Colonial Endeavors Research Articles

Multiple Monarchy and the Kent Island Controversy: A Scottish Licence, Chesapeake Rivalries and the London Business World

Kent Island, located in Chesapeake Bay, was the subject of fierce debate and competition in the 1630s. Historians typically present the conflict in binary terms relating to its status as either part of one English colony or another; namely, was Kent Island part of the Virginia colony or was it part of the Maryland colony? There was, however, a third interpretation – that Kent Island was not part of an English colony at all but, rather, an independent Scottish trading outpost. This article examines the basis for this alternative interpretation. It was a pivotal issue in the contemporary debate as the initial European occupation of the island was predicated on the rights conveyed in a royal licence granted under the Scottish privy signet. Taking that grant as its starting point, the article analyses the ways in which the 1603 union of the crowns affected colonisation stemming from the British Isles under the Stuart monarchs. The Kent Island controversy is one example of the ‘Scottish complication’ that was present in many colonial endeavours traditionally thought of as solely English. 1

St. Francis Xavier—“Patrón desta jornada”: Jesuit Writings and the Spanish Re-Appropriation of the Pacific

Abstract The figure of St. Francis Xavier was a tool used in Spanish texts as an instrument to increase the prestige and dissemination of colonial endeavors. In the seventeenth century, amidst the tense rivalry between the Spanish and the Portuguese empires, several Jesuit writings take a stand in support of the Spanish monarchy’s interests in Asia, reinforcing the legitimacy of its conquests and the appropriateness of Spain’s intervention in the area. This article studies two of these texts: Diego de Bobadillas’s Relación de las gloriosas victorias and Diego Calleja’s San Francisco Javier, el Sol en Oriente, focusing on the textual strategies employed in them to vindicate the fight against Muslims in the Philippines and the wider Spanish intervention in the Pacific through the celebration of St. Francis’s endeavors.

A Decolonial Project for Europe

AbstractEurope's past is an imperial and colonial past. Often presenting itself as a cosmopolitan continent of nations, it is, in fact, a continent of national projects buttressed by colonial endeavours. These have included colonial emigration and settlement, dispossession, appropriation, extraction, and enslavement. While particular national governments have played a central role – Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, for example – populations from across the European continent have also participated. This article sets out the ‘varieties of colonialism’ at the heart of the European project and asks what a decolonial project of Europe might look like. I argue it would be one that places the colonial histories of Europe at the centre of our understandings of the present and which seeks redress of the injustices associated with that history through postcolonial reparative action.

Vandra Costello. Irish Demesne Landscapes, 1660–1740.

Vandra Costello. <i>Irish Demesne Landscapes, 1660–1740</i>.

Reimagining the World: Decolonisation and the Promise of Development

The 1975 World Conference on Women marked the beginning of the United Nations Decade for Women. The conference report, written soon afterwards, underlined that ‘the issue of inequality that affects the vast majority of women of the world is closely linked with the problem of under-development which exists as a result not only of unsuitable internal structures but also of a profoundly unjust world economic system’. This type of holistic and more radical understanding of (under)development has usually been lost in mainstream accounts of the history of development as a colonial endeavour or as a Western-imposed set of values and templates rooted in modernisation theory. A recent wave of scholarship, however, has sought to recover the agency of the ‘Global South’ in the history of internationalism and development, uncovering the plurality of internationalisms and the variety of political imaginaries that shaped twentieth-century ideas of development.

Agency versus Insurgency

Agency versus Insurgency

From Pennsylvania to Transylvania: August Ludwig Schlözer and the decentering of Enlightenment

This article analyzes the historical and political thinking of the eighteenth-century German historian August Ludwig Schlözer, in the context of the American War of Independence and the French Revolution. The article argues that Schlözer's disillusionment with these transformative events led him to identify the German settlers in medieval Transylvania as agents of a better Enlightenment. In doing so, Schlözer constructed the history of the Transylvanian German colony as an antithesis to American colonial endeavors, while redefining the frameworks and history of enlightened progress in both time and space. In this way, Schlözer translated the history of a marginal East–Central European region into a world-historical narrative.

