Direct Colonial Rule Research Articles

Stylistic hybridity in palatial architecture during the reign of King Rama V: a postcolonial reinterpretation on modern Siam

ABSTRACT Informed by postcolonial theories, this research presented critical investigations on Chakri Maha Prasat Throne Hall, the ordination hall at Niwet Thammaprawat Temple, and Munthatu Rattanaroj Villa. Aside from examining the three hybrid Siamese-European buildings beyond stylistic analyses and antiquarian mode of historiography, the upcoming discussions unveiled that the case studies – which were commissioned at the height of Western colonial expansions in Southeast Asia – testified for the Siamese’s: (1) reinterpretations, reappropriations, and recreations of European cultural artifacts; (2) active and authoritative roles in generating, combining, and projecting their versions of contested meanings upon the immediate world and beyond; (3) assertions of a newly acquired self-image by conspicuous consumptions of Western material culture; and (4) long established tradition of mediating power through built forms. In addition, by utilizing the politics of representations as a mode of problematization, these eclectic palatial structures were perceived as representational tools to create a civilized identity and discursive devices for power mediation, as opposed to unskilled or kitschy copies of Western precedents. In conclusion, the inquiries essentially argued that although Siam was among few places in Asia that did not succumb to a direct colonial rule by any Western power, the kingdom was a de facto crypto-colony.

Can the policy Francophonie be considered a manifestation of neocolonialism (on the example of foreign cultural strategy of France in the 1960s)

The subject of this research is the correlation between the policy of neocolonialism and Francophonie in the context of foreign cultural strategy of France in the 1960s. Decolonization forced France to relinquish direct colonial rule and shift towards the policy of “cooperation” on the basis of bilateral agreements with the developing countries, which regulated intergovernmental relations in various spheres. The idea of the universality of French language and cultural values underlied the Agency for Cultural and Technical Cooperation established in 1970. A crucial role in its establishment was played by the political leaders of African countries, who sought benefit from cooperation with France in terms of the development of young sovereign states. Despite this fact, the activity of Francophonie was the object of criticism, and by some researchers, considered a version of French post-colonialism. Analysis is conducted on different interpretations and approaches towards the terms “neo-colonialism” and “Francophonie”. The article employs the unpublished archival documents of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of France, which determines the scientific novelty. The authors conclude that the equality sign between neo-colonialism and Francophonie seems unreasoned, since the latter has improved the educational, cultural, scientific and technical standard of living in the young sovereign states, contributed to the establishment of their political and administrative and increase of authority on the world stage. The participation of the developing countries in the Agency for Cultural and Technical Cooperation and the leaders of the Western world – France and Canada – consolidated the authority and broadened the experience of the political elite of the third world countries. At the same time, there is no denying that de Gaulle sought to increase the international prestige of the Fifth Republic by strengthening the positions of France in the Francophone world.

Colonial legacy, private property, and rural development: Evidence from Namibian countryside

ABSTRACT Does the legacy of direct colonial rule, through its impact on property rights security, affect rural development in Africa? Although mainstream economic theory links secure property rights to development, extant micro-level evidence from the continent remains mixed. We take advantage of a natural experiment in Namibia, exploiting as-if random application of direct colonial rule that later affected property rights security. Using detailed census data and matching on underlying climatic conditions, we find evidence of more commercialized agricultural cultivation in directly ruled areas. We relate this finding to differing tenure regimes. In formerly indirectly ruled areas where land is still allocated by traditional elites, own-account agricultural activity for the market and living standards lag behind formerly directly ruled regions. Our work has direct implications for students of colonial legacies and land tenure regimes.

Indirect Colonial Rule Undermines Support for Democracy: Evidence From a Natural Experiment in Namibia

This article identifies indirect and direct colonial rule as causal factors in shaping support for democracy by exploiting a within-country natural experiment in Namibia. Throughout the colonial era, northern Namibia was indirectly ruled through a system of appointed indigenous traditional elites whereas colonial authorities directly ruled southern Namibia. This variation originally stems from where the progressive extension of direct German control was stopped after a rinderpest epidemic in the 1890s, and, thus, constitutes plausibly exogenous within-country variation in the form of colonial rule. Using this spatial discontinuity, we find that individuals in indirectly ruled areas are less likely to support democracy and turnout at elections. We explore potential mechanisms and find suggestive evidence that the greater influence of traditional leaders in indirectly ruled areas has socialized individuals to accept nonelectoral bases of political authority.

