Abstract Early theorizations about translation in the Philippines were largely a product of colonial rule. Although translation had been practiced long before this Southeast Asian archipelago became a colony, knowledges about it were first systematized by Catholic missionaries, who began arriving in the sixteenth century as part of Spain’s colonial project. These knowledges further evolved under US colonialism in response to the spread of English as a colonial language, the flourishing of literary traditions in Philippine languages, and the internationalization of the local literary scene. Translation knowledges are approached in this essay as tropes. They are analyzed alongside the notion of Indigeneity, revealing shifts in how the latter evolved over time and intersected with contemporaneous political doctrines such as secularization and benevolent assimilation.

ABSTRACT This paper examines punishment in the Philippines as a penal project shaped by colonial rule, carceral expansion, and the continuing dominance of retributive justice. It argues that, despite the rise of rehabilitative and restorative approaches elsewhere, the Philippine criminal legal system remains strongly oriented towards moral censure, punitive containment, and the uneven punishment of marginalised populations. Drawing on Foucauldian scholarship, postcolonial and decolonial criminology, and historical criminology, the paper traces how Spanish and American colonial administrations institutionalised punishment through spectacle, discipline, and racialised governance. It shows how these logics persist in prolonged pre-trial detention, overcrowded jails, selective criminalisation, and harsh sentencing. The paper also critiques rehabilitative and therapeutic discourses, particularly in drug policy, arguing that they often extend carceral power rather than disrupt it. In response, it turns to abolitionist critiques and Liu’s relational paradigm to argue for a penal future grounded in repair, collective responsibility, and culturally resonant forms of justice.

Abstract How does a reparation claim intervene in a world order made and unmade by colonialism? This article answers this question by analysing the 2009 reparation case in the British courts that was brought by veterans of the Mau Mau anti-colonialism struggle in Kenya in the 1950s. Colonial rule had been catastrophic, its exploitations and brutalities exemplified by a property law regime that dispossessed the Gĩkũyũ people and emergency laws that licensed torture. Invoking state succession and the statute of limitation, the United Kingdom (UK) sought to place colonialism beyond the temporal reach of reparations claims. However, the presiding judge recognized continuities between the UK and the colonial administration as well as layers of collusion and collaboration between London and Nairobi. The challenge of exercising ethical judgment in an office embedded in an unethical enterprise resonates with that of the Magistrate in J.M. Coetzee’s novel Waiting for the Barbarians. He grapples with the temporalities of (in)justice in reaching for a reparative response to colonialism’s catastrophic force. The turn to reparations interrupts law’s space–time continuum by conjoining legal subjects of yesterday and today – here and there – by treating colonial atrocities not as past violations of the rule of law but as symptomatic of the present rules of the game.

Abstract This article reconstructs a1903 smallpox outbreak in Omdurman by following the life of a sixteen-year- old girl, Kantousha, whose illness sheds light on an expansive regime of colonial medical surveillance. Drawing on Sudan Medical Department archives, the article reads clinical records against their intended logic, tracing how colonial medicine simultaneously enacted care, coercion, and obfuscation particularly around slavery and unfreedom. Foregrounding the social worlds of children, enslaved people, and working families, the author ponders how illness makes lives legible. Quarantine camps, vaccination campaigns, and policing collapsed distinctions between criminality and contagion, while masking the persistence of slavery under British colonial rule. By centering relationships of friendship, captivity, and care, the article exposes the limits of colonial archives and the ethical stakes of historical narration. Disease takes shape not only as a biological event but also as a spatial, social, and political force that mapped Omdurman's neighborhoods, hierarchies, and fractures. Ultimately, the article offers accompaniment as a historical practice: a slow, reflexive method attentive to presence and absence, violence and intimacy, and the historian's complicity in regimes of knowledge.

ABSTRACT Situated within the broader historiographical discussion of women’s agency in colonial port cities across the Indian Ocean World, this article examines the lived experiences of women who formed relationships spanning cultural, linguistic, and religious lines. Drawing on detailed case studies from Galle (Sri Lanka) and Melaka (Malaysia), the article rethinks marriage, intimacy, and social connectivity in the eighteenth century. A comparative look at their testamentary decisions reveals the lives of widows and the ways they were able to exercise agency within a colonial order shaped by both patriarchy and racial hierarchy. Despite their differences, these women all contributed to the social cohesion in culturally highly diverse spaces through acts of marriage, child-rearing, and the maintenance of familial relationships. By bringing to light these women’s participation in informal credit networks in particular, the article highlights how individuals from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds helped weave the horizontal connections that sustained urban life under colonial rule. In doing so, it challenges persistent portrayals of VOC societies as isolated enclaves centered on European settler families and male authority, showing instead how family histories illuminate the complexities of empire as it was lived. Ultimately, it argues that these intimate relationships formed the connective tissue of VOC colonial society, linking households, economies, and imperial worlds across continents.