Spare the Rod, Spoil the Society? The Moral Complexity of Caning in Singapore

You have the opportunity to decide whether or not a person gets caned, the only caveat is that they have committed a crime against you. What will you do? This essay explores the moral complexity of caning in Singapore through an exploration of corporal punishment, criminal justice, moral philosophy, and the Asian values debate; a dilemma that ultimately places concerns of society and the individual at odds. In doing so, the essay argues that the morality of caning changes on the basis of the ethical framework and modification of situation variables. Even so, the moral complexity of caning is not superficially evident. In order to thoroughly engage with all elements of this complexity, this essay begins by attempting to decipher the place of punishment within international human rights frameworks. From there, the essay explores the morality of punishment and its employ in colonial endeavors. This leads to a discussion of modernization, humanitarian ideologies, and control. By creating a framework for analyzing criminal justice in Singapore—including an outline of the intersections of criminal justice, development, and prosperity —this essay seeks to explore the balance between corporal punishment as a tool of prosperity and corporal punishment as a source of pain and degradation. When placed in consequentialist and virtue-based ethical frameworks caning in Singapore looks very different, forcing the moral actor to weigh societal concerns with concerns for individual pain, suffering, and liberties.&#x0D; Keywords: Caning, Morality, Society, Punishment.

Dilemmas of Sharing Religious Space

Christianity has a long presence in the Maghreb, dating back to Roman imperial times. Eventually it became a mostly Muslim region, but in the late nineteenth century, the Roman Catholic Church embarked on a vast mission of church building, in part to assist the French colonial endeavor. In Tunisia, political independence in 1956 was accompanied by a further reinvigoration of Christianity, and, over the last twenty years, conversion to Christianity (mainly in the form of evangelical and neo-evangelical Protestantism) has been on the rise. Beginning in 2003, workers and students from sub-Saharan Africa have contributed to the growth of both Catholic and Protestant churches in Tunis. This article analyzes the ways in which various Christian groups organize and articulate their religious practice and proselytization in ritual spaces that are sparse and must be shared in contemporary Tunisia.

Refugees, Conscripts, and Constructors: Developmental Narratives and Subaltern Han in Xinjiang, China

China’s frontier construction through the PRC era, involving the often-violent expansion of Han cultural and political space, has been undertaken primarily by subaltern Han people from rural areas of China. Female domestic labor has been essential to this colonial endeavor. The focus of the article is Han people associated with the organization that makes frontier construction its raison d’être, the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, or bingtuan. More often pushed by circumstance than drawn by nationalistic fervor to settle on the backward frontier, these people and their offspring nevertheless became a significant part of the affective base of Han settlement in Xinjiang. By “affective base,” I mean that this (now multigenerational) population possess a sense of belonging in and of Xinjiang that bolsters the idea of Xinjiang as an integral part of China and challenges non-Han claims of exclusive moral ownership. The ultimate construction is achieved.

