Colonial Land Research Articles

Authoritarian urbanism in Pakistan and Indonesia: a conjunctural comparison of two new cities

ABSTRACT This paper conducts a conjunctural comparison of two planned new cities in Asia: Ravi City in Pakistan, and Nusantara in Indonesia. Planned urbanization, and infrastructure-led development (ILD) more broadly, has been connected in the literature to a rise in authoritarian urbanism. This paper analyses legal sources to situate the historical-geographical trajectories of Ravi City and Nusantara within the global conjunctural moment of ILD. Our legal lens reveals two features of authoritarian urbanism that connect and differentiate our study sites: (1) the legacies of colonial land laws and (2) the scalar politics of land governance. The paper highlights how authoritarian urbanism is exercised, and challenged, in legal arenas such as courts, parliaments, and constitutions. Our method of conjunctural comparison demonstrates that authoritarian urbanism is both transregional and historically-geographically situated. This paper thus advances geographic understandings of authoritarian urbanism and comparative methodology.

“Land Without Identifiable Ownership” in the Post-East Japan Earthquake Recovery: Lawful Land-Grabbing in Neoliberal Japan

AbstractThis paper, with a focus on the status of tsunami disaster victims affected by the 2011 East Japan Earthquake, investigates into the status of private property rights in facing with the reviving legal instrumentalism in Japan, under the campaign of land law reform for the elimination of “land without identifiable owners” in the name of facilitating the disaster recovery, by means of the “special zone” method or the designation of lawless areas where the normal time law is excluded, with the particularly targeted area for such exclusion being the constitutional requirements of due process and fair compensation in public taking. Under the extraordinary setting of absolute majority of conservative party at the National Diet in the aftermath of the 2011 great disaster, legislations in Japan during this decade have been characterized by a manifestation of neo-liberal policy, driving the entire Japanese legal system into a corner. Facts observed in present Japanese society are not different from those observed in other authoritarian regimes in Asia, including the phenomenon of “land grabbing” by the governmental projects, which Asia once experienced a century ago for the colonial land enclosure by “wasteland management.”

Participation and Perception of Project Affected People in SIA Process under RFCTLARR Act 2013

Undoubtedly, growing urbanisation, increasing of infrastructure requirement and rapid economic development has imposed high pressure on land in India. Private land is regularly acquired for both State-sponsored development and private projects, which is increasingly become contentious. Compulsory acquisition of land till the end of December 2013 is primarily governed by the Land Acquisition Act, 1894, which is century-old legislation enacted in the very different social, economic and political milieu. Post-independence period Indian Government has not fundamentally changed the acquisition policy to reflect the values and needs of our times, which has resulted in legal, social, cultural, economic and political fallouts. Land Acquisition Act, 1894 is needed for public purpose and economic development, but it is deficient in many respects. In this background the colonial Land Acquisition Act, 1894 was repealed and replaced by the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act.2013. It is now settled that whatever State or Government acquires land from its citizens for public purpose, it has power to do so. The jurisprudence that has developed around colonial Land Acquisition Ac, 1894 over the years on this subject has made the citizen, a subject. The colonial mind-set is that all pervasive under the Act was reflected in practice and even the judiciary in some cases has inadvertently furthered this notion. Thus, it becomes imperative to scrutinize the law and test it, against the contemporary democratic values. However, the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013 made an attempt to balance within the larger political context of land acquisition in India. Through the land acquisition how people be affected to be estimated by SIA study suggested in The RFCTLARR Act 2013. But the entire SIA process can be succeed when all the stakeholders in general and the project affected people or families in particular to be participated fully during the implementation of the project. The current paper have studied the participation and perception of project affected families in different projects implemented by Government of Odisha.

The Political Origins of Colonial Land Policy: Evidence From British India and French Algeria

Whereas the literature on colonial legacies has flourished in recent years, relatively less attention has been paid to the origins of colonial institutions. What explains variation in the design of colonial institutions? Some scholars have stressed the importance of precolonial factors, arguing that institutions were designed to reflect the environmental and socio-political conditions that the colonizers encountered in the colonies. Others hold that policymaking reflected the colonial powers’ metropolitan identity and aims. We believe these literature have been insufficiently attentive to the colonial state and the political ideals of colonial bureaucrats. Drawing on evidence from British India and French Algeria, we show that land policy was shaped by intense competition between ideologically motivated officials, who disagreed over the uses and aims of state power. Theorizing the role of ideas allows us to explain variation in colonial policies across both space and time while highlighting the indispensability of qualitative methods of analysis.

