Colonial Office Research Articles

Potent Roots on the Move

Calumba <i>(Jateorhiza calumba</i> / <i>J. palmata)</i> and abutua <i>(Cissampelos pareira)</i> are multi-purpose medicinal plants, whose roots have been used in Eastern, Southern, and West-Central Africa for a considerable time. In the early modern era, the Portuguese adapted the roots, which became commercially traded in the Portuguese empire across the Indian and Atlantic Oceans. By the early nineteenth century, the roots were recognized also by the British and North American pharmacopoeias, but there was confusion and secrecy surrounding their origins and quality. Engaging with recent historiography about African and imperial plant medicines, we demonstrate that calumba and abutua had long, dynamic, and mobile continuities on the continent—first in Portuguese imperial settings and then in appropriation by British botanists and colonial officials in East Africa. Exploring African agency in the making of knowledge about calumba and abutua is problematic, however. While in the longue durée, calumba and abutua maintained their value and meanings within Africa, in certain moments, these plants became objects of scientific curiosity and heightened commercial interest in the West.

United Indian Patriotic Association versus Indian National Congress (1888–1893)

The article examines the emergence of Anglo-Indian and Muslim opposition to the Indian National Congress (INC) in the second half of the 1880s – early 1890s. By 1887, Congress had lost the support of the Viceroy of India Dufferin, and it greatly influenced the formation of the anti-Congress movement. The social base of opposition to the Congress was formed by the most conservative parts of society – the Anglo-Indians (the British who permanently lived in India) and Indian Muslims. The center of the anti-Congress movement was the Aligarh College, and the leader was the Muslim educator and founder of the college, Syed Ahmad Khan. The movement received support from the Anglo-Indian press and colonial officials. In 1888, United Indian Patriotic Association was founded with the Muslim organizations of Upper India and the conservative Hindu aristocracy in its ranks. The Association believed that the Congress did not represent the interests of the entire Indian people, but only a narrow stratum of European educated Indians. The INC&amp;apos;s proposals for the introduction of an elective element in legislative councils and simultaneous examinations for civil service in India and Great Britain were regarded as premature, threatening interests of Muslims and British rule in India. The main goal of the United Indian Patriotic Association was to counter the agitation of the INC in Great Britain, where the British Committee of the INC operated, by holding anti-Congress meetings and pamphleting. After the adoption of the Indian Councils Act of 1892, the leaders of the Association focused on protecting the interests of Indian Muslims, and this solution led to the dissolution of the United Indian Patriotic Association in 1893. The Association became one of the first organizations opposed to the INC and had a significant impact on strengthening the political activity of Indian Muslims. The emergence of Muslim opposition to INC in the second half of the 1880s. became an important factor in the political development of India and the national liberation movement in the first half of the XX century.

"The Crown's Colonial Enforcers": The Stories of Two West Indian Police Officers

Using the process described by Jennifer Jensen Wallach as "empathetic re-feeling", this paper engages in a comparative analysis of two memoirs written by British colonial police officers who worked in the Caribbean between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The study shows that although British colonial policemen had unique and varied experiences and saw and interpreted their worlds in different ways, policemen living in different parts of the West Indies similarly saw themselves as important members of the British colonial establishment, helping to maintain law and order in the region.

Fourteenth Colony: The Forgotten Story of the Gulf South During America's Revolutionary Era by Mike Bunn

Reviewed by: Fourteenth Colony: The Forgotten Story of the Gulf South During America's Revolutionary Era by Mike Bunn John Paul Nuño Fourteenth Colony: The Forgotten Story of the Gulf South During America's Revolutionary Era. By Mike Bunn. ( Montgomery, Ala.: NewSouth Books, 2020. Pp. xiv, 289. $28.95, ISBN 978-1-58838-413-3.) In recent years, scholars have begun addressing the historiographical gap that relegated West and East Florida to the status of forgotten British North American colonies, especially in the traditional narrative of the American Revolution. Even to a greater extent than for East Florida, scholarship on West Florida has been particularly sparse, except for older foundational texts by Cecil Johnson and, later, Robin Fabel. More recently, Andrew McMichael's Atlantic Loyalties: Americans in Spanish West Florida, 1785–1810 (Athens, Ga., 2008) and Kathleen DuVal's Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution (New York, 2015) have shed light on the colony's history. The latter recontextualizes and complicates the traditional narrative of the American Revolution for a general audience. DuVal focuses on historical figures whose lives illuminate important themes and the contingent nature of the period. Entering into the fray is Mike Bunn's Fourteenth Colony: The Forgotten Story of the Gulf South During America's Revolutionary Era, which is also aimed at a general audience but provides more of a comprehensive narrative focused on the creation and eventual conquest of British West Florida. Bunn is a public historian, the director of Historic Blakeley State Park, and the editor of Muscogiana, a journal of the Muscogee County, Georgia, Genealogical Society. His book fits well within his efforts to educate the public. He explains to his readers that he seeks to present a "broad arc of the life of the colony" while demonstrating that the history of West Florida, once seen as inconsequential, is "worth telling and remembering" (p. xii). Bunn embarks on this mission by taking a chronological approach that details the British founding of the colony and ambitious plans to develop it. Of note here is the ineffective leadership of Governor George Johnstone, who fostered political divisiveness in the colony. The author then devotes several chapters to themes such as settlement, daily life, and earning a living. He also includes an [End Page 147] informative chapter on the Indian trade despite acknowledging that most of his work does not focus on the Indigenous population. His decision to include this chapter is vital since Florida's Native peoples had the power to significantly shape events on the ground. Toward the second half of the book, Bunn returns to a chronological scope by outlining the events of the American Revolution on the Gulf Coast. Readers will find James Willing's notorious incursion into West Florida and Bernardo de Gálvez's stereotype-defying performance as an effective Spanish colonial administrator and military leader particularly interesting. This book is primarily a synthesis of secondary works, in which the author is well versed, supplemented by primary sources from the British Colonial Office and published archival materials. The text serves a general audience that would benefit from an introduction to the nuts and bolts of the British colonization of West Florida. However, an academic reader may find that the end-notes, which are condensed in one note at the end of each paragraph, are not always clearly delineated. Further, the text would benefit from a tighter conceptual and thematic focus. Nonetheless, it succeeds in its objective of showing that the history of the colony enriches our understanding of the American Revolution. Bunn's work contributes to the larger project of presenting more nuanced narratives of southern history to the public, which is not inconsequential. John Paul Nuño California State University, Northridge Copyright © 2022 The Southern Historical Association

Exhibiting Asante

<h3>ABSTRACT:</h3> The British Museum’s exhibition <i>Asante, Kingdom of Gold</i> grew out of Asantehene Opoku Ware II’s 1974 demand for the return of regalia removed by British forces a hundred years earlier. The British Museum Act of 1963 prevented the requested return. Nevertheless, the Museum sought ways to cooperate with the Golden Stool (i.e., the Asante nation). The exhibition was one result: it was opened in 1981 by the Asantehene. There were earlier displays about the Asante. The 1874 British invasion of Asante prompted commercial exhibitions during the 1880s and 1890s. The next major display was organized by the Gold Coast colonial officer, R. S. Rattray, as part of the great 1924–1925 Empire Exhibition at Wembley. In succeeding years, many museums exhibited Asante artifacts, but with little concern for context. The large <i>Arts of Ghana</i> exhibition created by Cole and Ross brought a welcome new perspective by emphasizing change and creativity in Ghanaian arts. <i>Asante, Kingdom of Gold</i> and the accompanying book drew on the British Museum’s vast Asante collection and tried to illuminate many areas of Asante life and culture through comprehensive displays of artifacts, reconstructions, and the use of early photographs. After London, it traveled to the American Museum of Natural History in New York where it was again opened by the Asantehene. At both venues it was visited by many Asante people, some making special trips from Ghana.

The noble mission of Nobel Laureate Sir Ronald Ross

The noble mission of Nobel Laureate Sir Ronald Ross

A Cuban City, Segregated: Race and Urbanization in the Nineteenth Century by Bonnie A. Lucero

Reviewed by: A Cuban City, Segregated: Race and Urbanization in the Nineteenth Century by Bonnie A. Lucero Richard Lee Turits Bonnie A. Lucero, A Cuban City, Segregated: Race and Urbanization in the Nineteenth Century. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2019. 288 pp. Through the prism of social geography and the history of one town, Cienfuegos, Bonnie Lucero provides a fascinating and original contribution to our knowledge of the workings of white domination and antiblack racism in nineteenth-century Cuba. The island was then one of the largest slave plantation societies in the history of the Americas. Lucero's primary focus, though, is not on plantations or slavery but on white Cubans' efforts to control urban public spaces in order to exclude and subordinate free people of color. Lucero's story is also one of determined, often entrepreneurial, and somewhat effective black resistance to white strategies of control. That resistance, in turn, provoked new white efforts to restrict people of color in Cienfuegos's streets, neighborhoods, and institutions. Lucero opens by chronicling the development of Cienfuegos in the late 1810s as an explicitly "white" town. It was one of several "colonies" established [End Page 324] at that time for migrants from Europe and the United States, whom colonial officials hoped to entice with land and travel grants. The king intended, he wrote, to "promote the augmentation of the white population on the island" (20). Colonial authorities saw this, Lucero suggests, as a means of reducing the threat to slave owners and the economy posed by potentially widespread resistance among an expanding enslaved population at the time. The crown's commitment to white colonization, though, was evidently modest. Fewer than six hundred white immigrants settled in Cienfuegos in its early years before state funding began to run out. At the same time, white Cubans came to Cienfuegos in increasing numbers and brought with them the many African-descended people they held in slavery. Free people of color also settled in the city, a good portion of whom "quickly established themselves as property owners on the peripheries of the colony" (188) and a large number of whom were women. Many had previously been enslaved. Some were born in Africa. Lucero shows how an economically diverse free black population formed cohesive communities in multiple neighborhoods in Cienfuegos. They composed 28 percent of the city's residents by 1858. This was roughly twice the proportion of free people of color in Cuba overall. Not surprisingly, then, Cienfuegos was "stripped of the title 'white colony'" already by 1833 (40). Yet, Lucero argues, city officials remained committed to sustaining white supremacy by other means, through segregation and other forms of racial hierarchy. Most black people lived outside the town's center in neighborhoods with virtually no white residents. Municipal ordinances helped keep it that way, with new requirements, for instance, that structures in the "historic city center" be made of stone rather than wood, something that few black people could afford. City laws also demanded performances of racial inequality in public arenas where white and black residents did interact. When Afro-Cubans ventured "to the town center" for "work, food, leisure," Lucero writes, they were legally obligated to "cede the sidewalk to whites when passing each other" and forbidden from gathering "at public stores" (68). Lucero makes clear that racial hierarchy was established in both law and practice in Cienfuegos, and Cuba overall, until the 1870s. At that time, though, the dynamics of racism began to change. Spain took steps to end both slavery and the most obvious forms of legal racism, such as bans on people of color in higher education and restrictions on marriage between "individuals of 'unequal' status" (118). Such steps were arguably a necessity for Spanish colonial leaders, as they sought to counter the vast mobilization of enslaved and free people of color in the independence wars between 1868 and 1880, wars that failed to overthrow Spanish rule but did revolutionize the island in important ways. A substantial number of people now liberated from slavery migrated to Cienfuegos, seeking to make real their hard-won freedoms. In these years the [End Page 325] city's black residents overall "made increasingly bold claims to...

Politics on the Growth and Development of the Agricultural Marketing Co-operatives in Tanganyika, c. 1920s -1930s

This article examines the politics and passage of the co-operative legislation in 1932 that led to the suffocation and eventual strangulation of the Kilimanjaro Native Planters Association (KNPA). In Kilimanjaro, Agricultural Marketing Co-operatives (AMCOs) were registered from 1933 onwards to market coffee. This similarly happened in Ngara District and Ruvuma Region. In Kilimanjaro, the colonial authorities as a whole were responsible for the introduction of AMCOs while in Ngara and Ruvuma the AMCOs were promoted by local colonial officials. In other parts of the country, senior colonial officials deprived support and undermined emerging interests for co-operatives. Additionally, the Registrar’s efforts to promote co-operatives was undermined. Consequently, limited development of co-operative undertakings was evident in the territory during interwar years including in areas that produced cash crops. Generally, the promotion of AMCOs lacked central coordination. Political interests dominated the decisions regarding the promotion of AMCOs.

Supping with a long spoon in the Indian Ocean: the negotiation of the 1972 Agreement on Economic and Technical Cooperation between Mauritius and the People’s Republic of China

ABSTRACT Against the backdrop of the Soviet Union’s 1970s reengagement with Africa through the Indian Ocean, this article investigates the overlapping extensions of aid and technical assistance to the island nation of Mauritius, focusing primarily on the unprecedented 1972 infrastructural development offer by the People’s Republic of China. By analysing the minutes of the Sino-Mauritian Agreement on Economic and Technical Cooperation’s negotiations as found in the United Kingdom’s Foreign and Colonial Office dossiers, this paper examines Chinese aid diplomacy to Africa in a period which saw its admission to the United Nations, its realignment against the USSR, and the concomitant latticed transformations of its aid diplomacy.

PENULARAN WABAK HAWAR BERDARAH DI TANAH MELAYU, 1917-1957

Bloody blight plague is an infectious disease of animals that have been occurring in Malaysia for a long time, since the British colonial era. According to the earliest found bloody blight disease has occurred since 1917. The outbreak of bloody blight has brought various implications for the economic and social sectors in Malaya. Therefore, this objective was to study the efforts taken by the British colonial authorities in order to curb the spread of dengue blight that occurs in Malaya from 1917 until 1957. This study applies the method of qualitative research methodology through the analysis and study of reference to primary sources such as documents from the Colonial Secretary's Office, State Veterinary Surgeon, and Annual Reports obtained from National Archive of Malaysiasources. Therefore, this study was conducted to examinate the British efforts in eradicating this disease. Further, this research has also led to the conclusion and finding that the British colonial authorities had arried out their roles and responsibilities well despite having to face some constraints in addressing the epidemic, especially when tried to develop a vaccine centre in Malaya in 1953.

Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion

Ilyse R. Morgenstein Fuerst’s book, Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857Rebellion: Religion, Rebels, and Jihad, is a masterful exploration of how animperial discourse of religion in the nineteenth-century defined Islam,Muslims, and jihad. Specifically, Fuerst calls attention to the significanceof the 1857 Rebellion by Indians against the British East India Company,and argues that British official histories of the Rebellion fundamentally alteredhow colonial officials, European scholars, and Indians thought andwrote about religion. Thus she builds on the work of previous scholars ofreligion such as Tomoko Masuzawa, who has argued that the concept ofuniversal religion is a constructed category, and David Chiddester, who hasshown how colonialism constructed both religions and races. Additionally,Fuerst’s book draws on historians such as Thomas Metacalf, who haveexplored the various ways the 1857 Rebellion transformed the business ofempire. However, Fuerst’s unique contribution lies in revealing the ways anofficial British discourse about Muslims and their supposed propensity forviolence, and the Indian Muslim engagement with this discourse, racializedand minoritized Muslims. This discourse presented as fact that all Muslimswere essentially homogenous and dangerous to imperial interests ...

The United States at the Center of the Action

The United States at the Center of the Action

The Uganda Museum’s Tribal Representation: Colonial Repositories and Community Reconciliation in Uganda

This article discusses the question of British indirect policy within a museum setting of the Uganda's Tribal representation as form of colonial rule. Why the colonial repositories have stagnated behind exhibitions of tribal crafts in the Uganda Museum's ethnographic shows how the protectorate government through its colonial officials embarked on the premised project of civilizing society. By tracing the establishment of the Uganda Museum, therefore, should be understood as part of the process by which British protectorate rule was enforced (Peterson 2015); that partly underlines the histories of colonial violence from the period of 1908 to 1960's. While the representation of tribal artefacts in the ethnographic galleries has remained immune to the disrupted intangible memories among young people in conflict situations. The effects have led to the loss of intangible memory that poses the risk of behavioral problems emerging from hopelessness and resulting in violence. Although, indigenous knowledge has gained new grounds in memory practices of the community and has reawakened the need for reinterpreting and redefining the meaning of ethnographic artefacts, little attention is being made to reactivate the knowledge of communities to reinterpret the colonial repositories of the storage artefacts.

Shea (Vitellaria paradoxaC. F. Gaertn.) – a peripheral empire commodity in French West Africa, 1894–1960

Burkinabé women have traded shea kernels and shea butter in periodic local markets, and on a regional scale with the densely-populated West African littoral, for centuries. This paper traces the origins of French colonial efforts to develop shea as a commodity of empire from the 1890s to independence in 1960. Colonial efforts to incorporate Upper Volta, a French colonial backwater, into the world economy was drawn out, heterogenous, and messy. The colonial state assumed erroneously that little shea trade existed, and that producers would respond positively to market incentives. Yet, we suggest that French colonial policies failed due to a composite of factors including the limited investment in either the colony or shea as an oilseed crop, adaptation by women shea producers to the extraction of male labour and the trade opportunities created by new international borders, and the 'blindness' of colonial officials to the economic, social and cultural functions of periodic local markets used by women shea traders. The historical trajectory of the shea trade continues to have implications for current-day shea markets and their actors.

Exile, Mobility, and Re-territorialisation in Aceh and Colonial Indonesia

For centuries, trading companies and colonial officials have sought to manipulate indigenous Asian kingdoms by banishing recalcitrant elites, thereby discouraging resistance and ensuring compliance. Less examined by scholars is how colonial officials adapted this tool in their efforts to manage mobility and achieve territorialisation at the turn of the twentieth century. Applying Josiah Heyman and Howard Campbell's framework of “re-territorialisation” to make sense of how states harness mobile flows for the purpose of redrawing boundaries and producing new political spaces, this article will examine Dutch strategies for incorporating the sultanate of Aceh into the Netherlands East Indies. Site of an infamous multi-decade war of insurgency and pacification between 1873 and the early 1900s, this Sumatran kingdom had long resisted imperial subjugation. Dutch authorities eventually moved to complete its elusive ambition of conquest by leveraging distance and forcibly sending Acehnese elites to “training schools” in Java. By fusing exile with pedagogy, colonial officials hoped to transform Acehnese elites into loyal servants of the colonial centre. Rancorous debates about the deposed Acehnese sultan, however, illustrated the limitations of such re-territorialisation schemes and the resiliency of alternative Asian geographies.

Collecting in the South Sea: The voyage of Bruni d’Entrecasteaux, 1791–1794.Tiki: Marquesan art and the Krusenstern expeditionResonant Histories: Pacific artefacts and the voyages of HMS Royalist, 1890–1893

Ever since the 1760s, European visitors to the South Seas have acquired objects made by Pacific Islanders and taken them away. With motives ranging from philosophical curiosity to avarice, explorers, naval officers, traders, whalers, missionaries, colonial officials, anthropologists, archaeologists, collectors and tourists have traded for, received as gifts, purchased, looted and confiscated objects, removing them from their original contexts of production and use, reclassified them as ‘curiosities’, ‘trifles’, ‘idols’, ‘artefacts’, ‘specimens’ and ‘souvenirs’, and put them up for sale, gifted them to institutions and retained them as family heirlooms. Over time, of course, many of these collected objects have ended up in museums, especially in Europe, which is why we know about them – or, at least, some of them. The practice of cataloguing and writing about collections of Pacific art and artefacts began as soon as the first collections were brought to Europe, but the modern, systematic study of the history of Pacific collections can be said to have begun with the publication in 1978 of Adrienne L. Kaeppler’s ‘Artificial Curiosities’: An exposition of native manufactures collected on the three Pacific voyages of Captain James Cook, R.N. (Honolulu, 1978). This was both a catalogue of a special exhibition, held at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, Hawai‘i, and a groundbreaking study of the fate and current whereabouts of the objects collected on the three famous Pacific voyages commanded by James Cook in the eighteenth century, providing researchers with a wealth of information and questions to be followed up, and demonstrating the crucial importance of the careful assessment of documentary evidence to the study of historic collections. ‘Artificial Curiosities’ demonstrated what could be done to trace the history of collections and individual objects and how scholars should go about doing it.

Reading Ibāḍī Women’s Legacies through Stone Town’s Built Environment

Abstract This article explores how women of means in nineteenth-century Zanzibar used their built legacies to convey their piety and authority even though they were not active in public religious life. The focus of the study is an old Ibāḍī mosque named after its founder, ‘Aisha bint Jumʻa al-Mughayri, and the tombstone of her younger female relative Muhayra bint Jumʻa al-Mughayri. While the details of the two women’s lives, works and property do not appear prominently in the written record of Zanzibar, this article asks what we can glean about their religious and economic commitments from the built legacies and religious endowments they left behind, as well as from the writings of their male contemporaries, British colonial officials and their descendants. The article also demonstrates how the conservation and upkeep of historic religious institutions in Zanzibar today depends greatly on collaborations between local family members, state institutions and transnational faith-based organizations (fbo s).

“Ruined Cities in Cyprus”

ABSTRACT At the eve of the twentieth century, Cyprus's British administration perceived the island's medieval structures from a utilitarian point of view; their premises were put to new uses, their stones were removed and reused in new constructions. A mere six years later, selected medieval structures were declared monuments under the then-enacted 1905 Antiquities Law. This article investigates this radical shift and seeks to establish the seminal role of an anonymous letter sent to the Times in December 1899. It argues that these 300 words against the alleged demolition of Famagusta's medieval walls by the British Colonial Office initiated the first steps toward the preservation of medieval structures not only within the town but across the island. Ultimately it seeks to establish that the actions of this six-year period, a response to the letter's allegations, marked the beginning of a process that shaped Cyprus's medieval monuments as we appreciate them today.

Geopolitics of the colonial prison island: The case of Poulo Condor (Con Dao)

This article takes up the specific example of Poulo Condor (the Con Dao archipelago in Vietnam) as colonial prison island in order to examine this persistence of colonial island imaginaries built around the imagined project of the prison island well into the middle of the 20th century. Such imaginaries appear to run counter to dominant political discourse of the period along with ongoing media campaigns calling for the end to penal transportation and overseas penal colonies. This article contends that closer attention needs to be paid to the disjuncts and gaps between the official discourse of the French colonial authorities located in France and the enactment of such discourse in the colonies themselves. The central focus of the article is a close analysis of correspondence between colonial officials stationed in French Indochina from 1925 onwards; these documents will be contextualised with reference to the longer histories of both the Con Dao archipelago and France’s use of prison islands. An understanding of Poulo Condor as a complex extralegal space will be framed by Ann Laura Stoler’s concept of the ‘colony’ as it develops Giorgio Agamben’s notion of the ‘state of exception’ and Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘security’. What emerges is an ongoing colonial pathology which continues to fixate on the prison island as a key colonial stake even after such a stake has become increasing untenable.

From Afghan Pan-Islamism to Turkish Feminism

From Afghan Pan-Islamism to Turkish Feminism