Colonial Crisis Research Articles

Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America

Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America

Dislocations of empire: colonies de vacances and estivage in Protectorate Morocco, 1912–1956

ABSTRACT This article considers the origins and evolution of colonies de vacances and childhood and youth estivage (summer leisure) in Morocco, over the lifespan of the French Protectorate. It will show how these practices manifested, and sometimes challenged, the social and spatial separations that were inherent to the Moroccan colonial order. The colonies served as enclaves of a kind in the earlier period of the Protectorate, designed to secure European ‘childhood’ amidst purportedly adverse climatic and social/political conditions. Over time, the colonies and estivage became the object of new investments, in line with the broader historical conversion of childhood and youth into a ‘field of action’ and arena of political contestation. In the post-1945 period, incipient colonial crisis compelled a greater opening of these sites and practices to under-represented categories of young people–Muslim, Jewish, female. Conflicts arising from this inclusion reveal how the dislocation that was inherent to colonies and estivage practices hadn't – and really couldn't – be reconciled with the prevailing social order, as happened in France.

Colonial crises of imagination, climate fictions, and English literary education

This paper argues that the contemporary climate crises we see around our planet correlate with a colonial crisis of (literary) imagination. The author engages with Caribbean literary scholar Sylvia Wynter and other anti-colonial scholars to trace how the colonial literary imagination is rooted in the euro-western humanism and racial capitalism that governs the west, the stories and literary forms that frame it, and whose logics continue to be rehearsed across the disciplines—particularly in English literatures taught in school. The paper then argues that to understand the histories of this crisis of imagination and its link to climate crises, and perhaps paradoxically access literature’s speculative potential to imagine different climate futures, literary educators and scholars need to prioritize literatures and literary critiques that are embedded in a different relationship to the imagination and ecology.

Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America by Matthew Kruer (review)

Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America by Matthew Kruer (review)

Of a Free Man: Downplaying colonial crisis in the discourse of V. S. Naipaul

V. S. Naipaul was one of the most prolific writers of the modern time. His writings fluctuate between a sense of psychological crisis triggered by collapse of colonization towards the midst Twentieth century and the meaning of a free man. In other words, his writings look at what does it take to be a free man in a decolonized world; whether this freedom is achieved at the cost of the crisis or within the crisis, or whether the crisis itself is a part of the freedom. However, the understanding of the answer to these questions in his readers seems to be very limiting. The sense of the crisis and the freedom in him has been understood as something narrowing and damaging. However, this can be contested and the sense of crisis, its cause and affect can be best understood with a point of reference to the idea of “irresponsibility” and “contamination” in Jacques Derrida and Gayatri Spivak. His discourse is a meditation on several world contexts- Indian, European, African and Caribbean for instance. This paper contends to say and establish that the sense of crisis in Naipaul as far as his writings on the Caribbean context are concerned, is not damaging, rather it is an enabling phenomenon ensuring a sense of freedom.

Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America

Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America

De klimaatcrisis als koloniale crisis

The climate crisis as a colonial crisis. Perspectives from African environmental history By reviewing recent works in African environmental history, this article explores the colonial roots of the Anthropocene. I argue that a historical approach is crucial to understand the current climate crisis and its planetary inequalities. This article traces colonial environmental injustices, through examples such as forestry, agriculture and hydroelectric dam schemes, to show how they are reproduced and endure into the present. The exclusionary histories of the nature-culture divide as well as the problematic effects of colonial development schemes poignantly presage the unsustainability of contemporary interventionist climate policies. In this respect, African environmental history provides unique perspectives on the Anthropocene’s unequal dynamics. Historians can play a more prominent role in contemporary debates about the climate crisis by documenting these colonial legacies and in doing so they can contribute to more just and sustainable climate policies.

Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America by Matthew Kruer

Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America by Matthew Kruer

Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America by Matthew Kruer

From 1675 to 1685, Kruer argues in Time of Anarchy, a “tide of insurrection” swept across England’s North American colonies as frontier settler patriarchs, driven by a combination of conspiratorial fear and material danger, withdrew from the political compact of empire (3). The most significant catalyst for these popular revolts, Kruer compellingly demonstrates, was one of eastern North America’s least understood, and most sparingly documented, indigenous nations: the Susquehannock.The raiding of Susquehannocks in Maryland, Virginia, and Albemarle (North Carolina) wrought popular protest against colonial governments for failing to prevent or adequately respond to frontier violence. Confusion surrounding the identity of raiders, and the perception that government inaction was motivated by alignment with the interests of Native Americans generally over those of settlers, further encouraged conspiracies that imagined coalitions of tributary Algonquian nations, foreign enemies, and complicit oligarchs combined against white Protestant colonists. These conspiracies nourished rebellions—most notably Bacon’s Rebellion—that fomented violent acts of racial hatred against Natives. Such acts provoked further frontier bloodshed and generated a “feedback loop between Anglo-Indian violence and colonial crisis” that challenged central authority in colonial polities for a decade—the Time of Anarchy (201).Time of Anarchy is both an ethnohistory of the Susquehannock people and a political history of English North America in the Restoration era. The work succeeds marvellously in each aspect. The range of themes organizing the work’s seven chapters—“emotional cultures, rumors, migrations, conspiracy theory, peacemaking, captivity, and racial thinking”—marks Time of Anarchy as one of the most methodologically sophisticated treatments of late seventeenth-century America ever to appear (7).Each chapter produces valuable insights, and Kruer’s writing on conspiracies and captivity is particularly novel. He distinguishes conspiracies from rumors by asserting that the former contain “narrative emplotment, with genre conventions” (117); identifies several conspiracies that periodically convulsed through colonial America; and frankly concludes that the most pervasive of them all, that of Franco-Native papist collusion, was based on knowledge of “actual projects” (127). On captivity, Kruer effectively proves that the Susquehannock, while living as supposed hostages among the Iroquois, remained an influential nation whose interests, grievances, and expertise largely directed “Northern Indian” raiding on southern frontiers during the early 1680s. This fascinating conclusion points tantalizingly toward further research in Iroquoian identity and politics during the early historic period, a once vibrant field that has been theoretically staid for several decades.Although the work proceeds in a roughly linear fashion, its thematic organization does render Time of Anarchy’s central thread—the anarchic feedback cycle described above—somewhat difficult to track and assess across time. Discussion of Culpepper’s Rebellion in North Carolina, the critical example of the cycle in motion outside of Virginia and after Bacon’s Rebellion, is scattered across three small sections (136–138, 163–166, 203–204) over the same number of chapters. Challenging details of this revolt, such as the fact that retaliatory strikes against the Susquehannock were in this instance carried out by proprietary rather than rebellious settler forces, are included but not subjected to analysis in this abbreviated treatment. More concerning for broad applications of the anarchic cycle, the two revolts in Maryland that followed Bacon’s Rebellion—the Clifts uprising and Fendall’s Rebellion—were comparatively merely riotous affairs of several dozen agitators. Kruer describes the former as having failed to “inspire a mass rising,” (122) and the latter as an “ignominious repeat” (214) of this flop. The narrative is more attentive to the flurry of frightened, hyperbolic writings that these tumults evoked from colonial officials than to the paltry material scale of the unrest, an emphasis that is perhaps due to its thematic focus on conspiracy. Readers are ultimately left wanting for a detailed explanation of why frontier raiding, conspiracies, and racial hatred produced Bacon’s Rebellion, but no other sustained, massive insurrections.Time of Anarchy is the sort of book that enables such granular critiques of its subject matter through its comprehensive, empirical, and edifying presentation of relevant evidence. Historians of Iroquoian peoples and Stuart Empire will undoubtedly consult its pages for many years to come, and they will be well rewarded for the effort.

The transfer of foreign modernity in Beijing: the new urban space in the Legation Quarter, 1900–1928

AbstractThis article suggests that the post-colonial viewpoint could be valuable in understanding Beijing during the colonial crisis between 1900 and 1928. Through the examination of urban space in the Legation Quarter, it pays attention to the emerging special types and forms, as well as the mechanisms behind them, and explains the transposition of a foreign modern cityscape to the local context. The Europeanized district in Beijing was a symbol of Western civilization and the uneven power dynamics in the city, and was regarded as both a spatial model and a competitor for the Chinese government's attempts to create a modern capital.

A general, a colonial crisis, and a nationalist schism: Primo de Rivera and the gaullist paradigm

This article develops hitherto unexplored comparisons between the Rif War and the Algerian War of Independence. The Rif War and the colonial policy of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship have been placed in various useful comparative frames, but these have tended to isolate specific elements of the overall history, eschewing the interrelationships between processes of domestic politics, international politics, and colonial warfare. Looking beneath the major differences between the Spanish experience in the Rif and the French in Algeria, three illuminating parallels emerge: (1) the emergence of a military “strongman” with the initial support of the colonial army despite his uncertain commitment to the army’s goals; (2) an international dynamic that circumscribed any real capacity for each “strongman” to dictate colonial policy; and (3) schism on the nationalist right of each country as a result of the conflict, pitting those who favored operating within the hegemonic international framework against those who organized against that framework. Although imperfect in many respects, this comparison emphasizes interrelated processes of politics, colonialism, and national identity.