Colonialism and Modern Architecture in Germany by J.P. Short

Reviewed by: Colonialism and Modern Architecture in Germany by J.P. Short J.P. Short Colonialism and Modern Architecture in Germany. By Itohan Osayimwese. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017. Pp. 352. Cloth $49.95. ISBN 978-0822945086. When in 1908 Adolf Loos issued "Ornament and Crime," his manifesto of purified modern design, he famously opposed austerity of form to the tattoo, "cultural evolution" to the "primitive," and inscribed the temporalization of cultural difference in the polemical language of modernism. Not long after, Germany emerged as locus classicus of the new functionalist style. In Colonialism and Modern Architecture in Germany, Itohan Osayimwese aims to undercut this polarity, to find in Germany—"sacrosanct in architectural history as the birthplace of the Bauhaus" (5)—not purity and identity, but rather heterogeneity and difference. She sets out to revise the classic account of German architecture by recasting its context as global. Perhaps most surprisingly, she pursues this under the sign of colonialism—albeit colonialism "broadly construed" (18), from the 1850s into the 1930s. She aligns her book with the revised history of expressionism that foregrounds the colonial context of avant-garde primitivism: a reflection of the critique of European modernist appropriations of colonized cultures catalyzed by the seminal 1984 MoMA exhibition Primitivism in Twentieth-Century Art. But her work is not a critique of the modernist elision of colonial ideology so much as an argument for the proximity of colonialism and architectural modernism; or, at its most far-reaching, a claim that colonialism is a constituent element of modernist form. Osayimwese ties her revision of architectural history closely to the newer global history of the Kaiserreich. The idea is to "upend the image of German insularity," to see "a country deeply embroiled in global currents," and thereby "globalize the [End Page 409] history of modern architecture" (20). Observing that architectural "experimentation was at a fever pitch" just as "the German empire was embroiled in the colonial fray," she "offers a history of modern architecture … that takes into account [its] formal colonial endeavors, informal imperial practices and deep involvement in global developments" (6). Osayimwese identifies five aspects of this history: architecture and colonialism in the universal exposition, ethnographic responses to indigenous architectures, a colonial architectural competition, prefabricated architecture, and the colonial pavilion at the 1914 Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne—a seminal event in the history of modern German architecture. But, in formulating her argument, she is mostly cautious, substantially deferring claims about flows of influence, exchange, or appropriation between metropole and colony in favor of simultaneity and proximity. Architectural reformism, in her restrained formulation, "became implicated with Germany's official colonial project" (4). This hesitation no doubt reflects the limitations of her archive and the relatively marginal place of colonial architecture for Germans. The challenge appears already at the world expositions. Strikingly, Germany never had one, leaving Osayimwese to focus mostly on the German presence at the St. Louis World's Fair. Her constellation of colonial exhibits, applied arts, and exhibition architecture is compelling, but her conclusions remain tentative. She traces the strong influence of the exhibit of German applied arts, but not on colonial architecture, while her account of the German East Africa exhibit does not definitively connect it to modernist design. What emerges is but the "possibility" that the exhibit "furnished grist" for German architects (59). And, the account of "architect-ethnographers" is just as circumspect, protesting that any conclusions about influence might never be possible. That these traveling architects embarked mostly on modernizing programs in places like Japan and the Ottoman Empire, together with the focus on world expositions, suggests that globalization might have been more appropriate as a key concept than the less capacious colonialism. But then, in 1913, the German Colonial Society agreed to cosponsor a competition for a model colonial house with the German Werkbund. Here, the spirit of reformism reflected a paradoxical marriage of "Heimatschutz," or architectural preservation, emphasizing the traditional and the local, and colonialism, ideologically predicated on modernization. The question is, as Osayimwese puts it, how "Heimatschutz as an ennobling of local practice" could "coexist with colonialism's devaluing of indigenous cultures" (122). A burgeoning anthropological science, which constructed the colonies as fields of ethnographic...

Native Southerners: Indigenous History from Origins to Removal by Gregory D. Smithers

