Neocolonial Research Articles

Between Political and Economic Imperialism: Russia’s Shifting Global Strategy

Abstract Russia experienced both economic and geopolitical expansion in the 2000s. During this time, the Kremlin and big business worked in tandem to assert Russian influence in post-Soviet space. However, the annexation of Crimea and Russia’s involvement in the war in Eastern Ukraine in 2014 marked a new period that severed the state’s geopolitical strategy and the interests of big capital. While the state continues to engage in open and covert military action, the activity of Russian business abroad has sharply diminished. Relying on David Harvey’s concepts of territorial and capitalist logics of power, the article explores the interplay between political and economic imperialism during Putin’s 20 years in power and situates Russia within today’s global imperialist landscape. I find that the Kremlin’s geopolitical and geoeconomic shift in 2014 can ultimately be explained by the strategic orientation of the country’s leadership, in particular, the deeply ingrained emphasis on security and ‘hard power’. However, the turn away from economic imperialism was also structurally determined by the exhaustion of the country’s economic engine that no longer generates surplus capital in need of a ‘spatial fix’.

Reciprocity and the Moral Economy of Exchange in African ‘Tealess’ Tea Parties in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, c. 1945–1950s

ABSTRACT In recent decades, historians’ understanding of colonialism has been significantly enriched, going beyond the central concepts of resistance and negotiation. Several works have been produced on various aspects of African lives in colonial cities. Yet African organisational life and networks of solidarity in such ‘restrictive’ urban spaces have been largely overlooked. In this article, we examine African ‘informal’ leisure parties known as tea parties (matiyipati) and their role as economic circuits for the African underclass in Harari Township in Salisbury. Although Africans in urban areas were offered few opportunities in the colonial economy, they were capable of exploiting the crevices in the colonial system to create an alternative, underground economy that enabled them to survive in the city. Drawing on archival sources and oral interviews, this article argues that not only were tea parties arenas for alcohol consumption and cultural resistance but they were also essential platforms for chatting new livelihoods. The moral discourse of both the organisers and patrons was founded on the premise of the right to subsistence livelihoods. As a result, the exchange at these parties remained embedded in wide socio-cultural systems of which reciprocity formed an integral part.

Review: ¡Printing the Revolution! The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now, by E. Carmen Ramos, Tatiana Reinoza, Terezita Romo, and Claudia E. Zapata

Review: <i>¡Printing the Revolution! The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now</i>, by E. Carmen Ramos, Tatiana Reinoza, Terezita Romo, and Claudia E. Zapata

Fourteenth Colony: The Forgotten Story of the Gulf South During America's Revolutionary Era by Mike Bunn

Reviewed by: Fourteenth Colony: The Forgotten Story of the Gulf South During America's Revolutionary Era by Mike Bunn Timothy C. Hemmis Fourteenth Colony: The Forgotten Story of the Gulf South During America's Revolutionary Era. By Mike Bunn. Montgomery: NewSouth Books, 2020. 288 pp. $28.95. ISBN 978-1-5883-8413-3. Mike Bunn's Fourteenth Colony: The Forgotten Story of the Gulf South During America's Revolutionary Era paints a vibrant portrait of the brief history of British West Florida. It is a much-welcomed narrative of the rise and fall of the British in the Gulf South. Often in the story of American history, the events in the Gulf South are an afterthought; however, in this well-researched and well-written account Bunn traces the simple origins of British West Florida to its eventual fall in 1780. Many people are well aware of the thirteen colonies that would eventually become the United States of America. However, many often do not realize there were other British colonies in the New World. Even though it is hotly debated among colonial scholars as to which colony held the title of the fourteenth, Bunn argues that British West Florida fits the description because it was "well used in literature" at the time of the American Revolution (xii). Despite the odd scholarly debate, it does not really affect the history of the Gulf South and its importance to the story of America. Bunn structures his book around the humble beginnings of British West Florida, specifically focusing on Pensacola and Mobile. Early on, West Florida was not a popular colony for the British, but it had immense commercial potential as it was near the lands of the Creek and Choctaw tribes, and that Native American trade sustained the colonial economy. Bunn points out that few British migrants moved to the Gulf South because of its inhospitable weather and tropical diseases. The first settlers tended to gravitate toward ports on the Gulf [End Page 330] of Mexico, like Mobile or Pensacola. But he notes that there were many land claims and grants in the region, especially near the Mississippi River. For example, he tells the story of Anthony Hutchins, who moved his family from the Carolinas to settle in West Florida near Natchez in hopes of obtaining farming lands for a large plantation (77). He demonstrates that Natchez was not a settled metropolis, but rather a frontier outpost that had the appeal of being near the Mississippi River and fertile lands. Despite these positive attractions, Bunn points out that the population of West Florida was relatively small with about 6,000 people in 1779 (83). The author examines daily life in the colony, which included the difficulties of contending with a wide variety of tropical diseases. West Florida became a notoriously hazardous environment to live in, as dangers lurked around every corner. Although this reviewer would have liked more discussion of hurricanes and how they affected the daily life of the colony, this section was enlightening as the environment is often a forgotten aspect of the colonial experience. Bunn also highlights the commercial life in West Florida and explains the agricultural practices of the region. In this chapter, the author mentions the role of slaves in the colony, which has often been overlooked. Additionally, Bunn correctly suggests that the cattle industry flourished in West Florida. Bunn describes Dauphin Island---which today is a popular vacation destination for Alabama beachgoers---as "one big cattle pen" during the colonial period (116). The most familiar part of Bunn's narrative were the chapters on the Revolutionary War. The infamous Willing Raid was a key part of Bunn's narrative, as it was the only time American patriots made an invasion of West Florida. The author demonstrates that this operation was more of a personal vendetta than one of any military importance. The objective of the Willing expedition was one of nuisance and commercial disruption, and it only rallied settlers against the American cause. However, the heart of the book really focuses on Spanish governor of Louisiana Bernardo de Gálvez's military campaign against the British. Here the narrative seems to be more [End Page 331] from...

