Colonial Connections Research Articles

European Integration, European Identity and the Colonial Connection

The significance of colonialism and decolonization for the dawning of European integration and their subsequent bearing on notions of European identity still constitute a largely unexplored field within research. In seeking to problematize and amend this state of things, this article embarks on charting a set of historical developments which provide a case for arguing that theoretical and empirical studies on the nexus of European integration and European identity need to pay much closer attention to questions pertaining to colonialism and decolonization. As such, the article seeks to offer a glimpse of what it takes to be a critical background against which scholarly debates on contemporary notions of European identity need to be considered. Such an approach, it is suggested, should be of particular value for research trying to come to terms with Brussels' current endeavour to foster a collective sense of European identity in the Union. In expanding on this exact point, the article also broaches the question concerning all those `non-European' territories in Africa, South America and elsewhere that are incorporated into the present-day European Union, but which, nevertheless, hardly ever surface as such in studies on the EU and its politics of European identity.

Transnationalism and the Geography of (Sub)Ethnicity in Hong Kong1

The concept of diaspora as an active agent in the making of transnationalism has been a subject of various interpretations and heated debates. This study examines the heterogeneous subethnic identities of the Chinese diasporas and their spatial manifestation, using Hong Kong as a case. With its colonial connections and strategic location, Hong Kong has functioned as a center of origin and destination in the transnational movement of the Chinese diaspora. The great spatial mobility demonstrated by the Hong Kong sojourners or their "refugee mentality," as it is known, is found to be deeply rooted in their subethnic identity in the nation. A systematic analysis of spatial data collected in 1961 and 1996 reveals an uneven geography of subethnicity polarized by the elite English and Shanghainese on the one end and the local Kejia people on the other end. Despite the processes of deterritorization and displacement, the great spatial mobility of the Hong Kong sojourners and the diasporic landscape they have created have remained effectively shaped by their place-based ethno-linguistic identities. The seemingly "ungrounded empire" of Chinese diaspora capitalism, in which Hong Kong has played a crucial part, has been based on preexisting place-specific conditions.

Refugees in an age of genocide: global, national and local perspectives during the twentieth century

Introduction - refugees, place and memory. Part 1 The closing of asylum 1900-1932: refugees in the age of mass immigration - from the late 19th century to World War I refugees and World War I triumphant anti-alienism - the absence of asylum 1919-1932. Part 2 The Fascist era, 1933-1945: refugees from the Spanish Civil War refugees from Nazism, 1933-1939 refugees, World War II and the Holocaust. Part 3 refugees from the Cold War: Polish refugees - assistance to wartime heroes refugees from Hungary - anti-communist fervour takes hold. Part 4 Government-enforced dispersal during the 1970s and 1980s: Ugandan Asian exiles - the colonial connection refugees from Chile - a gesture of international solidarity refugees from Indo-China - a media-driven resettlement scheme? Part 5 World asylum seekers at the end of the century - closing the doors: the Kurds - a moment of humanity in an era of restriction? refugees from former Yugoslavia - the last programme refugees? refugees from the former Zaire - the context of colour. Conclusion: asylum, refugees and home.

Colonial Connections of Protestant Missionaries in Travancore

Colonial Connections of Protestant Missionaries in Travancore

Colonial Connections of Protestant Missionaries in Travancore

Colonial Connections of Protestant Missionaries in Travancore

Estate and empire: Sir George Cornewall's management of Moccas, Herefordshire and La Taste, Grenada, 1771–1819

Increased attention is now being paid to the relationships between cultural and material forces in the process of colonization. This paper examines the relationships developed between Britain and its colonies in the Caribbean through the landed estate, a key working and scenic landscape of late Georgian society, and the georgic discourses surrounding it. A general survey is made of colonial connections and the various media in which landed estates were represented. We argue that many connections can be found between estates in Britain and the Caribbean colonies, through material exchanges and in discourses over landscape, labour and finance. Caribbean property was accommodated by the adoption of conventional modes of representing and managing British landed estates, a process important in the assimilation of the islands as British colonies and in the integration of those with colonial interests into British élite society. But this accommodation was disrupted at certain times and places by debates over slavery in particular. In our case study of the activities of one landowner, Sir George Cornewall, we examine and compare the representation and management of La Taste, his sugar plantation in Grenada, and his Moccas estate, in Herefordshire, and we evaluate his position in British élite society.