Interpreting the Oil Kingdom: Opportunities and Hazards

It is telling that Cambridge University Press commissioned two anthropologists to write its histories of modern Yemen and Saudi Arabia. Having escaped the experience of direct colonial rule, these countries do not fit comfortably into the dominant model of modern Middle Eastern history. It follows that the template for modern Saudi statehood cannot be retrieved from the colonial archives, or the postcolonial corporate ones, for that matter. Instead, it must be cobbled out of disparate parts, some Arabian, some Islamic, and some imported. Few modern states defy the reigning scholarly consensuses of economics, politics, history, and anthropology like Saudi Arabia, a place that on account of oil wealth has been transformed almost beyond recognition in the span of two or three generations. As a rentier-based, kinship-organized, orally inscribed, puritanically orthodox Muslim polity, Saudi Arabia poses problems for the best traditions of graduate training in any single discipline.

Itinerant Figures: Textual Mobilities in Fiction’s Diasporic Turn

Diasporas are dynamic and volatile in today’s globalizing realities and imaginaries because the sense of place and location by which diasporic experiences are understood has become fluid, ambiguous, even contested, and no longer a fixed and static space. In the process of globalization fractured at the very site of identification of the postcolonial self, it becomes that liminal space in-between, constituting, at once, demand and desire. In the fictional texts analyzed in this special forum written either during or after direct colonial rule, an access is given to fleeting transnational images of the fugitive and ephemeral displacement, dispersal and migrancy of intellectuals and ordinary people that underscore cultural difference in their diasporic experience. However complex that access might be in view of the diverse and multi-layered methodological protocols of interpretive reading, we find diasporic subjects that are present but invisible in a foreign land, mobile but constrained, located but displaced, connected yet isolated, real but illusory. In other words, we see shadows of metaphorically liminal sites of possession and loss, participation and alienation, subjectivity and subjection.

From Science to Fashion: Photography and the Production of a Surrogate Colony in Weimar Germany

This article examines German colonial cultures in the post-World War I period following Germany’s loss of a colonial empire. Photography had long been embedded in both the practical and ideological production of empire, but after 1918 took on an especially significant role in constructing a ‘surrogate colony’ that kept the colonial idea alive in the absence of direct colonial rule. The dynamics of this surrogate colony are especially evident in the publications of the organised colonial movement. Drawing on these publications, I argue that the colonial movement produced a surrogate colony that was as much about the management of gendered and racialised German populations as it was about propagandising for a return to colonial rule. Photography played a key role in bringing together two areas that underlay this gendered and racialised dynamic: science and commercial culture. I thus begin by tracing the way in which photographic scientific cultures, in particular in the fields of medicine, anthropology, and racial science, shaped the contours of the surrogate colony. These scientific cultures emerged in an unstable relationship with mass commercial photographic cultures, with the article then turning to an exploration of ‘colonial fashion photography’. The foregrounding of clothing and bodies in this photography highlights the complex relationship between scientific and commercial photography, which is shown to be deeply implicated in the production of racialised and gendered forms of embodiment.

CIVILIZED DEPRAVITY: EVANGELICAL REPRESENTATIONS OF EARLY-NINETEENTH-CENTURY CHINA AND THE REDEFINITION OF “TRUE CIVILIZATION”

In the first few decadesof the nineteenth century, the experience of missionaries among peoples as diverse as the ancient civilizations of India, the highly organized Zulu kingdoms, and the cannibal tribes of the South Seas had sparked a national debate concerning whether or not the “civilization of the heathen” was necessary before they could be converted, or whether Christianity would be the best means of civilizing them. Unresolved as far as public policy was concerned, this question entered discussions of the 1835 Select Committee on Aboriginal Tribes (British Settlements), a committee convened to address problems arising between British settlers and indigenous communities, including important trade sites in Australia, New Zealand, and the islands of the Pacific. As with several other areas where significant British imperial pressure never took the form of direct colonial rule, the trade ports in China fell outside the committee's explicit considerations. Along with forbidding foreign settlements, Chinese culture did not fit the terms or assumptions of the committee's conversation. Since the first Jesuit mission to China in the late sixteenth century, there had been little doubt in Europe that Chinese civilization was far advanced. As a tightly controlled bureaucratic state confident of its own position as the Middle Kingdom of the world, China simply did not work within the discourse of civilization. This essay explores one attempt to adjust the terms of that British discourse in order to accommodate a civilized China.

