Colonial Geography Research Articles

Between the Plantation and the Port: Racialization and Social Control in Eighteenth-Century Paramaribo

AbstractStarting from an incident in the colonial port city of Paramaribo in the autumn of 1750 in which, according to the Dutch governor Mauricius, many of the proper barriers separating rich and poor, men and women, adults and children, white citizens and black slaves were crossed, this article traces some of the complexities of everyday social control in colonial Suriname. As gateways for the trade in commodities and the movement of people, meeting points for free and unfree labourers, and administrative centres for emerging colonial settlements, early modern port cities became focal points for policing interaction across racial and social boundaries. Much of the literature on the relationship between slavery and race focuses on the plantation as “race-making institution” and the planter class as the immediate progenitors of “racial capitalism”. Studies of urban slavery, on the other hand, have emphasized the greater possibilities of social contact between blacks,mestizos, and whites of various social status in the bustling port cities of the Atlantic. This article attempts to understand practices of racialization and control in the port city of Paramaribo not by contrasting the city with its plantation environment, but by underlining the connections between the two social settings that together shaped colonial geography. The article focuses on everyday activities in Paramaribo (dancing, working, drinking, arguing) that reveal the extent of contact between slaves and non-slaves. The imposition of racialized forms of repression that set one group against the other, frequently understood primarily as a means to justify the apparent stasis of the plantation system with its rigid internal divisions, in practice often functioned precisely to fight the pernicious effects of mobility in mixed social contexts.

A Biography of a Map in Motion: Augustine Herrman's Chesapeake by Christian J. Koot

Reviewed by: A Biography of a Map in Motion: Augustine Herrman's Chesapeake by Christian J. Koot Keith D. Pluymers A Biography of a Map in Motion: Augustine Herrman's Chesapeake. By Christian J. Koot (New York: New York University Press, 2018. Pp. [xiv], 283. $35.00, ISBN 978-1-4798-3729-8.) Over the course of the 1660s, Augustine Herrman, a merchant and cartographer who navigated the borderlands of English and Dutch mid-Atlantic colonies, created a distinct, precise manuscript map of the Chesapeake region. In his wide-ranging and accessible A Biography of a Map in Motion: Augustine Herrman's Chesapeake, Christian J. Koot traces the histories of Herrman and his map as both moved in and between empires and around the Atlantic world, illuminating how these peregrinations transformed the man and the object. Koot uses Herrman's map, Virginia and Maryland as it is Planted and Inhabited (1673), to draw out two Atlantic worlds: the colonial, which had relatively porous boundaries and ample opportunities for interimperial trade, movement, and intellectual exchange; and the imperial, which emphasized metropolitan primacy, sovereignty, and clearly delineated authority. Three chapters framed around the details of Herrman's life as a colonial merchant and mapmaker, but offering extended discussions of mercantile life, material culture, and local politics, argue for the existence of a flexible, mobile colonial community. Herrman—who was born in Bohemia, lived in the Dutch Republic, worked as a merchant in New Amsterdam, developed trade networks across the Dutch and English mid-Atlantic colonies, and ultimately settled as a planter in Maryland—was, Koot argues, a truly colonial individual whose skills and networks were valued by English and Dutch colonial authorities. Herrman moved consistently and easily across the waterways of the Chesapeake and as far afield as the Caribbean. While Herrman stood out for his commercial success and his cartographic prowess, he typified, as Koot suggests, "colonists in the Mid-Atlantic [who] belonged to one larger cross-national community" (p. 51). Even open hostilities and the English seizure of New Netherland "did not reorient the mapmaker's imagining of the larger Mid-Atlantic as an interconnected unit" (p. 133). These dense and overlapping mercantile networks and relationships with Native peoples enabled Herrman to create "a unique map that captures a distinctive colonial geography" while displaying Dutch cartographic traditions [End Page 141] and ways of seeing (p. 55). In its manuscript form, the map conveyed colonial attitudes, knowledges, and uses, including ones at odds with imperial policy. Koot convincingly teases out these details about a manuscript map of which there are no surviving copies—a testament to his subtle, skillful visual analysis against the grain of the extant printed maps and to his deep engagement with technical histories of cartography. It is one of the book's great strengths that Koot provides such analysis without burdening nonspecialist readers or deadening his light, flowing prose. Koot's reconstruction of the absent manuscript informs his reading of the surviving prints. In peeling back engraver William Faithorne's transformations of Herrman's manuscript, Koot reveals how Faithorne and Lord Baltimore sought to transform a colonial manuscript into a metropolitan print that "spoke to the imperial uses to which the landscape could be put" and that cemented Baltimore's own interests in North America (p. 140). The new map also required a transformation of Herrman, from a planter, merchant, and mapmaker moving easily across physical and political geographies into "Augustine Herrman Bohemian." "Augustine Herrman Bohemian," Koot argues, was "a metropolitan figure" who evoked renowned Bohemian engraver Wenceslaus Hollar while simultaneously lending the image authority through a text that celebrated "an actual individual and his skill in capturing the colonies" (pp. 166, 170). But conflicting interpretations did not end the moment the printers put ink to engraved copper. The careful visual and textual rhetoric of the printed map enraged at least one anonymous Maryland colonist, who wrote that the presence of Lord Baltimore's coat of arms on the map was evidence of broader Catholic plots to usurp royal authority. People and objects in motion have long been one of the defining characteristics of Atlantic history. One of the chief virtues of A Biography of a Map...

