Colonial Policymakers Research Articles

Kartini, Inlandsche kunstnijverheid and Dutch Imperial Policy in the East Indies, 1898–1904

This article concerns a colonial "moment" when Native arts and crafts (Inlandsche kunstnijverheid) became an object of a multifocal public discourse. This was generated in the context of a flurry of Dutch national, international, and colonial exhibitions and the formulation of new colonial policy that took place around the turn of the twentieth century. The "exhibition" provided a physical and a rhetorical presence for Native arts and crafts to be employed to project assumptions about race, civilization, and national identity and competing colonial policy trajectories. The article explores representations of "the Native" generated by these colonial and imperial discourses from the vantage point of the archive of Raden Ajeng Kartini, an emerging "voice" of a modernizing Javanese national consciousness, and indirectly involved "behind the scenes" in a rapid succession of Dutch colonial, national, and international exhibitions between 1898 and 1903. Using contemporary media, the article explores the gap between Kartini's celebration of Javanese arts and crafts as an expression of Javanese identity and the assumptions of contemporary European exhibition curators, commentators, and "progressive" colonial policy makers in relation to Inlandsch kunstnijverheid in this particular moment in the history of modern Indonesia.

The (Un)governable City: Productive Failure in the Making of Colonial Delhi, 1858-1911 by Raghav Kishore

Delhi has always been a crucible of political disquiet, and the seat of manifold state and aesthetic desires to order, control and design the city. Even at this moment, we find ourselves before a ubiquitous impulse to change the appearance of the city through the Central Vista Project which proposes to cater to needs of increase in government office space. There are layers to the city and obvious enough, it is not monolithic. The vestiges and architectural remnants of subsequent ages narrate the relentless saga of power, domination and settlement. A historical analysis of the spatial structures reflects the reasons behind its physical organization. To talk about colonial designs within this very broad spectrum is but, only a brief moment in a longue duree of human settlement in this region. Yet, it is necessary to understand the spatial synchrony, for much of it is what we have inherited today and this is what shapes our experiences of this city even at present. Raghav Kishore’s The (Un)governable City (2020), makes an intervention in this corpus of historical analysis with his impeccable research and endless forays into the archives. This is a welcome addition to studies in the field of urban development of Delhi, with Pilar Maria Guerrieri’s Maps of Delhi (2017) being one precursor, which painstakingly curates maps of Delhi from the precolonial times, to the modern municipal Master Plans to contemporary digital mappings. Kishore unearths curious details from local sources and twines those with debates among colonial policy makers and personnel to highlight issues of political ideology, statecraft and governmentality. This volume juxtaposes notions of policing, control and accessibility with debates and discussions on sanitation, traffic, communication, railways and the building of military cantonments, which are significant if we think of the British rule in India as a garrison state, heavily dependent on the easy mobility of its military forces. The success of the control was conditional on the ability to gather up huge military forces to curb parallel sporadic outbursts at their very onset. The broadening of roads, regulation of quarters and delimiting encroachments and concerns over connectivity, were carefully thought out strategisations towards the goal of containment and territorialisation.

‘Qu'il est question d'une langue sauvage’: Phrasebooks for European Travellers in Eighteenth‐Century North America

AbstractThis article explores the vocabularies of Amerindian languages published as part of the travel accounts written by explorers, traders and colonial policymakers in North America over the eighteenth century. Starting with the renowned Voyages by the Baron de Lahontan, the analysis takes as its endpoint the journals of the famous expedition led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The aim of this study is to foreground what these lexicographic compilations reveal about European encounters with societies categorised as radically different from – and less civilised than – the traveller's own: an ‘otherness’ sometimes exploited as a mirror and term of comparison that challenged the observer's ethnocentrism. Drawing on existing scholarship about the cultural history of Euro‐American encounters in the modern age, this study puts forward an original analysis of the temporal conceptualisations underpinning vocabularies of ‘savage languages’, in terms of both historical diachronicity and time as a culturally constructed frame of human experience.This focus on the lists of words and phrases included in travel accounts, journals and relations makes it possible to question the relationship between the recording of linguistic evidence and travel narratives, and explore the complex negotiations between empirical observation and pre‐existing cultural categories and stereotypes. A close reading of these often‐neglected primary sources helps us to identify recurrent conceptual tropes and assign a central role to the historicisation of the Amerindian within wider processes of cultural construction of a global Europeanness.

