Colonial Expansion Research Articles

Rail relations: Aboriginal storywork and remaking Australia’s settler‐colonial infrastructure

AbstractAustralian railway histories are dominated by narratives of engineering triumphs, colonial expansion into empty land, and bringing civilisation and development through railway infrastructure. These settler‐colonial stories can be read back on themselves as histories and geographies of Aboriginal dispossession and colonial possession. Indeed, Aboriginal people, lands, waterways, and cultures have always been implicated in railway infrastructures, willingly or not. Aboriginal people’s entanglements with the New South Wales railways, to which we refer as “rail relations,” have involved dispossession, removal, employment, mobility, and travel, including the forced removal of children known as the Stolen Generations. These are relations of harm, loss, and grief but also of pride, connectivity, and survival. We argue in this paper that when Aboriginal communities engage in storying the New South Wales railways as Aboriginal they reassemble this infrastructure otherwise: not just as a tool of dispossession but also as life affirming. Indigenous storytelling can therefore overcome settler colonial erasure and the oversimplification of railway infrastructure hi/stories. Research about how Aboriginal lives have been interconnected with railways expansion and development is limited. While Aboriginal railway stories are continuously told within communities, they remain almost entirely silenced elsewhere. Overcoming the invisibility of Aboriginal rail relations is crucial as both truth‐telling of the past and to ensure more just infrastructural outcomes now and in the future.

Discoveries, nations, and archaeological explorations: The scientific colonization of Tarapacá, Atacama desert

The discovery of the “ruins” of Guatacondo, in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile, made the news in 1963. It was the pinnacle of a process of scientific colonization of this territory that had begun in the 19th century and connected multiple experts with the desert and its history. This paper explores the context of discovery of an archaeological site in the Atacama to show how archaeology—as a field of knowledge and a scientific practice—emerged in the interstices of projects of colonial expansion and capitalist modernization, often merging public and private interests. Weaving together histories of scientific explorations, museum operations, and extractivist enterprises, it highlights deep connections between geopolitics and ideology with the seemingly apolitical and objective nature of archaeology. Starting with the peripheral figure of Emil de Bruyne—an engineer employed by one of the biggest mining operations in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile—we explore the role of different actors within a network of well-connected people whose personal histories, intellectual backgrounds, and personal positions gave shape to the practice of archaeology in this part of the Atacama Desert.

The Synod of Dort in Arabic: Bodleian MS Marsh 268

ABSTRACT Bodleian MS Marsh 268 is a translation of the Heidelberg Confession, the Belgic Catechism, and a selection from the Standards of the Reformed Church. Completed in May 1619 at the conclusions of the Synod of Dort, it is the first documents about Protestant theology in Arabic, and it demonstrates that the Synod was preparing for proselytization in Arabic-speaking regions of Dutch commercial and colonial expansion.

From colonial conquest to climate crisis: reframing French maritime museums

ABSTRACT Maritime museums occupy a challenging position when it comes to confronting environmental and social justice issues linked to colonial modernity, understood as five hundred years marked by European colonial expansion and exploitation. As institutions that emerged to celebrate national maritime exploits and dominion over the seas, they embody many of the features of colonial modernity itself. In light of the climate emergency, this article examines two recently opened or renovated French maritime museums to analyse the extent to which they are reorienting their focus and embracing more critical, oceanic ways of thinking about human relationships with the sea. An oceanic perspective recognises the fluid, interconnected nature of the oceans and the need for more holistic approaches to environmental sustainability and climate justice. The analysis reveals tensions between nationalist perspectives and emerging efforts to tell more environmentally attuned stories. Significant scope remains for maritime museums to shift their interpretive frameworks towards the seas as entities worthy of preservation in their own right, rather than as resources to be managed for human use and profit.