“A mild despotism of sugar”: Race, labor, and flood management in British Guiana

Volumes of research have demonstrated the ways in which the production of sugar served as a key economic motivator for the development of capitalism. Embedded within this extractive economy is a requirement for strict environmental management and large pools of seasonal labor, typically within the context of the racial geographies of colonialism. In this article, I draw on archival research conducted at the National Archives in London, UK to examine the relationship between these agrarian economies, the social and economic requirements for flood control on a low-lying coastal plain, and British colonial-racial politics in British Guiana. I argue that colonial planters manipulated flood control systems and legislation in a way that produced and maintained a reserve army of black labor and in the process producing a racial geography meant primarily to ensure the survival of the crop even as prices plummeted in the twentieth century.

Making Mount Kilimanjaro German: Nation building and heroic masculinity in the colonial geographies of Hans Meyer

In 1885, as Germany claimed dominion over what was to become German East Africa, Mount Kilimanjaro became the highest German mountain; in 1889, the German geographer Hans Meyer was the first European to reach its summit. The “conquest” of Kilimanjaro was more than just one man's heroic adventure; it was an event that brought together Geography, the building of the German nation and European imperialism. This paper seeks to explore Hans Meyer's production of geographical knowledge about Kilimanjaro and the way in which the geographical gaze of one man gave rise to an object at which others could gaze and about which they could read. Building on scholarship on exploration, field work in Colonial Geography, and the production of the geographical self, the paper follows Meyer to the field in colonial German East Africa, and back to academia, publishing houses and public talks in Germany. In so doing, the paper encounters not only the production of knowledge about Physical Geography, the messiness of fieldwork and a wide range of technologies of observation and recording, but also the production of the white, male and German geographer as a trustworthy witness.

Repurposing beauty pageants: The colonial geographies of Filipina pageants in Canada

This paper considers how notions of beauty and performances at pageants transform as they move across different colonial times and spaces. It examines how gender, racial, and sexual subjectivities take shape among cisgender Filipina women who participate and organize community-based pageants on the traditional and ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Skxwú7mesh, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples (Vancouver, Canada). I analyze observations and interviews conducted with Filipina/os who organize and participate in community pageants. Based on this examination, I argue that spatial processes make apparent the shifting nature of gendered, racialized, and sexualized pageant performances. Pageant ideals change with migration as white heteropatriarchal logics, which are enmeshed in settler colonial projects of Canada, make grooves into the ways Filipino gendered sexualities come to be in Canada. More broadly, the paper speaks to the ways in which power works with and through space through the logics of race, gender, and sexuality. It outlines how racialized women’s feminine heterosexuality is made legible by liberal scripts designed for immigrants in the white settler colonial context of Canada. Thus, the paper sets in motion questions of how intersections of power are shaped by contemporary forms of colonialism.

