary of love can have a powerful and efficacious effect, generating connections and capacities, particularly associated with being ‘modern’ and Christian.

Belgian Unforgotten Historical Evils Orchestrated Against the Congolese (BUHEOAC) till the Assassination of Famous Black African Nationalists (AFBAN) 19th-20th Centuries

A deeper historical study and understanding of Belgian BUHEOAC and AFBAN in the African Continent were manifested through 28 different Diplomatic Agents with distinguished administrative portfolios beginning with Francis de Winton as an Administrator General (A.G) from 22 April 1884 to Hendrik Cornelis as Governor General (G.G.) whose massacred era came to an end on 30th June 1960.Then, On 1st July 1960, the former Congo Free State (CFS) later Belgian Congo (B.C) became an independent country bearing the name the Republic of the Congo (R.C) with the worst and horrible homicide with total conspiracy masterminded by the Western Capitalist World following the assassination of Patrice Lumumba who was qualified as a pro-Communist African Nationalist during the second half of the 20th Century. Those cannibalistic activities occurred with total complicities of the 7 Belgian Monarchical men alongside with 53 Prime Ministers identified in this study. The activities of the Belgian colonial agents are comparable to the aggressive actions of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini in Africa and elsewhere around the World during the first half of the 20th Century as aggressors and Statesmen who acquired honours from human massacred. Therefore, what are the Belgian Government and Kings thinking of the unforgotten evils of their ancestors against the Congolese? The scrutiny of, diverse sources and documentaries enable us to use a historical analytical approach with statistical tables of the actors involved between 1884 and 1960 as a modest contribution to the 21st Century constant reawaking of reparation requested by the country’s siblings.

A Newfound Empathy

The Boston Massacre occurred on March 5, 1770. Following the death of five Bostonians, both the American colonists and the royal officials in Boston took testimonies and sent them to London. Elected colonial agents issued motions to open debate on Parliament’s accountability in creating an imbalanced relationship between the military and civil authorities in the colonies. Unfortunately, the motions from these colonial agents were voted in the negative, leading to disappointment on both sides of the Atlantic. Two years prior, a similar tragedy happened in England: The Massacre of St. George’s Fields. Scottish soldiers accosted a British mob that had gathered to protest the arrest of MP John Wilkes. From 1768 to 1771, Parliament rejected motions that sought to reconcile the grievances that led to the Massacre of St. George’s Fields. After years of Parliament silencing colonial agents and liberal politicians, the British public began to express a stronger sense of understanding and empathy towards the American colonists, as evident by the outpouring of public support in the months following the Boston Massacre.

“A point that escapes Darwin”: Crises of colonial self in the nature essays of Edward Hamilton Aitken and Philip Robinson

This article shows how the colonial nature essay both spoofs and affirms crises of the European self in British India’s post-Rebellion era (1857–1947). Authored by English civil servants who took to naturalism as a hobby, the nature essay’s exaggerated misadventures with quotidian animals such as ants, beetles, and mosquitos parody British accounts of the 1857 Rebellion, while dehumanizing caricatures of uncooperative servants reduce Indian society’s complex hierarchies of class, caste, gender, and race to buffoonery. Taking as a case study two of the genre’s exemplars, Edward Hamilton Aitken and Philip Robinson, I read the colonized animals and people in these texts as agents who destabilize the material and psychic life of empire. Historians and postcolonialists agree that censorship, paranoia, and violence defined British rule over India between 1857 and 1947, yet they overlook the everyday life of empire. The nature essay’s peculiar synthesis of humour and science grants surprising insights into how colonial agents understood themselves as Raj hegemony shifted into its final stages. As the nature essay’s colonized people and animals thwart the daily work of empire, they also reveal the colonial class’ failure to confront its anxieties about the sahib’s political and epistemic stability as a rational, post-Enlightenment agent destined to master the colony.