Material Masquerade: Porcelain, Sugar, and Race on the Eighteenth-Century French Dining Table

Abstract With the advent of biscuit porcelain at the Sèvres Royal Porcelain Manufactory in the 1750s, French porcelain at last achieved an ideal whiteness that could compete with foreign wares. Unexpected, however, was how this new material could replace the ephemeral sugar sculptures that transformed aristocratic dining tables into lavish multi-media assemblages. But replace, porcelain did not. Instead, the artificial whitening of both porcelain and sugar allowed the resulting figures to intermingle, playfully masquerading as each other while simultaneously erasing and displacing material histories linked to colonial expansion and emerging ideas of race. Taking up the ethos of the masquerade ball, whitening became the critical act through which these materials were ‘Frenchified’, moving carnivalesque early modern dining traditions into the age of colonialism.

An anticipatory regime of multiplanetary life: on SpaceX, Martian colonisation and terrestrial ruin

ABSTRACT In recent years, the aerospace engineering corporation SpaceX has been a vocal – and perhaps the foremost – contributor to the recent repopularisation of a discourse proposing the colonisation of Mars. This discourse has been intensively generative: SpaceX’s press releases regularly command prominent headlines in the news; the social media posts of Elon Musk, SpaceX’s CEO, invariably attract thousands of replies; and a lively meme culture further amplifies what Musk himself has described as a mission to ‘make life multiplanetary’ – an imagined future in which humans have ‘occupied’ Mars. Such speculations about the future can be understood as ‘anticipatory regimes’ in which some notional, wished-for possibility is legitimised through historical narratives and inflected with the anxieties and hopes of the present. For SpaceX, this has involved assuming the inevitability of terrestrial ruin while mobilising a powerful discourse of great men and scientific endeavour embedded in the logics of colonial and capitalist expansion. This anticipatory regime occupies a prominent and generative position in net culture, but it also functions to obscure other possibilities for meaningful alternatives and urgent action in the here and now. To pursue the mission to make life multiplanetary is to marginalise urgent, vital discussions concerning colonial reckoning, environmental reconciliation, and the redistribution of extreme wealth disparities.

Postcolonial city walks in Germany at the nexus of activism, education, and tourism

Abstract In various ways, postcolonial initiatives in Germany contribute to the formation of ‘national cultures of remembrance’ and to the debate about Europe’s responsibility for the negative effects of colonial expansion that can still be felt today. One approach, which the activist groups use in their educational and activist work, is that of the guided walking tour – a method that allows them to sensitize an interested audience to colonially contoured spaces in German cities. Interestingly, the postcolonial initiatives do not see themselves as providers of tourist services, even though they use the rather fundamental touristic form of the ‘city walk’. As this discrepancy in perception allows discussions about tourism in a more general, conceptual sense, this paper examines the tours at the nexus of activism, education, and tourism. Thereby, it asks what constitutes the walks and discusses their relation to urban tourism. To do so, the article first explains relevant concepts of tourism geographies and postcolonial studies and then connects them to insights gained from the qualitative and quantitative analysis of empirical data collected in a field phase in Germany in 2022.

A Marxist Approach to Bostonian Missionaries in Hawaii

For centuries, the United States has euphemized their imperial endeavours across the North American continent as they have continued to rely on providential rhetoric to justify their means of colonial expansion. This research critiques beliefs of American exceptionalism in an attempt to expose the hidden ills of America’s colonial efforts. It looks at the activities of Boston’s missionaries in Honolulu, Hawaii, in the nineteenth century and examines the way American identity and understandings of their own exceptionalism manifested on the ground via imperial pursuits. Sponsored by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), Boston’s missionaries entered Hawaii in 1819 with the intent to civilize what they perceived as an uncivilized nation. In colonial Hawaii, we will see the extensive blurring of lines between informal and formal empire, which this paper positions as a deliberate transition pivotal for the archipelago’s 1898 annexation. These actions will be observed through a Marxists-based approach to examine how the gradual subjugation of Hawaii’s Indigenous population occurred through religious and educational institutions. Religion and education will therefore be observed as tools used for grander imperial pursuits in colonial Hawaii. As this paper attempts to deconstruct beliefs associated with American exceptionalism, it will look at its origins—that is, Christian belief structures that informed ideas of America’s superiority—and its practical workings on behalf of Bostonian missionaries.

