Colonial State Research Articles

Intimacy, comradeship and everyday police violence: the rape of Sophie M. in German South West Africa in 1910

AbstractThis article asks whether and how gendered violence was part of the quotidian activity of state building in German South West Africa. Investigating the intimate space of a police compound, it gives a micro-historical account of how interracial sexual relations unfolded there, and how policemen’s private, intimate affairs were subject to close scrutiny by the colonial state. Rape – as distinctively masculine violence – posed a notably delicate problem to the legitimacy of the colonial state. The white masculine prerogative needed to be affirmed as the raison d’être of the colonial regime, but disorderly, unprofessional violence had to be controlled for the same reason. The case examined in this article was a rare moment in which an African woman attempted to take part in the discussion over the meaning of sex and violence. Ultimately, her articulation of what intimate, physical interactions meant to her was ignored. Instead, policemen articulated what masculine honour and comradeship meant to them. These discussions over what individual ‘honourable’ (including violent) behaviour implied were also always negotiations over the nature of colonial power and its programme.

‘Our stomachs are still hungry’: The colonial state, African nutrition and small grains in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), c.1950 to 1970s

By the early 1950s, farms and industries in Southern Rhodesia were reportedly experiencing increasing cases of malnutrition and poor physical health among African workers. Yet, notwithstanding these alarm calls, the government as well as most mining and commercial crop sectors of tobacco, maize, and cotton, were reluctant to acknowledge the crisis – let alone take action. The colonial state and employers alike avoided the additional expense of providing what was then understood as a decent diet for labourers, or wages that could ensure one. Thus, despite increasingly joining the waged labour force, Africans could not rely on employers – instead turning to the support net of African families. Relying on primary archival data, this paper uses the development of small grains – sorghum, millet and rapoko – to re-examine the story of African food and nutrition over three decades during the Federation and UDI years from the 1950s to 1970s. In telling this story, we show the contested social, economic and political impact that diets had on black and white society. We argue that African consumption of ‘traditional’ small grains was central to the social and economic survival of a workforce in crisis. We show how African ways of eating triumphed over the state’s notions of so-called ‘African traditional’ food and their economic ambitions behind controlling their diet.

The “New Woman” in the Periodical Press: Portraying Usefulness at St. Stephen’s Girls’ College in Hong Kong, 1921-1941

AbstractThis paper uses the writings of European teachers and Chinese students at St. Stephen’s Girls’ College in Hong Kong—published in English periodicals of its school magazine and local English newspapers—to examine how the school tactically positioned itself as an educational site for the “useful women of China” during a period in Republican China that was simultaneously defined as a time of “cosmopolitan modernity” and “national rebuilding.” St. Stephen’s brand of usefulness responded to the “New Woman” phenomenon in Republican China, and it was defined through the narrative of science learning and a sense of service. Through its progressive science curriculum and social service branch, the school helped prepare a class of “career women” for China. It was in educating this class that St. Stephen’s, in resonance with the colonial state, envisioned its role in the shaping of modern China.

Ethno-Cultural Associations as Shadow States: The Case of Ijebu Province in Western Nigeria, 1900-1960

Extant scholarly works on ethno-cultural associations (ECAs) have done little to provide a robust historical perspective on their roles in community development of British colonies in continental Africa. Thus, this paper is an attempt to fill the gap in the body of knowledge on ethno-cultural associations in colonial Africa with specific reference to Ijebu province in Western Nigeria. The study is aimed at providing a critical historical discourse on the social, economic and political roles of ethno-cultural associations in colonial Ijebu province of Western Nigeria. The study utilises primary and secondary sources. While archival materials and oral interviews provide the primary data in this discourse, books, journal articles and newspaper reports are explored as secondary data. The study found out that the efforts made by the ECAs through several strategies in colonial Ijebuland brought about meaningful development at the community level. We also found out that the ECAs represented indigenous organizational structures developed by the Ijebu people and functioned as community-wide forums for problem identification and prioritization, social and financial resource mobilization and development project implementation at the community level in colonial Ijebu province of Western Nigeria. The study concludes among other things that the ECAs were more or less shadow states and that their efforts must be seen against the background of the failure of the colonial state and the Ijebu Native Administration between 1900 and 1960.

