Colonial Asia Research Articles

Innledning: Det danske imperium og 1814

Denmark has not traditionally been categorized as an empire for three major reasons. First, ‘empire’ was not a self-referencing term historically. Second, Copenhagen lost its overseas colonies in Asia and Africa before the second wave of European imperial expansion in the 19th century. Third, ‘empire’ has been a politically loaded term ever since the end of that century. In this article the Danish case is seen through the lens of conceptual history and politics, with the conclusion that, analytically, Denmark was an empire on a par with other European empires not just around 1814, but from the very beginnings up until the present.

Teaching East and Southeast Asia through Asian Eyes

Colonialism and indigenous responses to its varied forms dominate modern Asian historiography and imbue the history of the region with rich and multifaceted connections to world history. As a result, the histories of East and Southeast Asian nation-states since 1500 cannot be viewed outside of the context of global affairs. Imagining Asian peoples and cultures during this time is problematic for students, who typically approach colonialism from a western perspective. This presentation explores various means of incorporating into the classroom pedagogical materials and diverse media sources that facilitate a more grounded examination of East and Southeast Asian colonies, peoples, and nation-states.It pays special attention to teaching colonialism, anti-colonialism, nationalism, and transnationalism from the perspective of Southeast Asia’s indigenous peoples.

A Taste of Singapore: Singapore Food Writing and Culinary Tourism

A Taste of Singapore: Singapore Food Writing and Culinary Tourism

A Story of Nobility in Colonial Urban Asia: Victorian Influence and the Red House in Taipei

As a stylistic form of representing the past, the Gothic Revival emerged as a reaction to the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, by establishing a sense of morality in architecture and urbanism. Its rise and development in the High Victorian period therefore represented a form of social nobility to the profession. This paper examines the construction of nobility in British architectural history and its implantation and evolution in the urban East. The Red House and its located city, Taipei, in Taiwan, in which inscribed its modern urban history and development on the building, is selected as a case. This study surveys the interplay between the moral/colonial nobility mentioned above and the de facto social circumstances in post-war urban Taipei, and as such describes the spatiotemporal trajectory of Victorian influence on urban Asia, from colonial times to the present.

Land Taxation in Asia: An Overview of the 19th and 20th Centuries

Most studies of land taxation in Asia have found that its importance has declined over the 20th century, as a proportion of total government revenues and often in absolute terms. In fact, this decline started well before 1940 in most colonial territories in Asia, as well as in Japan. The paper explores the reasons for this decline in the context of several former colonies in Asia, including British India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Korea. The paper also examines why attempts to revive land taxation, especially in rural areas as a source of revenue for sub-national governments, have often been disappointing, and draws some lessons for future policies.

Global spread and genetic variants of the two CYP9M10 haplotype forms associated with insecticide resistance in Culex quinquefasciatus Say

Insecticide resistance develops as a genetic factor (allele) conferring lower susceptibility to insecticides proliferates within a target insect population under strong positive selection. Intriguingly, a resistance allele pre-existing in a population often bears a series of further adaptive allelic variants through new mutations. This phenomenon occasionally results in replacement of the predominating resistance allele by fitter new derivatives, and consequently, development of greater resistance at the population level. The overexpression of the cytochrome P450 gene CYP9M10 is associated with pyrethroid resistance in the southern house mosquito Culex quinquefasciatus. Previously, we have found two genealogically related overexpressing CYP9M10 haplotypes, which differ in gene copy number (duplicated and non-duplicated). The duplicated haplotype was derived from the non-duplicated overproducer probably recently. In the present study, we investigated allelic series of CYP9M10 involved in three C. quinquefasciatus laboratory colonies recently collected from three different localities. Duplicated and non-duplicated overproducing haplotypes coexisted in African and Asian colonies indicating a global distribution of both haplotype lineages. The duplicated haplotypes both in the Asian and African colonies were associated with higher expression levels and stronger resistance than non-duplicated overproducing haplotypes. There were slight variation in expression level among the non-duplicated overproducing haplotypes. The nucleotide sequences in coding and upstream regions among members of this group also showed a little diversity. Non-duplicated overproducing haplotypes with relatively higher expression were genealogically closer to the duplicated haplotypes than the other non-duplicated overproducing haplotypes, suggesting multiple cis-acting mutations before duplication.