Incorporating the King's New Subjects: Accommodation and Anti‐Catholicism in the British Empire, 1763–1815

Concerned at its broadest level with the question of how empires manage religious diversity, this article explores the incorporation of Roman Catholics into the British Empire between the 1760s and the 1820s. It examines British attitudes and policies toward Catholics in Minorca, Canada, Grenada, Trinidad, and Malta, demonstrating that while both anti‐Catholicism and accommodation were evident, the trend was toward accepting and even supporting the practice and institutions of Roman Catholicism. Accommodation emerged as an important strategy of imperial governance as the empire underwent expansion and shifted toward forms of direct colonial rule in the early nineteenth century.

CULTURE, PSYCHE AND STATE POWER

The discipline of anthropology has perhaps always been especially close to the exercise of state power, but, in the last two-thirds of the twentieth century, the nature of both anthropology and state power changed dramatically. This was a period when many anthropologists distanced themselves from earlier evolutionist accounts that traced a generalized human development from “primitive” to “civilized.” This evolutionist anthropology, as many scholars have shown, reflected and justified a range of imperialist practices by presenting European conquest as bringing progress to societies existing in a noncontemporary present. Two of the most important variants of post-evolutionist anthropology are the cultural relativism associated with Franz Boas (1858–1942) and the sociological universalism associated with Emile Durkheim (1858–1917). The state power that evolutionist anthropology had once supported also changed radically over the same period. The forms of domination exercised by the global North over the global South gradually shifted from direct colonial rule to the combination of military intervention and economic control that characterizes the postcolonial period. Anthropology, Talal Asad has written, is “rooted in an unequal power encounter between the West and Third World . . . an encounter in which colonialism is merely one historical moment.” Internally, the social welfare state continued its remarkable growth but also, in the 1960s and 1970s, faced challenges from those who rejected the patriarchy and heteronormativity that it often presupposed and reinforced. The two books under review reveal how new types of anthropology in the United States and France came to serve these new forms of state power in the twentieth century. In both cases anthropology adapted to these new political conditions by incorporating psychoanalysis to posit an especially strong bond between individual and culture that produced what one contemporary called an “oversocialized conception of man.”

The Encounter of Buddhism and Law in Early Twentieth-Century Korea

Law is central to an understanding of the development of modern Korean Buddhism. New legal and regulatory structures that were introduced during the first two decades of the twentieth century in Korea significantly impacted the course of modern Korean Buddhist history. The relationship between modern secular laws and Buddhist organizations during this period, however, was forged chiefly in the context of increasing Japanese political control over Korea, especially after the start of direct colonial rule following annexation in 1910. Therefore, the critical legal issues involved in the historical development of early modern Korean Buddhism have typically been subsidiary to the analyses of Japanese colonial policies toward the monastic community. The precise contours of the relationship between Buddhism and law in the modern period remain largely unexplored and thus indistinct because the focus in previous studies has been placed on the confrontation between thesanghaand the colonial state.

Women as Indirect Beneficiaries in Elite Conflict in Princely Mysore, 1860-1920

Women's education in Mysore was not a product of social reform movement as was the case in the Presidencies. Here it began as a conscious effort first by the British bureaucracy during the direct colonial rule and then by the Indian bureaucracy after the rendition. The elite conflict among the Madras Party consisting of officials from the Madras Presidency, the Mysore Party consisting of Tamil speaking Iyangars and the third group consisting of local Kannada speaking Mysorians for controlling the administration dominated the public space during this period. The debates regarding the regional and linguistic identity often centred on the issues related to women. This article deals with the identity conflict and their positive effect on the growth of women's education in princely Mysore during 1860–1920.

