Colonial Investment Research Articles

Gorgobad: reflections on a German-Australian family biography

ABSTRACTThis article continues the focus on German-Australian militarised modernities through the Second World War to the present day. It draws on the author’s own family history, beginning with the memories evoked by her grandparents’ house in northern Sydney, built between 1950 and 1953. Named ‘Gorgobad’, Persian for ‘place of the wolves’, it resonates with a family history that involves German colonial investments in post-First World War Iran, the global geopolitical upheavals of the Second World War, which drew her family into separate histories of refuge, British imprisonment and deportation and, finally, building a new home in Australia. The essay asks pertinent questions about the entanglement of hegemonic racialised orders in Europe with the very racialised orders of the grounds on which Gorgobad was built.

Exploring the Influence of Colonial Railways on Javaas Economic Geography

This study explores the impact on Java’s economic geography of railways built by the Dutch colonial government. Pre-1940 Dutch railway construction affords an historical experiment on the spatial distribution of economic activities across urban Java both before and after 1940. Using city data for over 100 years, the study finds that the railways had a short-term impact on the distribution of population, but that in the long run colonial railway investment lost its advantages. Until 1930, the railways substituted for the Great Mail Road. Between 1930 and 2010, however, the Great Mail Road regained an earlier importance in shaping urban Javanese patterns. The study also draws important lessons for recent Indonesian infrastructure development in Indonesia, notably in regard to the railway system itself.

La mancata «valorizzazione» dell’impero. Le colonie italiane in Africa orientale e l’economia dell’Italia fascista

The aim of this paper is to analyze the economic goals of the Ethiopian War and the results of the Fascist Empire in Italian East Africa (Africa orientale italiana). In this respect, the creation of the new colony in East Africa gave rise undoubtedly to a failure. It was the consequence of the weakness and the lack of planning that characterized the origin of the “Empire” – as it is testified, for instance, by confused and contradictory laws and frequent conflicts of jurisdiction – and was also the consequence of big companies’ lack of interest in colonial investments.

From Sacred to Commodity and Beyond: Colour and Values in India

A venture in a less traversed terrain of Indian scholarship, this article looks at the transformation in the value regimes that go into the making of colours in the Indian milieu. At one level, this study traces the sacredness imbued in colours and at another level the article delves into the genealogy that gives rise to a complex where colour, colonial investment in the economy of colours (with an aim at capitalizing colours as commodities), values and experiential dynamics enshrined in the imageries and practices associated with colours all come together. With these entanglements, the idea is to engage with the social fabrics and the politics of colours in the Indian milieu. In this rendering, the distinction between values and forms collapses giving us in turn a field of aesthetic experience. Mobilizing a wide range of registers (written as well as pictorial, archival as well as literary), this story is narrated with key rubrics, such as, ambiguous location of colour in the discourse on visuality, social and cultural life of colours and the manner in which Western science and modernity has influenced the values pertaining to colours. However, the core anxiety is parked on the relation between colour, aesthetic experience and the question of value.