abstract Spanning multiple generations and different geographies, Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (2016) explores the lingering effects of colonialism, slavery, and dislocation, unfolding the complexities of the black diasporic experience. Mapping the family branches of Esi’s and Effia’s descendants – one in Ghana and the other in America – the novel unfolds the tensions surrounding the African diaspora, throwing light on the fractures, estrangements, and shifting identities that complicate notions of return and belonging. While Ghana’s Year of Return initiative in 2019 encourages descendants of the African diaspora to reconnect with their long-lost roots and ancestral belonging, Homegoing complicates this idea of diasporic return, portraying it as a fraught, incomplete negotiation rather than a resolution to historical displacement. Under the colonial rule in Ghana, Effia’s descendants grapple with the contradictions of postcolonial identity and cultural hybridity, indicating how Africa is not an unchanged and unproblematic homeland. On the other hand, through the experiences of Esi’s descendants in the US, Gyasi highlights how the African diaspora survives the violent legacies of the Middle Passage, Jim Crow segregation, and systemic racism, and also how diasporic Black women withstand the general trauma induced by racial division. By foregrounding these parallel narratives of displacements and mutual estrangements between Africa and the Black diaspora, Homegoing not only interrogates narratives of seamless returns and reconnections but also reinforces that diasporic returns are mediated by history, memory, and the limitations of belonging. Analyzing the female characters’ experience of displacement and return, this paper examines Homegoing as a diasporic narrative that resists the fixity of “homeland” and instead presents return as an uncertain, often illusory process shaped by historical trauma and generational rupture. Drawing on Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic and Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother, this paper aims to situate Homegoing within critical discussions of Black diasporic identity and the afterlives of slavery and argue that Gyasi's novel ultimately reframes return not as a physical journey back to the continent, but as an ongoing, contested and gendered process of diasporic self-making across time and space.

ABSTRACT This article engages with Ching‐Kwan Lee's (2025) idea that the post‐1997 Hong Kong protests represent a series of decolonization efforts, stemming from British colonial rule and now from the Chinese ‘neo‐colonial’ regime. Instead of focusing on Hong Kong natives, however, this article presents mainland Chinese immigrants (MCIs) who live in Hong Kong and how they perceive themselves being the settler colonizers within two conflicting decolonization efforts—the Chinese government's decolonial initiatives in Hong Kong (i.e., removing the British legacy) as well as local resistance to the political rule under the Chinese regime. The latter was entangled with failed decolonization from the British colonial nostalgia, valuing English over Mandarin, and resistance to the idea that reunification with China is the only imaginable destiny. Realizing the state's failed decolonization and unfavourable traits associated with Chineseness, some re‐emphasized the sovereignty of Chineseness, whereas others concealed it by speaking English or pretending they were from other countries to facilitate better social integration. Such strategies manifest the tensions within this double decolonization process—in ethnopolitical identities, cultural and sociopolitical spheres, intercolonial competitions and conflicts between the government's decolonization agenda from above and daily encounters of Hong Kongers' resistance to the neo‐colonial Chinese regime from below.

ABSTRACT While browsing for Algerian literature, I unexpectedly came across a list of so-called Algerian writers: Albert Camus (born in Attaref), Bernard-Henri Lévy (Beni Saf), Robert Merle (Tebessa) and Hélène Cixous (Oran). These names befuddled me; it seems, if you are a French intellectual, being born in Algeria is enough to claim the ‘Algerianity’ of your work. This article attempts to answer the question, ‘What is Algerian literature?’ One could argue it is writing in Arabic produced by an Algerian national. But this is not all. We cannot ignore Algerian literature’s links to French, which unleashes a debate on identity, language and culture. I cite selected Arabic-writing Algerian authors from the colonial and post-independence periods to demonstrate how this literary tradition persisted and evolved through colonial rule and beyond. Further, this article will seek to explore Algerian literature in French specifically by considering Kateb Yacine and Malek Haddad, prolific figures of Algerian combat literature. The research findings indicate that Algerian authors writing in Arabic and French defend their identity through counter-hegemonic narratives. With a strong sense of national consciousness, they were committed to uncompromising literature that sought to demythologise the archetypical propaganda of ‘l’Algérie, c’est la France’.