Tropical Furniture and Bodily Comportment in Colonial Asia

This essay examines graphic, textual, and material evidence concerning the use of chairs by European colonists in South and Southeast Asia and by Japanese colonists in Taiwan. It focuses particularly on informal furniture made from lightweight tropical fibers such as rattan. The significance of chair sitting and the ways that chairs were used in these different contexts reveal contrasting colonial sensibilities — that is, bodily awarenesses and experiences of the colonial milieu and colonial social relationships. Many Europeans in Asia adopted furniture suited to a posture of languishing that would have been socially unacceptable in the same settings in Europe but reflected the sense of tropical life as a constant physical affliction and the accompanying indifference to the presence of native servants. In Japan's case, the process of colonization was concurrent with an effort to modernize national customs in both metropole and colonies on a European model, and inexpensive upright rattan chairs played a role in this. Yet Japanese colonists in Taiwan found themselves in an unusual situation since they were by habit floor sitters, placed by colonial conquest in a dominant position among a Chinese population accustomed to sitting on chairs. This introduced a complex dynamic into the bodily negotiation of relationships between colonizers and colonized in Taiwan, in which Japanese colonists' attitudes and behaviors did not always successfully map the power relationship of metropole and colony. A coda briefly considers a third type of rattan chair and an accompanying set of sensibilities tied to circuits of deployment in the United States military empire in the Pacific after World War II.

Parasitic Kidney Disease: Milestones in the Evolution of Our Knowledge

Of the 342 parasites that infect humans, 20 are associated with kidney disease, yet of these, only schistosomes, plasmodia, filariae, and leishmanias are held responsible for significant clinical or epidemiologic impact. Reviewing the evolution of human knowledge for these parasites discloses a lot of similarities regarding their discovery, patterns of kidney injury, and pathogenic mechanisms. From a historical perspective, our relevant information may be classified into 4 phases: (1) disease documentation in ancient and medieval scripts as far back as 2000-3000 bce; (2) discovery of the parasites, their life cycles, and clinical correlates by European clinicians working in African and Asian colonies during the second half of the 19th century; (3) discovery and characterization of the renal manifestations of monoparasitic infections during the second half of the 20th century; and (4) recognition of the confounding effects of coinfection with bacteria, viruses, or other parasites. The spectrum of respective kidney diseases extends all the way from acute kidney injury to glomerulonephritis, amyloidosis, urologic disorders, and malignancy. Discovery of the common immunopathogenetic host response to parasitic infections has provided a knowledge core that explains the similarities, diversities, and interactions with regard to kidney injury.

Historyka. Studia Metodologiczne ed. by Klemens Kaps and Jan Surman (review)