The Botany of Emergence: Kanaka Ontology and Biocolonialism in Hawai‘i

The Botany of Emergence:Kanaka Ontology and Biocolonialism in Hawai‘i Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller (bio) and Noenoe K. Silva (bio) The Biotechnology Industry . . . in Hawai‘i cannot succeed without the manipulation and ownership of our Mana or biodiversity and related traditional, Indigenous knowledge. They have taken our lands and now they come to take our Mana, our very soul. —WALTER RITTE AND LE‘A KANEHE Though the plant is distinguished from the animal by fixity and insensibility, movement and consciousness sleep in it as recollections which may waken. —HENRI BERGSON He po‘o ulu ko nā mea kanu. (Plants have heads that can grow again.) —MARY KAWENA PUKUI THIS ESSAY HAS TWO PURPOSES and proceeds in two voices. The first is to observe the steadily growing resurgence among Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) of a Native Hawaiian world and to argue for a more elaborated recognition of the spiritual and familial dimension of plants (as well as animals and other elements of nature) within it. The second is to analyze the ongoing colonial/imperial efforts of the state and global corporations to use Hawai‘i’s land to propagate genetically modified organisms, especially seed corn, replacing our Native life on the land, despite the continual protest of Native Hawaiians and environmentalists. We argue in this essay that plants provoke and organize necessarily incommensurate colonial and Indigenous ways of thought and practice. We therefore ask, what are the effects of contemporary and past biocolonial labors on the efforts toward resurgence of a Maoli1 world, and vice versa? Our argument proceeds historically and philosophically in order to examine Kanaka struggles against the biocolonial genomic industrialization of corn in Hawai‘i, whose roots we discover in the European encounters with ‘ulu (breadfruit), and the plantation colonialism of pineapple. We present, first, a brief theoretical inquiry into the political and philosophical meaning of plants in the colonial and settler-colonial contexts of the Pacific, and introduce our concept of emergence for comprehending the distinctiveness [End Page 1] of Kanaka ontologies. We then discuss the colonial investment in botany—comprising multiple specialized forms of knowledge about plants—that has ordered many of the political theories, scientific institutions, and laws underlying settler colonialism in Hawai‘i. Finally, we turn to a discussion of genomic corn production and Kanaka resistance, seeking to understand what is currently emergent in this struggle. Emergence What does it mean to restore a meaningful Kanaka life amid ongoing colonial occupation? Jeff Corntassel and Taiaiake Alfred suggest that one answer for similarly situated Indigenous peoples can be found in the maintenance of interconnection: “There are new faces of empire that are attempting to strip Indigenous peoples of their very spirit as nations and of all that is held sacred, threatening their sources of connection to their distinct existences and the sources of their spiritual power: relationships to each other, communities, homelands, ceremonial life, languages, histories. . . . These connections are crucial to living a meaningful life for any human being” (2005, 559). For Kanaka Maoli, I (Silva) argue that living a meaningful life should also include reviving and maintaining our interconnections with divine spirits embodied in trees, herbs, water, fish, animals, clouds, winds, sunlight, rain, and so on. Let’s imagine the thought world or ontology of my Kanaka ancestors. They live/d in a “honua ola,” a living earth (Kanahele 2011). In this world, many plants, animals, birds, and other beings precede/d humans in our cosmogonic genealogies. Thus, as Kaleomanu‘iwa Wong often comments, they, too, are our (Kanaka Hawai‘i’s) kupuna (ancestors).2 The deities of our ancestors took many forms, inhabiting many bodies, a concept called kino lau. Pukui and Elbert (1986, 153) describe kino lau as “many forms taken by a supernatural body, as Pele, who could at will become a flame of fire, a young girl, or an old hag” (see also Goldberg-Hiller and Silva 2011). Kino lau means that many plants, animals, birds, clouds, and so on are the bodies of deities, either the powerful akua nui (major akua) like Kāne, Kū, Pele, Haumea, and others, or less powerful but just as meaningful ‘aumākua, family spirits. In the Hawaiian world then plants (and many...

Effect of Carbohydrate Supplementation on Investment into Offspring Number, Size, and Condition in a Social Insect.

Resource availability can determine an organism’s investment strategies for growth and reproduction. When nutrients are limited, there are potential tradeoffs between investing into offspring number versus individual offspring size. In social insects, colony investment in offspring size and number may shift in response to colony needs and the availability of food resources. We experimentally manipulated the diet of a polymorphic ant species (Solenopsis invicta) to test how access to the carbohydrate and amino acid components of nectar resources affect colony investment in worker number, body size, size distributions, and individual percent fat mass. We reared field-collected colonies on one of four macronutrient treatment supplements: water, amino acids, carbohydrates, and amino acid and carbohydrates. Having access to carbohydrates nearly doubled colony biomass after 60 days. This increase in biomass resulted from an increase in worker number and mean worker size. Access to carbohydrates also altered worker body size distributions. Finally, we found a negative relationship between worker number and size, suggesting a tradeoff in colony investment strategies. This tradeoff was more pronounced for colonies without access to carbohydrate resources. The monopolization of plant-based resources has been implicated in the ecological success of ants. Our results shed light on a possible mechanism for this success, and also have implications for the success of introduced species. In addition to increases in colony size, our results suggest that having access to plant-based carbohydrates can also result in larger workers that may have better individual fighting ability, and that can withstand greater temperature fluctuations and periods of food deprivation.

‘A State of Affairs which is Essentially Indefinite’: The Linguistic Survey of India (1894–1927)

Historians of colonial India have argued that cartography was central to colonial power in India; maps came to define the British empire's authority in the subcontinent. The effectiveness of imperial geography made India a concrete entity for both British colonialists and Indian nationalists, for whom India came to be a single and coherent geographical entity whose boundaries coincided with those of the subcontinent. This article argues that the geographical imagining of India in the Linguistic Survey of India (1894–1927) was in conflict with these colonial and nationalist mappings of India. It complicated the notion of India as a single, coherent, self-referential geography, and in doing so it centralised India in a global linguistic geography. Its cartographical exercises were at odds with the colonial state's investment in a particular geographical image of India, and with the canonical nationalist geographical imagining of India as a multilingual entity as expressed in the Report of the State Reorganization Commission of 1955.

