Colonial State Research Articles

Other Radicals

This essay is an introduction to a special section that focuses on the life and work of Anton de Kom, and especially on his seminal 1934 Wij slaven van Suriname. It forms part of a larger project that explores how a Caribbean intellectual tradition can be thought differently if greater attention is paid to the Dutch Caribbean. The essays included in the section demonstrate the shifting role that De Kom and his book have played—from the 1930s and the anxieties they created for the colonial state; to their international impact on other revolutionary movements, such as in Cuba; to their current mobilization by numerous young people of Surinamese descent in the Netherlands as part of an antiracist activism and politics of belonging. Almost ninety years after Wij slaven was first published, it has become a bestseller and De Kom has been named to the Dutch national historical canon. As more than political activism, the guest editors examine Anton de Kom in this Small Axe platform for Caribbean thought with the hope that these essays will stimulate even more scholarship on De Kom’s life and work and on the Dutch Caribbean more broadly, beyond the borders of the Dutch-speaking context.

Tambach, Economic Change and Keiyo Struggle for the School, 1902-1939

The establishment of African Government School, Tambach in 1927, epitomised Keiyo and Marakwet struggle for what they considered a valuable asset to their society. Missionary enterprise had neither converted the two communities to Christianity nor created a school for them, as was the case in other parts of Kenya. Responsibility fell on the Local Native Council (LNC), which had become operational in 1925. The LNC wanted a secular education geared towards literacy for the Keiyo and Marakwet as opposed to the government and missionary type of education which was technical oriented and evangelical. While missionaries viewed western education as a vehicle for spreading the gospel, the colonial state demanded that African education meet the needs of the Uasin Gishu settler labour market. Both, however, were desperately handicapped by lack of resources and each Keiyo adult and Marakwet had to contribute two shillings each in the form of taxes to construct Tambach School. The colonial government reluctantly facilitated the infrastructural and curriculum development as part of their control and domination strategy. This essay builds on „the struggle for school‟ paradigm elaborated by John Anderson that Africans in Kenya played a major role in the early development and control of schools in Kenya. But for a start, such a history cannot be complete without a brief narrative of colonial economic change and of Tambach enclave as a hill station that was scenic and exotic, situated at mountain range of the picturesque Elgeyo escarpment.

To Counterfeit Is Death? Money, Print, and Punishment in the Early American Public Sphere

This article contributes to recent scholarship on early American money by exploring the role of print and the public sphere in making local paper currencies meaningful. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, elected assemblies and paper money advocates produced currencies, legislation, and discourse to incite belief in paper money and foster confidence in the fiscal promise that underpinned its value. With the spread of the press and the rise of counterfeiting, colonial governments and established printers turned monetary crime into a force of legitimation, distinguishing genuine monetary tokens from their fraudulent counterparts to authenticate "real" paper money. At a time when threats to the monetary system came less from counterfeiters than from political and economic factors, the authorities used the power of the press to legitimate paper as money and to demonstrate stewardship over the market relations paper money shaped. By the mid-eighteenth century, printers were putting variations of the phrase "To Counterfeit Is Death" on colonial currencies and detailing harsh punishments for counterfeiters in their newspapers, rendering colonial state power visible to abstract subjects. The political basis of paper money's value—the power of the purse—was in the process hidden from public view.

Grounding Wellness: Coloniality, Placeism, Land, and a Critique of “Social” Determinants of Indigenous Mental Health in the Canadian Context

Authored by a small team of settler and Indigenous researchers, all of whom are deeply involved in scholarship and activism interrogating ongoing processes of coloniality in lands now known to many as Canada, this paper critically examines "social" and grounded determinants of Indigenous mental health and wellness. After placing ourselves on the grounds from which we write, we begin by providing an overview of the social determinants of health (SDOH), a conceptual framework with deep roots in colonial Canada. Though important in pushing against biomedical framings of Indigenous health and wellness, we argue that the SDOH framework nevertheless risks re-entrenching deeply colonial ways of thinking about and providing health services for Indigenous people: SDOH, we suggest, do not ultimately reckon with ecological, environmental, place-based, or geographic determinants of health in colonial states that continue to occupy stolen land. These theoretical interrogations of SDOH provide an entry point to, first, an overview of Indigenous ways of understanding mental wellness as tethered to ecology and physical geography, and second, a collection of narrative articulations from across British Columbia: these sets of knowledge offer clear and unequivocal evidence, in the form of Indigenous voices and perspectives, about the direct link between land, place, and mental wellness (or a lack thereof). We conclude with suggestions for future research, policy, and health practice actions that move beyond the current SDOH model of Indigenous health to account for and address the grounded, land-based, and ecologically self-determining nature of Indigenous mental health and wellness.