Colonial Technology: Science and the Transfer of Innovation to Australia

Part I. Overview: 1. Dependency at the periphery: debates and questions 2. Cross-currents of change Part II. Microbes, Rabbits and Sheep: 3. Microbes versus poisonous plants 4. Contagion, conflict and compromise 5. From Paris to Narrandera 6. From foreign to domestic capability Part III. Rocks, Cyanide and Gold: 7. Australian gold, British chemists 8. Transfer agents and colonial connections 9. A challenge for technological imperialists 10. governments, experts and institutional adjustment 11. From Glasgow to Kalgoorlie 12. Out of the hands of 'rule-of-thumb' men Part IV. Linkages, Learning and Sovereignty: 13. Transfer, diffusion and learning 14. Colonial science: an intellectual bridge 15. Toward an Australian system Notes Index.

The Canadian Charter of Rights: Lessons and Laments

systems of government around a written Bill of Rights, it is natural to look to Canada and to reflect on its experience with its Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The common colonial connections, legal traditions and political cultures make the Canadian approach to judicial review particularly pertinent. Moreover, it is now 15 years since the Charter was entrenched, so a significant body of jurisprudence has been built up that gives a very clear picture of what judicial review has meant to ordinary Canadians and how it has altered the relationship between the courts and the other two elected branches of government. Two features of the Canadian account of constitutional rights stand out from all the rest. In the first place, the nine judges in Ottawa have come to rely on the same set of principles and analytical framework to test the constitutional validity of the various rules and regulations they are asked to review as are used by their brethren in Washington, Tokyo, New Delhi, Strasbourg, Rome, Karlsruhe, etc.' The Supreme Court of Canada has read the Charter in the same way Bills of Rights have been interpreted all over the world, to include two broad principles of rationality (also known as necessity or avoidability) and proportionality (also known as consistency or equality) which politicians and public officials are obliged to respect. For those (sceptics, cynics, etc) who need it, the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court of Canada provides yet another body of hard, empirical evidence that there is a set of neutral (viz formal) principles (of distributive justice), which lie at the core of the concept of constitutional rights, that allow judges to act out their role as 'guardians of the constitution' in an objective, determinate and ultimately very democratic way. If rights, defined as principles and duties, is the theoretical story which runs through the first 15 years of Canadian constitutional law, deference and caution two other characteristically Canadian attributes describe the way it has actually been practised on the Bench. At the same time that Canadian constitutional law teaches that there are universal principles and common ideas that are embedded in all constitutional Bills of Rights, it also makes it very clear that, as a practical matter, it is up to each individual judge to decide how much these principles will actually protect people's basic human rights.2 Chief Justice Hughes' much-cited aphorism that, in the United States, 'The constitution is what the judges say it is,' applies as much above as it does below the 49th parallel.

Colonialism and Technological Choice: The Case of the Railways of India

To what extent was technological choice within colonial countries deter-mined by requirements or expectations that emanated from interests located within the metropolitan powers? The quick answer, supported by a number of case studies, is that the colonial connection played a major role. The same case studies, however, demonstrate how complex and nuanced the determinants of particular technological choices in particular colonies at particular times were. Moreover, in recent scholarship many facets of the colonial experience have been subjected to considerable deconstruction such that colonialismquacolonialism has lost, for some at least, explanatory power: colonialism has become a background condition, a playing field for the contingent interplay of competing forces and interests located within a colony, a metropole and elsewhere. Without going that far but also without denying the benefits of the richer, more complex understanding deconstruction has brought this paper emphasizes the importance of colonial regimes and colonial labour processes to the analysis of technological choice in colonial contexts. The building and operation of the railways of colonial India provides the content for the arguments that follow. Colonialism as a structure of command and control will be seen to have been a powerful determinant of technological choice for the Indian railways although never independent of other considerations which included, this paper will argue, an important role for Indian railway labour.

Towards Regionalization of New Communication Services in the CARICOM: A Technological Free-For-All

The regionalization of new telecommunications and media services in the Caribbean has to be seen in the context of the history of a region which remains fragmented along the lines of antecedent colonial connections. While the inevitability of pan-Caribbean co-operation, if not integration, has to be acknowledged, the regionalization of new information/communication (infocom) services in the Caribbean proceeds along the traditional geopolitical lines. This paper focuses on the English-speaking Caribbean, which comprises the Caribbean Community (CARICOM). The specific issues that are pertinent to the notion of regionalization of services are geopolitical, economic, and technological. More precisely, the region’s proximity to North America, the emergence of a competitive global economy, and the role of infocom technologies in the global economy, both as a sector of that economy and as the cohesive element within it, are our main concerns.