An OLS analysis of the impact of colonialism on inter-country differentials in slum incidence in Africa

An ordinary least square (OLS) model is employed to examine the link between colonialism and slum incidence in Africa. Previous studies suggest a direct or positive link between these variables. This revelation is considered counter-intuitive. Consequently, the study reported here hypothesized a negative or inverse relation between the variables at the inter-country level. The analysis uncovered evidence supporting the hypothesized link. The findings suggest as follows. Given two types of countries, ‘A’ and ‘B,’ where the former experienced more intense colonialism, while the latter was less intensively colonized, ‘A’ would have a lower incidence of slums than ‘B.’ Thus, the conclusion that colonialism is associated with less, and not more, slum incidence. This relationship, at least within the context of the study reported here, holds true whether colonialism is operationalized in terms of the duration of colonialism, the level of colonial investment or the extent of colonially-induced urbanization. The strongest predictor of slum incidence as revealed in the study is the duration of colonialism. The population size of the main colonial city in 1960 came in last as a predictor of this phenomenon.

Bear-Child Stories in Late Liberal Colonialist Spaces of Childhood

The article examines the entangled constitution of the child-bear figure through the analytics of late liberal colonial investments. It maps three frictional child-bear encounters, both imaginary and real, in the context of early childhood classrooms: bears as unwelcome and (yet) original inhabitants that pose a threat to human safety, bears as endangered victims in need of human protection, and bears as cuddly and cute creatures in children’s literature. Specifically, we explore bear-child entanglements in early childhood classrooms in British Columbia by grappling with the complexities and tensions that emerge in late liberal colonized and colonialist spaces where bears and human children “meet.”

Towards a Genealogy of Minor Colonial Australian Character Types

The business of colonization is often understood in terms of global frameworks, large-scale movements and top-down, ‘abstract’ perspectives; in which case, the turn to minor characters in the colonized world might seem almost like an act of bad faith. It runs the risk of breaking open stable, overarching categories, like the ‘white man’ – which, as minor characters are introduced, sometimes struggles to retain its ascendancy. This essay pursues the idea of minor settler types in colonial Australia as points of departure or differentiation from the macro-narratives of colonial discourse. Sometimes they do consolidate into something dominant, but they can also disassemble into peripheral identities that the nation might continue to invest in or want to leave behind, depending on the case. The narratives they inhabit are therefore especially important, throwing types together, leading them in different, sometimes contradictory, directions, juxtaposing them with one another. This essay will look at colonial investments in a range of major and minor character types, including the Coming Australian, the rouseabout, the Melbourne dandy, the ‘night auctioneer’, the Sydney pieman and the ‘inspector of nuisances’. It introduces a Sydney-based magazine called Heads of the People (1847–8), which immediately raised – and did not resolve – the problem of who is central and who is peripheral to the colonial economy. The magazine self-consciously drew minor character types back into public life, recognizing that colonial literature – like the colonial economy itself – was continually assembled, and disassembled, by the narratives these figures inhabited.

Does history matter? Colonial education investments in India

Can good policy overcome or alter the effects of history? This question is addressed in this article using unique district‐level data for 148 districts of former British India. Controlling for observable differences in geography and income, the ordinary least squares estimates suggest a large and positive effect of colonial expenditures on rural primary education in 1911 on rural literacy up to 1991. However, instrumental variable estimates that control for the endogeneity of colonial investments suggest that the effects of historical spending are significant only up to 1971. Two policy changes can account for these findings: an increase in spending following the 1968 National Education Policy and a greater emphasis on the universal provision of public goods such as schools in the 1970s. Unlike recent studies documenting the persistent effects of historical investments on contemporary outcomes, this study emphasizes how effective policies can overturn the effects of history.

A critical number of workers in a honeybee colony triggers investment in reproduction.