Citizen, Subject, Human: For A Humanist Sociology at The End of The Eurocene

The history of humanism is intertwined with empire and racism. Many in sociology are aware of the significant contributions of Sylvia Wynter in our understanding of how modernity has shaped what it means to be human. ‘Man,’ Wynter argues, was never more that the European bourgeois man of the colonial world. Colonial conceptions of humanity have largely excluded ways of being and living that resist and refuse global empires. I argue that the differences between those who lived under state rule and those whose politics were illegible to European colonists became part of what we now think of as race. Colonists conflated the human with a certain kind of colonial subject, and later, the favored White citizen-subject and fellow colonist of an empire-state. In contemplating this journal’s title and mission for a humanist sociology, I argue that ‘society’ its 20th and 21st century articulations have often stood in for Man in the Wynterian sense. U.S. Sociology promoted ‘society’ as both an object of inquiry and a cognate for the colonial state. As such, sociology as the study of ‘society’ contained a specifically statist bent. Finally, this essay ends by offering examples of anticolonial humanist sociology that nurtures a more egalitarian genres of the human for the future.

Socionatures, Space, and Decolonisation: Amílcar Cabral's Praxis of Dialectics

AbstractThe agronomic writings of influential theorist and independence leader Amílcar Cabral contain a hitherto underappreciated dialectical approach that is environmental, nonreductive, spatialised, nonteleological, and anticolonial, with significance for geographies that are simultaneously critical, physical, Southern, Black, African, and decolonial. Cabral's interests in socionatures—and especially colonialism and the state—emerged from childhood in colonial Cabo Verde. His undergraduate thesis examines dialectics of soil erosion and agrarian structures in Portugal, amidst his politicisation and anti‐colonial networking. He developed his dialectical approach spatially as he conducted Guinea‐Bissau's agricultural census and advanced beyond methodological nationalism and evolutionary stagism by emphasising colonial connections (colonial state mechanisation and export crops in African agrarian systems). These insights and concerns shaped and were shaped by his work on warehouses, Angolan plantations, and broader post‐1960 liberation struggles to suggest that a rural guerrilla strategy was possible and necessary in Guinea through dialectical engagements with diverse peasantries and international support.

Imagining Frontier Spaces: The Frontier Tribal Areas in Imperial Defence in the Northeast of British India

This article concerns the northeast frontier of British India during the last years of British rule. It explores how the conundrums of the Second World War led to the reconfiguration of the northeast frontier as a strategic space in the empire’s geopolitics. This reconfiguration was pushed by contestation over the frontier spaces by different powers—threatened by the Japanese during the Second World War and, later, the possible post-war reification of Chinese and Tibetan expansionist policy towards India’s northeast frontier and the impending Indian independence. The colonial state’s strategic interest led the frontier officials to reimagine the northeast frontier, whereby the region and its local populations came to be regarded as integral to the preservation of the colonial state’s dominance.

The grey zones of antiquarian pursuits: The 1938 Barger expedition to the princely state of Swat

AbstractThis article discusses and analyses the Barger archaeological expedition of 1938 to the princely state of Swat. It argues that archaeology in princely, as well as in British, India did not originate and develop in a unilinear manner. This understanding is in line with the recent realization of variations in the historiography of native India. Given this, an attempt has been made to situate the Swat state in relation to British paramountcy. Miangul Abdul Wadud, the first British-recognized ruler of the state, was aware of colonial power relations and had a friendly attitude towards the British. He dealt with Swat’s archaeology with political and dynastic expediencies in mind. Since there was no proper legal and institutional dispensation in place in the area, the Frontier government officials and the political administration at Malakand treated the Barger expedition as a local matter, beyond the legal jurisdiction and disciplinary apparatuses of the colonial state. The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) and the related laws were, thus, kept out of the entire enterprise. All this ensured a smooth transfer of antiquities to England at a time when strong legal-institutional and ethical dimensions to archaeology were in place within British India and in some princely states.

Decolonial process tracing: Indigenous rights and pipeline resistance movements

This article explores how decolonial methodologies and Anishinaabe gkendaasowin (ways of knowing) can augment detailed narrative process tracing methodologies used to examine social and political processes. While detailed narrative is most frequently used as a tool of causal inference, focusing on the unfolding of a singular time, I see potential for it to be enriched by Indigenous legal traditions that emphasize epistemic diversity and multiple temporalities. Analyzing how Indigenous rights are leveraged in decision-making processes for the Line 9 and Line 3 pipelines, I show how a decolonial approach to process tracing (DPT) that centers Anishinaabe gkendaasowin can change both the actors and power relations involved. Recognizing that energy decision-making processes take place alongside, outside, and within colonial state institutions, and are embedded in the land as constellations of reciprocal kinship responsibilities, DPT opens space to examine two kinds of Indigenous rights: those acquired through struggle with state institutions, and those inherent to Indigenous communities’ attachment to place. DPT addresses the shortcomings of a focus on linearity by privileging inherent rights that are often excluded from detailed narrative process tracing. To take inherent rights seriously, one must also take more-than-linearity and more-than-humans seriously—and DPT is uniquely positioned to do this. The key features I propose for decolonial process tracing are grounded constellations, multiversality, and multitemporalities. Decolonizing methodologies and Anishinaabeg studies provide direction for more expansive, decolonial process tracing techniques which can in turn help understand the relationship between temporalities, law, and energy governance.

Hijra, trans, and the grids of “passing”

This paper examines the contestation about khwajasara corporeality—legal, medical and activist claims about the khwajasara body—and how it has been subjected to state projects of welfare and citizenship in South Asia. The khwajasara/hijra body was a suspicious and a transgressive body for the colonial state, but it has become a target of legal and medical forms of knowledge with the transformation of the “transgender” as a new subject of citizenship in South Asia. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the khwajasara community in Pakistan, this paper examines how new “grid[s] of intelligibility” (Butler, 2001: 629) informed by legal and medical forms of expertise mediate rights claims as well as fuel social imaginary about khwajasaras—making the body of khwajasara legible as a Gender X citizen while also providing a new political context to which khwajasaras diversely respond. My analysis suggests that the new “citational apparatus” (Mitra, 2020: 111) concerning khwajasara corporeality makes khwajasaras “deserving” subjects of state welfare and protection, but only through introducing new forms of welfare surveillance, mediated by legal and medical experts. The paper suggests that as an object of state intervention as well as a means to elude legibility and demand equality and rights, the body remains central to governmental projects of welfare, governance and citizenship.

The Truth Will Set You Free? The Promises and Pitfalls of Truth‐Telling for Indigenous Emancipation

First Nations in Australia are beginning to grapple with processes of treaty‐making with state governments and territories. As these processes gain momentum, truth‐telling has become a central tenet of imagining Indigenous emancipation and the possibility of transforming relationships between Indigenous and settler peoples. Truth, it is suggested, will enable changed ways of knowing what and who “Australia” is. These dynamics assume that truth‐telling will benefit all people, but will truth be enough to compel change and provide an emancipated future for Indigenous people? This article reports on Australian truth‐telling processes in Victoria, and draws on two sets of extant literature to understand the lessons and outcomes of international experience that provide crucial insights for these processes—that on truth‐telling commissions broadly, and that focusing specifically on a comparable settler colonial state process, the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The article presents a circumspect assessment of the possibilities for Indigenous emancipation that might emerge through truth‐telling from our perspective as a team of Indigenous and non‐Indigenous critical scholars. We first consider the normative approach that sees truth‐telling as a potentially flawed but worthwhile process imbued with possibility, able to contribute to rethinking and changing Indigenous–settler relations. We then consider the more critical views that see truth‐telling as rehabilitative of the settler colonial state and obscuring ongoing colonial injustices. Bringing this analysis into conversation with contemporary debate on truth‐telling in Australia, we advocate for the simultaneous adoption of both normative and critical perspectives to truth‐telling as a possible way forward for understanding the contradictions, opportunities, and tensions that truth‐telling implies.

Wage-Earning Slaves: Coartación in Nineteenth-Century Cuba

Wage-Earning Slaves: Coartación in Nineteenth-Century Cuba

Enlivening Gandhi and Sanitary Nationalism: Transmuting Health into Materialization of Swaraj

Health defines the nation—since the nineteenth century, the liberal democratic states in the West had been compulsive about the nation’s health, albeit, at the same time, they were much repulsive towards the health of the colonies, except the white enclaves where sanitary improvement was prioritized more than that of native towns. It was only after the germination of germ theory that colonial states took the health of the ‘colonized’ into account on a serious note. Nevertheless, these whirling ideas, debates, approaches and colonial encounters regarding health and hygiene shaped Gandhi’s perception on body, sanitation and nationalism. The Gandhian way of equating Swaraj with the cleanliness of mind, body and soul, i.e., ‘Constructive Programme’, was in contrast to the ‘Obstructive Programme’ like civil disobedience. To Gandhi, a nation could truly attain Swaraj by cleansing the self and the ‘others’. The bodies, previously ‘colonized’, were now ‘nationalized’ through the Constructive Programme and health directives. This article seeks to explore those Gandhian narratives on sanitation and health and the way in which the notion of Swaraj was enmeshed with the emerging health education.