The Ego Conquiro as the Paradigm of Modern Imperialism and its Violence Against the Struggle for Epistemic Justice

This article begins with a discussion of the implications of Enrique Dussel’s “I conquer, therefore I am” (ego conquiro) thesis as the paradigm of modern imperialism. According to Dussel, underlying the “myth of modernity” (mito de la modernidad) is an epistemological structure of a substantive ego that naturalizes European colonial expansion. Dussel admits that the “I conquer, therefore, I am” thesis began earlier than Descartes’s account of the cogito, which was theorized after the Spanish colonization of the Americas, but the substantive “I” that constitutes the ego conquiro nonetheless represents a theory of knowledge that served and continues to serve the political domination of bodies that have been historically victimized. Couched within the epistemic structure of Descartes’s cogito is a duality between soul and matter, where the former represents an immortal substance detached from the body, taken to be the recipe for rational truth, while the latter is reduced to a quantifiable object occupying a “zero-point” geometrical space. But the cogito became the epistemological standpoint that allowed for the justification of the many hidden forms of domination around the world, because it masks the social, economic, and geopolitical contexts and their history to the modern subject. This article will investigate the ego conquiro thesis and its link to epistemic violence, namely, epistemic racism and epistemicide, and will argue as a concluding point for a method of resistance that foregrounds philosophical pluralism to disrupt the internalization of the epistemologies of the Global North as the common-sense position(s) of today.

Under siege: The role of settler colonialism in targeting healthcare systems.

This article looks at the effects of armed conflict on healthcare systems in Gaza at the intersection of international humanitarian aid, settler colonialism and the ethics of war. Since October 7, 2023, there has been a systemic assault on the health services in Gaza, rooted in colonial expansion. I begin with an overview of human rights and the concept of medical neutrality. This is followed by biopolitics within Gaza and the contradictions in international law regarding the ethics of war. Explained through the lens of historical revisionism, postcolonial theory and biopolitics, I attempt to highlight how healthcare systems are increasingly becoming targets of armed conflict in Gaza as a war strategy.

A Journey Towards a Non‐Western International Relations Theory: Non‐Western Conceptualization of the English School

The purpose of this study is to examine non‐Western international relations theory (IRT) and explore, at the theoretical level, the potential for epistemological autonomy from the confines of Western‐centered epistemology prevalent in existing IRT. As a consequence, the non‐Western world, subjected to colonialist expansion and modernization and often regarded as merely the leaves, has been relegated to a passive role within the international system, becoming a disengaged object of little interest. However, what has existed cannot be entirely erased. While it is undeniable that international politics was predominantly developed based on a Western‐centric epistemology, other ancient civilizations had diverse international systems and orders that molded their identities as regional international societies. Consequently, the study provides a crucial backdrop for theoretical endeavors aimed at integrating the voices and experiences of the Global South into IRT, which has traditionally been dominated by Western perspectives. This study seeks to explore the potential for transcending Western intellectual hegemony by critiquing the limitations of a singular worldview and expanding and transforming the English School Theory (EST). It seeks to investigate the possibility of moving beyond Western‐centricity in international relations theory by conducting a historical comparison of civilizations across countries and the associated disciplines within civilizations as a field.

Globalization and its changes

Nowadays, there has been a kind of polarization among intellectuals all over the world regarding globalization. One part considers it to be essential and positive, while the other part rejects the establishment of both. Globalization lies in the direction of humanity. The ideologies and systems prevalent since the modern period have been destroyed; the first one is capitalist and the second one is socialist. As soon as the national market of capital became a factory, the capitalist countries started colonial expansion and one day most6 of the world became the colony of some capitalist country or the other. The impact of market globalization gave rise to two world wars. Today’s globalization is an essential condition for the flourishing of financial and monopoly capital. Similarly, even if socialism, like capitalism, originates at the national level, its nature is also to form a world federation of socialist countries. The Soviet Union was its initial form. In this way, globalization is the result of development in any system.

