European Colonization Research Articles

“New Slavery” vs. Huagong: Chinese Indentured Labor in South Africa in the Chinese Press, 1903–1905

In the context of Asian indentured labor within European colonies, the use of Chinese indentured laborers during South Africa’s post-Anglo-Boer War reconstruction period remains relatively obscure. This article addresses this gap by examining how early 20th-century foreign-style Chinese-language newspapers reported on the recruitment of Chinese indentured laborers, known as huagong 华工, for South Africa’s gold mining industry from 1904–1910. Rather than dispatching journalists to South Africa, these newspapers primarily translated news from foreign sources. This article investigates how these news articles were interpreted and translated for Chinese readers, exploring whether terms like “new slavery” or “Chinese slavery” from South African and British discourse were conveyed and, if so, how. The central argument posits that huagong was the favored concept, rooted in its pre-existing association with the extensive history of Chinese people working overseas, thereby contributing to an increased awareness of labor exploitation and social inequality.

The transition from resistance to acceptance: Managing a marine invasive species in a changing world

Abstract Marine invasive species can transform coastal ecosystems, yet mitigating their effects can be difficult, and even impractical. Often, marine invasive species are managed at poorly matched spatial scales, and at the same time, rates of spread and establishment are increasing under climate change and can outpace resources available for population suppression. These circumstances challenge traditional conservation goals of maintaining a historic environmental state, especially for a species like the European green crab (Carcinus maenas), a formidable invader with few examples of successful long‐term removal programs. A management paradigm where decision alternatives include resisting or accepting a new ecological trajectory may be needed. We apply mathematical concepts from decision theory to develop a quantitative framework for navigating management decisions in this new resist‐accept paradigm. We develop a model of European green crab growth, removal and colonization, and we find optimal levels of removal effort that minimize both ecological change and removal cost. We establish a benchmark of colonization pressure at which green crab density becomes decoupled from a decision maker's actions, such that population control can no longer shape the invasion trajectory. For informing the decision boundary between resistance and acceptance, our results highlight that a decision maker's understanding of how removal cost scales with removal effort is more important than understanding the density‐impact relationship. We show that assuming stationary system dynamics can result in sub‐optimal levels of species removal effort, highlighting the importance of developing anticipatory management strategies by accounting for non‐stationary dynamics. Policy implications. For marine invasive species that can disperse across long distances and recolonize rapidly after removal, the focus of conservation policy should shift away from understanding how to resist change to understanding when to stop resisting change. Navigating this decision problem involves trade‐offs among competing objectives, highlighting the need for structured approaches to elicit objective weights that reflect the values of the decision maker. For natural resource managers facing possible ecosystem transformation, this decision framework can enable proactive and strategic decisions made under uncertainty in a changing world.

Una mirada decolonial a la Hacienda de Cañasgordas: a propósito de su restauración y apertura en calidad de museo

Since 2014, with Resolution 0423 regarding the Special Management and Protection Plan, Hacienda de Cañasgordas entered a restoration process as a museum after being declared a national heritage and cultural asset. Thus, the novel "El Alférez Real" by José Eustaquio Palacios was used to substantiate the symbolic value of the estate based on the context of representativeness of Cali society in the 18th century. However, this process remained in the 19th-century interest of reconstructing a concrete and recognizable historical past, emphasizing the preferences towards spaces, cultural environment, and lifestyle of colonial hegemonic individuals, while minimizing the fact that Cañasgordas, as a slaveholding estate, also played a fundamental role in the living conditions of the enslaved and the formation of Afro-descendant populations and/or black communities in the departments of Valle del Cauca and Cauca. Inscribed within Latin American cultural studies, specifically in the notion of decolonialism developed by the Modernity/Coloniality group, the discursive practice and thought are reviewed to identify the modes of utilization, understanding, and appropriation of the novel in order to materialize power relations from the structuring of differences and the projection of such social representations. Therefore, the objective of this article was to substantiate a decolonial perspective of Hacienda de Cañasgordas through the approach of epistemological, paradigmatic, and historiographic dimensions, to propose a way of seeing the Other that questions European colonialism and the subsequent coloniality established with the perpetuation of the Eurocentric model, insofar as the paradigmatic concept of the museum was privileged, and how this category has been affected in its construction from the fictional and factual discursive practice of the novel "El Alférez Real".