Rethinking cities in the Middle East: political economy, planning, and the lived space

Urbanisation is an economic, political, and socio-cultural complexity, and so is its interaction with cityscapes. However, this truism rarely finds an expression in academic research. It is obvious that economic transitions would determine the quality and volume of the built environment. Municipal and state decision making further shape the nature of urban spaces, and socio-cultural transformations influence perceived notions of the lived space and, in turn, reshape the physical landscape itself. Nevertheless, research on cities in the Middle East and elsewhere remains fairly limited in scope, with little cross-discipline ‘conversation’ among scholars in different fields which attempts to account for such complexity. This is all the more surprising as life in cities has become, over the past half century or so, the most significant form of human collective dwelling; in the Middle East over half the population currently lives in urban settings and the numbers are forecast to grow in the future.1 This review article is the result of a dialogue between an architect and an economic historian in response to the foregoing. We have united in an attempt to offer a more integrative approach to Middle East urbanism, accounting for the interactions of the political economy of this region, planning, and the lived space. The key questions on which we focus are why and how do state transformation and economic structural change impact upon urban space. In seeking the answers we examine the long-term trajectory of cities as they went through the first period of globalisation under imperial intervention and/or direct colonial rule; gradually came under independent, inward-looking, national regimes; and presently experience the second wave of globalisation and the opening of local economies to international markets. Such a narrative explores common themes in the historical trajectories of cities' lives. Our long-term, geographically extensive overview (Map 1) is bound to miss some specific developments that have made a significant impact on the transformations of cities in the region; our aim is not to totalise Middle East experiences and reduce a variety of narratives to a simplistic linear model of change. Even more so, our study of the Middle East is mostly focused on Egypt, the Asian Arab countries (the mashraq), Israel/Palestine, and Turkey, the geographical unit which roughly corresponded with the Ottoman Empire, the last state to control the Middle East before the age of nations. We acknowledge that any bird's eye view perspective is bound to do some injustice to historically specific contexts, and city transitions that occurred in such contexts. We would welcome any future work that brings our suggestion here, namely to integrate political economy with the study of urban development and city life, to bear on more specific research on urbanism in the Middle East.

Structural Holes and Structural Synergies: A Comparative-Historical Analysis of State-Society Relations and Development in Colonial Sierra Leone and Mauritius

Drawing on network theory from economic sociology, this article argues that development through state-society synergy requires the spread of information and resources between state and society. After describing key concepts and a nested methodological approach, the article analyzes how the different network structures affected the success of state decentralizing reforms in two former British colonies after World War II: Sierra Leone and Mauritius. It finds that the use of gatekeeping intermediaries in indirectly ruled Sierra Leone caused structural holes between state and society and that the reforms therefore increased the extent of decentralized despotism. Alternatively, direct colonial rule in Mauritius promoted dense ties between state and societal actors, and the colonial state reforms therefore made decentralized development possible.

The Dynamics of Rural Accumulation in South Africa: Comparative and Historical Perspectives

The view that the opening up of Africa by metropolitan capitalism, particularly during the period of direct colonial rule, was bound to lead through evolutionary stages to economic development and modernisation has long since fallen into scholarly disrepute. In the atmosphere of radical pessimism that has pervaded academic perspectives on Africa since independence, an altogether more sceptical view of the beneficence of Africa's integration into imperial economies has prevailed. But as is often the case in scholarly debate, thesis and antithesis occupy the same battleground, and both tend to view the world through similar lenses. What modernisation and underdevelopment theories have in common is the assumption of a single universal dynamic in the making of the modern world; exposure to market forces is thus apparently destined either to reshape third world societies in the image of industrial Europe, or to “underdevelop” them in the interests of capital accumulation in the metropoles.

The making of race in colonial Malaya: Political economy and racial ideology

The conventional interpretation of the “race problem” in Peninsular Malaysia (Malaya) is founded upon the supposedly inevitable frictions between ethnic communities with sharply divergent cultural traditions. In this view, assimilation between the indigenous Malay population and the descendants of immigrants from China and India was always a remote possibility. In this paper I argue that modern “race relations” in Peninsular Malaysia, in the sense of impenetrable group boundaries, were a byproduct of British colonialism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Prior to 1850, inter-ethnic relations among Asian populations were marked by cultural stereotypes and occasional hostility, but there were also possibilities for inter-ethnic alliances and acculturation. Direct colonial rule brought European racial theory and constructed a social and economic order structured by “race.” A review of the writing of observers of colonial society provides a crude test of this hypothesis.