The interlacing of disease, death, and colonial discord: San Lazaro Crematorium, Manila, the Philippines

ABSTRACT American colonization of the Philippines restyled local civilization’s character. One notable transition prompted by American colonial rule was the adoption of new public health conventions. In spite of these practices being introduced to elevate the well-being and life expectancy of the Filipinos their implementation was met with resistance. Accordingly, this paper focuses upon the creation of the Philippines’ first crematory facility, namely the San Lazaro Crematorium (opened in 1903, in Manila). The work, thus, grants an overview of how Filipinos responded to a societal modernization project initiated by the American colonial regime. The paper discusses three matters: first, what American colonial policymakers sought, with reference to public health, to accomplish; second, how the American colonial framework directly challenged Filipino culture with regard to disease prevention and death management; and, third, why the construction of the San Lazaro Crematorium offers a unique entry point to grasp the nature of America’s initial governance of the Philippines. Such clarification has twofold value: it helps to deepen comprehension of the administration’s operation and, in association, native opposition to it; plus, given that the crematorium is presently derelict this paper can underscore its value as a dark heritage object worthy of preservation.

Colonial policing and urban space in the notorious Commune Rouge of Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of Congo

AbstractZooming in on the urban history of the Kenya neighbourhood in Lubumbashi, this article deals with the relation between urban space, colonial policing and African unrest. Colonial policy-makers feared the populous neighbourhood and its African masses, and deployed urban planning to materialize an ambiguous agenda of ‘welfare colonialism’ and discipline. The implementation of these planning projects was incomplete, and a spatial analysis of subsequent African local unrest, everyday colonial policing and military schemes sheds additional light on how colonial forces and Africans utilized urban space as a resource for protest and control. As such, the article aims to contribute to the academic debate on colonial policing, in which spatiality has been lacking.