The Constitutional Right of Collective Property of Quilombola Communities and the State's Action for its Achievement in Brazil

Objective: the objective of this study is to investigate the role of the State in the processes of granting collective property titles to quilombola communities in Brazil. Theoretical Framework: the theory of coloniality of power, developed by Aníbal Quijano, guides this research. The concept of coloniality of power is related to the fact that European colonization of Latin American territories influences current power relations. It provides a basis for the development of the research, especially by contributing to the understanding of the reasons why the rights of quilombola communities have not yet been fully realized. Method: the method used is hypothetical-deductive, with the bibliographic review technique. The documentary research technique is also used, with the analysis of documents from the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA) on the administrative processes for granting quilombola titles. Results and Discussion: the results of the research show that the administrative processes for granting collective property titles to quilombola communities in Brazil are bureaucratic and time-consuming, requiring specific legal and technical advice, which most quilombola communities do not have. In the discussions, the coloniality of power is present in state action, since most quilombola territories are not titled, despite the fact that Decree No. 4,887/2003, which regulates the territorial rights of these peoples, is over 20 years old. Research Implications: the research implies contributing to theoretical discussions regarding quilombola territorial rights. Originality/Value: which is an emerging theme in the country, with potential impact on the search for solutions to the problems of quilombola land regularization.

Subfossils suggest worse-than-realised losses of small-bodied mammals in northern Australia

Context Examining Australia’s late Quaternary subfossil record can be valuable in assessing whether the current diversity of small-bodied mammals seen across some parts of northern Australia is ‘normal’. Such records are important for establishing baselines for measuring historic changes in communities today and into the future. These datasets are becoming increasingly important, given trajectories in current global climate change, and predicted habitat losses and other potential anthropogenic impacts. Aims The main aim of this study is to utilise the local subfossil record from north-eastern Australia to establish a natural baseline for assessing changes in small mammal communities post-European colonisation. Methods Subfossils of vertebrates and other taxa were recovered from surface deposits adjacent to cave entrances at Broken River, near Greenvale in north-eastern Queensland, and were subjected to taxonomic, taphonomic and statistical analyses. These were then compared with local faunal records from modern surveys to compare differences in faunal communities between past and present. Key results Radiocarbon dating showed that these subfossils are geologically young, dating to approximately the time of European colonisation. We provide evidence for the former presence of extinct species of hopping mice (Notomys spp.) and rabbit rats (Conilurus spp.) in the region. Additional locally extirpated taxa such as Cape York bandicoot (Isoodon peninsulae) and Shark Bay mouse (Pseudomys gouldii) demonstrated considerable range contractions since the deposits accumulated, compared with their current distribution. Independent evidence from subfossil land snails recovered from these deposits is, with two exceptions, all modern-day vine thicket, karst-dwelling species indicating a long-term maintenance of vine thicket habitat. Thus, the loss of several mammal species is unlikely to be the result of habitat loss. Conclusions Analysis of the surface deposits showed that local historic small-mammal communities were much more diverse than are the region’s extant faunas recorded by modern surveys. Many extinctions and extirpations evidently occurred prior to such faunas being recorded as local inhabitants of the region. Implications Our data suggested that post-European colonisation small-mammal losses are likely to be substantially worse than previously realised.