A British Sky: Imperial Networks and the Symbiotic Relationship Between Imperialism and Astronomy in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire

Despite modern perceptions of science as an apolitical, irreligious, democratizing force, science has historically been a tool used by individuals and organizations for their own purposes. In the case of late European empires, science and scientific “progress” were valuable tools for agendas of Christianization and civilization. Moreover, scientists and scientific methods could be used to further the types of work needed to grow empire – such as a map-making and exploration. However, the relationship between science and empire was not limited to imperial domination. Scientists and scientific bodies could also use the tools of empire to further their scientific work. The Royal Astronomical Society is an excellent example of the “use” of empire – most of its funding came from imperial pundits looking to entrench British superiority. Among the various scientific disciplines practiced in the nineteenth century, astronomy played an interesting role in entrenching the relationship between science and empire – particularly as it was practiced on the fringes of the British empire.&#x0D; Growing empires necessitated the creation and proliferation of new technologies that in turn made practicing science in recently acquired colonies much easier. The interconnected web of new technologies, scientists, and imperial structures of power and politics combined with scientific desires, colonial ideals, race relations, and imperial economies of trade and knowledge to produce an incredibly complicated vision of science. Astronomy, in its looking to the heavens, reflected back upon earthly issues to ultimately reveal the tangled ideologies that permeated British imperial science at this time. This story of British imperial astronomy is meant to complicate modern notions of what science is and has been.

Black Atlantic Currents: Mati Diop’s Atlantique and the Field of Transnational American Studies

This essay reads French-Senegalese director Mati Diop’s 2019 film&nbsp;Atlantique, a Senegalese-French-Belgian coproduction, to argue that its oceanic focus gestures at the haunting histories that suture the US and Senegal. Atlantique,&nbsp;spoken in Wolof,&nbsp;explores global and local class inequalities through a romance narrative that foregrounds the lasting effects of colonialism and economic imperialism on Senegal. Despite this distinct national context,&nbsp;Atlantique was quickly absorbed into a global media stream, picked up by Netflix and distributed to more than one hundred and sixty-five million subscribers.&nbsp;While&nbsp;Atlantique appears to tackle the ravages of capitalism on a global scale by highlighting labor migration and the disruptive effects on the women left behind, a close reading of the film reveals a more complicated and transnational story.&nbsp;Atlantique forces us to also think about the United States. The American continent in the colonial era formed the tragic third corner in the&nbsp;triangular Atlantic economy based on the slave trade. Placing Atlantique within a Black Atlantic trajectory yields a richer, more politically invested reading of the film that simultaneously helps us to rethink the political work that film can do in a globalized world.&nbsp;In particular, I posit that Atlantique’s circulation to the US and Europe helps reverse the traditional patterns of flow, North to South, West to East, as such challenging limited understandings of the US's cultural and political ties to Senegal.After a discussion of production and circulation, I therefore turn to a close reading of the film and the paratext surrounding it to proffer a theory of how films like&nbsp;Atlantique can help us rethink the potentialities and investments of transnational American Studies as a field.