Slavery, Race, and the Contours of Belonging in the Atlantic World

Slavery, Race, and the Contours of Belonging in the Atlantic World Jessica M. Parr (bio) Edward B. Rugemer, Slave Law and the Politics Resistance in the Early Atlantic World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018. 400 pp. Maps, notes, and index. $39.95. Brooke N. Newman, A Dark Inheritance: Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. xii + 340 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $40.00. Ruma Chopra, Almost Home: Maroons between Slavery and Freedom in Jamaica, Nova Scotia, and Sierra Leone. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. 336 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00 Elena A. Schneider, The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic World. Chapel Hill: The Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina University Press, 2018. 335 pp. Maps, figures, and index. $39.95. When direct English engagement in the transatlantic slave trade opened up in 1689, it ushered in an age where the English became the largest traffickers of Africans. The dissolution of the Royal African Company’s charter was the result of arguments made by merchants that the Company’s monopoly on English trade was a violation of their rights as Englishmen, under the Constitution of 1688.1 English sensibilities about “rights” and “liberties” stood in contestation to “slavery,” and in many cases, the lack of positive and/or negative law concerning the legality of chattel slavery meant that the shapers of empire were left to define the parameters of enslavement. Early English debates about law and slavery frequently entailed addressing potential loopholes over whom could be enslaved and under what circumstances. For instance, was it permissible to hold slaves in Great Britain, or only in its dominions? Was it legal to enslave Africans who had been baptized, or would planters who allowed missionaries onto their plantation be forced to manumit those who converted to Christianity? And what of the children born to enslaved [End Page 211] women? Were there justifications in law and philosophy that made slavery an inheritable condition, and were the children born of enslaved Black women and white enslavers condemned to slavery themselves?2 In an effort to address these legal ambiguities, English economic interests and law frequently went hand-in-hand in shaping imperial policy around the Atlantic slave trade.3 The transatlantic slave trade was a multi-empire system, but even within the British Empire, the legal geography was complex, uneven, and inconstant. Edward Rugemer’s ambitious new work, Slave Law and the Politics of Resistance in the Early Atlantic World, traces the development of slave law in the British Atlantic, with a particular focus on mechanisms of resistance to slavery. Rugemer follows the development of slave law from English’s first “slave society” in Barbados through Jamaica, slavery’s entrenchment in the Carolinas, the complexities of abolitionist politics in Great Britain and the United States, and the “retrenchment” of enslavers in the nineteenth century.4 He illustrates the ways in which economic interests, law, and resistance are interlinked. For instance, in his discussion colonial administrators worked not only to clarify details like the ways that the sale of slaves as property could be used to satisfy planter debts, but administrators’ ability to align their general drive to protect property rights with the laws that were designed to control property (i.e. their slaves). His analysis is corroborated by works like Andrew Fede’s study of the law governing planters’ homicides against slaves. Fede draws the connections between jurisprudence that framed justified killings as, at times a necessary function of protecting their property (including their other slaves).5 British law, as both Rugemer and Fede demonstrate, was different than that in the Portuguese, French, or Spanish empires because the structure of English law meant that colonial policymakers and judges were able to fold aspects of English positive law and common law into “local conditions.”6 Collectively, these works illustrate the different ways that law shifted to make enslaving Africans more economically efficient.7 Birthright citizenship is another contour of slavery and the law that has begun receiving attention recently. Martha Jones’s pathbreaking book, Birthright Citizens (2018) provides an exemplary analysis of...

Beyond the Pale: Whiteness, Masculinity and Empire in the British Union of Fascists, 1932–1940

This article seeks to intervene in the debate over the legacy of the British Empire, using the British Union of Fascists (BUF) as a case-study. It will argue that, during the interwar period, the BUF drew heavily on earlier constructions of racialized imperial masculinity in building their ‘new fascist man’. The BUF stand out in the period following the First World War, where hegemonic constructions of British masculinity were altogether more domesticated. At the same time, colonial policymakers were increasingly relying on concessions, rather than force, to outmanoeuvre nationalists out in the Empire. For the BUF, this all smacked of effeminacy and they responded with a ‘new man’ based on the masculine values of the idealized imperial frontier. By transplanting these values from colony to metropole, they hoped to achieve their fascist rebirth of Britain and its Empire. This article charts the BUF’s construction of this imperial ‘new fascist man’ out the legacy of earlier imperialists, the canon of stories of imperial heroism, and the gendered hierarchies of colonial racism.

VOTING, NATIONHOOD, AND CITIZENSHIP IN LATE-COLONIAL AFRICA

AbstractIn the face of considerable scepticism from some British commentators, elections by secret ballot and adult suffrage emerged as central features of the end of British rule in Africa. This article considers the trajectories of electoral politics in three territories – Ghana (Gold Coast), Kenya, and Uganda. It shows that in each of these, the ballot box came to provide a point of convergence for the disparate ambitions of nationalist politicians, colonial policy-makers, and a hopeful, restive public: performing order, asserting maturity and equality, and staking a claim to prosperity. Late-colonial elections, we argue, constrained political possibility even as they offered citizenship, presenting the developmentalist state as the only possible future and ensuring substantial continuities from late colonialism to independence. They also established a linkage between nationhood, adulthood, and the ballot that was to have enduring political force. Yet at the same time, they established elections as a space for a local politics of clientelism, and for kinds of claims-making and accountability that were to complicate post-independence projects of nation-building.