М.К. Ганди – неортодоксальный «ортодокс»

The reference to the native tradition by thinkers of modernizing societies is a complex, multidimensional process. It includes endeavours of rational recon­sideration of their own religion, which as a rule are accompanied with reformers’ declarations about revival of true ancient essence of faith and about their ortho­doxy. The typical example of the last one is Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s ar­ticle “Who is a ‘Sanatani’ Hindu?”. Translation of this text into Russian is pre­sented to the readers. And though the question about consideration Gandhi as а reformer of Hinduism is debatable, his approach to religion has many similar features with reformative practice by Rammohun Roy (1772–1833) and his fol­lowers. Reflection on originality of the Indian civilization and particularly on Hinduism, which is characteristic for the thinkers of that period, can’t be under­stood without analysis of modernization context and especially for Gandhi with­out attention to anti-colonial struggle. The meet with the West divided Indian so­ciety to three parts: those who gladly copied European lifestyle, others who refused all foreign and those for whom the discovery of new culture became the reason for the recognition of the past and the present of their native country. The last thinkers weren’t contented with just safe-keeping of Indian civilization in the situation of the colonial crisis and therefore they defined another aim – to revive its ancient greatness. Every reformer created his own project of religious renaissance based on his own conception of ‘true’ ancient Hinduism, which was corrupted in time. But there is something common in interpretation of Hinduism by different thinkers of that direction, and by Gandhi too. All of them tried to find the essence of Hinduism, which brings it together with other religions and which defines its uniqueness in order to show to the compatriots and to the world the special role which Indian civilization should play in all-human destiny.

A CRISIS OF COLONIALISM: THE FIRST WORLD WAR IN DEUTSCH-OSTAFRIKA

This paper aims at understanding the First World War in the German colony of Deutsch-Ostafrika from all important perspectives. It aims to show that the situation led to a crisis of colonialism; Therefore, it firstly takes a close look at the actual history of the course of the First World War in Deutsch-Ostafrika and its immediate effects for the African population. Its arguments are that German armed forces consisted mainly of African soldiers under white officers, whose constant replacement weakened the army. A lack of supplies and infrastructure led to lootings and the forced recruitment of local porters, of whom many died in service, and whose absence on their fields let to famine. The Germans therefore were at the good will of Africans, what undermined the classical colonial distribution of roles. Until the war there had been an ideological frontier between black Africans and whites of all European nations. This was important to establish a deterring system of representation, to make Africans feel inferior and not to attempt revolt. The war changed this radically, as black soldiers learned to kill white people and to understand their weaknesses. For long, furthermore colonial missionaries had struggled to spread Christianity among natives; the waring Europeans’ display of “Christianity” though led to major setbacks. The following spiritual vacuum was in part filled by the spread of Islam. The paper argues that this interplay of military, ideological and religious points shook the colonial system to its foundations. The article’s final chapter traces how some of the events of the war in Africa then effected the subsequent period.

Puerto Rico’s Summer 2019 Uprising and the Crisis of Colonialism

Puerto Rico’s Summer 2019 Uprising and the Crisis of Colonialism

Learning Empire: Globalization and the German Quest for World Status, 1875–1919 by Erik Grimmer-Solem