The development of passenger carriage design and passenger service on the railways of India: The end of the 19th – the fi rst half of the 20th century

By the end of the nineteenth century, several dozen railway companies operated in India on intercity routes, including those of several thousand kilometres in length. On both wide and narrow gauge lines, various wagons were operated: from Classes IV and III with almost no amenities (often even without the simplest benches for sitting) and up to luxury Class I coaches and saloon coaches. Almost until the beginning of the twentieth century, when organizing passenger transportation, railway companies focused on a relatively small circle of European colonizers — civil servants, British military and wealthy entrepreneurs, including Indians, and, to a lesser extent, on middle–income Indians, while virtually ignoring the interests of the poorest population groups, which made up the vast majority of Indian society. Based on the above, a fleet of passenger carriages of wide, metre and narrow gauge lines was also formed, while, of course, all technical innovations and improvements related to improving travel comfort were initially introduced in saloon coaches, first-class carriages and, decades later, often in second-class, and then third- and fourth-class carriages. This situation remained almost until India gained independence in 1947. Real improvement began in the 1960s with the renewal of the country’s passenger coach fleet and an increase in the overall level of passenger service, including the second and third classes.

Family recipe diaries and consumption of transcultural Anglo-Indian identity

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the present mixed-race Anglo-Indians (a minority community of India) and their ancestrally derived culinary culture. The Anglo-Indians as a race were historically formed at the contact zone of European colonizers and ‘native’ Indians. The hybrid nature of their culinary culture, vis-à-vis their sociocultural identity, is the prime focus of the research. To this end, I investigate 19 Anglo-Indian family recipe diaries (currently in use) from various regions of India. I read them as markers of the syncretic cultural character of the community. The hybrid identity of the culture, as reflected in their culinary culture, negotiates cultural differences and affiliations and engages with issues of identity and representations, adapts and appropriates colonial legacies, and subverts any homogeneous notion of ‘national food culture’.

Tracing the Evolution of Human Immunity Through Ancient DNA.

Infections have imposed strong selection pressures throughout human evolution, making the study of natural selection's effects on immunity genes highly complementary to disease-focused research. This review discusses how ancient DNA studies, which have revolutionized evolutionary genetics, increase our understanding of the evolution of human immunity. These studies have shown that interbreeding between modern humans and Neanderthals or Denisovans has influenced present-day immune responses, particularly to viruses. Additionally, ancient genomics enables the tracking of how human immunity has evolved across cultural transitions, highlighting strong selection since the Bronze Age in Europe (<4,500 years) and potential genetic adaptations to epidemics raging during the Middle Ages and the European colonization of the Americas. Furthermore, ancient genomic studies suggest that the genetic risk for noninfectious immune disorders has gradually increased over millennia because alleles associated with increased risk for autoimmunity and inflammation once conferred resistance to infections. The challenge now is to extend these findings to diverse, non-European populations and to provide a more global understanding of the evolution of human immunity.

The Impact of Colonialism on the Islamic Education System: Changes in Education Systems in Colonized Regions Such as Indonesia, India, and North Africa

This study examines the impact of colonialism on the Islamic education system in colonized regions such as Indonesia, India, and North Africa, using a literature review method. The research finds that colonialism brought significant changes to the Islamic education system, both structurally and curricular. In Indonesia, the influence of Dutch colonialism is evident in the introduction of Western-based formal education, which shifted the position of traditional madrasas, although these institutions managed to survive by adopting modern curricula. In India, British colonialism introduced Western education, influencing the madrasa system with the adoption of some modern elements in its teaching. Meanwhile, European colonialism in North Africa created a dynamic interplay between Islamic traditions and modernity, leading to changes that reflect a compromise between local values and foreign influences. In conclusion, colonialism not only transformed the landscape of Islamic education in these regions but also drove adaptation and innovation within Islamic educational institutions to maintain their relevance amidst changing times.

The Ethics of Decolonization

Sampling from the “Indigenous turn” in anthropology, this article asks what might be relevant for our thinking about the politics and ethics of social research practices in the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) region from the decolonizing efforts of those working in New Zealand, Hawaii, Bolivia, and Native America. It begins with Linda Tuhiwai Smith's 1999 classic Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples and her judgment that “from the vantage point of the colonized . . . the term ‘research’ is inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism.” Decolonizing means shifting the focus from the power/knowledge formations and questions of representation that Edward Said's work highlighted for those of us in MENA studies toward the ethics of social research itself and the silences on the political contexts that shape research and make research possible. If we were to transpose the practical ethical questions about the methods and purposes of social research, imagining our research subjects as analogous to “Indigenous” people in settler-colonial states insofar as they are living in the region or coming from the region under study—despite their diversity of location, class, ethnicity, religion, social capital, political power, living conditions, and possibilities, not to mention experiences of displacement, coercion, and violence—how would the decolonial impulse translate?