The colonial ethnological line: Timor and the racial geography of the Malay Archipelago

This article examines the connected histories of racial science and colonial geography in Island Southeast Asia. By focusing on the island of Timor, it explores colonial boundaries as modes of arranging racial classifications, and racial typologies as forms of articulating political geography. Portuguese physical anthropologist António Mendes Correia's work on the ethnology of East Timor is examined as expressive of these productive connections. Correia's classificatory work ingeniously blended political geography and racial taxonomy. Between 1916 and 1945, mainly based on data from the Portuguese enclave of Oecussi and Ambeno, he claimed a distinct Malayan racial type for the whole colony of ‘Portuguese Timor’. Over the years he developed an anthropogeographical theory that simultaneously aimed to reclassify East Timor and to revise the racial cartography of the Malay Archipelago, including Wallace's famous ethnological line.

Race, biopolitics and liberal development from the Jim Crow South to postwar Africa

In this paper I document links between the racialised biopolitics that characterised theUSgovernment interventions in theUSSouth in the early 20th century, and theUSA's and theUK's late colonial and early development strategies in Africa. I do so by interrogating why Thomas Campbell, the United States Department of Agriculture's (USDA) head of African‐American agricultural extension, was chosen byUSphilanthropic elites and approved by theUK's Colonial Office to co‐direct a 1944–1945 survey of educational facilities in Africa. I show that it was Campbell's experiences and expertise with “improving” rural life through strategies of self‐help and character‐ and community‐building – key markers of a liberal way of development – that made his presence on the survey seem essential to both theUSAandUKelites. By so doing, this paper documents the importance of theUSDA's biopolitical interventions in theUSSouth for understanding the historical geography of late colonialism and liberal forms of development, thus contributing to critical geographies of development.

Of monsters and boomerangs: Colonial returns in the late liberal city

Our crisis is colonial. This is not a metaphorical statement. It is a historical assessment. If the global South today holds up the mirror of the future to the global North, this is but the effect of the endurance of forms of colonialism at work precisely in their contemporary deformations. When Aimé Césaire in 1950 spoke of the ‘terrific boomerang effect’ of colonialism he had fascist Europe in his sights. This article suggests that today, in the days of revanchist austerity and resurgent far-right populism, the boomerangs are again coming back thick and fast; it traces three intensified points of convergence between liberal-democratic and (post)colonial geographies: mass eviction, the deeper extraction of value from social-biological life, and repressive force. Dispossession—as a modality of government in its own right—is one name through which we might think this conjuncture. A conjuncture that marks the unraveling of not only the normative self-image of liberal politics (as it tumbles closer to its self-ascribed Other—the authoritarian), but also the very foundations upon which our critical urban thought rests—the liberal city.

“The River Told Me”: Rethinking Intersectionality from the World of Berta Cáceres

ABSTRACTInspired by the spiritual and political journey of Berta Cáceres (1973-2016), a fierce Lenca woman leader from Honduras who died in defense of sacred indigenous rivers, the essay aims to rethink the frame of intersectionality that is axiomatic in feminist theorizing and activism. Against the backdrop of the January 2017 Women’s March in the USA, I interrogate inclusionary accounts that equate intersectionality with a pre-existing unity among women that leaves power differentials intact. I recover the intersection as an index of invisibility and violence by drawing on the intimate connections that Berta foregrounded between multiple structures of domination. However, I argue that attending to the relational histories and geographies of patriarchy, colonialism and capitalism, is insufficient for imagining more just futures that are hospitable to subaltern horizons. Feminist praxis must also interrogate the Western liberal conceptions of agency and human-nature relations that undergird its intersectional analysis. Through an exploration of the indigenous cosmovisions and transnational grassroots solidarity that coalesce under Berta’s name, I point to the importance of cultivating a disposition to listening to incommensurable worlds where rivers tell stories and call upon us. This is an ecofeminist vision capable of rooting intersectional analysis within decolonizing relations and alternatives.