The Private/Plural Selves of Afro-German Women and the Search for a Public Voice

Africanist George Shepperson (1982), considering the global dimensions suggested by the concept diaspora, spoke of it as being an intrinsically comparative idea which has everything to gain by approaches through other (p. 49). He goes on to insist that the fullest development of African Diaspora Studies and an understanding of its relationship to other disciplines require that Africanists look further outward by conducting research in languages other than English in order to assess more completely the impact of other cultures directly or indirectly involved with the dispersal of Africans and their descendants throughout the world. A similar idea turned inward must also be applied to German Studies, whose expansive breadth and diversity cannot be fully appreciated without study of the impact of minorities, in this case Africans and their descendants, on the language, literature, and culture. Certainly the African presence within German culture contrasts sharply with the experience of Frenchor Spanishand Portuguesespeaking countries, whose colonial ties to Africa were more firmly and widely established and lasted much longer than the ties initiated by Germany. Although Germany's colonial interests in Africa were severed by the end of World War I, the brief colonial connection, along with subsequent wartime occupation (during both World War I and World War II) and peacetime migration, brought an influx of Africans and descendants of Africans-primarily from France and

Conversion and Church formation in tuvalu∗

Islands and formed part of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony. The formal colonial connection began in 1892 when a British protectorate was declared. With the assumption of British rule a powerful new element impinged on this tiny island world which altered existing relationships between Tuvaluans and foreigners, gradually giving Tuvalu the basis for a wider sphere of participation with the outside world. An equally important influence has been Christianity, which affected the affairs of each island at every level, and whose introduction predates that of colonialism proper by three decades. The London Missionary Society (LMS) took over Tuvalu by degrees, from its early successes in the mid 1860s until pagan resistance in the three northernmost islands was broken a decade later. The archipelago has remained a Protestant stronghold ever since, despite the recent incursions by Seventh Day Adventists, Jehovah's Witness, Bahai, and Mormons, and the reintroduction of Catholicism. Today the Tuvalu Church (the local successor of the LMS) is an autonomous body affiliated to the Council for World Mission.

The development of natural history in early nineteenth century Ireland

The Ireland of the early nineteenth century is today hardly discernible. Dublin, after London, was then the major city of the British Isles and looked the part of a cultural capital. Belfast was an increasingly prosperous industrial town, throwing out an assertive challenge. The previous century had seen the American Revolution in which Presbyterian Scots-Irish had played a major role—some were signatories to the Declaration of Independence. The French Revolution had plunged Europe into war and on its periphery both revolutions added to growing Irish notions of liberality of thought and national independence. For some, then, natural history studies were a part of the development known as the 'Enlightenment'. For the less idealistic, these studies were a chance to apply business acumen to a leisure activity—the ledger-book naturalists making accounts of the natural world—and for the leisured classes they were a new means of self-expressi on in otherwise unfilled time. Whatever the driving force, the naturalists needed material to work on and there was a singular dearth of it; this was to change dramatically. In 1792 Richard Kirwan F.R.S., a renowned Irish scientist, persuaded the Dublin Society to purchase for £1,350 the natural history museum of Nathaniel Gottfried Leske, Professor of Natural History at Marburg, who had amassed considerable collections consisting mainly of minerals, a large collection of shells and insects, a herbarium and several anatomical prepar­ ations (White, 1911:8). This presaged a flood of acquisitions as assiduous collectors began to journey to all parts of Ireland. English and continental material was acquired by purchase, exchange or gift, and exotic material flooded in as a consequence of ever expanding colonial connections. As the collections grew, so momentum in growth was encouraged. Collec­ tors became more knowledgeable and increasingly specialised, and the quality of information associated with specimens correspondingly improved. These larger, better collections generated a need for storage space, curators, and finance as, indeed, did the ever-growing specialised literature based on the collections; the aims of Irish institutions and societies became directed towards satisfying these requirements. The collectors and their fund of knowledge were to provide the basis for William Thompson's four-volume Natural History of Ireland (1849-1856), which seems to have embodied various ambitions of its contributors. It is, for example, based on Irish material in Irish institutions, it is enlightening, From Linnaeus to Darwin: commentaries on the history of biology and geology. Society for the History of Natural History, London, 1985.