Distortions on Cameroon’s War-Time Economy, 1914-1916

Purpose. The paper examines the degree of turbulence that was meted on the colonial economy of the Cameroons between 1914-1916.&#x0D; Methodology: The study was built on the theoretical method, garnered largely from secondary sources, and an analytical pattern that is highly conventional.&#x0D; Results: The indicated that wartime conditions led to increased distortions on Cameroon’s economic patterns especially in the form of higher taxations, agricultural shifts and restrictive trading regulations and concluded that this metropolitan based economy was literally altered to pilot allied war efforts.&#x0D; Unique contribution to theory and practice: The paper recommends that, a shift from the archaic system of bitter revanchist that placed nation-states at war with each other as a necessary corollary for imperial expansion, for a more peaceful approach to cross country rifts, would lessen future tensions and make futile any eminent war with bitter lessons on world economies even as national rivalries persist until the 21st century.

The nexus of nationalism and internationalism: the journey of a “diplomat” after the galleons

After the galleons, Benito J. Legarda’s masterpiece on socioeconomic transformation after the galleon trade, has enriched our knowledge of the semi-open colonial economy in the 19th-century Philippine Islands, which witnessed the rise of nationalism at the end of that century. In this paper, I shed new light on the nature of the Ilustrados’ nationalism and their international activism by revisiting the life of the country’s “first diplomat”, Felipe Agoncillo, who battled in vain to achieve independence through a diplomatic channel. While class politics tends to be a focal point of the scholarly debate over the Ilustrados’ nationalism, this paper highlights the international dimensions of their advocacy. Agoncillo’s mission in the United States and Europe seems a reasonable option from our perspective, which has been shaped by the norm of modern diplomacy, but it was a risky adventure considering the overwhelming influence of imperialism. Why did Agoncillo conclude they had to send a mission? What kinds of negotiation strategies did they have? Combining Legarda’s global insights on the Philippines’ colonial economy with Agoncillo’s ideational and actual travel, this paper reveals how Philippine nationalism and internationalism created a nexus whose legacy exists in current Philippine diplomacy, one of whose achievements was the award of the arbitration case over the South China Sea in 2016.

An Historical Assessment and Analysis of Economic Imperialism in West Africa

Abstract The West African political economy has been shaped by the policies, decisions and actions of dominant European imperialist countries since about over 500 years. Starting with imperial merchant capitalism along the West African coast in the 16th Century and French gradual acquisition of Senegal as a colony as from 1677, West Africa has remained under the imperialist hold. West Africa remains economically dependent on its former colonial masters despite more than 60 years since the countries started gaining independence. The consequences of economic imperialism on West Africa have included exploitative resource extraction, proxy and resource influenced civil wars, illegal trade in natural resources, mass poverty, and external migration of skilled workers necessary for national development. The world sees and broadcasts poverty, starvation, conflict and Saharan migration in the West African sub-continent, but hardly reports the exploitative imperialistic processes that have produced poverty and misery in West Africa in particular and across sub-Saharan Africa in general.

From colonial subjects to post-colonial citizens? Considerations for a contemporary study of Black México

The Mexican government is currently attempting to incorporate Black Mexicans into the national cultural landscape. However, the centring of whiteness through mestizaje limits the possibilities of Black inclusion by continuing to imagine the archetypal Mexican citizen as non-Black. Therefore, a colonial inheritance of racial value continues to frame how blackness can be constituted as part of the contemporary nation. This article argues that while the War for Independence may have allowed for the imagination of a new ‘Mexican’, a colonial racial economy continues to endure. This racial economy continues to limit the possibility of citizenship for African descendants in México.

The Unfolding of the Intellectual Activist: An African Philosophical Perspective

Writing from an African and philosophical position, we argue that intellectual activists require an unfoldment, because they have been hindered by different factors such as co-option and exile. The African philosophy of ubuntu, particularly its epistemic dimension, is used as the basis for unfoldment. We depart from the justified but extremely combative critique of (neo)colonialism, and posit that there is the potential to solve African problems without perpetually blaming colonialism. Using the African Renaissance theory, we emphasise a shift towards becoming better through development and by analysing the question of poverty. Poverty is worsened by development policies, which often remain unchallenged. African philosophy can simultaneously fight colonial discourses on Africa while contributing towards human well-being by situating intellectual activism in the African condition of poverty. Intellectual activists should participate, together with citizens, in the formulation of relevant and practical policies. This requires a reframing of the intellectual landscape in order to stimulate a participatory intellectual project. It enables alternative understandings of what it means to be an intellectual, beyond the usual role of writer. Reframing intellectual activism offers an opportunity to use indigenous languages to make sense of local and lived realities on the ground.