From Istanbul to Dakar and Dar es Salaam

This article studies the formation of (borrowing Wilson Chacko Jacob's terminology) efendi masculinity, through the conceptual lens of adab (proper conduct). It combines interviews with members of Süleyman Efendi Cemaati in Dakar, Senegal, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and digital ethnography of Islamic forums in order to develop a historically informed cultural analysis of gendered and raced sartorial practices within the Cemaat. It argues that the Cemaat's culturally specific dress code—an ironed shirt tucked into trousers—is produced by tensions and convergences between civilizational discourses emanating from European metropoles, the modernizing reforms of the Kemalist state, and Islamic pedagogies of civility. At the intersection of these competing and concurring civilizing projects and processes is situated the figure of “Istanbul efendisi” (the gentleman from Istanbul) as the embodiment of civilized Muslim masculinity championed by Süleyman Efendi Cemaati. The article explores efendi masculinity within the Cemaat's pedagogy of adab, as a legacy of the Kemalist modernization project and the Turkish state's civilizing mission, by analyzing the discourses of order and hygiene in dormitories and the adoption of European-style male clothing. It examines how in Muslim Africa these legacies intersect with those of European colonialism and its civilizing mission.

Ecological Grief and Anxiety: The Voice of Native American in Joy Harjo’s Selected Poems

The arrival of European colonizers led to the disruption of the nature and ecosystem. As the indigenous people with a close relationship to nature, Native Americans express their grief and anxiety about the condition of nature through literary work. The study presented in the present article aims to scrutinize three selected poems by Joy Harjo “Remember”, “Praise the Rain”, and “I am a Prayer” to see how the poet expresses her ecological grief and anxiety. The lines and stanzas of each poem are analyzed using the theory of intrinsic elements and the five stages of grief by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. The researchers use a descriptive qualitative method and employ a psychological approach to reveal the speaker's suffering in the poem psychologically in which she feels grieved because of the loss of nature. The findings were that there were five stages of grief portrayed in the poems implicitly, that is, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. The speaker’s grief and anxiety can be seen from the personification, repetition, and imagery used in the poems. Joy Harjo offers a different way to experience the stage of ecological grief and anxiety. She invites us to honor the journey of grief with empathy, wisdom, and a profound appreciation for the natural world. Harjo invites a deeper awareness that is both accepting of past wounds and open to future possibilities. The acceptance of grief is a crucial step toward reconnection. It is only by accepting the grief of what has been lost that one can truly remember, appreciate, and care for what remains.

Corruption and neo-colonialism in Latin America

Corruption is deemed one of the main drivers of development challenges in many countries, mainly in those territories that drag the shackles of colonialism. The roots of corruption in underdeveloped countries can be traced from Colonial times from South America, Asia to Africa the pattern seems to be repeated: populations subjugated to new masters, disenfranchised indigenous people, labour and sexual exploitation, brutal punishments for those who resisted colonial power were commune features for countries that experienced colonialism. Many of those power excesses have been recognised historically, however one of the most persistent element of Colonialism that survives until nowadays is corruption. The present text aims to shine a light on the relation of colonialism and corruption in Latin America. The hypothesis raised suggests that corruption was installed through colonialism in the Latin America region. The text is presented in three parts; the first one offers some historical considerations about European colonialism, the second one describes the strategies used by colonisers and the use of corruption as a tool to impose their rule and consolidate their power, and the third one exposes the new colonial form of corruption carried out by the West, led today by the United States.