Reviewed by: Native Southerners: Indigenous History from Origins to Removal by Gregory D. Smithers F. Todd Smith Native Southerners: Indigenous History from Origins to Removal. By Gregory D. Smithers. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019. Pp. 260. Notes, bibliography, index.) Employing the voluminous amount of secondary works dealing with southern Native Americans that have been published in the last two decades, Gregory D. Smithers has written a short and accessible overview of the southern Indian experience up to 1840 that will have great value for college students and professors alike. Although the book includes details concerning numerous different Indigenous groups of various languages—Muscogean, Southern Iroquoian, Siouan, and Caddoan—the author has done a fine job in clearly presenting his main theme of Native cultural continuity in times of extreme hardship and change. Smithers defines the Native South as extending eastward from the Louisiana-Texas border to the Atlantic Ocean, and southward from the Tennessee River to the Gulf of Mexico. (Although Texas is not included in his definition, the author does provide a bit of information on the Caddo Indians—the Tejas of Spanish Texas—due to the groups that resided in western Louisiana). Chronologically, the book begins with the question of origins and examines how these interrogations relate to issues of storytelling and identity among Native southerners. Throughout the entire work, Smithers intersperses Native oral traditions and viewpoints with the findings of modern secondary research. The author also makes sure to demonstrate how Native southerners coped with fluctuations in climate and local ecosystems, adopting new technologies and agricultural innovations as they saw fit. One of the highlights of the book is Smithers' explanation of the Mississippian chiefdoms that emerged in the centuries prior to European contact, along with concise descriptions of how kinship networks and clan systems functioned while buttressing chiefdom societies, subjects that are often baffling to the modern reader. Smithers also discusses the "Mississippi Shatter Zone" in the early eighteenth century, demonstrating how disease, warfare, and European colonial endeavors that inspired slave raiding caused the chiefdoms to decline and splinter. However, tribes such as the Choctaws, Creeks, and Cherokees built on their communal identities to coalesce during this period, enabling them to overcome the dangerous situation they found themselves in. [End Page 361] The situation became even more threatening for Native southerners during the era of the French and Indian War and the American Revolutionary War. The violence and warfare that resulted between Indigenous polities, combined with their involvement in the various wars, caused small-scale migrations within the Southeast, notably among the Cherokees. The author also charts the history of the development and migration of the Seminoles into northern Florida as a complex story of ethnogenesis, demonstrating how their emergence amounted to something more than a group of Lower Creeks migrating out of the Creek Confederacy. Instead, he shows how these dynamic communities had their ethnic origins among smaller tribes such as the Oconees, Yamasees, and other Florida Natives. The discussion of the Seminole emergence is an example of the author's commitment to investigating the smaller, forgotten Southern tribes, highlighting how the book is not just concerned with the so-called Five Civilized Tribes that usually dominate the discussion of Native southerners. Late eighteenth-century wars provided the backdrop for rekindling Native religious revivals and attempts to forge pan-Indian alliances as a means of countering the growing power of the American republic. Although these movements failed, ultimately leading to removal in the 1830s, Smithers shows how the Native southerners were able to hold onto their social and cultural traditions, maintained their Native languages, and worked to nurture bonds of kinship and community in Indian Territory. Native Southerners is a sophisticated overview of the history of the region's Indigenous groups, combining the latest historical research with Native oral traditions to provide an excellent introduction to the subject for students and teachers. F. Todd Smith University of North Texas Copyright © 2020 The Texas State Historical Association

Stillness, Collaboration, and Assisted Movement: The Global Trajectories Charted Through Latin American Pop Music

In this essay, I read Puerto Rican pop star Luis Fonsi’s 2017 chart-topping single, “Despacito” (Slowly), as emblematic of dominant global trajectories. While “slowness” is here equated to maximising the pleasures of heterosexual male desire, it becomes in the remixed version with English-language pop star Justin Bieber a symbol of resistance to colonial endeavours. I identify the objectified female in the original version as a “slow mover” in the remixed track, whose stationary positioning can be read as having revolutionary potential for thinking globalisation anew. I continue to read slowness through the social gatherings and collaborations represented in recent tracks by Gente de Zona and Calle 13 and observe that such examples of restricted movement lead to the formation of global networks of empathy, solidarity, and shared struggle. I argue that the work of Franco-Chilean rapper Ana Tijoux and, in particular, her anthem “Somos sur” (We are South), featuring British-Palestine hip-hopper Shadia Mansour, elaborates on notions of collaboration as it derives a poetics of assisted movement as a strategy for resistance and revolution. The stationary positioning of Fonsi’s female object of desire here becomes a stand against global mobility as she is an imagined part of Tijoux’s support system.

Centre Stage and Behind the Scenes with the “lion of Katanga”

Abstract This article complicates the image of Benedictine missionary Jean-Félix de Hemptinne (1876–1958), a central figure of the 20th century Belgian colonial and evangelisation endeavour in the Congo, as a steadfast missionary with political, religious and economic power. It contextualises his ideas within wider debates on religion, civilisation and colonialism and looks at the strategies he employed to defend his authority. Through the figure of the Apostolic Vicar of Katanga, this article rethinks the ideas and the power mechanisms, in particular the “trinity” between church, state and capital and the church-state alliance, which underpinned the Belgian colonial and missionary enterprise.