<p class="ql-align-justify">This article examines the modern Tunisian writer Ali al-Douagi’s (also al-Du‘aji, 1909–1949) travelogue, titled <em>Jawla Bayna Ḥanāt al-Baḥr al-Mutawassiṭ</em> [Journeys Through the Mediterranean Taverns], with a special focus on “Nice,” his eponymously titled chapter and account of the French city of Nice. Al-Douagi embarked on a tour of the Mediterranean region between 1933 and 1935. Through a sea voyaging tourism company, he explored the cities and ports on the Mediterranean shores: from Tunis to Nice in France, through Italy and Greece, then to Turkey (now Türkiye) and Syria, to Alexandra in Egypt, and back to Tunis. In addition to critically engaging Douja Mamelouk’s article, titled “Alī al-Du‘ājī and <em>al-‘Ālam al-Adabī</em>” [The Literary World: A Voice of the Tunisian Avant-Garde Under Colonial Rule (1930–1936)], I discuss the form and content of “Nice,” focusing on the intersection of the themes of travel, East meets West, humor, gender, race, culture, and implicitly, colonization. Firstly, I argue that al-Douagi not only binarizes between the West/colonizer (or Global North) and the East/colonized (or Global South), but also privileges his own implied (Arabic/Islamic) culture over that of the European colonizers, which he mocks and denigrates, albeit innocuously. Secondly, contrary to both al-Douagi’s (in the introductory chapter to the travelogue) and Mamelouk’s position, I contend that the author is rather didactic in his travel accounts.</p>

ABSTRACT Caïda Halima (1859-1944) stands as the only woman in the history of colonial Algeria to have borne a title traditionally and exclusively reserved for men. She epitomizes the exception within the category of the ‘indigenous woman.' As a shrewd businesswoman, she possessed an intelligence shaped not only by her native cultural environment but also by her mastery of European social codes. Halima contributed to philanthropic initiatives supporting Algerians under colonial rule, while simultaneously cultivating peaceful relations with the French social elite. What might be interpreted as compliance, in fact, reveals itself as a strategic posture. Halima succeeded in establishing herself—despite the double burden of being both a woman and an ‘indigène'—as an influential figure in the eyes of Europeans. She defended both her personal interests and those of individuals with whom she maintained ‘maternal' relationships, while skilfully navigating colonial structures to assert her legitimacy and authority. The aim here is to shed light on a woman named Halima—her name meaning ‘clement’ in Arabic—who, despite her modest and conservative background, rose to become a powerful figure, both respected and feared, within her native milieu as well as in colonial and European society of the time.

ABSTRACT This essay examines Kuni Masami's autobiographies, Yōroppa no gogo (Afternoon in Europe 1949) and Berurin sensō (The Berlin War 1993), asking what it meant for a dancer from colonial Korea to claim to be cosmopolitan in a postcolonial context. Kuni's writing attempts to produce a new self-portrait in his need to navigate the aftermath of Japanese colonial rule. In his autobiographies, Kuni constructs his image as a cosmopolitan artist, reflecting his implicit views of colonial Korea, Imperial Japan, and his positionality in Europe. His claim to be cosmopolitan was a strategic decision he made to efface memories of himself from the colonial setting and rationalise his foreignness in Japanese society. He also obscures his collaboration with Nazi Germany by emphasising his support for the Jewish people. His postcolonial writing suggests not only an internalised gaze on the inferior position of his homeland but also the lingering legacies of the Japanese Empire among the formerly colonised in questions of identity, memory, and belonging in the decolonisation process.

This paper draws on Michel Foucault’s analysis of disciplinary power to examine the history of penal punishment and Buddhist chaplaincy at Lüshun Prison in Dalian during Japan’s colonial rule (1905–1945). The goal is to call into question the dominant understanding of Japanese prison system as simply an apparatus of naked colonial oppression by exploring the contradictions and limitations in the penitentiary system of Japan as an empire and a modern nation-state. The research is based on official prison documents, True Pure Land Buddhist Honganji sect archival sources, local Chinese publications, oral testimonies from the 2000s, interviews with descendants, and fieldwork at Lüshun Prison. The first part introduces the history of Lüshun Prison and the second explains the prison as a modern criminal justice institution embodying the Benthamian panopticon principle and modern disciplinary power. The third part examines the brutal corporeal punishment at Lüshun Prison and explores how the prison combined deliberate strategies of disciplining manipulation with bodily punishment to (re)create disciplined and subjected individuals. The fourth and fifth parts focus on Buddhist chaplaincy at Lüshun Prison as a disciplining practice. The fourth considers the limits of Buddhist chaplaincy by showing the depoliticized Buddhist doctrine deployed by chaplains was unable to discipline prisoners as it failed to make them repent and be loyal subjects of imperial Japan. The notion of public good used to justify Buddhist chaplaincy in Japan loses its political meaning when applied to the colonial penitentiary setting of Lüshun Prison. The fifth part further explores this ambiguity in Buddhist chaplaincy by focusing on examining the case of Ahn Jung-geun, the Korean independence activist who assassinated the Japanese statesman Ito Hirobumi and was imprisoned and executed at Lüshun Prison in 1910. Rather than transforming Ahn, prison chaplains ended up being transformed by him. This reversion betrays not just a tension between the private and the public, or the individual and the social, but at the same time a tension between the supposedly homogenized nation-state and the multi-ethnic empire.