Reviewed by: Historyka. Studia Metodologiczne ed. by Klemens Kaps and Jan Surman Iryna Vushko (bio) Historyka. Studia Metodologic zne. 2012. Vol. XLII: Postcolonial Galicia: Prospects and Possibilities / Guest Editors: Klemens Kaps, Jan Surman . Kraków: Polish Academy of Sciences, Kraków Branch and Jagiellonian University, Department of History, 2012. 233 pp. ISSN: 0073-2777X. Was East-Central Europe a colony? Who was colonizer and who was colonized? Is postcolonial theory applicable to the study of East-Central Europe? These are some of the questions raised in a recent issue of Historyka, Studia Metodologiczne. Klemens Kaps and Jan Surman, young scholars of nineteenth-century Galicia, served as the guest editors of this issue of Historyka. Colonialism, Kaps and Surman explain, has been widely discussed by scholars of literature and culture of Eastern and Central Europe, but so far has attracted little attention from historians of the region. Historians of colonialism have typically focused on European colonies in Asia and Africa and paid less attention to continental empires. The editors address this gap in scholarship in two ways: first, by placing Galicia within the discussion of colonialism; and second, by bringing together historians and specialists in literature and cultural studies. The issue includes an introduction by the editors, eleven articles, a review article on the "state of the art" of Russian studies in the United States, and several book reviews. The collection first appeared online and is now available at http://historyka.edu.pl/en/article/art/historica-2012-29. All of the articles online are published in the original languages as written by the authors (English, German, and Polish). The printed version of Historyka presents all texts in Polish translation. In my review, I analyze the print collection, focusing on several substantive articles and their place within the general scholarship of East (East-Central) Europe and Galicia. I refer to the original titles of the articles written in English. Translations of Polish and German titles for the purposes of this review are mine. In the introduction, the editors suggest approaching Galicia as a palimpsest of sorts because of its multinational character. They produced this issue in an attempt to address the history of Galicia as a Habsburg province from the vantage point of "cultural marginalization and the 'colonial imaginary' - the perception of one's own colonial position and the feeling of a 'civilizing mission' as determinants of the cultural dependencies" (P. 9). Several authors address the relationships between nationalities in the province by reconstructing the [End Page 350] matrix of empire and colonial rule. The notion of subalternation - sub alternacja - appears in several texts and refers to the subaltern status of one group in its relationship to the other. In her "Stefan Żeromski's Ashes as a Postcolonial Narrative," Ewa Thompson analyzes the novel Ashes by one of the leading Polish novelists of the nineteenth century. Żeromski tells the story of a Polish nobleman espousing the ideology of "Sarmatism" and his interaction with an Austrian bureaucrat symbolizing the modern and, in the Polish view, foreign state. Żeromski's novel, Thompson explains, reveals a typical colonial encounter: the nobleman refusing to comply with the norms of the new state, and the bureaucrat resorting to force as a means of imposing these norms. The complex system of subordination and domination in Galicia is the subject of Danuta Sosnowska's text titled "Limitations and Possibilities of Postcolonial Criticism." Sosnowka tests the applicability of postcolonial theory to the study of Galicia. She finds that the relationships of Poles with neighboring peoples were sometimes "schizophrenic." On the one hand, they were driven by a feeling of superiority or even messianism toward Ruthenians and Lithuanians, but at the same time they experienced an inferiority complex regarding the rest of (Western) Europe. Polish-Ruthenian relationships, Polish messianism, and Ruthenian subalternation are the subjects of Burkhard Wöller's article, "Civilization Mission or Alienation: The Annexation of Red Rus Under Kasimir III in the Colonial Discourses of Polish and Ruthenian Historians in Austrian Galicia." Wöller shows how several Polish writers and intellectuals - among them, Karol Szajnocha, Henryk Schmitt, and Michał Bobrzyński - justified Poland's occupation of the Red Rus (Rus' Czerwona) back in the fourteenth century by...

The Empire Illuminated: Electricity, "ethical" colonialism and enlightened monarchy in photographs of Dutch royal celebrations, 1898-1948

This article examines photographs of royal festivals in the Netherlands and the Netherlands Indies (colonial Indonesia) during the reign of Queen Wilhelmina (1898-1948). The association of electricity with the royal House of Orange in vernacular visual culture expressed the idealised connections made, in colonial as well as in Dutch politics, between the queen and the Ethical Policy in the Indies. Electric lights and nocturnal illuminations featured strongly in images of royal celebrations in the Indies from the early 1900s onwards—a pattern that was not followed in the Netherlands until the late 1930s. Monarchy was thus particularly linked with modernity in Dutch colonies in Asia during the twentieth century.

Framing a Deterritorialized, Hybrid Alternative to Nationalist Essentialism in the Postcolonial Era: Tjalie Robinson and the Diasporic Eurasian “Indo” Community

In her study of Transnational South Asians (2008), Susan Koshy highlights the systematic neglect by scholars of the perspectives and activities of such seemingly peripheral actors as diasporic subjects in the macro-narratives of nationalism and globalization. Such neglect was even more pronounced in the case of the “repatriates” from European colonies in Asia and Africa. The epistemological implications of the dislocated, de-territorialized discourse produced by repatriates from former European colonies remain largely overlooked. One of those groups that seem to have slipped between the pages of history is the diasporic Eurasian “Indo” community that has its roots in the former Dutch East Indies. In this article, I focus on Tjalie Robinson, the intellectual leader of this community from the 1950s to the mid-1970s. In recent decades, there has been a growing interest in what Homi Bhabha, in The Location of Culture (1994, 38), called “the conceptualization of an international culture, based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity.” Long before Bhabha, Robinson had already published substantially on hybrid, transnational identity. As the son of a Dutch father and a British-Javanese mother, Robinson had made a name in Indonesia with his writings. He left Indonesia in 1954, and soon became the leading voice of the diasporic Indo community in the Netherlands and, later, also in the United States. His engagement resulted in the founding of the Indo magazine Tong Tong and the annual Pasar Malam, the world’s biggest Eurasian festival. With his writings, Robinson played an essential role in the cultural awareness and self-pride of the Indo community through the acceptance of their essentially hybrid and transnational identity.

Scientific Patriotism: Medical Science and National Self-Fashioning in Southeast Asia

Physicians and scientists dominated the first generation of nationalists in at least three East Asian colonies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the Philippines under the Spanish and United States' regimes, the Dutch East Indies, and the Japanese territory of Taiwan. There is substantial evidence that, in each place, decolonization was yoked to scientific progress—not only in a practical sense, but symbolically too. The first generation to receive training in biological science and to become socialized as professionals used this education to imagine itself as eminently modern, progressive, and cosmopolitan. Their training gave them special authority in deploying organic metaphors of society and state, and made them deft in finding allegories of the human body and the body politic. These scientists and physicians saw themselves as representing universal laws, advancing natural knowledge, and engaging as equals with colleagues in Europe, Japan, and North America. Science gave them a new platform for communication. In the British Empire, for example in India and Malaya, medical science also proved influential, though it seems lawyers cognizant of precedent and tradition more often dominated decolonization movements. This essay will examine how scientific training shaped anti-colonialism and nationalism in the Philippines and the East Indies, concluding with a brief comparison of the situation in Taiwan.

The Sewing-Machine in Colonial-Era Photographs: A record from Dutch Indonesia

AbstractEveryday technologies of the nineteenth century—mass-produced items that were small, sturdy, and affordable—transformed the daily lives of working people in Asian colonies. There is already a large literature on colonial technology transfer and a specialist literature on the sewing-machine, which draws on Singer archives, production figures, sales techniques, and advertising to establish uptake by households from North America to the Philippines, India, China, and Egypt. Still, documentation of how and why imported objects such as the sewing-machine were appropriated is difficult to find because, unlike elites, ordinary people left few records of their own. Here a visual archive is investigated to complement existing studies. Photographs and early moving pictures from the former Dutch East Indies show that ordinary Indonesians sought and appropriated imported goods such as the sewing-machine. The colonial camera's visual record of sewing-machine operators displaces attention from the more impersonal trade and productivity statistics. It brings the silent user into the history of technological uptake and allows us to consider the repercussions across a wide social band and period. Indigenous tailors and seamstresses expanded their own work options. Through the Singer they fitted out and launched their compatriots into modern jobs and lifestyles in the Dutch colony. The sewing-machine changed habits, manners, and expectations; machine operators influenced senses of propriety, fashion, and status. Appropriation of mundane technology demonstrates that modernization was not only a process trickling down to the masses from Westernizing elites; it also bubbled up from below.

Population genetic structure and implications for natal philopatry of nesting green turtles Chelonia mydas in the Yaeyama Islands, Japan

ESR Endangered Species Research Contact the journal Facebook Twitter RSS Mailing List Subscribe to our mailing list via Mailchimp HomeLatest VolumeAbout the JournalEditorsSpecials ESR 14:141-148 (2011) - DOI: https://doi.org/10.3354/esr00355 Population genetic structure and implications for natal philopatry of nesting green turtles Chelonia mydas in the Yaeyama Islands, Japan Hideaki Nishizawa1,*, Osamu Abe2, Junichi Okuyama1, Masato Kobayashi2, Nobuaki Arai1 1Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University, Yoshida Honmachi, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto, 606-8501, Japan 2Ishigaki Tropical Station, Seikai National Fisheries Research Institute, Fisheries Research Agency, Fukaiohta 148-446, Ishigaki, Okinawa 907-0451, Japan *Email: nishizawa0311@gmail.com ABSTRACT: Patterns of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) variation and microsatellite genotyping were used to analyze the population genetic structure of nesting green turtles Chelonia mydas (n = 67) in the Yaeyama Islands of Japan, which represent the northern limit of green turtle nesting in the western Pacific Ocean. The composition of a mixture of 6 mtDNA haplotypes from 3 rookeries, southwestern (SW) Iriomote Island (n = 26), eastern (E) Ishigaki Island (n = 29), and northwestern (NW) Ishigaki Island (n = 12), produced genetic diversity values (haplotype diversity h = 0.582 to 0.638, nucleotide diversity π = 0.0138 to 0.0244) within the high end of the range found in previous studies. The phylogeny of haplotypes, representing 3 distinct clades, indicated historical introgressions by individuals with divergent haplotypes from both Pacific colonies and Indian and Southeast Asian colonies. Significant genetic differentiation, at least between SW Iriomote Island and Ishigaki Island in which samples from E and NW Ishigaki were combined, was observed based on mtDNA; this indicated precise female natal philopatry compared to other Pacific and Indian regions, although microsatellite analyses of 4 markers revealed no significant genetic differentiation. Further studies are needed to clarify the precision of natal philopatry and male-mediated gene flow; however, this study provides valuable insights about the phylogeography of green turtles in Japan. Our results also underscore the need for green turtle conservation in the northwest Pacific Ocean. KEY WORDS: Sea Turtle · Pacific Ocean · mtDNA · Phylogeography · Conservation · Microsatellite · Chelonia mydas Full text in pdf format PreviousNextCite this article as: Nishizawa H, Abe O, Okuyama J, Kobayashi M, Arai N (2011) Population genetic structure and implications for natal philopatry of nesting green turtles Chelonia mydas in the Yaeyama Islands, Japan. Endang Species Res 14:141-148. https://doi.org/10.3354/esr00355 Export citation RSS - Facebook - Tweet - linkedIn Cited by Published in ESR Vol. 14, No. 2. Online publication date: July 07, 2011 Print ISSN: 1863-5407; Online ISSN: 1613-4796 Copyright © 2011 Inter-Research.

Ancient Voyaging and Polynesian Origins

The "Polynesian motif" defines a lineage of human mtDNA that is restricted to Austronesian-speaking populations and is almost fixed in Polynesians. It is widely thought to support a rapid dispersal of maternal lineages from Taiwan ~4000 years ago (4 ka), but the chronological resolution of existing control-region data is poor, and an East Indonesian origin has also been proposed. By analyzing 157 complete mtDNA genomes, we show that the motif itself most likely originated >6 ka in the vicinity of the Bismarck Archipelago, and its immediate ancestor is >8 ka old and virtually restricted to Near Oceania. This indicates that Polynesian maternal lineages from Island Southeast Asia gained a foothold in Near Oceania much earlier than dispersal from either Taiwan or Indonesia 3-4 ka would predict. However, we find evidence in minor lineages for more recent two-way maternal gene flow between Island Southeast Asia and Near Oceania, likely reflecting movements along a "voyaging corridor" between them, as previously proposed on archaeological grounds. Small-scale mid-Holocene movements from Island Southeast Asia likely transmitted Austronesian languages to the long-established Southeast Asian colonies in the Bismarcks carrying the Polynesian motif, perhaps also providing the impetus for the expansion into Polynesia.

