Colonial State Research Articles

The Search for Spices and Souls: Catholic Missions as Colonial State in the Philippines

A growing literature posits that colonial Christian missions brought schooling to the colonies, improving human capital in ways that persist to this day. But in some places, they did much more. This paper argues that colonial Catholic missions in the Philippines functioned as state-builders, establishing law and order and building fiscal and infrastructural capacities in territories they controlled. The mission-as-state was the result of a bargain between the Catholic missions and the Spanish colonial government: missionaries converted the population and engaged in state-building, whereas the colonial government reaped the benefits of state expansion while staying in the capital. Exposure to these Catholic missions-as-state then led to long-run improvements in state capacity and development. I find that municipalities that had a Catholic mission have higher levels of state capacity and development today. A variety of mechanisms—religious competition, education, urbanization, and structural transformation—explain these results.

Settler Colonial Socialization in Public Sector Work: Moving from Privilege to Complicity

In this piece, we ask, what are the risks of a pedagogy and politics that begins and ends with privilege? What does it mean to declare privilege when embedded in institutions of the settler colonial state? These questions are raised through an ongoing project where we interview provincial public sector workers on Treaty 6, 7 and 8 (Alberta, Canada) and Coast Salish Territories (British Columbia, Canada) about their implications in settler colonialism through public sector work. In the project, we articulate the interdisciplinary framework of settler colonial socialization to consider the space between individuals and structures – the meso-space where settlers are made by learning how to take up the work of settler colonialism. For these reasons, in our research we ask, “what do the pedagogical processes of settler colonial socialization tell us about how systemic colonial violence is sustained, and how it might be disrupted or refused in public sector work?” In this paper, we narrow our focus to the declarations of privilege that many of our interview participants are making. We reflect on these declarations and consider whether focusing on settler complicity and Indigenous refusals can better support a decolonial politics for settlers working in the public sector. We argue that declarations of privilege risk reproducing settler-centric logics that maintain settler colonialism, settler jurisdiction, and settler certainty, and we reflect on how to orient participants (and ourselves) towards the material realization of relational accountability and towards imagining otherwise.

Town Talk: enhancing the ‘eyes and ears’ of the colonial state in British Hong Kong, 1950s–1975

Abstract This article offers a longer perspective on the origins and effectiveness of reforms of colonial governance in Hong Kong. It shows that the colonial state shifted from increasingly ineffective indirect rule to using a covert bureaucratic opinion poll, Town Talk, to assess public opinion. The article argues that this bureaucratic device increased the organizational capacity of the colonial state and, in so doing, enabled a constructed form of ‘public opinion’ to influence policy formulation in a state-controlled manner without democratization. This mechanism was used as an imperfect substitute for representative democracy. These reforms enhanced a ‘non-political’ sense of citizenship among the Hong Kong Chinese but failed to bridge a communication gap between an unelected government and the people over whom it ruled.

Migrant Memory, Movement, and Misrecognition: Reactivating Diasporic Experience Toward an Anticolonial Politics of Place

How might diasporic experiences of loss and displacement aid immigrants in responding to and acknowledging Indigenous lands and territories? Drawing from my own immigrant experience, I retrace and reinvent my movement in Tkaronto through walking practices that recover memories of migrancy as a newcomer to the land known as Canada. Such memories can be useful sources for immigrants to consider their relationship to settler colonialism. Reactivating them through movement might elicit a new responsiveness to the land as well as recognition of its caretakers and their struggles. I reflect on the possibilities that such a practice of walking and thinking through embodied memories can open up for undoing the coloniality of thought that underpins migrant aspirations for “a better-than-survival kind of living” (Berlant) and that so often results in assimilation to, and participation in, a settler colonial state.