Literature and the Colonial Connection

Literature and the Colonial Connection

Coutinho, the Nova Critica and Portugal

CULTURAL nationalism a fickle companion, responsible for many positive benefits to a society in process, but sometimes causing facts to be sacrificed to wishful thinking. Afrafnio Coutinho's cultural nationalism was just such an unpredictable ally. It caused him to confuse is with ought, the concept of literary autonomy with the desired cultural autonomy, and moral with intellectual qualities. These confusions appear most blatantly in Coutinho's attitude toward Portugal, the object of his cultural nationalism. The extraordinary relationship between Portugal and the scientific nova critica, as it existed in the mind of the fiery, controversial Coutinho, the subject of this study. Coutinho first described the Portuguese character very early in his career, in an essay written in 1939. At this point, he was neither a new critic nor a Lusophobe, but a student of Brazilian literature and culture and an ardent admirer of Portugal. Deeply influenced by the sociologist Gilberto Freyre and the Christian Humanist, Jacques Maritain, Coutinho shared Freyre's colorful view of the Portuguese colonist, of the fraternal nature of Brazilian slavery, and of the strong African influence in the formation of the Brazilian race. He extolled the wise policy of miscegenation pursued vigorously by the Portuguese, and offered Brazil's exemplary racial harmony as proof that the Portuguese were good colonists and egalitarian Christians.' Whatever racial problems remained, such as the inferiority complex of the resentful mulatto, would be erased eventually through a humanistic education program. Though Coutinho reminded readers that Brazil was not merely an extension of Portuguese culture, but a mixing of Indian and African elements as well, he was quite flattering to the Portuguese. He stated the need to free the popular mind from the clutches of atavism, fetishism, magic and superstition, which he considered legacies of the institution of slavery, not of the commendable Portuguese colonial experience.2 So spoke Coutinho in 1939. By 1957, however, he blamed the irresponsible Portuguese for three hundred years of ignorance in Brazil.3 Further, he faulted them for the intolerable colonial legacy of personalism, adventurism, dilettantism, amateurism and improvisation that still plagued Brazilian culture like a curse.4 Even for the mercurial Coutinho this was quite an astonishing about face. How can we account for it? Coutinho's radical transformation from Lusophile to Lusophobe occurred dramatically during his years of study in the United States, from 1942-47.' His time at Columbia University, where the New Criticism was the approach to literature, and his enthusiastic embrace of the North American democratic values proved to be the parting of the ways as far as his attitudes toward the relationship between Brazil and Portugal were concerned. How the austere Anglo-American New Criticism fit into this development quite a story, and one that would surely amaze any North American or English new critic, for it inspired in Coutinho a thorough critique of Brazilian culture. By every standard, as he saw it, Brazil was woefully inadequate when compared to the advanced cultural and intellectual life of the United States. Where Americans were serious and professional, Brazilians were frivolous and amateurish. Where Americans debated significant issues, Brazilians postured in cafe conversations. Where Americans rewarded merit, Brazilians rewarded connections. Where American universities were vibrant centers of intellectual stimulation, Brazilian universities were irrelevant strongholds of the incompetent. But Coutinho could not accept the notion that Brazilians were inherently inferior; he had to find an external cause that, once found, could be uprooted. This need led him to a sweeping rejection of the colonial connection. It was Portugal that was responsible for the poor showing of Brazilian culture. Portugal had created the monstrous, characterless Macunaima. So far, we have a critique of Brazil by means of an unfavorable contrast with the United States. But what does the New Criticism have to do with this development? The rigor of the New Criticism, by Coutinho's interpretation, supplied the antidote to widespread flaws in the nation-

Britain and India between the Wars

In the nineteenth century, the British succeeded in deriving growing benefits from their Indian territories. With dominion firmly established, and the colonial connection beginning to take its modern shape, India came to fit less awkwardly with British economic interests. India now became Britain's best customer for her most important industry, a useful supplier of raw materials, a safe field for capital investment, a crucial element in her balance of payments and key to the multilateral system of settlements which sustained the continued expansion of her world trade.The pattern of trade and investment, which brought such signal benefits to Britain, depended upon dominion over India. Dominion had given Britain the levers of power to open up Indian markets to her trade,knock down the internal barriers to the free flow of her goods, and prevent the erection of external tariffs to protect the Indian product.Dominion enabled Britain to build, at Indian cost, a system of transport by rail and road which linked the ports, themselves the creation of British rule, to their hinterlands, and to tilt the advantage in favour ofher own nationals who dominated India's foreign trade; it helped to give British shipping, banking and insurance a virtual monopoly over the invisibles of Indian trade and it imposed upon India a currency and banking system which protected the ratio of sterling to the rupee. Butthese balance-sheets of imperialism do not reveal the full importance of the Raj to the British world system. Just as India's growing foreign tradehelped to push British influence into east and west Asia alike, so her growing military power underwrote that influence, whether formal or informal, in those regions. An oriental barracks, where half of Britain'sworld force was billeted free of charge, India was the battering ram of British power throughout the eastern arc of its expansion. Before the First World War, India seemed triumphantly to have justified the efforts of generations of empire-builders.

Agriculture in a Restrictive Environment: The Case of Greece

N classical times, Greek wealth was largely derived from an economy extending far beyond the homeland. Extensive colonial and trading connections were essential supports of a high level of economic and artistic activity. In modern times, however, Greece has been forced to depend largely on her own limited and imperfectly ex)loited resources-primarily agricultural. The economy of modern Greece is undiversified, and exhibits many characteristics of an underdeveloped, foreigntrade-oriented country. Its basic features are as follows: