Colonial State Research Articles

Preventing Violence in the Disability Margins: A Culture-Centered Study in Aotearoa

Abstract Disabled people are overrepresented as victims of sexual violence and family violence, but are often excluded from research and the development of communication campaigns, laws, and interventions. Grounded in the culture-centered approach, we undertook 77 qualitative interviews with predominantly Māori (Indigenous) and low-income disabled individuals to identify primary prevention needs for reducing family and sexual violence. Participants articulated disability as being structural, intersectional, and layered with erasure, contributing to conditions that perpetuate violence. Erasure and the resulting loss of agency were pervasive across diverse disabilities and participant groups, with Māori bearing a disproportionate burden. Emergent in the participants’ narratives were strategies around addressing communication inequalities and grounding prevention resources within local community contexts, set against structural determinants of violence perpetuated by the settler colonial State. This study challenges the hegemonic approach to addressing sexual violence and family violence, revealing a relationship between communicative and material forms of violence.

Indigenous rights-based approaches to decolonising research methodologies in settler colonial contexts

IntroductionIndigenous knowledge and perspectives continue to be misrepresented and misunderstood in settler colonial states, including within academic circles. This is particularly the case in the field of research, where non-Indigenous researchers continue to design and conduct research in their field of expertise without appropriate collaboration and guidance from Indigenous experts.MethodWe explore the Indigenous rights-based approach (IRBA) as a means of decolonising research methodologies, focussing on the Australian context as a case study, where an Aboriginal Australian higher education expert has worked in a dyadic relationship with one Aboriginal and 16 non-Aboriginal subject experts to develop their knowledge, skills, and understanding of how to employ IBRA in their research. After working collaboratively, it became possible to analyse the similarities and differences in the use of IBRA across various fields of study.ResultsOur analysis reveals five key aspects that were revealed during the implementation of the Indigenous rights-based approach: (1) Indigenous People as Data, (2) Protocols of engagement, (3) Privileging Indigenous Knowledge Systems, (4) Community Benefit, and (5) Tackling Doctoral Research Training.DiscussionWe found that an Indigenous rights-based approach is crucial for decolonising research in settler colonial states such as Australia. Working in a dyadic partnership between an Indigenous higher education expert and academic researchers across several disciplines, we have seen an emergent approach to researching with Indigenous Peoples that allows non-Aboriginal researchers to work with Indigenous people in a manner that is ethical, relevant, and significant for Indigenous communities, contributing to place-based reconciliation and Indigenous community empowerment.ConclusionWe recommend how non-Indigenous researchers can collaborate with their universities to successfully implement an IRBA. Critically, this will require each university to employ Indigenous higher education experts who will lead and support professional development in research with non-Aboriginal people and communities. This will require a fundamental shift in how research is conceptualised, conducted, and disseminated.

Forced Labour and the System of Overburdening in the Interwar Middle Congo: Congolese Populations between Administrative Violence and Local Runaway Schemes, 1918–1948

Abstract Forced labour in the Middle Congo was characterized in the interwar period by, on the one hand, a declining role of the notorious French concession companies, and, on the other hand, the growing importance of forced recruitment and forced labour orchestrated by the colonial state. The article attempts to analyse and understand the overall setup of overburdening created by these conditions. Based on new French and Congolese archival resources, it discusses the effects of this overburdening, linking it to the responses shown by local populations, notably through flight and evasion. In a last step, the discussion focuses on the role of intermediaries and their impact on the violence that was locally experienced. The analysis includes a wider perspective into the changes and continuities during the years of World War II, and on the challenges for the forced labour system due to its official abolition in 1946 and the decline of clandestine practices of continuity until 1948.

“The Kimono and the Turban” Revisited: Charting Turkestan in Imperial Japan’s Muslim Policy

Abstract This article sheds light on a series of Xinjiang maps created by order of imperial Japan’s General Staff Headquarters in 1943. These maps, seventeen in all, offered panoramic views on Xinjiang’s topography, geological and meteorological conditions, ethnic composition, major cities, riverine systems, aviation ports, roads for motorized vehicles, wireless and postal systems, and various resources. Those maps invite the heretofore little-studied question of how Xinjiang figured in imperial Japan’s geostrategy. This article contextualizes imperial Japan’s heightened strategic interest in Xinjiang during World War II, particularly after the closure of the Burma Road, which paradoxically revitalized Chongqing’s Republican regime. These sources inform the argument that the place of Xinjiang in imperial Japan’s geostrategic thinking must be understood beyond the narrow lens of Sino-Japanese enmity. It warrants a world historical perspective. The article examines said maps and uncovers the multiplicity of Xinjiang’s toponyms and ethnonyms that encapsulated parallel and oftentimes contested temporalities. Tokyo’s attentiveness to ethnological understandings of the region’s indigenous populations reflects an aspiration to construct a political demography that tethered indigenous sovereignty to the authority of the colonial state, bypassing the domination of the Chinese Republic in Chongqing.

Apagamentos e Vestígios em Curitiba

This article takes as its starting point the investigation of the performance [escrevedor de histórias] carried out between 2016 and 2019, in the city of Curitiba and in six Remaining Quilombola Communities in Paraná, a period corresponding to a section of my own professional practice, to understand the place or non-place of Afro-diasporic narratives. Based on an autoethnographic analysis, the aim is to articulate Christina Sharpe's concept of “trace” and Saidiya Hartman's thinking, which addresses the limits of historical writing about characters who were victims of slavery. Based on sources that expose the absent presences of [story writer] and Anita Cardoso Neves, we aim – together with the bibliographic reference on the topic – to think about processes of subjectivation that constitute the creative processes of blackness and that are inserted as micropolitics in the face of the “official history” that governs the colonial status quo in the performing arts in the city of Curitiba.

Poetry, Politics, and Purity: The Khari Boli–Braj Bhasha Debate in Colonial North India

This paper explores the Khari Boli–Braj Bhasha debate in colonial North India as a pivotal episode in the politics of language, where literary choices were deeply intertwined with questions of cultural identity, communal affiliation, and linguistic nationalism. At its surface, the debate appeared to center on dialectal preferences in Hindi poetry—Braj Bhasha, the classical medium of devotional verse, versus Khari Boli, the emerging standard for modern prose. However, the controversy reflected deeper ideological anxieties, shaped by the broader Hindi–Urdu controversy and the colonial state’s role in codifying linguistic identities. Supporters of Braj Bhasha viewed the adoption of Khari Boli in poetry as a potential conduit for Urdu’s influence, which they saw as threatening the purity of Hindi and its Hindu cultural roots. In contrast, proponents of Khari Boli emphasized its accessibility, standardisation, and modern potential, viewing it as essential for the future growth of Hindi literature. The debate also invoked arguments around the division of poetic and prose registers, the shared linguistic heritage of Hindi dialects, and the perceived encroachment of Persian and Arabic lexicons through Urdu. Figures like Radha Charan Goswami, Shridhar Pathak, and Pratap Narayan Mishra framed these tensions in both cultural and communal terms. Ultimately, the Khari Boli–Braj Bhasha dispute was not merely about literary form but symbolized the contestation over Hindi’s identity and its autonomy from Urdu. It reveals how literary aesthetics became a vehicle for negotiating broader social, religious, and political concerns in colonial India’s linguistically charged environment.

On the Historiographical and Historical Displacement of Land

Abstract Standard accounts of South Asian developmentalism render invisible the very conditions that make it possible: the successive displacement of land, both historiographically and historically. The author argues that by the late nineteenth century, there was a critical shift in the epistemological paradigm through which colonial political economy viewed the potential for agrarian development. It was not land, but the intimate, personal, and laboring capacities of the peasant proprietor that was the real object of “improvement” in the grammar of development. The author points toward how credit was the financial logic through which “development” was sought to be put to work in service of maintaining an embattled Britain's hegemonic grip over imperially organized global capital. Indeed, the author's claim about land in this piece is part of a larger set of claims about the epistemological orientation of the late nineteenth-century colonial state. There is a history to be excavated between the structural conditions through which South Asia related as a financial project for Britain and its stewardship of the global economy: between the appearance that political problems took in policy and the epistemological coordinates of political economy in the calculus of governance.

Kala-azar and the contestations of its nomenclature

Abstract This review examines how the epidemic of kala-azar was recorded in the medical registers of Assam under various debated names, stirring the British colonial state to trace its origins and its identity. Inquiries were focused on establishing the origin and cause of this mysterious fever as also the associated “darkening of skin,” the latter possibly being emphasized with a view to shifting responsibility from the colonial state to the local environment and individuals residing in those regions. The government led research tended to attribute the fever to the “insalubrious” conditions, whereas the locals termed it as “sarkari bemari” or “governments disease” placing the onus on their masters.

Banking failure and regulatory reform on the periphery: The Kwong Yik Bank in the British Straits Settlements

The Kwong Yik Bank (KYB) was the first modern bank formed by the ethnic Chinese in colonial Singapore, the capital city of the British Straits Settlements. Founded in 1903, the bank was short-lived, collapsing in 1913 after operating for a decade. Its failure prompted the British colonial authorities to impose stricter regulations on the finance and business sectors. Drawing on a range of little-utilised primary sources in Singapore, this article demonstrates how stricter regulations were not imposed in a purely top-down approach. Rather, they emerged through debates and negotiations between the colonial state and representatives of corporate and banking interests, with racial and cultural considerations subtly shaping these processes. These findings contribute to business history by highlighting the complexity of the relationship between banking failure and regulatory reform in a colonial and multicultural context.

In the Name of Stability and Prosperity: Place Identity in Hong Kong and the Anti-Cultural Revolution Discourse in the KMT’s Popular Magazine

ABSTRACT The Cultural Revolution (CR) is often depicted as ‘the Other’ in Hong Kong’s identity formation during the 1960s and 1970s, with the main role being assigned to the benevolent colonial state, but this depiction overlooks the CR’s catalysation of local ideological conflicts between Left and Right newspapers. Situated in the tradition of studies on modern Chinese newspapers, this article scrutinises the interpretation of the CR in an unofficial KMT periodical, Popular Magazine (PM). It focuses on three salient events: the 1967 riots, China’s membership of the United Nations, and the New Leftist campaign ‘Learning about China, Caring about Society’. The KMT’s intellectual sources (e.g., the Three Principles of the People), the article shows, became comprehensible in light of PM’s own priorities as counterattacks on the local Left/New Left, consolidation of local Chinese identification, and resolution of colonial injustices. PM’s advocacy of pro-KMT national identification in the name of promoting a place identity based on ‘stability and prosperity’, as well as its anti-Communist mission, developed in a process of dialectical interaction with ‘the Other’ (i.e., the CR) while negotiating colonialism. This identity discourse compels us to rethink the pro-colonial and homogenous construction of identity discourse in Hong Kong.

“Until Indian Title Shall Be … Fairly Extinguished”: The Public Lands, Indigenous Erasure, and the Origins of Government Promotion of Infrastructure in the United States

Prior to the authorization of the Erie Canal in 1817, it was not taken for granted that governments should directly promote infrastructure projects such as roads, canals, and railways as a means of stimulating what is now called economic development. This article investigates infrastructure promotion in this early period to examine the origins of the American developmental state. It finds that legislators repeatedly called on the nation’s public lands as a costless and freely available resource—even in the face of legally recognized Native title—for infrastructure finance. Doing so allowed legislators to rely on assumptions of Indigenous erasure to mobilize the public lands as a politically light fiscal resource that reduced the perceived costs of government action. In making this argument, this article develops the concept of political lightness as a concept for diagnosing how public budgets can institutionalize power-laden cultural contexts in public policy, makes visible the processes of Indigenous dispossession and erasure constitutive of the fiscal calculus of the modern developmental state, and contributes to the theorization of the United States as a case of settler colonial state formation.

Mobility and Labour in the Colonial Prison, India c. 1820–70s

This article argues that incarceration in and outside prisons of colonial India represents an exercise in disciplined mobility. Practices of disciplined mobility during the nineteenth century were embedded in local responses to specific challenges of penal governance. They were also part of the colonial state’s pontificatory claims of introducing circulation and movement into the static, tabula rasa of India. At the same time, however, these strategies also ensured the difference between stated aims and modest returns of colonial prisons, producing an unsettled prison characterised by substantial porosity of power. Inside prisons, more granular forms of movement were used to inculcate industrial discipline, maintain jail economy, induce adherence to jail rules, and extract desired work outcomes. During the nineteenth century, prisons came to be situated along a circuit of individuals, information, diseases and commodities even as it became part of the larger post-abolitionary mobilisation of labour in the colony.

Subjects of Difference: Māori Petitions and the Late-Nineteenth Century Colonial State

ABSTRACT For nearly two hundred years since the annexation of New Zealand to the British empire, Māori have written thousands of petitions criticising the colonial and later national government. There has been surprisingly little analysis of this extensive archive of Indigenous petitioning in New Zealand. A close examination of petitions changes how historians understand relations between power and resistance in the colonial state and wider empire. This article focuses on one set of petitions written by prominent individuals and land-holding groups in the 1860s and 1870s. I argue that these examples of petitioning show how effectively and strategically Māori countered the narratives and assumptions of the colonial state in regard to central matters of concern to their communities: recent violent conflict and the confiscation and sale of land. In so doing, Māori petitioners laid the groundwork for later activism and their petitions have been revisited in more recent decades when the nation-state has sought to reckon with the colonial past. Rather than being assimilated into the late nineteenth-century colonial state, petitions demonstrate that Māori understood that they were different from settlers. Petitions show that Māori difference was shaped not only by how the state treated Indigenous subjects but also by how Indigenous peoples remembered what had happened differently.

Petitioning, Scandal, and Conspiracy in Early Colonial Calcutta: Rethinking the South Asian Context for the Impeachment of Warren Hastings

ABSTRACT Corruption scandals have long been viewed as crucial to the making of the British Empire in India in the late eighteenth century. But histories of these scandals have mainly focused on metropolitan British critics of the East India Company, most notably Edmund Burke’s diagnosis of root-and-branch corporate corruption in the parliamentary impeachment of Warren Hastings (1788–1795). Yet imperial scandals also grew out of the frenetic political culture of early colonial Calcutta, where petitions of complaint from Indian subjects including allegations of official corruption were a common feature of political and legal conflicts. This essay reexamines the petitionary culture of early colonial Calcutta to highlight the South Asian, Persianate context for British imperial corruption scandals. Under the surface of the Company’s official bureaucracy, Indian petitioners, and a small group of British and Indian petition-brokers, played a critical role in the political scandals that marked the governorship of Warren Hastings (1772–1785). Petitioners adapted Persian genres of political address, and Mughal imperial conceptions of official probity, to the new regulatory frameworks of colonial rule. Yet, as the article explores, ‘native’ petitioners were increasingly vulnerable to political and legal counter-attacks within the racialized power-structures an emergent colonial state.

Perception and ‘Salvation Government’ in 1940s Lagos Petitions

ABSTRACT In the 1940s ordinary citizens in Lagos had subjective perceptions of the colonial state. Their views about how the governing system was run was so personalised that they held on to the belief that the system had their interests at heart despite evidences to the contrary. Flawed as their positive feelings were, they contradicted their perceptions in such a way that their letters spoke of a system that was messianic and benevolent even when their efforts toward a better life did not receive the due attention from the authorities. They constructed, in their letters, what this paper presents as ‘salvation government’, given the religious undertone of the letters examined. This study shows that a positively subjective mind-set by everyday people characterised the petitions written to the offices of the colonial government and that their personal claims-making rewards close attention hermeneutically and phenomenologically. This study thus points to the need for such ‘oases’ of positivity in the midst of contradictory evidences of lifestyle in the period to be inserted in the historiography alongside the silences, the coded criticisms and disappointments with the colonial regime.

Island networks: Telecommunications in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the early twentieth century

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, British colonial discourse was marked by a concern with new forms of telecommunication (telephony and wireless) for maintaining the security of their far-flung possessions. Historically located in an area of intense commercial and social activity, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal became marginalised in the colonial narrative. Initially occupied for strategic reasons, the islands were used to incarcerate criminals and political prisoners after 1857. The desire to stay connected to the Indian mainland and the simultaneous need to maintain the isolation of the prisoner population made the islands a fertile ground for discussion over a secure system of communication. Telecommunications became the new tool to mitigate the fear and anxiety, both real and imagined, generated by this geography and its inhabitants. This article will analyse how geopolitics framed the establishment of communication lines in the region and how the information flows were monitored to maintain control. Since new technologies had the potential to disrupt old orders of information, censorship became as crucial as connection. The article will also look at how technology in turn challenged imperial hegemony and revealed the inconsistencies within the workings of the colonial state.

Colonial Prostitution in Burma: Inter-Asian Perspectives on Gender, Sex, and Sexuality

ABSTRACT Histories of prostitution in colonial Burma have long centered on the colonial discourse of the debauched “native” prostitute, borrowing from racial categories in British India that classified them as sexually promiscuous and ignorant. The myopia of colonial archives and the state’s limited knowledge of migrant communities have thus under-documented the presence of foreign Asian women and sources in Burma’s history of colonial prostitution. This article examines the significance of using inter-Asian sources to glean new perspectives on colonial prostitution, gender, and sexuality in Burma and its divergence from colonial tropes of native sexuality and prostitution over the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Chinese and Burmese sources differ from imperial interpretations of the conventional trope of the sexually free and promiscuous Southeast Asian women, offering a rare insight into how racialized populations dismissed by the colonial state viewed prostitution. As a starting point for more inclusive minority migrant histories, this article bridges conversations about sexuality, colonial prostitution, and Asian migration in Southeast Asia by looking at how the inclusion of inter-Asian voices complicated imperial aspirations to make race and sexual morality enforceable qualities across the British empire.

Under the Colonial Radar?

An expanding scholarship on interracial intimacy in colonial contexts has generally focused on cases of administrative disputes or judicial conflicts that brought “mixed couples,” “mixed-race families,” or “métis” to the attention of colonial authorities. But what of the lives and experiences of those who did not contest their legal status, remaining under the administrative radar and thus virtually invisible in the archives of the colonial state? This article tackles these issues in the context of the French colony of New Caledonia by analyzing the trajectory of a household established out of official sight, made up of a French settler, a Kanak woman, and their descendants. The goal here is to understand what this phenomenon of relative social invisibility reveals about the scope and limits of colonial domination “at ground level.” Combining ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, the article traces the conditions under which this family configuration was able to emerge and then endure for over fifty years. It finally disappeared after the death of the French settler, when each of the wider family groups—European and Kanak—to varying degrees sought to efface this awkward past within their respective social worlds.

Authoritarian Neoliberalism and the Repression of Protest and Dissent in Canada: The Wet’suwet’en Land Defense Movement & #ShutDownCanada

The Wet’suwet’en land defense movement and the allied #ShutDownCanada protests remain some of the most highly publicized anti-pipeline protest events of the last decade. This protest movement offers an insight into how Canada protects and reproduces its accumulation by resource extraction strategy. Situating this research within an observed global phenomenon of growing intolerance to protest and dissent in democratic contexts, I illuminate the ways through which opposition against extractive projects is repressed by the Canadian settler colonial state in the contemporary era of neoliberalism. Drawing on the political economy framework of “authoritarian neoliberalism,” I elucidate the legal, discursive, and coercive means through which extractive projects are insulated from public opposition. These means are repressing the democratic right to protest in Canada and indicate that Canada is no exception to a broader global deterioration of democracy under a political-economic system that is antagonistic to social solidarity and collective action. Moreover, these repressive strategies exacerbate the violent and dispossessive nature of Canada’s settler colonial extractive capitalism.

Seeking ‘permission to narrate’: Debunking the global media reporting of the Israeli War on Gaza and the Palestine exceptionalism

This article attempts to debunk the global media’s agenda-setting role in covering the war on Palestine since October 2023. It argues that the western media coverage has unveiled yet another level of bias, which amounts to complicity by fully embracing the Israeli narrative as a settler colonial state. Along various tech companies, growing evidence reveals that global media giants are responsible for the systematic censorship of pro-Palestine content while amplifying the Israeli narrative. By juxtaposing the Gaza war coverage with the media reporting of the war on Ukraine, this paper unveils a significant failure in fact-checking on the part of scores of European and American media outlets. It has become evident that such outlets have systematically become caught in a web of disinformation campaigns which aim primarily to deny the humanity of Palestinians’ lives along with their right to exist. Also, by drawing on patterns of reporting the war on Gaza and other Palestinian cities and villages under Israeli occupation, this paper argues that there exists a whole echo system of global media organizations, politicians and lobby groups who work together to create, sustain and consolidate a support system for the settler-colonial state. Missing in their coverage is a genuine critique of the ongoing Israeli genocidal policies condemned by international law against Palestinian people and by contrast an unwavering support of the Israeli narrative vis-à-vis this war.