“Relationships are reality”: centering relationality to investigate land, indigeneity, blackness, and futurity

This paper proposes that the paradigm of relationality, engaged methodologically, can be the basis of praxis that purposefully moves away from business-oriented notions of “best practices” and toward education research that meets the needs of Indigenous and Black communities currently designing futures within settler colonial states during climate catastrophe. In so doing, the paper considers what a critical Indigenous research paradigm requires of researchers, what a critical Black epistemology requires, and what we can learn by bringing the two together in a relational approach to qualitative research. Relationality is defined and placed in historical context. The author’s positionality is engaged by exploring his relationship to relationality through examination of the confluence of Black and Indigenous epistemologies in the United States. Through auto-reflection on a qualitative study of land-based education, this paper analyzes research “openings” as an example of relational methodology praxis. The paper offers a critical analysis of specific, detailed methodological actions undertaken to practice relationality in order to create cracks in existing educational research methodologies through which relationality can take root.

Warriors, pacifists and empires: race and racism in international thought before 1914

Abstract Before 1914 scholars of international thought frequently relied on racist arguments, yet the ways that race was used varied widely from author to author. This article charts the way that race was used by two groups of Anglophone writers. The warriors used biological arguments to construct views of international affairs that relied on racist analysis. Pacifists might have used racist language that relied more on cultural prejudices, and would often base their more progressive views of international affairs on the idea of a civilizing mission. Using A. T. Mahan and Brooks Adams as exemplars of the warrior approach, and Norman Angell and H. N. Brailsford for the pacifists, I argue that race and racism play an important part in international thought before the First World War. This racism was directed at the colonized in the global South, Indigenous peoples in settler colonial states, and Jews in the global North. This use of race and racism in pre-First World War international thought has implications for how we view the development of International Relations today. It is not just statues and stately homes that require a thorough reassessment of attitudes to race, but also our understanding of the progression of ideas in international thought.

Fleet-footed Performers at the Edges of Colonial Law: Jack Johnson, Maud Allan and the Struggles of Cinema Censorship in British India

ABSTRACT This article explores the archival entanglements that brought together world-champion boxer Jack Johnson and world-famous dancer Maud Allan, with the legal and political history of cinema censorship in early twentieth century British India. Focusing on the battles waged to prevent these performers being viewed by Indian audiences, these episodes are situated within the wider context of developments in technology, economy and law in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Both famous stars in their own right, their expansive transnational reach presented a particular set of problems for colonial administrators tasked with managing the precarious relationship between race, gender and the imperial political order. Indicative of much more than exceptional moments, this article argues that these incidents were symptomatic of a series of changes within and beyond the British Empire which were pressuring the colonial state to reconsider the suitability of a legal architecture constructed for a nineteenth century world, and to imagine one that could meet the challenges of the twentieth century. As the article argues, the difficulties faced managing these two performances would expose the limits of the colonial state’s legal apparatus at this juncture, as well as the scope of its political imagination. When colonial lawmakers turned their hand to the radically novel challenge of the cinema, neither would be easily overcome.

Solitary confinement and health and other life course outcomes for convict women

Many studies have linked sensory deprivation punishments to elevated risk of suicide and other immediate poor health outcomes, although there have been comparatively few examinations of the potential medium- and long-term impacts of being placed in a solitary cell. This article seeks to fill that gap by exploring the effects that the experience of solitary confinement and separate treatment had on the life courses of female convicts transported to Van Diemen’s Land in the period 1803–1853. As a result of recent community-based digitisation initiatives, it is possible to reconstruct female convict life courses in a way that identifies the number of sensory deprivation episodes each woman experienced and the duration of each punishment. A date and cause of death are available for nearly half of all female convicts. The article uses this information to explore the ways in which the coercive actions of the colonial state may or may not have affected long-term health outcomes. It also examines the influence of different punishment regimes on family formation, shedding light on the powerful and previously under-appreciated ways in which the policing of convicts influenced the colonial birth rate.

Preserving the Resources: Plantations and Mines Workers’ Hygiene

This article examines the role of physicians in the colonial state of the Dutch East Indies in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, especially in Sumatra. Being assigned mainly for assuring the health of the Europeans in the colony, their task expanded as they also had to maintain the health of the plantations and mines workers. This additional duty was crucial to ensure the workers’ productivity which eventually resulted in economic benefits for the colonial state. The cultivation system (sistem tanam paksa) resulted in a high rate of mortality among workforce. Doctor Willem Bosch expressed his concern by criticizing the colonial government and later suggesting for a healthcare system that would reduce the death rate in the colony. When large plantations were opened as a result of the implementation of liberal politics, attention to workers’ conditions increased, although not entirely thorough, to ensure a healthier population as the main driving force for businesses. In many cases, however, these workers experienced awful treatments, including from the plantation doctors themselves. Using European physicians’ reports, this article discusses their views on workers’ health issues concerning the political economy of the colonial state.

Dirty Subjects

In the early 1900s in the settler colonial states in Southern Africa, the nascent Jewish community institutions took actions to avoid the racialised accusation of dirtiness, thus shaping the community into adopting white colonialist subjectivities. Using Albert Memmi’s analytic framework of colonisers and colonialists, and Anne McClintock’s conceptualisation of the racial function of dirt, this article reassesses existing archival sources through the lens of dirty bodies, dirty sex, and dirty work to show how communal subjectivities were formed through close collusion with the colonial state and the internal enforcing of the social habits of Whiteness. This article argues that this colonial subject formation foreclosed the possibilities of a peruvnik: a potential South African anticolonial Jewish barbarism.

Constructive Extraction? Encomienda, the Colonial State, and Development in Colombia

Constructive Extraction? Encomienda, the Colonial State, and Development in Colombia

The Apache Diaspora: Four Centuries of Displacement and Survival by Paul Conrad

Reviewed by: The Apache Diaspora: Four Centuries of Displacement and Survival by Paul Conrad Kiara M. Vigil (bio) The Apache Diaspora: Four Centuries of Displacement and Survival paul conrad University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021 366 pp. Paul Conrad's ambitious and powerful work The Apache Diaspora: Four Centuries of Displacement and Survival offers historians and Native American and Indigenous Studies scholars in-depth discussions and analyses of "apacheness"—the various identities through which Native people, while living in diasporic relation to their Indigenous homelands, both defined themselves and contended with the ways they were being defined by [End Page 616] the colonial states of Mexico and the United States. As the title notes, this is a sweeping work covering four hundred years of history in order to highlight pre- as well as post-conquest experiences of Apache life in regard to captivity, mobility, and colonization. The chronological range of this work enables Conrad to contend with both Spanish and Euro-American efforts at colonization and the shifting geopolitical and cultural spaces of the USMexico borderlands. Although this work is clearly for historians of Native America and Indigenous Studies, its geographical reach will also make it of interest to scholars working in Latin American history and LatinX Studies. Given Conrad's ability to focus on the life stories and experiences of specific individuals and groups, the book will be of great interest to scholars working in American literature, as will his adept use of diaspora as both a theoretical framing device and lived-experience. Centering "diaspora" in these ways enables Conrad to add new dimensions to Native American and Indigenous Studies approaches and will also interest scholars from African American Studies, literary studies, and American Studies. Similarly, by focusing on experiences of Apache peoples in terms of mobility and also enslavement and other experiences of life in exile, there are ample opportunities for scholars working at the intersection of Afro-Native Studies to consult Conrad's work for Indigenous-centered responses to these ways of being and knowing in the world that might further enhance that growing field. Conrad's book opens with a specific example built around the story of Sam Kenoi, who had been taken prisoner by the United States at the age of eleven, when he was sent to attend the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania in 1898, a critical moment for many of his Apache kin who were experiencing life as prisoners of war, living in exile in Florida, Alabama, and later Oklahoma after being taken from their homes in Arizona. Kenoi's life in exile, his first time being exposed to the conditions of diaspora, was full of "tragedy and triumph," Conrad notes, as the settler state promised him a better life through the attainment of industrial skills and an education that would assimilate him into American culture and society, even if he had to leave all traces of his Native identity behind (1). As many scholars of Native history have pointed out, this period of assimilation and allotment marks the end of violent resistance by Native people to settler colonialism. In many ways it also represents a period of growth in the colonial state's infrastructure and reach, as the Indian Office (which would [End Page 617] later become the Bureau of Indian Affairs) created new ways to confine and limit the power of its Indigenous wards. Mobility, then—for all Native people, including those the state called "Apache"—became a new site of resistance and survival. Kenoi's particular story, Conrad asserts, points us to a broader portrait of Apache life and death across North America and the Caribbean. "As Kenoi knew so well, the history of colonialism for Native people was one of pain and loss, slavery and dispossession, but it was also a history of resistance, adaptation, and return. These fantastic and terrible stories are Apache history, Native history, all of our histories" (13). Drawing on the poetry of Joy Harjo, Conrad reminds readers of the core themes of American Indian history: "rootedness and displacement, pain and laughter, a seemingly impossible but true survival" (2). Conrad uses these themes to expand on the example of Kenoi's life, arguing that his...