The New Age of Andeans: Chronological Age, Indigenous Labor, and the Making of Spanish Colonial Rule

Abstract In the Andes from the beginning of the Spanish conquest, colonial administrators sought to develop efficient methods of labor extraction. The study of chronological age, Indigenous tribute, and censuses reveals an uncharted chapter of this process. This article explores how chronological age mediated the relationship between the colonial state and Andeans by creating the administrative status of tributary. Andeans adjusted their precolonial notions of aging to the concept of chronological age, which they associated with the tribute regime. During the government of Francisco de Toledo, ordinances and law relied on chronological age to standardize the time frame for tribute obligations among male Andeans as between 18 and 50 years old, and this standardization shaped Andeans' life experiences. By the late sixteenth century, previous censuses and baptism records helped to make the administrative registration of age increasingly precise. Chronological age thus emerges as a key category to study the rise of Spanish colonial rule. In doing so, this study also challenges the association between the bureaucratic use of chronological age for population control and contemporary forms of state making.

The Night Trains: Moving Mozambican Miners to and from South Africa, 1902–1955

The Night Trains: Moving Mozambican Miners to and from South Africa, 1902–1955

The Northern Ireland Conflict and Colonial Resonances

ABSTRACT Scholarly disagreements over the applicability of a colonial framework to Ireland’s relationship with Britain have neglected how political actors perceived or used ideas about colonialism and imperialism. This article argues that how such ideas resonated and were used in the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’ is as worthy of consideration as their validity. It examines how militant republicans conceived of Northern Ireland as having a colonial status and identified it as fitting into a broader pattern of decolonisation, seeking links with other anti-colonial forces outside Europe. It considers how a section of British politicians used the colonial framework to argue that British withdrawal was inevitable, viewing unionists as a settler community beyond the boundaries of Britishness. The dominant British discourse that opposed this framed self-determination differently, rejecting the utility of colonialism as an explanation of the dynamic of the conflict. When faced with charges of colonialism abroad, however, the rebuttal offered by those articulating this discourse had to be tailored to a suspicious international audience; the arguments available to British diplomats were narrowed by Britain’s colonial past. To overcome this, the unionist cause was omitted and select Irish voices within constitutional nationalism were promoted. Colonial analogies and comparisons shaped overall thinking on Northern Ireland, whether they were valid or not.

The Lettered Barriada: Workers, Archival Power, and the Politics of Knowledge in Puerto Rico

The Lettered Barriada: Workers, Archival Power, and the Politics of Knowledge in Puerto Rico

Introduction: African International Migration to the West: Insights from Canada, Australia and Nigeria

Introduction: African International Migration to the West: Insights from Canada, Australia and Nigeria

R. Scott Sheffield and Noah Riseman. Indigenous Peoples and the Second World War: The Politics, Experiences and Legacies of War in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Indigenous Peoples and the Second World War: The Politics, Experiences and Legacies of War in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, by historians R. Scott Sheffield and Noah Riseman, focuses on a detailed comparison of the military service and postwar developments of Indigenous peoples in four settler colonial states during World War II: Native Americans of the United States, First Nations Peoples of Canada, the Māori of New Zealand, and the Indigenous peoples of Australia and the Torres Strait Islands. While the Native men and women from these regions served in varied roles and theaters of the war, and had a wide variety of assignments and experiences, their larger experiences, before, during, and following the war were overall similar. Due to stereotypes of possessing natural martial or warrior abilities, members of each group were often placed in forward combat roles, resulting in their groups seeing disproportionate amounts of combat in relation to their numbers.

The (Re-)construction of Monuments in Germany: New Historical Narratives in a Time of Nation-building

In the slipstream of the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, there has been a global mobilisation around monuments and statues of famous figures involved in the slave trade and European colonial conquest. In former colonial states – such as France and Britain – and states shaped by the legacies of slavery – such as the United States – activists have defaced, damaged or torn down monuments associated with these contested pasts. This is hardly a novelty. The destruction of physical symbols is often a response to regime change. But, in this case, the mobilisation has taken a different form. Instead of legitimising a new regime and new elites, the destruction of monuments is part of a demand for justice from historically marginalised groups who are seeking to reclaim their heritage. The deconstruction of these monuments automatically entails the deconstruction of dominant national narratives that have contributed to such marginalisation.