Truth commissions in the established democracies of the Global North: Theoretical and practical perspectives

AbstractIn the wake of South Africa's truth‐telling experiment as part of its transition from apartheid to democracy, truth commissions have become one of the most utilized mechanisms for addressing past atrocities. While most truth commissions are established in countries undergoing “transition” to democratic governance or peace, increasingly, established democracies such as Canada, Norway, Sweden, and Finland have also undertaken such processes to address historical (and often, racial) injustices. The U.S. Department of State has denied the relevance of truth commissions to the United States for addressing its own history of racial injustice, however, the U.S. itself has been home to at least 13 official truth commissions (operating primarily at the state‐, county‐, and city‐level) and numerous unofficial truth‐telling processes emanating from civil society. In this article, I review literature on truth commissions with a focus on history and theorized importance, recent application to the more established democracies of the “Global North” and overall significance and limitations in terms of fostering racial justice and social transformation in what are primarily settler colonial states. I conclude by evaluating the state of this research area and by suggesting directions for future research.

Pacific transformations of the ‘Country of Babel’

Abstract The story of Babel has been used for centuries to prompt negative evaluations of linguistic diversity. It has been instrumentalised in debates about English, to attest linguistic purity and propagate the standard variety. In (post)colonial discourses, Babel came to project imperialist language ideologies and hierarchies onto new contexts. This paper demonstrates how Babel, as a recurring theme in debates on Hawai‘i Creole and Tok Pisin, has undergone transformation, having been employed in seemingly contradictory ways, variably used to legitimise or delegitimise the creoles. These competing, diametrically opposed lines of argumentation reflect different concepts of community and nation. Yet, as I propose here, Babel remains consistent in its core function: It serves as a topos, invoking ostensibly common knowledge about the dangers of (unmonitored) linguistic heterogenisation. Thus, regardless of its ideological force to challenge or maintain the (post)colonial status quo, it perpetuates a basic imperialist understanding of the nation as monolingual.

The Role of the Colonial State in the Spread and Strengthening of Christianity in Colonial Tanganyika, Circa 1890–1961

Abstract This paper makes an essential contribution by arguing that shifts in German colonial educational policy, which continued under British control, consistently favoured the spread of Christianity over Islam in Tanganyika. The paper also looks at how the two colonial powers used Article 6 of the Berlin Act 1884–1885, Article 438 of the Versailles Treaty, and Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant, as well as Command Paper No. 2374 of I925 that emphasised the protection of Christian missionaries and the provision of education by missionaries across British colonies in Africa. The aforementioned articles established colonial state-missionary partnerships and provided security to missionaries. The colonial authority’s protection of missionaries was essential to investing in the education sector, which became a centre for the spread of Christianity in the country. As a result, the spread of Christianity throughout the territory accelerated. The paper relies heavily on secondary and primary sources for this analysis.

Caste Prejudice, Colonial Education in Kumaon: Dynamics of Depressed Class Education, 1881–1947

From the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the East India Company slowly acquired the area which is now called Uttar Pradesh. Territories were acquired from different powers by the company were initially kept under Bengal Province. However, in 1833 these, areas were separated and a new province called North-Western Provinces was created. Again, after the annexation of Oudh, this province came to be called in 1877 as North-Western Provinces. The United Provinces of Agra and Oudh was changed to United Provinces in 1902 which later became present Uttar Pradesh. Colonial rule wanted to control the knowledge systems of the colonized. The epistemology and knowledge systems produced by the colonial state sought to create the feeling of interiority among the colonized people. Education is one such area through which the colonial state wanted to justify their rule. The British argued that Indians were inferior and justified their monopoly of all higher posts. They, further, pointed out that untouchability, rigid caste system are some of the reasons for inferiority. In this article, I would like to discuss the colonial state policy towards education of lower castes and depressed classes in Kumaon division of United Provinces of British India. I argue that although the British professed that it wanted to educate all people, yet in practice the colonial state gave in to the caste prejudices of the society and also because of its own ambivalent policy towards depressed classes. Doms constitute majority of Dalit community in Kumaon division of United Provinces from whom Shilpakar community emerged gradually.