Opiates, Labor, and the US Colonial Project in the Philippines, 1898–1908

During late Spanish colonization of the Philippines, there was a strict but legal opium monopoly in place, catering solely to the Philippines’ Chinese inhabitants. Purveyors of recreational narcotics were thus considered a valid entrepreneurial sector of the colonial economy. By the time of the American conquest, recreational opium sales and consumption were considered inherent to the Chinese community by American and Filipinos alike. The success of the American colonial experiment there was framed as contingent upon stamping out opium distribution and consumption before it could spread to the Indigenous Filipino population. The colonial state viewed this course of action as necessary not only from a Protestant American religious perspective to safeguard the morality of Filipinos but also to preserve their economic productivity as a colonial workforce. After an initial tariff on opium imports and a proposal to reinstate the monopoly system, the United States permanently rejected generating colonial revenue from opium sales in favor of an unprecedented prohibition of recreational opiates. The colonial state sought to enforce this prohibition by eradicating opium from the bodies of consumers—initially through medical means—and finally through incarceration to isolate drug consumers from the general population and, most importantly, from the colonial labor force.

Introduction

Introduction Karin Pallaver (bio) and Filipa Ribeiro da Silva (bio) KEYWORDS gender, women, labor, production, business This special issue aims to examine the participation of women in the economy of several sub-Saharan African countries by looking into multiple forms of female labor in a historical and comparative perspective.1 To do so, the authors make reference and apply the methodological approach that has been developed by the "Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations (1500–2000)," under the initiative of the International Institute of Social History (hereafter IISH) in Amsterdam.2 The history of labor in Africa became central in the field of African Studies after independence.3 Being strongly influenced by Marxist theory, the studies of the 1960s and 1970s focused on class formation and proletarianization and showed how a waged labor force developed during the colonial period and became stabilized from the 1940s onwards. This scholarship was particularly attentive to local African perspectives and experiences,4 and stressed the role of African wage laborers in independence movements, shedding light on the initiatives they developed under the power structures imposed by colonial rule.5 In this scholarship, the study of the impact of colonialism on African laborers was therefore critical. With its perpetual search for labor, the colonial state no doubt transformed labor and laborers in Africa. Nonetheless, [End Page 1] waged work never became the most important labor relation among African workers.6 As Bellucci and Eckert recently pointed out, in sub-Saharan Africa "the male proletarian does not represent the quintessential worker but is rather one among a number of categories of workers whose histories are connected."7 Among these workers, women no doubt played a critical role. Given the strong focus on wage labor, the role of African women was largely invisible in the early studies on African labor, as women, with very few exceptions, were very rarely involved in waged work. In the late 1970s, however, gender started to receive a new attention from scholars interested in the history of African labor.8 This new interest also stemmed from multiple studies by economists and social scientist who, starting from the 1960s, made important contributions to assess women's participation in the economies of western countries as well as of non-western ones, including sub-Saharan African states.9 Among them, Ester Boserup's Woman's Role in Economic Development was particularly important, as it stressed the need to include the domestic work that women performed in general studies of female labor.10 This produced an extensive volume of studies on gender and rural populations in Africa and on the role of women in economic development, that went beyond waged and urban labor and challenged universalist conceptions of labor and productivity and how Africans reinvented them.11 In the 1980s, however, studies of African female labor became critical towards Boserup's approach, in that it considered "women as pawns rather than actors."12 Preoccupied to show African women's agency and initiatives, these works stressed that women were not only victims of African patriarchy or the exploitation of the colonial state, but rather actively responded to socioeconomic changes. Works such as Judith Olmstead's on Ethiopia or Carolyn Clark's on Kikuyu women showed how women, even if working under structures of male dominance and patriarchal relations, were able to influence economic and social processes.13 Thanks to these perspectives, studies on women's labor history in Africa have significantly improved our understanding of precolonial African societies, the impact of colonialism, and post-independence trajectories.14 At the basis of the precolonial agrarian social organization was a gendered division of labor. Even if obviously characterized by local variations, men performed activities such as hunting, building houses, or preparing the land for cultivation, whereas women took care of the cultivation of food.15 Colonialism had no doubt a strong impact on African female laborers: their workload increased because men were away; they had reduced access to land and political power; their economic position often declined, both in relation to their former lives and vis-à-vis men; and they had limited access to formal western-type education and therefore to skilled and better paid jobs, due...

The Formation of Islamic Law in Indonesia: The Interplay between Islamic Authorities and the State

In the course of the early twentieth century, Muslim majority countries, including Indonesia, attempted to transform Sharia into Islamic law. This transformation has encompassed diverse orientations and interests of Islamic scholars and the (colonial) state. The transformation in Indonesia deserves a special inquiry as Indonesia is a nation with a high degree of cultural heterogeneity. This article addresses the extent to which the interplay between Islamic authorities and the state has shaped the coming into being of Islamic law and its judicial institutions. I argue that Islamic authorities and the state have simultaneously taken part in revising and articulating the content, meaning, and scope of Islamic law. Islamic authorities had to adjust Islamic law with modern law and national sovereignty to make its norms possible. However, for Muslims, the issue was not only the formation of the national legal system but rules on the application of matrimonial matters as stipulated in Islamic legal doctrines. Through Islamic family law, devout Muslims found it important to claim a clearer position of the relationship between Islam and state authority.

Do Transitions from Liberation Movements to Political Parties Guarantee Good Governance? The Case of ZANU-PF and the ANC

The purpose of this study is to examine the transition of liberation movements into political parties and whether that guarantees good governance or not. Since the end of the Second World War and the Cold War, the number of democratic states has increased on all continents. African states began to explore democratic governance from independence and the end of apartheid. Furthermore, the liberation struggle fought by many African movements led to independence and ‘decolonisation’. The emergence of these liberation movements was to emancipate and liberate their respective states so that the rule of oppressive imperialists such as the British could come to an end. The transition of the former colonial states ensured that the movements which fought the liberation struggle turned into political parties. The study uses the cases of the Zimbabwe African National-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) in Zimbabwe and the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa to interrogate the transition into political parties and examine if good governance has been achieved because of that. The study has found that the implications of former liberation movements turning into political parties have not had the foreseen intentions. With the neopatrimonial theory, the study substantially examines whether ZANU-PF and the ANC have been in accordance with or against the dynamics of good governance informed by liberalism values.

Capitalism, Plantation Industry, and Environmental Change: East Sumatra During the Late Dutch Colonial State in Indonesia

This paper departs from the problem of the conspiracy between capitalism and imperialism and modern colonialism which has become a powerful force to exploit the environment in order to meet the demands of industrialization and modernization of society in capitalist countries. Some research questions that will be answered in this paper are why the East Sumatra region is a frontier area that is contested by the capitalists to expand their capital in this region? How did the various colonial powers compete for control of this region? How was the expansion of the plantation industry during the late Dutch colonial period? The results of the study show that the East Sumatra region is a potential area for the plantation industry (tobacco, rubber, tea, etc.). It is not surprising that the main colonial powers in Southeast Asia tried to control this region, especially the Netherlands and England. Various approaches were taken to negotiate with local authorities to obtain the right to control this area. Finally, from the second half of the 19th century until the end of the colonial government in Indonesia, the plantation industry in this region developed remarkably.