The Gendering of Irish and Caribbean Food/Land Crises in Children's Novels by Marita Conlon-McKenna and James Berry

Marita Conlan-McKenna's Under the Hawthorne Tree (1990) and James Berry's Ajeemah and His Son (1991) are children's novels that address foundational national or regional trauma (dealing with transatlantic slavery and the Irish potato famine respectively). Both employ historical fictive modes to bring the nineteenth century to life, in the process illustrating the extractive capitalism at the heart of the colonial endeavour. Links between Ireland and the Caribbean have long existed, Hilary Beckles observing the persistent characterization of the Irish as ‘one-dimensional colonial characters […] battered and bruised by a triumphant imperial Englishness that viewed them as “baggage” along the route from Cork and Limerick through Bristol to Boston and Barbados’ (Beckles ix). Expanding on this sense of Ireland and the Caribbean as jointly tethered to global imperial trends, this article focuses on the role of food and consumption, arguing that these novels make clear the ongoing role of food scarcity and land control within the cyclical crises of capitalist expansion. Ajeemah and His Son reinforces the importance of land ownership in Jamaica as its protagonist falls in line with the values of the society he has been thrust into, while Under the Hawthorne Tree frames famine as a representative crisis of the world-system.

Meiji Japan, Ottoman Egypt, and the British Occupation: A Turn of the Century Colonial Triangle of Non-Western Modernity and Anti-Colonial Egyptian Nationalism

The independent Japanese nation-state of the late 19th century, with its modern institutions and its enlightened officials, became a powerful role model for other non-Western societies who struggled to acquire the trappings of modernity they often associated with the West – parliamentary constitutionalism, universal compulsory education, and patriotic love of homeland, for example. Under British occupation since 1882, Egyptian nationalists in late Ottoman Egypt looked to this Japanese example in formulating their anti-colonial resistance ideologies. After Japan’s dramatic victory in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, the pages of the Egyptian nationalist press were full of articles arguing for a British withdrawal in order to facilitate independent Egyptian nationhood. The authors of these anti-colonial demands used the Japanese example as a discursive tool to highlight their particular strategies for liberating Egypt. But a question arises: could an “Eastern” nation such as Japan, which served as an exemplary nation-state for other “Easterners” to emulate, also be acknowledged as colonialist? Or was colonialism at this time only understood as a by-product of Western imperialism to suit the needs of Egyptians, allowing them to deploy the Japanese model rhetorically, with knowing regard for Japanese colonial endeavors in East Asia?

John Beveridge, the Neo-Latin Horatian Ode and the Narrative of British Colonialism in Eighteenth-Century North America

The composition of Neo-Latin poetry was integral to the bilingual literary culture of eighteenth-century Britain, and the practice was taken by the British colonists to America. Yet the role of this Neo-Latin verse in the new political, religious and social setting of early North America has remained largely unexplored. This article examines the Latin Horatian odes published by the colonial poet John Beveridge in his Epistolae familiares (Philadelphia, 1765), a collection of Latin verse epistles. Beveridge used his Latin poetry to not only describe but justify British colonisation of North America. His appropriation of Horatian models for the colonial experience was influenced by the later reception of Horace’s poems which attributed religious and political significance to them – in order to reflect the moral, religious and cultural superiority of Christian Europeans in America. By exploring the cultural symbolism of Latin poetry, this article enables a greater understanding of the place of Neo-Latin literature in the colonial endeavour to Anglicize, Europeanize and Christianize America.

Entangled Empires: The Anglo-Iberian Atlantic, 1500-1830 ed. by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