Social insect colonies, like individualorganisms, must decide as they develop how to allocate optimally their resources among survival, growth, and reproduction. Only when colonies reach a certain state do they switch from investing purely in survival and growth to investing also in reproduction. But how do worker bees within a colony detect that their colony has reached the state where it is adaptive to begin investing in reproduction? Previous work has shown that larger honeybee colonies invest more in reproduction (i.e., the production of drones and queens), however, the term 'larger' encompasses multiple colony parameters including number of adult workers, size of the nest, amount of brood, and size of the honey stores. These colony parameters were independently increased in this study to test which one(s) would increase a colony's investment in reproduction via males. This was assayed by measuring the construction of drone comb, the special type of comb in which drones are reared. Only an increase in the number of workers stimulated construction of drone comb. Colonies with over 4,000 workers began building drone comb, independent of the other colony parameters. These results show that attaining a critical number of workers is the key parameter for honeybee colonies to start to shift resources towards reproduction. These findings are relevant to other social systems in which a group's members must adjust their behavior as a function of the group's size.

Seasonal shifts in macronutrient preferences in supercolonies of the invasiveYellowCrazyAntAnoplolepis gracilipes(Smith, 1857) (Hymenoptera:Formicidae) onChristmasIsland,IndianOcean

AbstractThe timing and duration of sexual brood production in ants can affect their rate of spread and colony growth. Because protein is key to larval growth, queen survival and fecundity, macronutrient collection by foraging workers is expected to favour protein prior to and throughout gyne production. However, food preference driven by the production of gynes may be overridden by a preference associated with worker production, especially if investment in workers vastly outweighs that of sexual brood and workers are produced on different schedules. Food preferences alone may not indicate the availability of that food type in the environment. OnChristmasIsland,IndianOcean, sexual brood of the invasiveYellowCrazyAnt,Anoplolepis gracilipes(Smith, 1857), was produced annually during a single period associated with the onset of the wet season. However, workers were produced continuously throughout the year and colony investment to worker production measured by the standing biomass of eggs, larvae and pupae, typically exceeded 98%. High, aseasonal investment in worker production, together with aseasonal worker activity, would suggest that there should be no seasonal preference shown by workers at food stations containing both protein and carbohydrate. However, workers showed a preference for one food type over another on 46 of 61 occasions at one site and on 31 of 41 occasions at another. When a preference was shown, it was predominantly for protein‐rich food during the dry season and almost always for carbohydrate at the onset and during the wet season. We suggest that these preferences reflect seasonal shortages in key resources when invertebrates (protein‐rich) are scarce during the dry season and honeydew from scale insects (carbohydrate) is depleted by rain during the wet season. OnChristmasIsland, timing and duration of the dry season preference for protein has been exploited by the control program forA. gracilipessupercolonies, which deploys a toxin in a proteinaceous bait matrix during dry periods.

The first global emerging markets investor: Foreign & Colonial Investment Trust 1880–1913

The Foreign and Colonial Investment Trust is the oldest surviving closed end fund, having been established in 1868. Its early success and emulation were related to its identification of a missing market – the provision of a wholesale diversified vehicle for the investing public. This paper is a micro-study of this leading investment trust during the First Era of financial globalisation. The history of this flagship fund over more than three decades provides an insight into the relative success of this financial innovation as well as into the risk and returns of investing in emerging markets over a century ago.

Does History Matter? Colonial Education Investments in India

We study the role of colonial education investments on post-independence outcomes in India using district-level data for 148 districts of former British India. Controlling for observable differences in geographical endowments and income between districts, OLS estimates suggest large and positive effects of 1911 colonial spending on rural primary education on rural literacy up to 1991. But, an instrumental variables strategy addressing the potential endogeneity of colonial investments suggests the effects of historical spending were short-lived in the Indian context. Colonial investments significantly influenced education outcomes only up to 1971. We believe these findings can be explained in the context of shifting political priorities of the central government in the 1970s to a universal provision of public goods. Broadly, the results suggest the long run effects of historical policies can be short lived in the presence of a strong state with clear political mandates.

Configuring Sacred Spaces: Archaeology, Temples, and Monument-Making in Colonial Orissa

This essay explores the problems of archaeological conservation of ancient temples in active worship in colonial India, specifically in the province of Orissa. Colonial archeology's investment in conserving these temples asserted the proprietary rights of the colonial state over the history and heritage of the colony. However, subjecting old structural remains to new regimes of historicity remained a process fraught with tensions. During the opening decades of the twentieth century, Orissa emerged as a critical site of contestation between colonial archaeology's regime of ‘secular’ historicist jurisdiction over ancient temples and the ‘traditional religious’ rights exercised at these very sites. In exploring these sites of contestation, the essay juxtaposes archaeology's involvement at the practicing temples of Bhubaneswar and Puri with the archaeological conservation of the deserted Sun Temple at Konarak. The study does not posit the domain of ‘religious’ practice as a seamlessly continuous space of tradition ruptured by colonial archaeology's modern regime of monument making. It argues instead that the new configurations of sacred spaces around old temples were predicated upon colonial archaeology's historicist preoccupations with ancient monuments and its commitment to conserving pre-modern temples and shrines as ‘secular’ historical vestiges of a lost past.