Making “settler time”: how mineral exploration finance circumscribes Indigenous resistance

This essay considers the relationship between exploration finance and the reproduction and maintenance of colonial land relations in Canada. Drawing on research examining the capitalization of exploration across Anishinaabe, Anishini, and Cree homelands in Ontario’s far north, I consider the significance of “flow-though” and royalty-financing techniques as essential to the sector’s liquidity. These techniques circumscribe Indigenous resistance in order to protect investor capital and contribute to a system of securities regulation that operationalizes certainty.

Voices and/of Places

After Indonesia’s independence was officially recognised by the Netherlands in 1949, several former members of the colonial élite repatriated. Many among the Indies-born repatriatees’ generation used writing to come to terms with their own controversial, multifaceted identity. While they belonged to the colonial élite, they can be studied as writers geographically and temporally displaced as their colonial land of birth no longer exists. Their desire for belonging is arguably exemplified in the way their novels’ protagonists’ linguistic identity is depicted. While these authors write in Dutch, their characters are embedded in local cultures, languages, traditions, questioning fixed labels and dichotomies. Taking as example Helga Ruebsamen’s 1997 novel Het lied en de waarheid [The song and the truth], this article explores how linguistic identity is represented in Dutch literature of repatriation and how this is tackled in translation into English. This novel is chosen not only because it allows to explore plurality in literature and translation in the selected context, but also because it takes the issues of linguistic plurality in literature and translation a step further: the five-year-old Dutch protagonist leaves the tropical (colonial) environment with its enchanting nature behind and arrives with her family in the Netherlands in 1939 as the daughter of a Jewish doctor, unveiling a third identity layer beyond the Dutch-East Indian dichotomy. After positioning this novel within Dutch literature of repatriation by means of a close reading analysis, this article discusses why and how it can be studied as a heterolingual, diasporic (in this specific case, neither colonial, nor postcolonial) text. The translation strategies used to tackle representations of cultural and linguistic hybridity into English are then analysed by means of a comparative textual analysis. Looking for recurring trends, the results are finally briefly related to the findings of a doctoral project about the English and Italian translations of Dutch-East Indian novels by Hella S. Haasse, which suggest that shared tendencies to generalisation may risk distorting images of linguistic hybridity.

Shaky ground: the fraud of property in Lahore

The city of Lahore, Pakistan inherited a colonial land bureaucracy in which land is owned according ‘rights in land’ rather than ‘rights to land’. Unlike the absolute ownership provided by state-backed titles, rights in land is merely a presumption of ownership until proven otherwise, creating a permanent gap between ownership and property. These gaps are investigated by patwaris, or lower-level bureaucrats who confirm rights in land before property is sold. Against the backdrop of Pakistan’s booming real estate market, however, land has become Lahore’s most profitable financial asset, and the gap between ownership and property is increasingly exploited to wrangle control over land from others. In this context, ‘fraud’ has become a constant point of concern for both patwaris and residents, each of whom use fraud at various times to negotiate Lahore’s colonial-era bureaucracy with the present-day demands of living in the city. In this article, I argue that fraud mediates property relations in Lahore. In the city, all property is potentially fraudulent, and all fraud can potentially become property. Rather than a fixed relationship between ownership and property, Lahore’s land bureaucracy is characterized by continuously unfolding property relations as new loops of fraud are opened and old ones close.

Grounded desires: Grazing regime, desires, and development in a Diné community

This article highlights the demands for development within the Diné community of Shonto in 2017. Using interviews with Shonto community members, I center the voices and desires of those most affected by development. Shonto is the site of conjuncture of a grazing regime that limits land use and a history of development that produces conflicting community desires for infrastructure, employment, and traditional livestock practices. Despite the plural views of development, community members express a collective desire for Diné continuity and self- determination. My research demonstrates that Diné desires for development are not monolithic but are grounded in land histories, a sense of shared collective continuity, and Diné self- determination. I draw upon Eve Tuck’s generative work on Native desire to demonstrate that land histories, in the form of a grazing regime and histories of development, inform Native desires for development. I argue that Native desires are grounded in historical and everyday land use and relations. These grounded desires center the lived-experiences of Natives in relation to development, colonial land regimes, and traditional practices. Moreover, these grounded desires draw from the daily lives and experiences of Native people to provide open narratives that do not impose expectations on Native peoples or their desires.

Coupled social and ecological change drove the historical extinction of the California grizzly bear (Ursus arctos californicus).

Large carnivores (order Carnivora) are among the world's most threatened mammals due to a confluence of ecological and social forces that have unfolded over centuries. Combining specimens from natural history collections with documents from archival records, we reconstructed the factors surrounding the extinction of the California grizzly bear (Ursus arctos californicus), a once-abundant brown bear subspecies last seen in 1924. Historical documents portrayed California grizzlies as massive hypercarnivores that endangered public safety. Yet, morphological measurements on skulls and teeth generate smaller body size estimates in alignment with extant North American grizzly populations (approx. 200 kg). Stable isotope analysis (δ13C, δ15N) of pelts and bones (n = 57) revealed that grizzlies derived less than 10% of their nutrition from terrestrial animal sources and were therefore largely herbivorous for millennia prior to the first European arrival in this region in 1542. Later colonial land uses, beginning in 1769 with the Mission era, led grizzlies to moderately increase animal protein consumption (up to 26% of diet), but grizzlies still consumed far less livestock than otherwise claimed by contemporary accounts. We show how human activities can provoke short-term behavioural shifts, such as heightened levels of carnivory, that in turn can lead to exaggerated predation narratives and incentivize persecution, triggering rapid loss of an otherwise widespread and ecologically flexible animal.

Persistent effects of colonial land tenure institutions: Village-level evidence from India

This paper estimates the causal impact of land revenue institutions on long run rural development using a Spatial Regression Discontinuity framework on a new village level data set from colonial India. An early 19th century historical quirk meant that villages in close geographical proximity were assigned to different property rights systems — some falling under landlords and others under the government. Villages that were assigned to landlords in the colonial era have a higher poverty rate and lower consumption per capita in 2012. Village census data from 1961 to 2011 shows that historically rooted characteristics in landlord villages prevented them from accessing Green Revolution technologies. Analysis demonstrates that non-landlord, cultivator villages secured preferential access to public investment in the early decades. Despite some convergence in public goods availability, lower private wealth and investment in landlord villages causes continuing spatial inequalities.

Cultural Memory and Nationalism at Scotland’s International Exhibitions: 1886–1938

This paper explores the ways in which Scotland portrayed itself during the run of International Exhibitions in Edinburgh (1886, 1890, 1908) and Glasgow (1888, 1901, 1911, 1938). It will be shown that Scotland, as a fundamental component of the British Empire, served to increase visions of Britishness in these Exhibitions (or World’s Fairs) by hosting a number of colonial exhibits and focussing, for the most part, on modern technological advances in machinery and engineering. While all of these Scottish exhibits did self-reflect on history and Scottish nationhood (via literature, art, and architecture), this paper will show that the novelty of doing this, in sharp contrast with the pomp and exuberance of the imperial display, reduced Scottishness to yet another exotic ‘other’. Following the ‘Old London’ featured in 1884, Edinburgh and – later – Glasgow featured ‘old towns’ which offered visitors an impression of their lost cityscapes, dislocated from their original place and built among the many other temporary pavilions. In the twentieth century, both cities featured human displays: a nefarious turn in Exhibition culture across Europe which curated people from colonial lands on a level with their material culture. Scotland, as part of the British Empire, boasted Senegalese and West Africans as part of their popular attractions. Following this, Glasgow followed London in displaying the people of the Scottish Highlands as part of a pastiche village named ‘An Clahan’: a crystallising moment in Scotland’s disorienting self-portrayal in these British imperial contexts. In working through these case studies, this paper will consider scholarship from the fields of history and memory studies.

An Assessment of the Partition and Scramble of Africa and the Effect of Slave Trade in the Continent

The scramble and Partition of African countries began in earnest with the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, and this was the cause of the most of Africa’s borders today. The conference was called by German Chancellor Bismarck to settle how European countries would claim colonial land in Africa and to avoid a war among European nations over African territory. All the major European States were invited to the conference which includes the Germany, France, Great Britain, Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal, and Spain were all considered to have a future role in the imperial partition of Africa. The United States was invited because of its interest in Liberia but did not attend the conference because it had no desire to build a colonial empire in Africa. Also invited were Austria–Hungary, Sweden–Norway, Denmark, Italy, Turkey, and Russia who all were considered minor players in the quest for colonizing Africa, though Italy has claim some colonial possessions in Northeast Africa. Most notably there were no Africans present at that conference, nor were any Europeans present to ensure that native Africans had any say in the proceedings. This paper has adopted secondary source of data in the process of data collection. The findings of the paper have revealed that partition in Africa has led to emergence of colonialism, slave trade and other related contemporary imbalance that led to for present African underdevelopment. The paper recommended that African countries needs to be allowed to run its affairs as an independent sovereign countries to manage both their mineral and human resource to compete with every continent of the world interterms of development dynamism and African countries should develop an approach that will help them to fight social menace of poverty, corruption, insecurity and unemployment.

From “Chinese Colonist” to “Yellow Peril”: Capitalist Racialization in the British Empire

The literature on “racial capitalism” exhibits a tension between the term’s evocative power and its conceptual imprecision. This article navigates this tension by developing the mid-level concept of “capitalist racialization,” which specifies the role of capitalist abstractions in the construction of racial hierarchies. I elaborate this notion around the racialization of Chinese migration in nineteenth-century Southeast Asia. I focalize the figure of the “Chinese colonist” as an index of the capitalist standards by which British observers ordered colonial populations in their reflections on imperial political economy. I argue that the racial stereotype of “the Chinese” as commercial, industrious, and “colonizing” people emerged from the subsumption of colonial land and labor under capital. Their “colonizing” capacity rendered Chinese migrants simultaneously an economic asset to the British Empire and a potential threat to the white world order. “Capitalist racialization” therefore highlights new inroads into the entwined histories of capitalism, racism, and empire.

Land revenue, inequality, and development in colonial India (1880–1910)

Abstract In my dissertation, I explore how colonial land institutions influenced both income inequality and the provision and funding of hospitals in colonial India. To do so, I present the first income inequality estimates assessing its evolution and levels across provinces and districts as well as a novel georeferenced hospital-level database. Findings suggest that the introduction of different colonial landownership rights—granting landownership and land revenue liability either to intermediaries or cultivators—explain differences in agricultural income inequality across districts and correlate with its evolution. These different landownership rights also affected the funding of hospitals through its interaction with local agency.

Bending Possession: How Detroiters Care for Land by Remediating Settler Property

AbstractThis article examines how people reconfigure the social, legal, and material claims that settler property relations make to place. It does so through ethnographic and historical attention to small‐scale gardens in Detroit, Michigan. When present‐day Detroiters transform grassy lots into gardens and places of shared enjoyment, they frequently encounter how antiblack environmental conditions are grafted with property claims created through settler‐colonial dispossession of Indigenous lands. Gardeners document encounters with the simultaneity of settler plotlines and contaminated soils as part of efforts to secure gardens from encroachment by real estate developers. As gardeners leverage legal conventions of settler property regimes like adverse possession manoeuvres, they also refuse the sociomaterial status quo of colonial land relations. In conversation with Detroiters and their gardens, this article offers bending possession as a handle for methods people develop that begin to provisionally redirect the violence of private property that sustains colonial racial capitalism.

Rethinking housing inequality and justice in a settler colonial city

This paper brings the housing studies literature into conversation with scholarship on settler colonialism to consider questions of housing justice in settler colonial societies. It begins from an understanding of Indigenous dispossession as not simply an historical context but an ongoing process in which housing is deeply implicated through its embeddedness in colonial land and property regimes. Furthermore, processes of exclusion, neoliberalisation, financialisation and gentrification have made housing central to the production of racial inequality in (and beyond) settler colonies. Liberal notions of inequality that dominate most housing policy and some scholarship are, therefore, inadequate; what is required is research and intervention oriented towards housing justice – the meaning of which is best understood through intellectual and practical engagement with movements struggling for it. In this spirit, the paper presents the story of a prolonged struggle in so-called Sydney, which suggests how housing initiatives and campaigns led by Indigenous people are iteratively reconstructing existing political and economic structures in ways that address commodification, dispossession, exclusion, and displacement. This story points to a need for housing justice scholarship to engage with concepts of reparations – an engagement towards which this paper, in its final section, makes some small but hopefully helpful steps.

Revisiting British Malaya's Era: An Intriguing Historical Legal Analysis of Land Administration and Colonial Forestry

The land and forest administration system in Malaysia faces a complexity bias due to the misinterpretation of rules and legislation, leading to increased disputes. The reliance on British law for matters like land ownership amplifies this issue, and the intricacies of static and dynamic arrangements further compound the complexity. Previously, Malay rural land rights were based on usufructuary principles, but the colonial land alienation policy redefined unalienated land, land reserved for public purposes, and reserved forests as State Land. This study seeks to comprehensively review and analyse legal rules, cases, statutes, and regulations to understand ancient land law practices and the influence of British colonial land law on land administration. Conducted in Peninsular Malaysia, the study focuses on primary documents, cases, and critical analyses from three states: Perak, Penang, and Kelantan. The findings of the study highlight the contentious nature of land rights and autonomy in utilizing natural resources in Malaysia. The country inherits both formal and informal land tenure systems rooted in customary law, making dispute resolution challenging. The principal characteristic of ancient land law is based on a hypothetical model of the ancient customary land tenure system, encompassing different eras, missions, and principles. Significantly, the study reveals a direct and strong connection between colonial land law and current land law practices in the respective states. Additionally, Malaysia's land law has been influenced by Islamic law (Syariah) to some extent and blended with other ancient customary laws before the introduction of Torren in 1897.

Wastelands of empire, sites of ‘salvation’: landscapes of ‘reform’ in late nineteenth-century Germany

This essay traces a rural network of modern carceral and internal colonial land enclosures developed in late nineteenth-century Germany. It considers the extent to which long-running debates over the value of penal colonialism and deportation for the management of societal ‘threats’ influenced shifts in carceral policy of the time, long thought to have been largely determined by the welfare reform movement of the Wilhelmine period and the notion of ‘protective supervision’ that prevailed in its wake. It is argued that certain aspects of convict colonialism, publicly interrogated by German legal theorists, were quietly adapted by carceral reform practices beginning in the 1880s. This essay speculates on the spatial and territorial implications of those adaptations, examining the little-known prison labour camps located in the sewage farms of Berlin after 1890, the model establishment of the rural labour colony founded by the pastor Friedrich von Bodelschwingh, and the Prussian Settlement Commission’s anti-Slavic, anti-migrant program of internal colonisation, established by the German Ministry of Agriculture in 1886. It is argued that links between them were crystallised in a racialised topos of waste, framed by an emergent environmental discourse that served to sediment difference. Together, these institutions of correction, the architectures of enclosure that attended them, and the segregated geographies that resulted from them transformed the meaning and administration of Germany’s rural landscape and demarcate modern imperial planning practices that mobilised space, territory, and environment as mediums of ‘progressive’ reform and ‘protective supervision’ tied to increasingly regimented and policed forms of settlement.

Indo—Netherlands Subalternity in Post-Independence Javanese Literature Social Portrait

The independence of a nation creates a new perspective on specific communities. Those odds with the general view are wrong and mistaken. This situation often happened to Indo-Dutch groups outside politics who were not involved in the hierarchies of past political practices. Indo-Dutch society in post-independence Indonesia is in the flow of national transitional cultural interests. Novel Godhane Prawan Indo Asmara's work tells of cultural pressures that affect the psychology of an Indo-Dutch girl named Evie Tavernier. This paper examines the figure of Evie Tavernier as part of the social reality of post-independence subalternities. The analysis results concluded that the independence of the Indonesian side gave rise to a cultural and identity revolution. The cultural defeat of the West over its colonial lands gave rise to a counter-identity: the East, which has the right to itself. Rapid socio-cultural changes become a dilemma because of the reversal of power. As a minority, even though indigenous figures accept Evie Tavernier, they do not necessarily unite in the mainstream of the majority culture. He remains alone and independent of other identities, out of the vortex of culture around him. He is in the vortex of the cultural power of local figures during his condition of being marginalized by the community association. In Gayatri Spivak's view, the character of Evie Tavernier is a picture of a subaltern or other in the currents of Dutch-Indonesian culture.

Thinking with relations in nature conservation? A case study of the Etosha National Park and Haiǁom

AbstractThe area of the Etosha National Park in Namibia has been inhabited for many centuries by Haiǁom, a group of (now former) hunter‐gatherers. In 1907, Etosha was proclaimed as a game reserve, although Haiǁom were still allowed to live in the area until they were expelled in the 1950s due to then‐dominant ideas of fortress conservation. In recent years, Haiǁom have been provided with several resettlement farms by the Namibian government as a reaction to the colonial land dispossession. In this article, I explore the onto‐epistemology of Haiǁom (i.e. their being in and knowing the Etosha area), focusing on their relations with the land and with human and beyond‐the‐human beings before their eviction. I argue that the eviction implies not only economic marginalization but also social deprivation, which is inadequately addressed with resettlement. I suggest that thinking with relations, illustrated with the Haiǁom case, would call for other solutions in the context of measures taken for past land dispossessions and would open new paths for Namibia's nature conservation initiatives.