Reviewed by: Learning Empire: Globalization and the German Quest for World Status, 1875–1919 by Erik Grimmer-Solem Dirk Bonker Learning Empire: Globalization and the German Quest for World Status, 1875–1919. By Erik Grimmer-Solem. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. 654. Cloth $44.99. ISBN 978-1108483827. In this impressive book, Erik Grimmer-Solem offers a new narrative of the German Empire's expansionist discourse and pursuit of global power from the 1870s through the 1910s. Learning Empire presents Wilhelmine Weltpolitik as an "improvised response" to, and product of, an "accretion of insights" about the "opportunities and challenges" presented by the processes of globalization that first came into view beginning in the 1870s (19). Weltpolitik flowed from a newly emerging and continually evolving liberal nationalist discourse about Weltwirtschaft and the interrelationship between global politics, empire, and economics. The discourse's prime movers were a group of university-trained, policy-oriented political economists, who as the nation's leading experts on matters of globalization gained, by 1900, the ears of key decision makers such as Alfred von Tirpitz and Bernhard von Bülow and then [End Page 405] remained involved in key areas of imperial politics through the end of World War I. Embedded within the world of global scholarly connections, these economists forged the contours of their discourse in the crucible of their experience of overseas travel and study in multiple parts of the world, especially North America, the Caribbean, Venezuela, Japan, and China, in the 1880s and 1890s. Elegantly yoking intellectual history to the history of policy making, and deeply grounded in vast multiarchival research, Grimmer-Solem places at the center of his analysis a group of five German economists: Ernst von Halle, Karl Helfferich, Karl Rathgen, Herrmann Schumacher, and Max Sering. Eventually gaining professorships in political economy, these men were connected in one way or another to Gustav Schmoller, the doyen of Germany's school of historical political economy and eminent public figure, who also figures prominently in the analysis together with one of his American students, Henry Farnam. Organized in three chronologically arranged parts ("Absent-Minded Empire, 1875–1897"; "Empire Imagined, 1897–1907"; and "Empire Lost, 1908–1919"), Learning Empire closely follows the pursuits of its main characters, covering both their encounters with the new worlds of global politics and economics through study and travel and their direct involvement in key fields of national policy making. These fields range from the naval build-up, trade relations and tariff reform, and particular overseas empire pursuits (for example, in China) at the turn of the twentieth century, to the multifaceted colonial crisis of 1904–1907, the subsequent colonial reform efforts, the Anglo-German naval arms race, financial reform, and Weltpolitik projects such as the Baghdad railways before World War I. They extend to the formulation of annexationist war aims, unconditional submarine warfare, the Jewish census, and other wartime issues. Throughout, Grimmer-Solem richly situates the intellectual and political pursuits of his protagonists within both ever-changing concrete situational contexts and conjunctures and his own account of the changing worlds of big-power competition over empire and industry and the German Empire's national politics and pursuit of global power. Learning Empire is a wonderfully ambitious book. Its goal is to offer not only a "new, wider narrative about German expansionism" but also a novel account of the "full arc" of German history from 1875 and 1919 as "concurrent with the rise and fall of the first era of globalization" (14, 19). It places liberal imperialism (including its radical nationalist mutation) and middle-class publics at the center of Germany's imperial imaginary and pursuit of global power and world empire. It stresses the paramount importance of the United States as the most important point of reference for German global-imperial aspirations and it presents Great Britain, not Germany, as the key destabilizing force in multicentered world politics before 1914, while stressing the fairly moderate and ultimately reactive and defensive nature of German ambitions in the fast-moving milieu of global power. Historiographically, Grimmer-Solem frames his intervention as an attempt to supersede, once and for all, any national [End Page 406] exceptionalist narratives of the German Empire...

Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America by Matthew Kruer

Reviewed by: Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America by Matthew Kruer Paul McKenzie-Jones (bio) Matthew Kruer Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America Harvard University Press, 2021 Matthew Kruer's Time of Anarchy is a stunning intervention into our current understandings of settler-Indigenous relationships in the Colonial-era United States—specifically as it relates to the Virginia and Maryland colonies and interactions with the Susquehannock. In many ways, the book follows a familiar pattern—charting Indigenous history in relation/reaction to colonial interventions, rendering intercultural events as the most significant moments of Susquehannock history, and leaving the internal Susquehannock-specific history largely unexplored. At the same time, it asks us to reconsider how we understand the trajectory of seventeenth century Indian-white relations. Kruer quickly establishes the importance of the Susquehannock to intertribal, international, and intercolonial, relationships—of trade, peace, war, diplomacy, and territory—within the Chesapeake region from first encounters in 1608 until 1701. As such, the monograph covers almost the entirety of the seventeenth-century regional and geopolitical contests for power between English colonists and Indigenous populations. Within that century, as the power and regional significance of the Susquehannock ebbed and flowed, disappeared and reappeared, Kruer focuses mainly on the decade between 1675 and 1685, a period he describes as the Time of Anarchy—a phrase borrowed from two separate contemporary sources: George Alsop, an indentured servant, and Thomas Lord Culpeper, the governor of Virginia. Alsop was referring to the seemingly alien processes of Susquehannock government, while Culpeper was describing the political turmoil following Bacon's Rebellion. While the two may appear seemingly unconnected, Kruer does an excellent job of showing how the first was intimately connected to the second. Kruer's diligent and exhaustive research is evident as he connects multiple fragmented records detailing multiple key moments when the Susquehannock intervened in colonial and cross-cultural events and shaped the cultural, political, and even social thinking of allies, enemies, and colonial governments at the time. In the process, he pieces together a seemingly lost history of the Susquehannock nation and the importance of Gandastogue as an area central to an era of imperial conflict and uncertainty that showcases the many possible outcomes that could have rendered the Chesapeake and colonial America as very different [End Page 91] places than they ultimately became. The outcome is a fuller and more nuanced Susquehannock history than has previously been available. A key aspect of Kruer's work is his discussion of the emotional culture of the colonies and the ways that this shaped decision-making in relation to the Susquehannock and other Native nations in the region. He does an excellent job of distinguishing the different cultural and political worldviews while critiquing the ethnocentrism of English exceptionalism within this emotional culture. He shows how this emotional exceptionalism consistently led the colonists to underestimate the power, resilience, and persistence of Susquehannock presence and influence in the region—until it was often too late to avoid conflict or panic. This resulted, according to Kruer, in an enduring struggle to impose English hierarchy and hegemony on the region and on the Indigenous nations, at least until the end of the Time of Anarchy in 1685. At the same time, according to Kruer, Susquehannock adaptability was equally responsible for the inability of the English to fully understand their enduring presence in the region, even when it seemed they had been defeated and dispersed. It was their ability to turn military defeat and regional dispersement to their advantage, as well as Susquehannock individuals rising through the political ranks of neighboring nations, that surprised the colonists. Through this ability, the Susquehannock became less overtly powerful but more subversively influential in regional and geopolitical relations. Kruer also deserves recognition for offering new details on "old" history, providing us with fresh ways to understand the issues within events such as Bacon's Rebellion and the Albany Congresses, the Covenant Chain, and other significant moments in colonial US history with well-worn narratives. Ultimately, however, so closely entwined are the Susquehannock and colonial histories within the text and so dominant is the discussion of...

‘Gracious intentions’: Church, Government, and Colonial Crisis

ABSTRACT This article examines the content, context, and implications of two letters of 1774 among the papers of the second Earl of Dartmouth, one from Revd John Fletcher, vicar of Madeley, Shropshire, the other from Thomas Rankin, a Methodist itinerant preacher in America (in which he mentioned Fletcher). The central issue is the nature of the preferment, which Lord Dartmouth seems to have offered to Fletcher. In turn this raises issues around the relationship between the national church in England and the Methodist movement, and also ecclesiastical aspects of the growing political crisis in North America, on the verge of revolution.

Fear and Loathing in Amritsar: an Intimate Account of Colonial Crisis

This essay revisits the events surrounding one of the most emblematic instances of colonial violence, namely the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, through the diary of an Englishwoman, Mrs. Melicent Wathen. Where most histories of the Amritsar Massacre emphasize British brutality and Indian suffering, Melicent’s experience was instead characterized by fear and the uncertainty of what became a headlong flight from Empire. Her diary thus offers an intimate account of colonial crisis. If we are to engage comprehensively with the lived experience of empire, the forms and functions of colonial fears and anxieties must be acknowledged; not because colonial panics were caused by real threats, which often they were not, but because they played such a crucial role in shaping colonial policies and in framing the relationship between rulers and ruled.

Reviewing the Reviews: Popular Film, Public Opinion, and the Enduring Crisis of Colonialism

Reviewing the Reviews: Popular Film, Public Opinion, and the Enduring Crisis of Colonialism

Education, culture and politics: the evolution of Chinese education at The University of Hong Kong, 1911–1941

The University of Hong Kong (HKU), following its establishment in 1911, has assumed the mission of bridging British and Chinese cultures, to prepare European and Chinese elite youth for political and other professional careers, and thus to improve Britain’s cultural influence in competition with other western powers with regard to China. Dominated by its colonial character and pragmatic orientation, Chinese education at HKU was confined to no more than a supplementary subject at the initial stage. However, colonial crisis and cultural changes in the 1920s and 1930s, together with the endeavours of local cultural and commercial elites, made advanced Chinese education at HKU necessary and possible, and led to an independent unit for Chinese education and Chinese studies being established and strengthened. Organisational and curricular reforms before the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941 led to further modernisation and solidified the structure of Chinese education at this university, laying the essential foundation for its post-war recovery and development. The evolution of Chinese education at HKU demonstrated well the subtle entanglements of education, culture and politics in a colonial context, through which coexistence and tensions between tradition and modernity, between China and the West, and between the imperial and republican intellectuals were also vividly revealed.