Colonialism has left an enduring and profoundly detrimental legacy on the socioeconomic and health landscape of formerly enslaved nations across Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Caribbean. The repercussions of colonial rule continue to manifest in persistent economic disparities, political instability, and inadequate healthcare infrastructures. Despite the profound and lasting effects of colonial exploitation, discussions on reparations remain limited in both scope and urgency. Addressing historical injustices is not merely a matter of historical reflection but an ethical and moral obligation. Among the various forms of reparations, such as financial restitution, debt relief, and public apologies, investment in public health systems stands out as a sustainable and impactful approach. Targeted public health investment can serve as a powerful mechanism for redressing colonial injustices and bridging the development gap between former colonial powers and their once-subjugated nations.

ABSTRACT Why have African states increasingly turned to China for development finance? Dominant explanations emphasise China’s strategic ambitions or the material effects of its lending, often overlooking how Western colonial legacies continue to structure African policy choices. This article adopts a decolonial political economy approach, arguing that China–Africa aid relations are shaped by, and represent a response to, enduring radicalised hierarchies and dependencies forged under Western colonial rule and reproduced through global governance. Drawing on 33 semi-structured interviews with senior Zambian policymakers, the article centres African policy voices to examine how colonial legacies shape their interpretations of, and engagement with, Chinese aid. The findings show that Chinese aid has transformed development finance into a contested political arena in which African actors strategically leverage China’s rise to challenge Western-dominated aid regimes, reclaim constrained policy space, and assert greater autonomy. While Chinese development finance remains embedded in global neoliberal logics and can reproduce historical dependencies, it provides African policymakers an alternative source of leverage within an unequal global political economy. By foregrounding African agency, the article advances debates on the changing politics of aid, geopolitics in the Global South and how colonial history continues to influence policy decisions today.

ABSTRACT At the turn of the seventeenth century Swedish Crown officials popularized a violent story describing how men called Birkarlar had long ago conquered the Sámi people and their homeland, Sápmi. Since then, the story has enjoyed widespread popularity in both Sweden and Finland, and it has been retold for a variety of political, academic, and artistic purposes by diverse Swedish, Finnish, and Sámi narrators. While the Birkarl conquest is today considered a fictional invention, the stories depicting it open an important window into a very real historical process: the construction – and deconstruction – of colonial power and ideologies in Sápmi. Drawing from the growing scholarship on the role of mediated violence in colonialism, this article scrutinizes how stories about a violent Birkarl conquest have participated in Swedish and Finnish colonialism in Sápmi from 1600 to the present. It argues that the stories have engaged with three important processes in Sápmi’s colonial history: colonial state-building, efforts to define the place of the Sámi within the colonial state, and debates over the morality and persistence of colonial rule in Sápmi. Moreover, the stories reveal important connections between Swedish and Finnish colonial imagination and broader currents in European colonial ideologies.

ABSTRACT The practice of colonial strategy and racial discourses is a deeply intertwined process that developed in tandem, particularly during the height of traditional colonialism and empires from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. This article concludes that the discourse of ‘Orientalism’ described by Edward Said in Orientalism (1979) and the usual practice of indirect British colonial rule, in this case, solely the foreign affairs of Bhutan during the 1840s to the 1860s, evolved together to create an exception to regional and temporal trends in indirect British colonial authority. By utilising discourse analysis to examine the process of British colonialism solely in the context of Bhutan's foreign affairs, it is shown that the British opinion of the Bhutanese grew increasingly negative over the course of their colonial interactions, resulting in an ‘Orientalist’ discourse. This regionally unique aspect of ‘Orientalism’ necessitated (in the British view) a more direct colonial strategy. This article examines the development of this deviation by archival research and content analysis of key British colonial documents from the British Library's India Office Records. Specifically, the mission of Ashley Eden to Bhutan in 1863 and the Duar War of 1864 between Bhutan and Great Britain are examined closely as examples of mutual influence between racial discourse and colonial strategy.