La colonisation du savoir

Samir Boumediene is a CNR researcher at the Institute d'histoire des représentations et des idées dans les modernités in Lyon (France), and this book is product of his PhD dissertation at the University of Lorraine. Boumediene presents in this well-researched monograph the extent of European colonisation and appropriation of Indigenous knowledge by focusing on medicinal plants from the New World, their transmission, and later integration into European markets and consumer culture.

The Indo–Pacific Pollen Database – a Neotoma constituent database

Abstract. The Indo–Pacific Pollen Database (IPPD) is the brainchild of the late professor Geoffrey Hope, who gathered pollen records from across the region to ensure their preservation for future generations of palaeoecologists. This noble aim is now being fulfilled by integrating the IPPD into the online Neotoma Paleoecology Database, making this compilation available for public use. Here we explore the database in depth and suggest directions for future research. The IPPD comprises 226 fossil pollen records, most postdating 20 ka but with some extending as far back as 50 ka or further. Over 80 % of the records are Australian, with a fairly even distribution between the different Australian geographical regions, with the notable exception being Western Australia, which is only represented by three records. The records are also well distributed in the modern climate space, with the largest gap being in drier regions due to preservation issues. However, many of the records contain few samples or have fewer than five chronology control points, such as radiocarbon, luminescence or Pb-210, for the younger sequences. Average deposition time for the whole database, counted as years per centimetre, is 64.8 yr cm−1, with 61 % of the records having a deposition time shorter than 50 yr cm−1. The slowest deposition time by geographical region occurs on Australia's east coast, while the fastest times are from the western Pacific. Overall, Australia has a slower deposition time than the rest of the Indo–Pacific region. The IPPD offers many exciting research opportunities to investigate past regional vegetation changes and associated drivers, including contrasting the impact of the first human arrival and European colonisation on vegetation. Examining spatiotemporal patterns of diversity and compositional turnover/rate of change, land cover reconstructions, and plant functional or trait diversity are other avenues of potential research, amongst many others. Merging the IPPD into Neotoma also facilitates inclusion of data from the Indo–Pacific region into global syntheses.

“Pageantry of aggression”: QAnon, animality, and the violent pursuit of whiteness

While the specifics of the far-right COVID-denying QAnon movement may remain cloudy within popular consciousness, in contrast, many can easily conjure the image of Jacob Chansley, the so-called “QAnon Shaman,” when evoking the January 6th US Capitol riot. Chansley, face-painted in the American flag and draped in faux regalia—a virtual menagerie of animals: coyote, buffalo, and eagle—appears clearly, spear in hand, as if parting the fog of war. Photos of Chansley howling or brazenly posing on the Senate dais are indelibly sketched into our collective memory. Some may conjure him simply as a buffoon, but his trespassing and seditious antics are interwoven with a costume that pulls at the long thread of European and American colonialism. This article posits that Chansley’s animalized insurrectionist attire and his ability to play at the borderlands between human and animal, civilized and uncivilized, was an enactment of white supremacy. Insulated by conjoined racist and speciesist legacies, his ensemble placed him closer not only to Western constructions of nature, but also to animality, all without threatening his human status. Working at the intersections of critical race theory and critical animal studies, and illustrated with mainstream news accounts, this article considers broader cultural contexts that reveal Chansley’s sartorial representation as anything but benign.

The Portrayals of the Other in Yemeni Postcolonial Fiction: A Critical Study on Ahmed Zein's Steamer Point

This research paper investigates the portrayals of the other in Ahmed Zein’s Steamer Point (2015), with a special focus on the European colonizer. In addition to that, it examines the coexistence between the natives and Europeans as reflected in the story. The postcolonial theory has been used as a methodology to frame the discussions and analysis of the novel in this study. The paper has been constructed in five sections: Introduction, background of the study, theoretical framework, discussions and analysis, and finally the conclusion. The study ended up with the conclusion that The relationship between the self and the other is one of the complicated issues in the postcolonial era. Each one of self and other seeks to abolish the boundaries between them. The other seeks to abolish the components of the self, which make the self feels the loss of his privacy and rights in his relationship with the other. Steamer Point dealt with the issue of colonization and the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized people. While the story seems to glorify the colonizers, it also showed their real face in the negative way they looked at the natives, as well as how badly they treated them. That hegemony and biasness against the local people led at the end of the story to independence.