Affixing the Nomads: Revisiting Marx’s Theory of “So-Called Primitive Accumulation” with a Deleuzo-Guattarian-Inspired Theory of the Colonial State

This essay tests Karl Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation on nomadic and seminomadic populations. Drawing on a comparative historical-sociological analysis of nomadic communities in North Africa and North America, it argues that in primitive accumulation, the control of mobility is as central as that of land enclosure. It theorizes the role of the colonial state as an apparatus of capture that operates not only through enclosure but through processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. For the colonized, this historical and continuous process of primitive accumulation operates through a double enclosure: land and mobility. For the empire, this process consolidates imperialism and statehood. Primitive accumulation deployed by a colonial state is empire making. This essay thus agrees with indigenous and critical scholars about the race-making function of primitive accumulation and provides a theoretical foundation regarding the primitive accumulation of mobility relevant to—but occulted by—the field of the sociology of migration.

Encomienda, the Colonial State, and Long-Run Development in Colombia

Encomienda, the Colonial State, and Long-Run Development in Colombia

Образ Еревана в контексте постколониального дискурса в повести Юрия Карабчиевского «Тоска по Армении»

Armenia has been incorporated into Russia or under its “protectorate” for two centuries. Throughout this period, a substantial body of texts about Armenia has emerged in prose and poetry, highlighting the distinctive “Armenian text” as a metatext with In Russian literature. However, Yuri Karabchievsky’s novella “Longing for Armenia” (1978), which could not be published in Russia until the times of Perestroika, is considered the first work to explore Armenia's colonial status and contain key motifs of post-colonial text: loss of territories, loss of history and culture, language, etc. The impact of Armenization is evident, notably in the capital city, Yerevan, portrayed as a space marked by impermanence, foreignness, contradiction, and negligence. An analysis of the novella’s central themes, characters, thoughts, and emotions related to Yerevan leads to the conclusion that Yerevan is inherently “non-Armenian,” bearing a profound colonial imprint in organizational structure and spatial symbolism, primarily in its architectural aspect. Furthermore, this article places significant emphasis on Soviet symbols and presence in Yerevan, as well as the role of the Armenian language in the city’s culture and space. Yerevan emerges as a city harboring a melancholy for a lost and estranged ancient past, whose specifics remain elusive, partly due to the suppression of the language of that past. It also yearns for a present and future in which Armenia has not forfeited its culture and history. Despite Yerevan’s failure to conform to the status of the capital of an ancient nation, the changes occurring in the city during the protagonist's lifetime in Karabchievsky’s novella offer hope for the revival of such a Yerevan and Armenia – longed for by the novella’s main characters and cherished by many.

Race, gender and corporeal resistance: reading settler territory through the scale of the body

The spatial architecture of settler colonialism in Africa has been subject to ample research, in geography and beyond. This paper offers an alternative reading of colonial settler territory at the scale of the body, showing how myriad colonial boundaries were displaced onto people’s bodies, and naturalized, negated and negotiated through bodily practice, performance and movement. Using Northern Rhodesia/Zambia as a case, my argument is organized around three sites of colonial spatial power: the ‘proper village’, the tribal ‘homeland’ and the colonial township. The analysis builds on historical literatures, archival research and ethnographic work to show how the construction of each of these spaces (territories) was contingent upon the making of African bodies as objects and subjects of colonial imaginary. Bodies – chiefs’ bodies, ‘ghost-like’ bodies, dirty bodies, unmanly bodies, malnourished bodies, reproductive bodies – became important bearers of symbolic value, subjected to racial and sexual regimes and power relations, all of which became sites of territorial inscription through which the construction and contestations of the colonial state and its territorial boundaries took place. The analysis makes visible the political work performed by these bodies, how their movement engendered administrative anxiety and became critical sites around which race, gender and territory were constructed and contested in intimate relation to each other. Through this conceptualization, the paper moves forward debates in geography on territory, showing how territory is not external to the body, not simply bodily experienced, but extend onto and out from the body as a critical site of subjugation and anticolonial resistance.

The Makings and Meanings of Childhood: Parents and the Juvenile Justice System in Interwar Palestine

Abstract: Over the thirty years of the British Mandatory government in Palestine, thousands of young people were arrested and tried as juvenile delinquents. This article explores how the parents and families of those "young offenders" confronted the logics of the colonial criminal justice system and argued for their own understandings of the law and their children's places in Palestine's social and political landscape. Studying parental petitions to the government reveals that different groups made fragmented and multidirectional claims on the category of childhood. This article argues that in interwar Palestine, childhood was the political capital through which colonial power was both constructed and contested. In doing so, this article also illuminates the roles that ordinary families and communities played in daily governance in a twentieth-century developmentalist colonial state.