1 Do you believe in Ram Setu? Adam’s Bridge, epistemic plurality and colonial legacy

The Sethusamudram Shipping Canal Project, whose construction was halted by a 2013 judgment of the Supreme Court of India due to religious sensitivity, has become a domestic and international strategic flashpoint. The religious and epistemic conundrum around the Sethusamudram project and Adam’s Bridge is a colonial-era legacy. Without understanding how the British colonial state saw Adam’s Bridge, we may wrongly infer that today’s Indian nationalist assertions of its sacrality necessarily stem from an anticolonial praxis to restore a politics of enchantment within Indian modernity. The British colonial state adopted epistemes or modes of knowing Adam’s Bridge that were ostensibly compatible with pre-Western forms of enchantment. This is particularly important considering that nationalist voices, largely represented by the right-wing BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) and the Sangh Parivar in general, and liberal voices representing the Congress (Indian National Congress), or regional political voices such the DMK (Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam) and AIADMK (All Indian Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam), have dated the origins of the proposed Sethusamudram project to the colonial era, erroneously prolonging the implication that the British government aided plans of demolishing Adam’s Bridge.

Communalized force: the 1947 partition violence in Punjab and role of law enforcers

ABSTRACT The communalization of the police, which resulted from the embittered political situation among the rival communities, was a prominent feature of the Partition violence in 1947. Instead of safeguarding minority communities under attack, the police largely condoned and contributed to the violence, not because of sympathies with their coreligionists, but because they could act with impunity in an environment of insubordination and administrative breakdown in the process of the transition of power of the outgoing British colonial state. This article will show that the absence of a restraining authority, impunity from the law at the point of transitional state-created conditions of violence and the participation of law enforcement agencies led to the widespread violence. This documentation is done by accessing previously unexplored police First Information Reports (FIRs) lodged at local police stations at the time, and the reports of the Punjab Special Branch Intelligence Police from the Roberts Club Archives (RCA), Lahore. The analysis not only contributes to recent scholarship that focuses on the ‘new history’ of Partition studies but also provides an intriguing insight into the role of law enforcement agencies in mass violence.

Metaphoric Sovereignty and the Australian Settler Colonial State

There is a pronounced anxiety within Australian jurisprudence at the use of metaphor in the creation of the law. This essay argues that the anxiety is symptomatic of the fact that metaphor is not only the source of Australian law, but the source of this law’s very (il)legitimacy. To develop this argument the first half of the essay focuses on Australian High Court cases that have addressed the use of metaphor in the creation of the law. Here the essay draws out two observations. The first is the Court’s prohibition against metaphorical legal reasoning; the second is the fact that metaphor is nonetheless the source of Australian law. This picks up on Justice Kirby’s observation, that British law was extended over Australia based on a claim to ‘occupy’ and ‘possess’ a continent upon which the British had barely set foot. The essay argues that these two observations are connected: the Court’s repudiation of metaphorical legal reasoning cannot be understood separately from the role that metaphor played in the violent foundation of Australian law. The second part of the essay is an attempt to think more carefully about how metaphor, and the metaphor of the body, has shaped and substantiated colonial sovereignty, and how this contrasts and interacts with First Nations’ sovereignty. The focus here is on a public festival held in 1850 to inaugurate the Colony of Victoria. The festival involved a public performance in which the colonists gave expression to their fantasy of being the rightful sovereign of the land, while including First Nations within it, as a constitutive part of the colonial body politic. But the festival also highlights the failure of the colonial effort to extinguish First Nation sovereignty through their inclusion. While colonial sovereignty is metaphorical, First Nations’ sovereignty is ontological – resulting in a state in which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are both a constitutive part of the Australian body politic and sovereign First Nations.