Death at Butterabby: the case of Belo and Mumbleby and Aboriginal women’s place in the nineteenth-century criminal justice system

The Butterabbey gravesite is significant for its evidence of Aboriginal peoples’ resistance to colonial pastoral expansion and the dispossession of land and water sources in Western Australia. It is also significant to the case of R v Mumbleby and Belo (1865) which exemplifies the experiences of Aboriginal women defendants in nineteenth-century Western Australia whose experiences in the criminal justice system were different to both non-Indigenous women and Indigenous men. This paper analyses the case of R v Mumbleby and Belo within its historical context of frontier violence to reveal the treatment of Aboriginal women accused of homicide, and determine the power struggles at play.

From Chateau Latour to Chateau Bourdieu: The sociology of wine between empire, class, ethnicity and gender (or, the oenologic of practice)

Many sociologists drink wine, but hardly any write about it professionally, and the putative scholarly field of the ‘sociology of wine’ remains inchoate, the study of wine mostly being ceded to other disciplines. This is strange, as wine is crucial to a host of phenomena, such as national and regional identities in winemaking countries, as well as identity construction and class-based distinction dynamics in many other locations. Wine has received relatively little attention from Bourdieu or those inspired by him. Indeed, some of the most influential writings on wine in a sociological register today are sometimes explicitly hostile to his sociology. Yet for all types of activities traversing the overlapping domains of the production, social distribution and consumption of wine, Bourdieusian elements must be brought into the analysis to be able to appreciate interlocking issues of class, ethnicity and gender relations and inequalities, particularly within imperial/colonial and post-imperial/post-colonial social contexts. In its 8000-year history, very major factors in the social structuring of wine have been imperial power and colonial expansion, factors bound up with ethnic and gender inequalities in wine phenomena both historically and today. A flexible and open-minded version of Bourdieu, as advocated by Bridget Fowler, draws attention to ongoing dynamics of power and resistance in wine worlds.

Towards the pluriversal museum: from epistemic violence to ecologies of knowledges

ABSTRACT Climate change, species extinction and accelerating inequalities are manifestations of a more fundamental crisis facing humanity: the global dominance of a capitalist/colonialist world order based on logics of extraction and exploitation. The modern, “universal” museum is implicated in this history. It is not only that the accumulation of exotic things was made possible through mercantile and colonial territorial expansion, but the transformation of such things into “objects of knowledge” and their incorporation into universalizing knowledge systems, given architectural expression in the museum, involved forms of epistemic violence that rendered other ways of knowing, understanding and being in the world non-existent. As part of the project of decolonizing the museum, this article questions whether this process of “epistemicide” was indeed so complete, considers whether marginalized forms of knowledge may be reactivated in historical collections, and imagines the role of the “pluriversal museum” in contributing to the shaping of more just and sustainable planetary futures.

Land, reconfigured: Defying the laws of physics, upholding the rules of the market in the metaverse

Land ownership, occupancy, and use are enduringly central components of economies and societies across the world. Even in a capitalist economy increasingly mediated through digital technologies, land remains foundational to wide-ranging aspects of social life. However, conceptualizations of land fundamentally transform through virtual environments like the Metaverse, where digital or virtual land is a core feature. This article examines the construction and use of land under digital capitalism, specifically in the online virtual reality environment Metaverse. Studying virtual land markets in this environment, we show how land exists in continuous material and conceptual transformation via myriad landmaking technologies. Virtual landmaking offers new capital accumulation possibilities while simultaneously reifying existing market logics and creating new fictions around land. We emphasize how, despite its newness, virtual landmaking in the Metaverse relates to landmaking efforts that predate digital capitalism, from state-led large-scale engineering projects to land grabs and colonial expansion. Simultaneously, land reconceptualization in the Metaverse reflects new economic dynamics germane to digital capitalism, including commodification and assetization, and the rise of digital platforms as both market creators, through digital renderings, and rentier intermediaries. Throughout, we highlight the distributional and political stakes of reconfiguring land via new technologies.