French-Brazilian Geography: the Influence of French Geography in Brazil by José Borzacchiello da Silva

Reviewed by: French-Brazilian Geography: the Influence of French Geography in Brazil by José Borzacchiello da Silva Federico Ferretti José Borzacchiello da Silva French-Brazilian Geography: the Influence of French Geography in Brazil Switzerland: Springer, 2016. xiv & 122 pp. $54.99 paper (ISBN 978-3-319-31022-0), $39.99 electronic (ISBN 978-3-319-31023-7), [1st ed.: França e a escola brasileira de geografia: verso e reverso. Fortaleza: Edições UFC, 2012]. This is the English translation of a very important book on Brazilian geography, originally published in Brazil in 2012. Borzacchiello's work is the first attempt to trace a general historiographic appraisal of the exchanges between French and Brazilian geographers, who traditionally maintained a privileged relation. This translated edition—as part of a new book series, Springer Briefs in Latin American Studies—can be considered part of ongoing efforts to bring the products of Brazilian and South American scholars to the English-speaking publics (L. Melgaço and C. Prouse, Milton Santos: Pioneer in Geography, 2017), and to address transcultural and international circulations of geographical knowledge (H. Jöns, P. Meusburger and M. Heffernan, Mobilities of Knowledge, 2017). The foreword by Hervé Théry, the great specialist of Brazilian matters in French geography today, highlights the depth of this "journey of love" (p. v) between French and Brazilian geographies, one which was institutionally inaugurated in 1934 with the appointment of French teachers such as Pierre Deffontaines (1894-1978) and later Pierre Monbeig (1907-1987). These scholars were the first Chairs of Geography at the University of São Paulo (USP) from 1934, and at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro from 1935, and they contributed to the foundation of the Association of Brazilian Geographers. Close relations between French and Brazilian geographers existed already before the university institutionalization of the discipline, through the political and scholarly networks of Elisée Reclus (1830-1905), Emile Levasseur (1928-1911), and Pierre Denis (1883-1951), all authors of monographs on the South American country and acquainted with local colleagues. [End Page 258] In this book, Borzacchiello addresses the chronological range 1934-1993, from the establishment of the first Chair of Geography in Brazil held by Deffontaines, to the author's own sojourn in Paris to perform this research. In that year, Borzacchiello realized interviews with four French geographers involved in cooperation with Brazil, Michel Rochefort, Yves Lacoste, Jacques Lévy, and Paul Claval, which constitute the core of the book. The chapters are organized following a periodization which considers the 1956 IGU Congress in Rio de Janeiro and the 1978 Congress of the Association of Brazilian Geographers in Fortaleza as the two big watersheds for investigating French-Brazilian geography between 1934 and 1993. In chapters 1-3, the author addresses the construction of "The Hegemony of French Geography in Brazil" until 1956; in chapter 4, including the interviews with Rochefort and Lacoste, he discusses its consolidation until 1978; in chapter 5, including the interviews with Claval and Lévy, Borzacchiello deals with the raising of "new figures" after the critical turn taken by Brazilian geography in the Fortaleza congress, with the introduction of radical tendencies and new cultural approaches. In chapters 6 and 7, the author tries a first assessment of the work of Brazilian students and scholars in France, providing an overview of the PhD dissertations discussed in France on Brazil, and by Brazilians in France. The main argument of the book is that the overwhelming influence of French geography in Brazil revealed an initial "asymmetry" (p. vi) in the scholarly relations between the two countries, hindering the formation of a recognizable "Brazilian School" of geography, despite the potential and originality of Brazilian scholarship. The colonialist attitude of French classical geography is pointed out by the author, for instance where he observes that "Third World geography is a mixture of colonial geography with tropical geography" (p. 20), then rejected by Southern scholars in the period of decolonization. Explicitly questioned on this points, the French geographers interviewed generally denied that French scholars in mission in Brazil adopted the same approach as their colleagues working in French colonies in West Africa or Southeast Asia. Yet, the sense of...