Gavin Maxwell in Morocco and Algeria with Margaret Pope and Ahmed Alaoui: public relations networks, anti-imperialism, and travel writing in the era of decolonisation

ABSTRACT This article asks how Gavin Maxwell, famed Scottish nature-writer and otter-keeper, author of Ring of Bright Water, emerged from a background of European colonialist adventure-writing to become a clandestine agent for the FLN Algerian independence movement in 1961, and then, in The Rocks Remain (1963) and Lords of the Atlas (1966), to advance a positive portrait of the newly independent Moroccan monarchy and, in the latter work, a condemnation of French colonialism. Using published writings and unpublished archival documents, this article examines Maxwell’s career as a travel writer in Iraq, Morocco, and Algeria, in the context of recent historiography on the global public relations networking of Moroccan and Algerian anticolonial movements. Through his relationships with British journalist-activist Margaret Pope and the Moroccan monarchy’s press services head and Minister of Information and Tourism, Ahmed Alaoui, Maxwell became, if only briefly and partially, a part of North African anti-imperialist outreach networks developed to cultivate global public opinion. In Maxwell’s case, his recruitment as a literary supporter was more of a success for the Moroccan monarchy than for the Algerian FLN.

Literary Realism, Speculative Fiction, and Queer African Futures in Akwaeke Emezi's Freshwater

ABSTRACT: This article positions Akwaeke Emezi's novel Freshwater (2018) as a text that challenges definitions of multiple genres, namely literary realism and speculative fiction. I argue that Freshwater 's seemingly fantastical elements are in fact iterations of Igbo cosmology, which recognizes coterminous human and spiritual realms as part of material reality. By positioning Igbo ontology as the grounding principle of earthly existence, Freshwater contests the division of realism into multiple subsets (magical, animist, literary). Furthmore, I argue that the novel playfully refigures ogbanje identities and Igbo cosmological structures to envision new horizons for future kinship. Rather than speculating about futures that respond to African histories of European colonization, Freshwater reconfigures uniquely Igbo concepts such as ogbanje and iyi-uwa into means for queer agential re-destination. Thus, the novel shifts the speculative focus away from postcolonial efforts to "write back," and instead locates the basis for speculative futures within Igbo ontological structures. Freshwater 's complex navigation of not only multiple realisms and speculative fiction, but also tradition and change, defies easy categorization and instead offers open-ended avenues for queer Igbo and other African futurities.

Addressing the Anthropocene from the Global South: integrating paleoecology, archaeology and traditional knowledge for COP engagement

The triple planetary crisis of climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss necessitates more holistic, comprehensive, and integrated public policy approaches. Within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, this crisis highlights significant conflicts over forms of knowledge and conceptualization, affecting how international policies are formed. Indigenous knowledge systems have become increasingly acknowledged for their vital role in addressing the challenges of the Anthropocene. Conferences of the Parties institutions like the International Indigenous Peoples Forum on Climate Change emphasize the critical, although not always recognized, importance of Indigenous territories, which contain eighty percent of the world’s biodiversity. Here, we show that research in paleoecology, archaeology and history demonstrates the long-term significance of traditional knowledge and Indigenous land management practices for contemporary ecosystem dynamics. Drawing from these varied studies and perspectives also reveal the socio-economic inequalities resulting from centuries of European colonialism. We showcase three case studies on; (i) pastoralism in eastern Africa, (ii) natural resource management in southeast Asia and (iii) adaptation to sea level rise in the Caribbean, which touch upon highly diverse human resilience strategies across space and time. Despite efforts at the COP28 to accelerate climate action and incorporate diverse knowledge systems, significant challenges remain. The need for a pluralistic knowledge, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach, blending scientific language with artistic and narrative forms, is proposed as critical for fostering effective communication and developing more effective and equitable solutions for global environmental governance.