Reviewed by: Entangled Empires: The Anglo-Iberian Atlantic, 1500-1830 ed. by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra Jason Daniels Entangled Empires: The Anglo-Iberian Atlantic, 1500-1830. Edited by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. x, 330. $55.00, ISBN 978-0-8122-4983-5.) Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra's Entangled Empires: The Anglo-Iberian Atlantic, 1500-1830 is a collection of twelve essays that examine the "entangled histories" of the Iberian and British Atlantic worlds as well as the archival processes that rendered those interconnected and common histories invisible (p. 3). Crafted by a diverse group of scholars, the essays focus primarily on the economic and intellectual strands that tied the two Atlantics together. The essays range in both depth and scope. With coverage across three centuries and more than a dozen locales in both the Atlantic and Pacific worlds, this collection appeals to a wide range of scholars working on sociocultural, intellectual, political, and economic histories. The volume is divided into four parts. Part 1, "Severed Histories," is composed of three essays. Mark Sheaves examines the actions of two "culturally ambidextrous merchants" operating around various places of the Iberian Atlantic world during the mid-sixteenth century (p. 6). Sheaves illustrates how individuals navigated between Iberian Catholic and English Protestant spheres by pragmatically shifting identities according to various religious and political climates in order to advance their particular sociocultural and economic goals. Michael Guasco's essay focuses on the underexamined role that Africans played in introducing the English to the Atlantic world. Guasco argues that a reevaluation of Anglo-African interactions before the rise of plantation slavery is crucial to understanding the expansion of the Anglo Atlantic colonial endeavor and England's rising competition with Spain. Taking on another long-held tradition, Benjamin Breen argues that it was the British, rather than the Dutch, who replaced the Portuguese in the tropics. He contends that the British inherited land, capital, and trading networks, as well as invaluable botanical and anthropological information, from the Portuguese. Breen highlights the epistemological link forged between the Portuguese and the British as they exchanged pharmaceutical knowledge and materials. Collectively, these essays highlight how deliberate erasures of the Iberian source material from the Anglo Atlantic narrative engendered two separate archival processes and two distinct historiographies of two obviously interconnected empires. Part 2, "Brokers and Translators," examines the role European cultural intermediaries played in either facilitating or obscuring Anglo-Iberian entanglements. Christopher Heaney examines the English understanding of South America during the mid-sixteenth century through an analysis of the work of Sir Thomas More and Richard Eden. Heaney argues that Eden's work, which built on More's Utopia, praised the Spanish colonial endeavor in Peru and encouraged "English navigators and merchants to contribute to and profit from an [End Page 410] expanding 'Christian Empire' of native peoples" (p. 86). Holly Snyder highlights the role Iberian Jews played in British imperial expansion during the seventeenth century. She illustrates how Jews embraced various religious identities to negotiate different local political-religious circumstances to further their personal agendas. Christopher Schmidt-Nowara uses the life of George Dawson Flinter to illustrate "the deep history of Irish immigration to peninsular Spain and the Spanish colonies and naturalization as Spanish subjects; Irish military service to the Spanish crown; and Irish involvement with the struggles over slavery and abolition in the Spanish colonial empire" (p. 125). Cameron B. Strang's examination of Anglo-Spanish merchant-planters during the second British occupation of Spanish Florida reveals how some colonists embraced the racial regime in the Spanish Caribbean because it was more in tune with their personal agendas regarding their multiracial families. He argues that Florida was "a place where slave-owning whites' mastery was not limited by prohibitions against publicly enjoying interracial intimacies" (p. 143). As a result, they attempted to forestall U.S. rule and strove to convince Anglo Americans that Africans and American Indians were not inherently inferior. In Part 3, "Possession, Sovereignty, and Legitimacy," essays by Cañizares-Esguerra and Bradley Dixon explore traditional notions of Anglo-Iberian discourses about sovereignty and possession of the Americas in untraditional ways. The editor's contribution challenges the long...

The Missionary: Figure of Reconciliation with the Colonial Past in Flanders (2007-2012)

During the colonial period and because of his prominent place in Belgian public life, the missionary was a crucial figure in forging a connection between Congo and the metropole. For the catholic part of Belgium, Congo was identified first and foremost as a mission area. The past decade the missionary knew a remarkable revival because of the popularity of the play Missie (2007) and the documentary Nonkel Pater (2012), in which he once again became an expert witness and ethnographic authority on life in Congo. This “ knowledge” has to give authority to a paternalistic narrative about the country and its inhabitants. At the same time, this focus on the missionary offers the audience – and society as a whole – the opportunity to avoid painful questions about the colonial period by concentrating on the “ humane” side of the colonial endeavour (healthcare, education). Beside all this, the cultivation of a “ Flemish folk figure” like the missionary offers a chance to escape the multicultural present and instead wallow in nostalgia to an imagined Flanders of the fifties and sixties.

Central European Missionaries in Sudan: Geopolitics and Alternative Colonialism in Mid-Nineteenth Century Africa

The article gives an example of how actors and processes should be differentiated from each other in an imperial context that concerns both a European and a non-European region. Some of the ‘Austrian’ missionaries who worked in the Catholic mission in southern Sudan were of Slavic or Italian origin. Their double identity shaped the way they conceived their pastoral work. Nevertheless, these missionaries were not the only group of people who were engaged in this Austrian colonial endeavour in mid-nineteenth century Sudan.