Energy without Conscience: Oil, Climate Change, and Complicity by David McDermott Hughes

David McDermott Hughes Energy without Conscience: Oil, Climate Change, and Complicity. Durham : Duke University Press, 2017. x + 191 pp. Maps, photographs, figures, notes, references, index. $89.95 cloth (ISBN: 978–0–8223–6306–4), $23.95 paper (ISBN: 978–0–8223–6298–2). With his book Energy Without Conscience(2017)DavidMcDermott Hughes offers us a rich and important ethnographic account of Trinidad that marks the Caribbean nation not only as the site of Christopher Columbus’ third exploration to the Americas, but also as the world’s first petro -extractive geography. Planet Earth’s deepest petroleum reserves occur naturally in the undergroundreservesbelowTrinidad,where the first oil well was drilled in the southern part of the island by Walter Darwent in 1866. The historical importance of what we might call Trinidad’s “double discovery” is not lost upon the author as he weaves an account of European territorial expansion in the Caribbean alongside an explanation of the rational science that undergirds petroleum exploration . He also locates the development of commodity capitalism within the ports and geographies of Trinidad and Tobago. Through a textured and expertly written narrative , Hughes describes energy systems as embedded both within the specific concern of hydrocarbon’s atmospheric release, and the ethical responsibility for global warming. Further, by centering the present-day carbon complicity web, the author reveals the hidden energy cycles that power our daily lives as consumptive activities of carbon release that often alienate us from the reality of our own destruction. Even when the author complicates accounts of the apocalypse, it is clear that he pursues passionate arguments fordelinkingfromhydrocarbondependency as the core of his engagement. Though there is not a direct discussion of Cedric Robinson’s monumental book Black Marxism or the specific historical naming of the rise of racial capitalism, Hughes locates his study within the historical arc of trans-Atlantic Slavery as well as a foundational critique of Indigenous dispossession. As Hughes recounts, the history of oil dependency is marked by its relation to human power and energy as far back as the sugar plantations, where Afro-diasporic populations were subjugated and enslaved within the matrix of colonial capitalism. Indeed, the monocultural plantation economy of sugar made one of the earliest carbon imprints as it created increased desire and demand for what Sidney Mintz (1985) first elaborated as the relationship between sweetness and power. Focused on energy, Hughes relays that “somatic power,” or what we might term Afro-diasporicsomaticpower,firstfueledthe global economic circuits to initiate a planetary drive for carbon energy. He also notes that through the U.S. Homestead Act of 1862, settler colonial policies contributed to the ideas of progress and improvement, which mandatedtheclearingoftheland,forest,and planters, and created direct links between the oil histories of Texas and Trinidad. By returning to such narratives a few times in the book, Hughes shows a rare attentiveness to the circuits of capital that organize the logics 14 Journal of Latin American Geography of petro-extraction as sites of primitive accumulation and in relation to the project of white settlement. By thinking with the text, we might also note how the extraction of silver, tin, and other minerals produced a carbon web of interdependentcomplicitythathasaccelerated overthepastfivehundredyears.Forinstance, the economic dependence upon Indigenous and African labor is also expressed by the near collapse of the Cerro Rico mine in Potos í, Bolivia and the history of mineral extraction on the sacred Aymara mountain. By considering regional colonial geographies of power within the Americas, such as the Caribbean sugar industry and the Andean mining industry, an intertwined global system of capitalist production of racialized labor becomes apparent. Like other anthropological studies of extractive environments, Energy Without Conscience makes visible the invisible web of connections that function to naturalize the oil industry’s rhetoric of geology’s upward flow. Hughes’s treatment of “above ground risk,” “the back stream,” the oil pollution belt, and other terms of petroleum extraction’s abstraction function as a way to explain the logics of petroleum industry. They also show us the constantly recursive and wrong-headed assumptions that justify local and planetary toxicity in relation to the oil industry. Like the documentary film Crude (2009) by director Joe Berlinger that focuses on eastern...