In 1912 officials in German East Africa reported that rinderpest, the most feared cattle scourge, had invaded for the first time since the 1890s African panzootic. This acknowledgment launched an expensive vaccination campaign and the creation of a veterinary infrastructure after years of neglect. Despite reports that rinderpest had been present in the region for several years, Germans nevertheless considered it an external threat, constructing disease laws accordingly. Modern virologists believe that rinderpest had been enzootic in colonial Tanzania since the 1890s, causing low mortality, afflicting animals with no prior exposure. African cattle keepers also believed the disease was the same as that of the 1890s. German resistance to recognizing rinderpest before 1912 owed to their faith in injection trials to verify a virus, and their failure to understand that enzootic rinderpest behaved differently than it did during prior epidemics. Moreover, colonial policies that traumatized animals, including landscape engineering, disease controls, wildlife slaughter, the commodifying of cattle, trade violence, and colonial warfare helped enzootic rinderpest become epidemic. The rinderpest campaign itself caused animal distress through mass vaccination and branding. While historians understand how colonial rule exacerbated human health by creating stress and compromising immunity, the same understanding has not been applied to animal health.

Are railways always a harbinger of prosperity? We examine the economic effects of railways in Bosnia–Herzegovina under Habsburg colonial rule. Our novel dataset consistently tracks the non-agricultural population share of over 4500 settlements in Habsburg Bosnia in 1885, 1895, and 1910, based on census records. Applying the inconsequential units approach, with least-cost paths as our instrumental variable, we estimate the effect of railway access on occupational change. In settlements directly connected to imperial railways and competition, non-agricultural activity declined as craftsmen returned to agriculture. By contrast, the new railway network temporarily accelerated non-agricultural activity, primarily by attracting factories and foreign labor. Railway access generated more sustained non-agricultural employment growth in settlements with higher human capital and stronger law enforcement. Overall, our findings suggest that colonial railways did not uniformly promote economic development: while railway access reshaped local occupational structures, lasting positive effects depended on local development preconditions.

Colonial rule operates through the reordering of ecological relations. By rendering land legible, measurable, and administratively governable, militarized regimes consolidate control while narrowing political futurity. This article examines how ecological territorialization unfolds in Pakistan-administered Kashmir along the Line of Control, one of the most militarized frontiers in the world. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork (2014–2022), I trace how afforestation campaigns, conservation regimes, landmine governance, and infrastructural management embed military authority into soil, forests, and futures, aestheticizing occupation as restoration and care. Ecology emerges as a technology of rule: a biopolitical apparatus through which territorial power is naturalized. Yet militarized enclosure does not exhaust political life. Alongside regimented plantation drives and mined slopes, residents cultivate fugitive ecologies: seed saving, memorial tree planting, foraging, and “flower bombing” that root memory, grief, and futurity in the land. These practices do not mirror state sovereignty nor directly overthrow it. Instead, they enact speculative sovereignty: an anticipatory claim to jurisdiction grounded in relational inhabitation under conditions where direct territorial contestation is foreclosed. Speculation here is not abstraction but material rehearsal, an extension of political horizon through ecological care. By tracing how authority is both inscribed and quietly replanted from below, the article reconceptualizes sovereignty as an ecological practice shaped through anticipation, uneven risk, and temporal extension rather than exclusively through state form.

This research paper explores the complex dynamics of Anglo-Sirmaur relations with respect to indigenous leadership of the princely state and the British colonial rulers. A specific thrust in the study is laid on the maharajas of Sirmaur and the role of British gazetted officers employed in the state from 1815 to 1947. Through historical analysis, the paper examines how Sirmaur's indigenous leaders, particularly its maharajas, navigated British paramountcy while trying to maintain internal autonomy. The paper investigates the inter-personal relationships between Sirmaur's rulers and British officials, the increasing role of gazetted officers in governance, and the eventual erosion of indigenous authority due to British administrative, legal, and military systems. Drawing on key historical sources such as official Sirmaur State Gazetteers, Ranzor Singh’s Tarikh Riyasat Sirmaur (1912) and M.S. Ahluwalia's History of Himachal Pradesh (1988), the paper provides a detailed account of how indigenous leadership both adapted to and resisted colonial interventions, offering insights into the broader colonial experience of India’s princely states. The study highlights how British policies altered the political landscape of Sirmaur, affecting both its governance and socio-economic fabric, and traces the legacy of these changes leading up to Indian independence in 1947. Keywords: Anglo, Sirmaur, Relations, British, Colonial Rule, British Paramountcy, Indigenous Leadership, Maharajas