Seditious Crimes and Rebellious Conspiracies: Anti-communism and US Empire in the Philippines

This article details how US colonial policymakers and Filipino political elites, intent on fostering a non-revolutionary Philippine nationalism in the late 1920s and 1930s, produced an anti-communist politics aimed at eliminating or delegitimizing radical anti-imperialism. Communist-inspired, anti-imperial activists placed US imperialism in the Philippines within the framework of western imperialism in Asia, thereby challenging the anti-imperial ideology of the US empire. Americans and elite Filipinos met this challenge by repressing radical, anti-imperialist visions of Philippine independence through inter-colonial surveillance and cooperation, increased policing, mass imprisonment, and the outlawing of communist politics in the Philippines.

"Inside the Fence", the Social Basis of Privacy in Nabenchauk

The guarded privacy of peasant life has long been a commonplace of European folk wisdom, and is well-established in social theory as a principle element in the notion of tradition. The privacy -and inaccessability- of the peasant has been the object of strategic manoeuvre by colonial policymakers, revolutionary cadres and agents of political and economic development. Current sociological and anthropological accounts of Mediterranean, Latin American, Asian and African peasantries revolve around the same axis. Through all these theories of society, both pragmatic and academic, run two competing images of peasants, coloured by the positive and negative aspects of privacy.

Decolonization or National Liberation: Debating the End of British Colonial Rule in Africa

When discussing the end of British colonial rule in Africa, many historians have highlighted the role of postwar international relations and the impact of domestic imperial politics on decolonization and have failed to recognize the role of African nationalists. This article argues that such a viewpoint is flawed because it conceives of colonial policy makers as isolated and autonomous entities impervious to changes taking place in the colonies. The national liberation movements in Ghana, Central Africa, Kenya, and other regions of East Africa are explored in this article to illustrate the central role that colonial subjects played in the British decolonization of Africa. While dominant scholarship on the failures of the post-colonial state has made studies of decolonization and African nationalism less fashionable, it is becoming increasingly clear that our understanding of the nature and mechanics of the crises that beset the continent requires taking fresh stock of the record of European colonial rule in Africa. In this regard, the study of colonialism and decolonization in Africa continues to be of critical relevance.

Bitter Pills: Colonialism, Medicine and Nationalism in Burma, 1870-1940

This article examines medicine as a field of knowledge deeply implicated in the emergence of new ways of articulating national difference. Specifically, it aims to shed light on the symbiosis between perceptions of political space and sovereignty, and conceptualizations of human anatomy. The article offers an analysis of the presentation, dissemination, and institutionalization of western medicine by colonial researchers, missionaries, educators and policy-makers in Burma, and correlates these generally ethnocentric perceptions with European presumptions about indigenous medicine. Reflecting upon the place of medicine as a strategic handmaiden to both military expeditions and missionary ambitions, it considers proposals for medical education and medical rights in Burma by Burmese advocates of educational and labour reform and the specific place of medicine in the training of Karen nationalist leader Dr. San C. Po and Burmese nationalist U Thein Maung.

Macau in Transition: The Politics of Decolonization

Decolonization is a process in which colonial policymakers delegate more administrative and political power to indigenous peoples. Usually this process is marked by more for local institutions, such as a legislature, and by recruiting local people into the civil service. In other words, political and localization of the civil service can be regarded as the essence of decolonization. Macau is no exception to this rule. Portugal's parliament in February 1990 approved revisions to Macau's constitution, the Organic Statute, drafted by the territory's Legislative Assembly. One major purpose of the revisions, according to former Macau Governor Carlos Melancia, was to give Macau more autonomy in enacting its own laws.1 Macau's political has been partly enhanced by strengthening the Legislative Assembly and its representation through the addition of six Assembly seats. Under the old Organic Statute, Macau's Legislative Assembly had 17 members in which six were directly elected by citizens; six indirectly elected by economic groups and by moral, cultural, and charitable groups; and five appointed by the governor. The new 23-member legislature has eight directly elected, eight indirectly elected, and seven appointed members. This composition, according to an appointed Portuguese legislator, Rui Afonso, will balance the representation of various aspects.2 The aspects that Afonso referred to are the four political forces existing in the Legislative Assembly-pro-China and pro-Portugal forces, in-