American neo-colonialism in the Philippines

This is one of those rare books that are small in size but heavy in substance and should be read and studied widely. It presents a well-documented indictment of American neocolonialist imperialism in the Philippines since its independence in 1946. Several earlier works have described in detail the classical form of American imperialism in the Philippines through military conquest and direct colonial rule and have helped suggest a close parallel between the conduct of the Philippine-American war and the American-Vietnamese war. However, America's continuing, pervasive domination of Philippine national life since 1946 has not been well appreciated except by a few perceptive and persistent observers of the Philippine scene. The neocolonial status of the Philippines in relation to the United States has generally remained concealed behind the facade of Philippine “independence” and “sovereignty.” Filipino presidents and other members of the Philippine establishment have helped hide the truth by proclaiming pro-Americanism as the cornerstone of their policy. President Manuel Roxas in 1946 not only vindicated American rule over the Philippines by expressing gratitude for Dewey's victory over the Spanish forces in 1898, but also affirmed close alignment with the United States in foreign affairs. This has meant that not only did the Philippines refuse to affirm Afro-Asian solidarity but, worse, it often took a simulated “initiative” in putting forth proposals designed to subserve American cold war interests. One example was the proposed Pacific Pact of 1950, calculated to stem Chinese communist “expansion.” Close alignment with the United States discredited the Philippines as odd-man-out in Asia. In the Philippines itself, the perpetuation of American dominance had tragic effects for the Filipino people and the Philippine nation-state. Foreign observers, especially from non-aligned countries, were puzzled and angered by the pro-Americanism of Philippine foreign policy. Filipinos themselves vented their frustration and fury in an intellectual, nationalist outburst against the lingering “colonial mentality.”

The Merchants and General Faidherbe. Aspects of French Expansion in Sénégal in the 1850's

In December, 1851, Hilaire and Marc Maurel, part-owners and managers of the Maurel and Prom Company of Bordeaux, began a concerted movement among the main firms engaged in trade with Senegal to bring about fundamental changes, both in the way firms like theirs traded with the Senegalese and Mauritanians, and in the political relationships which had existed up until then between the French in their small enclaves, and the surrounding African state Systems. Synthesizing many specifie ideas which had been recommended, over the years, by certain business leaders and naval officers, like Bouët-Willaumez, Marc Maurel wrote a long petition or memoir, signed by numerous influential persons of Saint-Louis and addressed to the Governor of Senegal, which presented a cogent, commercially justified, argument in favor of using French military power on a limited scale to accomplish two principal objects. First, he wished to exempt French trading and navigational along the Senegal River from any form of control, fiscal or political, by the African rulers. Secondly, he wished to prevent the Mauritanian nomads of the right bank, as well as disorderly éléments from the left, from raiding the sedentary farmers south of the Senéegal River, and interfering with their cultivation of peanuts, a staple which Marc Maurel and Hilaire Maurel thought would become the economie mainstay of the French commercial establishment in Senegambia. Acting through two bordelais officiais, Ducos, the Minister of the Navy, and Mestro, the Director of the Colonies, both of whom had close ties to bordelaises companies which did business in Senegal and elsewhere in West Africa, Hilaire and Marc Maurel were able to prevail upon both of them to give specifie sets of instructions to Governor Protet, Faidherbe's predecessor, ordering him to initiate the sort of commercial and political changes recommended by their memoir. Then, by 1854, because they and other important wholesalers had lost faith in Protet's ability to bring about these changes, they took steps to have him removed and replaced by Captain Faidherbe, who had been Director of the Engineer Corps in Saint-Louis since November, 1852. The Maurel and Prom Company supported Faidherbe through his two periods of rule, defended him against his detractors, and advised him on how to fulfill their recommendations. Despite his reputation for spectacular military activity, he followed their lead in favoring only a limited form of French colonial domination in Senegambia, which would leave most of the Senegambia states independent but cowed by French arms and willing to trade on the terms of the Bordeaux wholesalers. Captain Jauréguiberry, Faidherbe's replacement after 1861, ran afoul of most of the principal wholesalers of Saint-Louis and alienated most of his subordinates as well because he attempted to introduce a more centralized form of direct colonial rule in the hinterland than had Faidherbe, which resulted in a rebellion in Fouta-Toro. Within a year of his arrivai, they took steps to have him recalled and Faidherbe, returned to the governorship. Faidherbe successfully restored the previous System of limited occupation and non-rule (except for the cases of Walo and Cayor) and left Sénégal for good in 1865.