No Country for God: The Brutality of Western Territorial Appropriation in Blood Meridian

Abstract In 1985 American author Cormac McCarthy published Blood Meridian, a novel that is set against the backdrop of the conquest of the West, a momentous and still relevant process that has acquired quasi-mythical dimensions throughout history and that is undoubtedly embedded in the United States’ national consciousness. In this article I will show the different mechanisms employed by Cormac McCarthy to deconstruct conventional Western narratives that glorify and sanction the Westward expansion as a courageous endeavour that shaped the American nation, hence underplaying the more devastating and pernicious side of this chapter of America’s imperialistic undertakings. To that end, I will argue that McCarthy contests the main tenets of the crucial 1893 Frontier Thesis proposed by Frederick Jackson Turner, in particular the depiction of American colonial expansion as a source of progress and democratic development; likewise I will contend that, in Blood Meridian, McCarthy aligns himself with the ideas of New Western Historians that offer a revisionist perspective of the country’s past, revealing such brutality and wickedness exerted in the appropriation of the western territories that seemed to deprive the process of any hope of God’s mercy.

Exploring the current meaning of plaster face casts in museums: the case of Lidio Cipriani’s facial masks at the Anthropological Collections of the University of Bologna (Italy)

ABSTRACT Among the different types of anthropological items that have been amassed over time for research and didactic purposes (e.g. identified human osteological series and anthropometric instruments), plaster face cast collections still enclose a sensitive nature when exposed in museums, being midway between objects and human remains, between scientific items and cultural heritage. The present work focuses on the plaster face casts stored at the Anthropological Collections of the Museum System of the University of Bologna (Bologna, Italy). The main subject is a series of copies of the human facial masks realised by Lidio Cipriani (1892–1962), an anthropologist of the University of Florence, during his scientific missions in African and Asian regions during the European colonial expansion. Starting from this collection, we want to emphasise our recent experience as the Self Steering Committee of the University of Bologna for the pillar Cultural Heritage of the alliance Una Europa, aimed at critically reflecting on the value of those plaster face casts, unveiling their dissonance. Then, we will present our results in the frame of the renewed principles of the discipline, reflecting on the scientific, cultural and social implications that this kind of anthropological asset may have today.

Buffalo Bill's Wild West, cowboys, and the fate of the western in Italy

Abstract This article examines the first tour of Buffalo Bill's Wild West in Italy and the so-called ‘sfida dei butteri’ (the challenge of the Italian cowboys of the Pontine marshes), which took place in Rome in March 1890. Analysing nineteenth-century Italian newspapers and photographs, I demonstrate that populist, anti-capitalist, and anti-American sentiments marked the Italian media's responses to the American show. In the historical context of Italy's socioeconomic crisis and of the first phase of colonial expansion in Africa (1870–1922), the mixed reception of Buffalo Bill's Wild West, amplified by the media event of the sfida, shaped the fate of the western genre in Italy.

Embodied and Enactive Creativity: Moving Beyond the Mind–Body Dichotomy in School Education

ABSTRACTThis study explores the ways in which embodied creativity is conceived and implemented in french schools through the study of a corpus of professional articles published since the 1960s in a journal dedicated to physical education. The analysis focuses on pedagogical experiments to foster bodily creativity carried out in primary schools, as part of a wide‐ranging educational reform during the 1970s. Those practices mark a radical break with the grammar of schooling whose worldwide spread is linked to the colonial expansion of western Europe. They revealed many similarities with indigenous pedagogies through the willingness to go beyond the mind–body dichotomy, to value a sensitive and intuitive body, to anchor knowledge in lived experience and to move from a top‐down relationship between teacher and pupil to a more horizontal one. The 1980s marked a return to more traditional methods, but these pedagogical experiments nurtured a conception of embodied and enactive creativity that sought to go beyond a western vision of the body, of action and of the relationship with the world in school education. The convergences with non‐western pedagogies underline the interest of these approaches to explore and foster embodied and enactive creativity.