The Myngoon plot: Seditious state-making and the 1902 Shan rebellion in northern Siam

In August 1902, the Siamese army occupied the northern township of Phrae after a rebellion by Shan timber workers, miners and traders. The Siamese general who investigated the rebellion claimed that the Shan attack on Phrae was part of a wider plot to restore Prince Myngoon to the Burmese throne. Myngoon was exiled from Burma in 1868 and had been living in Indochina since 1889. Most observers have regarded the so-called ‘Myngoon plot’ as implausible. This article provides the first detailed history of the plot. It argues that the plot was a product of ‘seditious state-making’ in the borderlands of mainland southeast Asia, a region in geopolitical flux. This exploration of the Myngoon plot uncovers a cosmopolitan web of seditious statecraft that extended from India, through Burma and Indochina and into Siam. The Shan rebellion was one outbreak in a region-wide web of Shan agitation dating from the early 1880s. The rebellion took place at the intersection of the competing colonial agendas of Siam, Britain and France, and various actors in this competition had been planting the seeds of a Myngoon-led rising since the 1880s. Myngoon's story was the product of a time when British, French and Siamese colonial agents were still grappling (and colluding) with dispersed and fragmented royal power.

TOTIC: PORTUGUESE PRE- COLONIAL AND COLONIAL DIPLOMATIC AGENTS OF TERRITORIAL EXPLORATION AND EXPLOITATION OF SAO - TOME AND PRINCIPE ISLANDS OF THE GULF OF GUINEA IN THE ATLANTIC OCEAN 1485-1975

The present article brings out typologies of pre-colonial and colonial great figures that strongly coordinated, moderated and put in radical human forces of European exploration, exploitation and colonisation activities in the overseas colonies in Sub-Saharan Africa with examples drawn from the following important lucrative region known as the Gulf of Guinea within the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS). The two countries used as our case studies include Sao-Tome and Principe from 1485 to 1975 (490 years) with 210 official agents remarkably during the pre-colonial and colonial periods. Considering the fact that most history books at times mentioned only few colonial administrators of the Continent, we therefore deemed it necessary to carry out this research on the various portfolios of specific foreign actors in full beginning from pre-colonial to end of colonial exploitations. The pre-colonial era brings out some of the foreign agents who in one way or the other prepared the ground work for deeper colonial partition, expropriation, expansion, exploitation and exaggerations of colonial activities as the best means to compensate themselves from the natural providence of the Black Continent in terms of natural and human resources well accessible in to the Atlantic Ocean. The work is divided into two parts using a chronological approach as indicated on the various tables and it brings out the total number of all prominent pre-colonial and colonial agents of the two countries. The scrutiny of specialized documents based on the pre-colonial and colonial Africa actually inspired us in the writing of this paper which can open new avenues to future researchers to find out in detail which of the Portuguese agent did what and when during their tenure of offices characterized with changing portfolios and revision of radical exploitative colonial policies colonialism.

Introduction of Glass as Fenestration in 19th Century Lagos, Nigeria: A Brief History

While glass as a material has been known to the people of western Nigerian for hundreds of years, it was only in the late 19th century that it became integrated into building and construction practice in Lagos. For the most part, early local architecture made little effort, if any at all, at covering window spaces with any material of permanence as the primary purpose of these orifices was more to let air in rather than light. Early European missionaries and colonial agents saw the situation differently. Their horrid fear for tropical bugs and matters of security and privacy necessitated a response and modification to the philosophy of tropical architecture. Using qualitative methods and visual analysis of archival images, this study takes a historical look at the beginnings of the integration and use of glass as fenestration and argues that so significant was the introduction in the late 19th and early 20th century in Lagos, that the innovation re-engineered the culture of architecture and living as we know it. The study identified the first building in Lagos to use glass as fenestration and discusses the role of missionaries in the development of innovation. It argues that missionary activity in the coastal city of Lagos, created a broad new industry and trade opportunities and concludes that the introduction of glass as a building material in 19th century Lagos, was not a mere development, but a significant innovation, both in construction and creativity.