Colonial Policy-Makers, Capitalist Class and China: Determinants of Electoral Reform in Hong Kong's and Macau's Legislatures

A FTER THE PEOPLE's REPUBLIC OF CHINA (PRC) recovers her sovereignty over Hong Kong in 1997, Macau will also become the PRC's Special Administrative Region in 1999. Since the Sino-British agreement on Hong Kong's future was initialled in 1984, the British administrators have introduced some electoral reforms to the law-making body, the Legislative Council (Legco). In 1985, some legislators were elected not by citizens in geographical constituencies but by electorates in such functional constituencies as law, commerce and medicine. Although more legislators were elected by functional constituencies in 1988, by 1991 one-fifth of the members in the Legco will be directly elected by citizens in future geographical constituencies. In Macau, one-third of the members in the Legislative Assembly had already been directly elected by citizens in 1976. In comparison with Macau, the pace of introducing direct elections to the colonial legislature in Hong Kong was slow from the 1970s to 1988. To explore and explain this phenomenon, this paper adopts a class perspective and analyzes the relations between the colonial policy-makers, the capitalist class and the PRC. The capitalist class refers to the industrialists, big businessmen and entrepreneurs who own the means of production. Between 1974 and 1984, ethnicity divided the capitalist class in Macau into Macanese and Chinese factions. The Macanese were those racially mixed residents with PortugueseMalaccan and Portuguese-Chinese blood.' They constituted about three percent of the population and some of the ten thousand Macanese could speak Portuguese and Cantonese. Most Macanese, however, not only identified themselves more as Portuguese than as Chinese but also regarded themselves as Macau citizens. As a Macanese said, We generally have a sense of belonging in Macau. Even if we return to Portugal, some Portu-

Toward Self-Government in Papua and New Guinea: The 1964 Election

Research Article| August 01 1964 Toward Self-Government in Papua and New Guinea: The 1964 Election Paul W. Van der Veur Paul W. Van der Veur Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Far Eastern Survey (1935) 4 (8): 991–999. https://doi.org/10.2307/2642636 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Paul W. Van der Veur; Toward Self-Government in Papua and New Guinea: The 1964 Election. Far Eastern Survey 24 April 1935; 4 (8): 991–999. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/2642636 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentAsian Survey Search This content is only available via PDF. Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Changing Pattern of Indonesia's Representative Government

In the new states of Southeast Asia the idea of parliamentary government has usually been closely linked with the struggle for national independence, yet with the latter a reality in most of the area, there has come a curious disillusionment with the actual values of the former. Thus, during the 1920's and 1930's in what was then called the Netherlands East Indies, nationalists agitated on behalf of “Indonesia berparlemèn” (a parliament for Indonesia), but today we find leading Indonesian public figures, such as President Sukarno, declaring that Western-style parliamentary government has failed in Indonesia, and that what the country needs is a governmental system “in harmony with the Indonesian soul,” that is, a “democracy with leadership,” or a “guided democracy.” The following pages will seek to suggest some of the causes of this disenchantment with the principle of representative government in Indonesia, by focusing on its historic origins and functions during these, Indonesia's first, years of national independence.When on August 17, 1945, Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta, acting on behalf of “the people of Indonesia,” formally proclaimed the independence of their nation, they confronted a condition of widespread popular inexperience in the art of representative government. It was not until 1918 that a rudimentary parliamentary body for all of Indonesia (the so-called Volksraad, or People's Council) had been established, in line with the plans, in great variety and often confusingly contradictory, of the Dutch colonial policy-makers to give their East Indian possessions a greater degree of autonomy.