Esparto crafting under empire: Local technology and imperial industry in Roman Iberia

Drawing on scholarship in postcolonial archaeology that emphasizes the place of indigenous technology in colonial and imperial contexts, this article explores the role of local communities in esparto grass weaving and basketry in the southeast Iberian Peninsula in antiquity. Esparto crafting became essential to Phoenician and Carthaginian colonial economies of the 1st millennium BCE and, later, to the production equipment for mining and other industries under Roman imperial rule. This paper uses ethnographic studies alongside archaeological evidence of esparto objects, particularly esparto mining equipment, to reconstruct the chaîne opératoire of ancient esparto crafting. It argues that local communities developed landscape learning and tactile technical knowledge surrounding esparto crafting over many generations. In supplying equipment essential to Roman mining, these communities used their technical knowledge to maintain agency and construct their identities under imperial rule. Ultimately, understanding esparto crafting helps elucidate the relationship between resources, technology, and imperial or colonial encounters.

The Planning Profession Questioned: Evidence from the Role and Practice of Planners in Zimbabwe

The planning profession is contested, especially in southern Africa where it remains rooted in colonial political economy, the consequential Western ideologies it poses on African cities, and its seeming failure to address the myriad problems inherent in these cities. In exploring the planning profession in Zimbabwe, this commentary involved document analysis and empirical engagement with planning professionals. It was revealed that the planning profession in Zimbabwe is exposed to and frustrated by multiple factors that complicate the integrity of the professionals and their practice. The commentary contributes to the critical reading of planning’s history and contemporary circumstances in Zimbabwe.

Review of Value Chains: The New Economic Imperialism.

Review of Value Chains: The New Economic Imperialism.

Squarter Question and Politics of Settlement Schemes in Trans-Nzoia Kenya: Some Conceptual and Theoretical Reflections

Historically, in most African countries settlement schemes have always been established with the aim to settle displaced persons or to provide landless families and squatters with land. Conventionally, these schemes have been regarded as a means to increase agricultural production and to further rural development through optimal utilisation of physical and human resources. In Kenya, the transfer of expatriate-owned farms began a few years before Independence. In retrospect, the most important characteristic of the process was not the transfer from European to African ownership but the break-up of many large farms in smallholder units, although there was considerable variety in types of settlement. From the very beginning, the settlement policy of the government of Kenya had to serve political as well as development objectives. By 1930s squatter labour had become the main source of labour on settler farms and estates and as such servicing the colonial economy. As such, squatting was a response on the part of ordinary people to the changing structure of the colonial economy, when Africans became a subordinate part of a system of capitalist production. The administrative framework of ordinances and policies that structured rural-urban migration first impelled men to seek wage labor and gradually brought whole families to the cities. This study looks at theoretical and conceptual issues on land settlements in relations to squatter problem in Nzans-Nzoia.

Чем философия может быть полезна институциональному экономисту?

In recent decades, economists are actively entering the space of other disciplines. This movement of economists into the field of research of other sciences was called “economic imperialism”. The result of this process is a more realistic representation the nature of man in economic science and the conditions for the formation of human behavior. One of the objects of economic research is culture: values, beliefs and models of human behavior. Analyzing the concept of cultural codes, V. L. Tambovtsev points out that the study of the individual cultural institutions influence can be more effective than the research work within the concept of “general - cultural” factors, i.e. culture as a “homogeneous monolith”. It is more productive to use the “piece by piece” strategy to explore its position on cultural phenomena, studying the impact of a single cultural phenomenon on society. In this case, the influence of certain cultural institutions on the formation of certain behaviors is of interest. The purpose of the article is to analyze philosophy as a specific model of behavior, the formation of which can contribute to certain cultural practices. Objectives: to define philosophy as a specific model of behavior; to analyze the relationship of philosophy with value attitudes common in society; to indicate the potential of analyzing philosophy as a specific model of behavior for an economist. Conclusion: philosophy may be of interest to an institutional economist as a specific practice, i.e. as a model of human behavior that can be studied in a language of institutional economics. The movement of “economic imperialism” in the direction of philosophy will help to better understand the nature of man and the logic of his choice of actions.