Cartographies of Colonial Commemoration: Critical Toponymy and Historical Geographies in Toronto

Everyday, I move across a cartography that tells me a story, one that I often don’t consciously listen to, but do learn from. This story, one of colonial dominance, lives on through the markings of place, particularly the toponyms, or place names. In this article, I seek to explore the role of these toponyms in telling a story of place, one that (re)writes my home, Toronto, as a colonized space, one whose geographic and historic intelligibility is made possible through the inscription of place-names that commemorate the European centre. I demonstrate how the banality of colonial geography works in its powerfully subtle ways by taking the reader on an imaginary subway ride, one that travels across a series of toponyms that highlight how the city recites, inscribes and promulgates a story of colonial presence in a largely obscured but simultaneously hyper-visible way. I argue that such colonial story telling through toponymy is a crucial site at which to engage critically.

Songs between cities: listening to courtesans in colonial north India

AbstractIn the aftermath of 1857, urban spaces and cultural practices were transformed and contested. Regional royal capitals became nodes in a new colonial geography, and the earlier regimes that had built them were recast as decadent and corrupt societies. Demolitions and new infrastructures aside, this transformation was also felt at the level of manners, sexual mores, language politics, and the performing arts. This article explores this transformation with a focus on women's language, female singers and dancers, and the men who continued to value their literary and musical skills. While dancing girls and courtesans were degraded by policy-makers and vernacular journalists alike, their Urdu compositions continued to be circulated, published, and discussed. Collections of women's biographies and lyrics gesture to the importance of embodied practices in cultivating emotional positions. This cultivation was valued in late Mughal elite society, and continued to resonate for emotional communities of connoisseurs, listeners, and readers, even as they navigated the expectations and sensibilities of colonial society.

‘Annamese Coolies’ at Australian Ports: Charting Colonial Geographies of Emotion, and Settler Memory, from French Vietnam to New Caledonia via Interwar Australia

In 1927, a ship carrying indentured Vietnamese workers travelled down the eastern coast of Australia on its way to New Caledonia. The movement of the Ville d’Amiens steamer through Australian waters sparked protests against alleged ‘French slavery’ and, eventually, moved politicians to recall the ‘injustice’ of the ‘pre-White Australia’ era. This article uses the Ville d’Amiens episode as a portal through which to explore the nexus between geographies of colonialism and of emotion. It argues that colonial and national power operated in pervasively ‘triangular’ ways, via the interplay of an affective triangle – of guilt, shame and pride – and a geo-political triangle – of French Vietnam, Australia and New Caledonia. Further, the article calls for greater exploration of the historical, geo-spatial contingencies of memory, motion and emotion.

Against his self, against his time: modernist aesthetic, post-war London, and the failure of imagination in J. M. Coetzee’s Youth

ABSTRACTJ. M. Coetzee’s Youth (2002), born in the heated times of the reconciliation of races in South Africa, has invited scholarship primarily on two areas: the problem of storytelling and the nature of place. Its predominant aspects, modernism, and post-war London have hardly been taken up for an analytical discussion on the issues of land, race, and storytelling. These aspects merit attention for three specific reasons: to understand the nature of exile for a white intellectual or artist from a peripheral colonial geography to a white metropolitan centre and the related notion of ‘real’ and ‘configured’ racial foreignness in post-war London; to comprehend the ‘evental’ in art and city-space as against the everyday and the contemporary influenced by 1920s European modernism; and to see the masculinist aspect in such project, especially in relation to the problem of love. The essay concludes with the argument that the author’s repeated focus on the aspect of John’s conscious dismissal of his essentially Romantic nature for this modernist quest is a suggestion that art, entirely dissevered from contemporary social and political reality, is bound to be futile and failed.

Drinking Colonialism: Alcohol, Indigenous Status, and Native Space on Shawnee and Sámi Homelands, 1600–1850

Drinking Colonialism:Alcohol, Indigenous Status, and Native Space on Shawnee and Sámi Homelands, 1600–1850 Sami Lakomäki (bio), Ritva Kylli (bio), and Timo Ylimaunu (bio) Introduction: Alcohol and Global Indigenous History IN THE 1830S, three very dissimilar colonial states on the opposite sides of the Atlantic launched almost simultaneous campaigns against Indigenous alcohol consumption. In less than a decade, the United States, Finland, and Sweden prohibited the production, sale, and, in some cases, drinking of intoxicating beverages on Native homelands lying within the borders claimed by the states.1 In each country these legislative measures greatly shaped the political and legal status of Indigenous peoples and their relationship with the colonial state. The liquor laws, together with other contemporaneous legislation dealing with Indigenous rights and lands, asserted state sovereignty over Native communities and helped to construct Indigeneity as a legal and racial category that set rigid limits to Native autonomy. Moreover, they created colonial geographies in which Indigenous homelands became special legal spaces within state boundaries. Beneath these striking parallels, however, the alcohol legislation of the three states constructed Native status and space in significantly dissimilar ways. Most notably, the federal legislators in the United States recognized Native American nations as semi-sovereign entities with authority over Indigenous drinking on tribal lands, while the Finnish and Swedish lawmakers denied the aboriginal Sámi people any autonomy and instead gave state officials full power to police Native alcohol consumption everywhere. These parallel but divergent colonial laws throw into stark relief the intimate interlinkages between alcohol, colonial state-building, and political and cultural constructions of Indigenous status and Native spaces. Scholars have long recognized alcohol as a "colonizing substance par excellence," but while [End Page 1] earlier studies saw liquor simply as "a particularly versatile weapon in the invader's arsenal," more recent research apprehends alcohol's roles in colonialism as far more "complex and even contradictory."2 In particular, during the past twenty years scholarly interest has expanded from alcohol's effects on Indigenous health and well-being to the politics of alcohol in colonial situations. Historians and anthropologists have demonstrated that alcohol gained diverse political meanings in variegated colonial contexts and that both Natives and newcomers mobilized it in multiple ways for a wide variety of political purposes.3 As these studies make clear, intoxicating beverages constituted an important meeting zone for Indigenous peoples and intruders who negotiated their relations and defined their own, as well as one another's, status by drinking, sharing, and controlling liquor. Across the colonial world, the power to drink, to regulate the drinking of others, and to assign cultural meanings to drinking constituted a crucial part in forging new relations of authority and classifying people in novel ways. Moreover, liquor consumption and control spatialized both claims to power and categories of people. By allowing or denying specific, socially constructed groups of people to drink at specific, culturally defined and demarcated places, Natives and newcomers alike imposed political meanings on the landscape, asserted authority over it, and articulated complex ideas about who belonged where and in which status.4 This article explores the complex connections between alcohol and the construction of Indigenous status and space in two seemingly disparate colonial contexts, eastern North America and northern Fennoscandia (the geographic area of contemporary Finland, Sweden, and Norway). It investigates how Natives and newcomers used the circulation, consumption, and control of colonial liquor to imagine and mold Indigenous sovereignty, Indigenous–state relations, and Indigenous spaces between 1600 and the 1850s, as fledgling colonial polities in both areas gradually grew into powerful territorial states. In North America, the essay zooms in on the Shawnee people and their experiences with British and, after 1776, U.S. colonialism. In Fennoscandia, the focus is on the Sámis and their encounters with the kingdom of Sweden and Finland, a province of Sweden that was annexed to the Russian empire as an autonomous grand duchy in 1809. It is important to stress from the outset that Shawnee and Sámi histories are internally immensely diverse. Both peoples have always lived in dozens of widely dispersed communities whose historical experiences have often been quite dissimilar. We concentrate on the main trends...