The Birth of a Custom: Nomads, Sharīa Courts and Established Practices in the Tashkent Province, ca. 1868-1919

AbstractIn colonial Central Asia qādīs played a key role in establishing customary legal practices. In adjudicating claims of horse theft, qādīs operating in the Tashkent province under Russian rule had recourse to customary rules of evidence known in the local Kazakh communities. If a qādī ascertained that an animal was not stolen, but had been acquired from a third party by a bone fide purchaser, he routinely used a probative procedure unknown of in the Central Asian judicial manuals of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Based on an examination of sharī'a court registers from the Tashkent province, Bukharan shurūt works and unpublished archival material, I argue that the establishment of Russian rule in the region and the introduction of triennial elections for choosing judges made it necessary for each qādī to meet the demands of the community that had elected him, thereby encouraging him to confer shar'ī legitimacy on local legal practices.

POSTCOLONIAL ANXIETY IN POLISH NATIONALIST RHETORIC

The field of postcolonial studies in the 1970s as a way to understand the legacy of European empires. While its focus has been primarily on the lingering impact of colonialism in Asia and Africa, the field has generally ignored Poland.1 Janusz Korek reminds us that postcolonial theories emerged in connection with leftist discourses and mainly within Marxist circles at the time of the Cold War.2 Seemingly, this forestalled debate about regions dominated by Soviet imperialism. In addition, the central role of race in postcolonial theory led many to dismiss Central Europe as postcolonial. Another complicating factor, which Korek and others have noted, is the two-sided postcolonial perspective at work in the Polish case: Poland has played both the role of colonized and colonizer. Finally, Korek concludes that the whole field of Slavic and Soviet Studies was deformed by the Cold War, excluding it from broader developments

The genesis of the Italian concession in Tianjin: a combination of wishful thinking and realpolitik

This essay focuses on the genesis of the sole Italian concession in China (1900–1901), which was ceded to the newly unified Italian state by the Qing dynasty. The concession was located in the Hebei district of the modern municipality of Tianjin, and constituted the only example of Italian colonialism in Asia. Through the analysis of documents pertaining to the acquisition of the concession, within the context of the Italian foreign policy at the time, the essay demonstrates that this was, ultimately, a military occupation. The essay investigates the rationale behind the evident dichotomy between the defenders (who envisaged the concession as a unique opportunity to affirm Italy's prestige on a global geopolitical scale) vis-à-vis the detractors (who saw the settlement as an ‘enterprise of dubious utility’ and suggested its withdrawal). The prevailing motives determined by a mixture of wishful thinking and realpolitik, are also evident in the discrepancy in the reflection of the actual conditions of the occupied territory, as it emerges from the Italian vis-à-vis the Chinese sources, with regards to the ‘inconveniences’, which required an urgent solution in order to utilize the territory.

Ulbe Bosma, Juan Giusti-Cordero, and G. Roger Knight, eds. Sugarlandia Revisited: Sugar and Colonialism in Asia and the Americas, 1800 to 1940. International Studies in Social History, vol. 9. New York: Berghahn Books, 2007. 233 pp. ISBN: 978-1-84545-316-9 $75.00 (hardcover).

Ulbe Bosma, Juan Giusti-Cordero, and G. Roger Knight, eds. Sugarlandia Revisited: Sugar and Colonialism in Asia and the Americas, 1800 to 1940. International Studies in Social History, vol. 9. New York: Berghahn Books, 2007. 233 pp. ISBN: 978-1-84545-316-9 $75.00 (hardcover). - Volume 11 Issue 3

Sugarlandia Revisited: Sugar and Colonialism in Asia and the Americas, 1800-1940 - edited by Bosma, U., Giusti-Cordero, J. and Knight, G. R.

Sugarlandia Revisited: Sugar and Colonialism in Asia and the Americas, 1800-1940 - edited by Bosma, U., Giusti-Cordero, J. and Knight, G. R.