Legal and economic thought in retrospect: a new facet of intellectual history

This article examines such a little-studied problem as the interaction of legal and economic thought in retrospect. New approaches to the study of this interaction are outlined. The research is based on historical, systemic and structural and comparative legal scientific methods. The author substantiatedly asserts about the chronological primacy of legal research, in connection with which the appeal to the study of economics was of a subordinate nature. It is noted that the research of that period was mainly of a normative nature, since their authors wanted to define a model of behavior in the field of economics, which would correspond to the ideals of natural law. Special attention is paid to the modern problems of interaction between legal and economic thought. In this regard, «economic imperialism» is subjected to well-reasoned criticism, according to which the laws of the economy apply to all spheres of social life. It is concluded that the study of the interaction of legal and economic thought in retrospect makes it possible not only to better understand the processes taking place in the past, but also to consider the directions of solutions to modern problems facing the legal and economic sciences.

Profitable partnerships: The Chinese business elite and Dutch lawyers in the making of Semarang

This article examines the collaboration between the law firm of C.W. Baron van Heeckeren from Semarang and the Oei Tiong Ham Concern (OTHC). From the 1880s this Dutch law firm became the centre of a close-knit group of Dutch lawyer-entrepreneurs who through interlocking business directorships developed important sectors of the Javanese economy and the city of Semarang. In doing so Van Heeckeren and his associates teamed up with the Chinese business elite of the port-city. In particular they worked with the foremost Overseas Chinese capitalist, Major Oei Tiong Ham, developing profitable partnerships. The Dutch lawyers acted not only as his legal advisors, but developed his sugar empire as directors-shareholders, held major stakes in his shipping business and coolie trade, and profited from his opium trade. They moreover helped Oei Tiong Ham to acquire real estate and enterprises formerly belonging to powerful Chinese opium farmers and collaborated with him in developing infrastructural and housing projects. This article provides new and revealing details about how the business world of colonial Java worked during the early phase of Dutch economic imperialism and how the Chinese business elite seized the opportunities provided by the Dutch colonial state to advance their business interests.

From Racial Difference to Racial Indifference: The Neo- Liberal Narrative and Its Colonial Legacy Through the Example of Washington Black (2018) by Esi Edugyan

The present article centres on Washington Black—a neo-slave narrative whose eponymous hero documents his route from slavery to freedom. The novel offers insight into how the structural legacy of colonialism lives on in (neo-)liberalism, which is understood here as a currently dominant socio-economic system and a set of beliefs rooted in the colonial economy and colonial ideology. The paper investigates how harmful discursive formations once created to justify European civilizing missions and chattel slavery are still being used to belie the reality of structural violence and systemic inequity, where particular groups are being racialised and marginalised at the same time. Through the prism of the novel, the article looks at how the discourse of universal human rights, the idea of a grateful slave, and the myth of self-sufficiency may be employed as the mechanisms of social control over the Other.

Etherealization in a Racial Regime of Ownership: Marconi in O‘ahu, circa 1900

This article traces the emergence of wireless telegraphy in the Hawaiian Islands in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Centrally, I argue that for an ascendant haole (white settler) planter class, wirelessness proffered potent resources with which to articulate a particular model of scale and connectivity—one in which Hawai‘i’s isolation from the US mainland was recast as the predicate of new, and highly lucrative, forms of intimacy and proximity. These intimacies, I argue, overlapped not just symbolically but materially with the de facto and de jure forms of US colonial governance that took shape in the islands in this period. To make the case, I think through and around one particularly notable wireless transmission complex: the American Marconi Company’s hulking installation at Kahuku, on the North Shore of O‘ahu, and its companion station at Koko Head, some fifty miles south. Recounting the maneuvers by which these sites were drawn into the fold of long-distance wireless signaling, I show that to whatever extent wirelessness animated transcendent visions of scalar extensibility and global connectivity, it did so from within the confines of a colonial economy of land use, elaborated around the enclosure and privatization of Indigenous land and the racially stratified exploitation of migrant labor. By way of conclusion, however, the article also considers how Kānaka Maoli (Indigenous Hawaiians) are today developing new models of wireless connectivity that upend this history of colonial enclosure by articulating wirelessness to projects of Indigenous nation building.