Postcolonial geography confounds latitudinal trends in observed aggression and violence.

To support their hypothesis, the authors point to an inverse correlation between latitude and the incidence of civil conflict and crime. This observation cannot be accepted as evidence for the hypothesis, because of a weighty confounding variable: the historical geography of colonialism and its effects on the fragility of nations.

Geography and Law in Almayer's Folly

In his preface to Almayer’s Folly, written soon after the novel’s completion Conrad takes issue with Alice Meynell’s recent article on “decivilisation.” “I am content to sympathise with common mortals” he writes, “no matter where they live; in houses or in huts, in streets under a fog or in the forests behind the dark line of dismal mangroves that fringe the vast solitude of the sea” (Conrad, Almayer’s Folly 3). At first reading, Conrad seems to peddle the very same prejudices he critiques in Alice Meynell: Jim-Eng, the Chinese opium wreck; Taminah, the impassive oriental woman inured against pain; Almayer himself, the Indo-European ruined by his own fantasies of fortune and unable ever to return to the European world he reveres. Each are stock characters amongst many more in the novel playing a part little different from those given to them by the popular authors whose works Meynell dismisses. What distinguishes them is the narrative context into which they are put, whose machinations throw into relief the instability of the rule of law and of the “civilizing” mission of colonialism. Conrad’s time in South East Asia was one of particular political and legal transformation for Borneo, the repercussions of which Conrad translates directly into Almayer’s Folly. My argument is that his sympathies with the colonized are expressed less through individual characters but rather through the complexities, frustrations and indeterminacies that arise out of the colonial enterprise. A key concern for Conrad, therefore, is the problem of justice in an international setting. As I argue, long before the publication of “Geography and Some Explorers,” Conrad’s fiction was already illuminating the inconsistencies that emerge in the process of putting (international and transnational) law into practice in the indeterminate spaces of colonial geography.

The western isle of Ireland and the Eastern seaboard of America ‐ England's first frontiers

This paper outlines the basis for a comparative analysis of the origins processes and geographical impact of British colonisation in both Ireland and North America from c. 1550 to c. 1800. While recognising the fundamental differences in scale, location, environments and native population densities between the two study areas, the available evidence suggests that in terms of general strategies of colonisation, some genuine parallels can be inferred. Likewise, in the actual processes of colonisation, similar patterns of early settlement dispersal and the exploitative competitive nature of both frontiers can be documented. The differences in the colonial geographies of the two regions were, however, more profound. Here, the fundamental contrasts between a more densely settled and more developed pre‐colonial Ireland and the sparsely settled extensive territories of the eastern seaboard of America were crucial. In Ireland, a colonial society was generally superimposed upon long‐developed settlement, land‐holding and societal structures, whereas in America a relatively small but more heterogeneous immigrant population was involved in a straightforward dialogue with a more spacious and varied frontier environment. Allowing for these and other striking differences, one can still make some broad comparisons of population size, trading patterns, levels of development and regional structures by the end of the eighteenth century.

Critical Reflections on (Post)colonial Geographies: Applied Anthropology and the Interdisciplinary Mapping of Indigenous Traditional Claims in Canada during the Early 20th Century

This paper examines tensions between mapping as a practice of nation building and the practice of applied anthropology and “counter-mapping” in Canada during the early 20th century as expressions of Indigenous territoriality. This research helps to correct a misconception within the scholarly community that counter-mapping as an applied practice within anthropology emerged during the 1950s and 1960s. Tracing the emergence of this practice through Frank Speck's anthropological work on the family hunting territory complex during the early 1900s provides important context for understanding the history of and continued use of maps and mapping practices to challenge colonial ideologies and support Indigenous claims for land and access to resources.