The politics of commerce in eighteenth-century Bengal: A reappraisal

This article broaches a simple question: Was there a politics of commerce within Bengali society in the eighteenth century, or was such politics limited to disputes between the British East India Company (EIC) and the Bengal nawabs? I begin by discussing the literature on markets in eighteenth-century Bengal and argue that the relationship between commerce and politics has been too narrowly defined in this body of work. A one-sided focus on determining the impact of the early colonial state, coupled with an uncritical acceptance of Peter Marshall’s Namierite story about the origins of the British empire, has led historians to downplay ideological conflicts within the EIC and British society. To show why these divisions matter, I build on the recent work of James Vaughn and Spencer Leonard, who have shown that between 1750 and 1770, political and ideological conflicts in both Britain and Bengal had far-reaching effects on the character of the British empire. Through an extended discussion of a dispute over market access in 1778 in the city of Calcutta, I show that petty merchants and shopkeepers often opposed arbitrary impositions by regional elites. To fully understand the motivations behind such challenges, I argue that we need to seriously consider divisions within Bengali society as well: namely, the reproduction of caste hierarchies through differential access to markets (and land).

The Influence of Mughal Law on the Creation of the British Colonial State in India

The Influence of Mughal Law on the Creation of the British Colonial State in India

Grand Narratives of Transition and the Quest for Democratic Constitutionalism in India and South Africa

There are currently two contrasting ways of narrating the Indian and South African constitutional transitions. The first contends that they were moments when liberal constitutionalism was adapted to the circumstances of the Global South. In contrast to what happened in many other post-colonial countries, this narrative goes, constitution-making in both India and South Africa was driven by a broadly representative liberation movement that had endeavoured to catch the colonial state in the contradiction between its claimed ‘civilising mission’ and the reality of its oppressive operation. At independence, the Congress party in India and the African National Congress in South Africa expressed this conception of the anti-colonial struggle in constitutions that repurposed liberal constitutionalism to the challenges of post-colonial governance. In so doing, they not only pluralised that approach to governance beyond the West. They developed it in ways that are relevant to the revival of liberal constitutionalism in the Global North. The second narrative, detectable in recent work in decolonial theory, but also in an older tradition of culturalist critique in each country, rejects this account of liberal constitutionalism’s already-achieved de-Westernisation. Far from demonstrating the universalisability of liberal constitutionalism’s animating principles, adherents of this second narrative maintain, the Indian and South African Constitutions simply reflect the values of the Westernised political elite that adopted them. As such, they prolong the colonial past into the colonial present and perpetuate the suppression of indigenous lifeways that began under colonial rule. After setting out these two narratives as they apply to each country, this paper brings them into dialogue with each other. Rather than offering a purportedly neutral framework by which to assess them, each narrative is treated as the other’s most demanding interlocutor, alert to its blind spots and convenient omissions. Proceeding in this way, the paper contends that, notwithstanding their many differences, the two narratives – charitably interpreted – are committed to the same ideal: a distinctively Southern conception of constitutionalism that gives the post-colonial state a central role in overcoming past injustices and creating the conditions for active citizenship. The final section of the paper examines the suggestions that adherents of the charitable version of each narrative make about how to realise this ideal in India and South Africa. The problem with the second narrative, the decolonial/culturalist story, is that its adherents’ call for fundamental constitutional overhaul tends to be lacking in detail and also in attentiveness to the political context in which such a call would be implemented. One very real challenge for adherents of the charitable version of this narrative is the risk that any new constitution-making process might be dominated by political actors with an exclusionary conception of the relevant national people. The first narrative, the ‘liberal constitutionalism already de-Westernised’ story, points in the direction of incremental adjustment rather than complete constitutional overhaul. While absolving its adherents of the need to design things afresh, this does not mean they have an easier run of things. Indeed, if anything, the demands on them are higher given the evident failure of the Indian and South African Constitutions thus far to realise their ambitions.