The First Global Emerging Markets Investor: Foreign & Colonial Investment Trust 1880-1913

The Foreign and Colonial Investment Trust is the oldest surviving closed end fund, having been established in 1868. Its early success and emulation were related to its identification of a missing market - the provision of a wholesale diversified vehicle for the investing public. This paper is a micro-study of this leading investment trust during the First Era of financial globalisation. The history of this flagship fund over more than three decades provides an insight into the relative success of this financial innovation as well as into the risk and returns of investing in emerging markets over a century ago.

Allometric scaling of foraging rate with trail dimensions in leaf-cutting ants

Leaf-cutting ants (Atta spp.) create physical pathways to support the transport of resources on which colony growth and reproduction depend. We determined the scaling relationship between the rate of resource acquisition and the size of the trail system and foraging workforce for 18 colonies of Atta colombica and Atta cephalotes. We examined conventional power-law scaling patterns, but did so in a multivariate analysis that reveals the simultaneous effects of forager number, trail length and trail width. Foraging rate (number of resource-laden ants returning to the nest per unit time) scaled at the 0.93 power of worker numbers, the -1.02 power of total trail length and the 0.65 power of trail width. These scaling exponents indicate that individual performance declines only slightly as more foragers are recruited to the workforce, but that trail length imposes a severe penalty on the foraging rate. A model of mass traffic flow predicts the allometric patterns for workforce and trail length, although the effect of trail width is unexpected and points to the importance of the little-known mechanisms that regulate a colony's investment in trail clearance. These results provide a point of comparison for the role that resource flows may play in allometric scaling patterns in other transport-dependent entities, such as human cities.

Living Conditions in Côte D'ivoire and Ghana, 1925–1985: What do Survey Data on Height Stature Tell Us?

ABSTRACT Survey data reveals that the pace of increase in height stature experienced by successive cohorts born in Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana during the late colonial period (1925–1960) is almost as high as the pace observed in France and Great Britain during the period 1875 to 1975, even when correcting for the bias arising from old-age shrinking. By contrast, the early post-colonial period (1960–1985) is characterised by stagnation or even reversion in Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana. This article argues that the selection effects linked for instance to measuring the height of women rather than men, mothers rather than women, and, most importantly, the interactions between height and mortality, cannot account for these figures. It then disaggregates these national trends by parental background and district of birth, and match individual data with district-level historical data on export crop (cocoa) expansion, urban density and colonial investment in health and education. Finally, it provides evidence that a significant share of the increase in height stature may be related to the early stages of urbanisation and cocoa production.

Impacts of the Use of Nonnative Commercial Bumble Bees for Pollinator Supplementation in Raspberry

Evidence for pollinator declines has led to concern that inadequate pollination services may limit crop yields. The global trade in commercial bumble bee (Bombus spp.) colonies provides pollination services for both glasshouse and open-field crops. For example, in the United Kingdom, commercial colonies of nonnative subspecies of the bumble bee Bombus terrestris L. imported from mainland Europe are widely used for the pollination of raspberries, Rubus idaeus L. The extent to which these commercial colonies supplement the services provided by wild pollinators has not been formally quantified and the impact of commercial bumble bees on native bees visiting the crop is unknown. Here, the impacts of allowing commercially available bumble bee colonies to forage on raspberry canes are assessed in terms of the yield of marketable fruit produced and the pollinator communities found foraging on raspberry flowers. No differences were found in the abundance, diversity, or composition of social bee species observed visiting raspberry flowers when commercial bumble bees were deployed compared with when they were absent. However, weight of marketable raspberries produced increased when commercial bees were present, indicating that wild pollinator services alone are inadequate for attaining maximum yields. The findings of the study suggests that proportional yield increases associated with deployment of commercial colonies may be small, but that nevertheless, investment in commercial colonies for raspberry pollination could produce very significant increases in net profit for the grower. Given potential environmental risks associated with the importation of nonnative bumble bees, the development of alternative solutions to the pollination deficit in raspberry crops in the United Kingdom may be beneficial.