In Citizenship We Trust? The Citizenship Question Need Not Impede Puerto Rican Decolonization

Puerto Rico is an uncomfortable reminder of the democratic deficits within the world’s oldest constitutional democracy. Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens who live in a U.S. territory that is subject to the plenary authority of Congress, to which they cannot elect voting members. In 2022, under unified Democratic control for the first time in a decade, Congress considered the Puerto Rico Status Act, legislation that would finally decolonize Puerto Rico. The Status Act offered Puerto Rican voters three alternatives to the colonial status quo—statehood, independence, or sovereignty in free association—and committed Congress to implementing whichever alternative won majority support from Puerto Rican voters. The Status Act sought to define how any change in status would affect Puerto Ricans’ access to U.S. citizenship. The Status Act proposed that all Puerto Ricans would retain their U.S. citizenship if Puerto Rico became independent or entered free association but included special restrictions that would limit Puerto Ricans’ ability to pass on their U.S. citizenship to children born after a change in status. While this Note appreciates the Status Act’s efforts to decolonize Puerto Rico, it argues that the Status Act erred in proposing this specialized regime for citizenship claims. Instead, it contends that the existing derivative citizenship framework would better regulate citizenship for Puerto Rican U.S. citizens born after a change in status. Although the Status Act died in the Senate, it represents a new and influential formula for decolonizing Puerto Rico. Future proponents of status reform should draw on the existing derivative citizenship law because it offers clearer provisions that can better ensure a large number of Puerto Ricans may rely on U.S. citizenship—a benefit Puerto Ricans themselves clearly value—even after a change in status.

Canadian Law Between the Wars

Examined through a legal prism, Canada is an officially bilingual federal state with a bi-juridical legal system based, for the most part, on the traditions of British common law as it has evolved over the years. But in Quebec, the private law is civil law, contained in a Civil Code, derived from the laws established in what was New France. Canadian public law is essentially British. The current Head of State is King Charles III, Head of the Commonwealth. Canada’s constitution sets forth, inter alia, the jurisdictional competence of the federal government and that of the provinces and territories. Over the course of the more than 150 years since Confederation, the respective governments have engaged in much litigation, testing the limits of their respective legislative powers. Beginning in the early years of the twentieth century, an increasing volume of legislation developed as Canada progressed from its colonial status to a fully autonomous state with full control of both its domestic and foreign affairs. The scope and volume of legislation increased substantially in the lead-up to the Second World War (and thereafter) as governments, in their respective spheres, sought to create a legal environment that was attentive to a broader range of social issues. The existence of a federal state complicated the development and enactment of policies that produce the same outcomes throughout the country, since the constitution confers legislative jurisdiction on the provinces regarding property and civil rights. Much effort is expended in intergovernmental negotiations, leading to achievement of substantially harmonised results.

A Benign Empire?

This article analyses how nineteenth-century Dutch colonial officials in the Moluccas repeatedly instrumentalised abolitionist rhetoric to increase the legitimacy of the colonial State. It first demonstrates how these officials used the ban on the slave trade in 1814 to present themselves as adhering to an enlightened colonial philosophy. This allowed them to distance the newly established colonial State from the legacies of the Dutch East India Company, which had violently ruled over the Moluccas from the middle of the seventeenth century up to the end of the eighteenth century. The second part of this article shows how Dutch officials used the abolition of slavery in the Dutch East Indies in 1860 to both paint themselves in a favourable light and to increase their territorial claims in Papua, a region that had been subject to the authority of the Sultan of Tidore for centuries.

“Never Settler Enough”

In this article, the authors examine the systemic nature of state violence and racial terror in the context of the Australian settler state and Indigenous deaths in custody. Drawing on Steve Martinot and Jared Sexton’s (2003) concept of a “double economy of terror,” the authors contend that police violence and Aboriginal deaths in custody must be read in terms of the standard operating procedures of a double economy of terror that ensures the institutional reproduction of the Australian settler colonial state. Death in police custody, Perera and Pugliese argue, is coextensive with the larger governmental and administrative apparatuses of the colonial state. In the face of the settler state’s systemic ignorability of the ongoing racialized violence against Indigenous peoples, the authors conclude their paper opposing such a state with an Indigenous voice that refuses tacit acquiescence and that howls with rage at the mounting Aboriginal deaths in custody and rates of Indigenous imprisonment.