Colonial Historiography Research Articles

Assimilation, Association, and French Advice to Japan on How to Rule Taiwan

Abstract Quels liens trans-impériaux ont existés entre l’empire colonial de la France et celui du Japon? Dans un exemple qui se raconte fréquemment dans l’historiographie coloniale japonaise, l’on discute du conseil que l’expert judiciaire français Michel Revon a présenté en 1895 quant au système administratif que le Japon devrait instaurer à Taiwan. Dans une note de politique, Revon aurait recommandé que l’on adopte un système français d’assimilation, ce qui aurait exercé une influence considérable sur le futur Premier ministre Hara Takashi. Cet article démontre que ce compte-rendu des faits n’est pas tout à fait exact et il présente donc une analyse nouvelle des sources primaires dans le contexte des théories françaises coloniales qui étaient dominantes pendant les années 1890. Nous avançons que Revon était en fait un partisan de l’association et que le programme d’assimilation coloniale de Hara Takashi n’était que superficiellement influencé par des modèles français.

“Guano in Their Destiny”: Race, Geology, and a Philosophy of Indenture

ABSTRACTTo the ways fertilizer has been employed as an extended metaphor of racial extraction and mourning in U.S. and British literary thought by Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Jackson, and Ian Fleming, I juxtapose archival traces of racial indenture across the Americas that gesture to the exploitations of the nineteenth-century global guano trade. The phosphate-rich droppings of seabirds, guano is refuse that is embedded with a poetics of refusal. Assembling fragments of ship logs, landscape photographs, novels, and knickknacks to compose a variegated archive, I attend to the contours of colonial historiography and the erosion of Chinese labor from the landscape of the Americas. Using the framework of the archipelagic turn, I focus on how Chinese indenture in the Caribbean and Latin America decontinentalizes the circuits of labor and capital in the Western hemisphere. In the 1860s the ecologies of relation between Asian indenture interlocked with black emancipation in a pivotal moment, fueling the notion of “free-market” capitalism. Examining the remains of the Chinese presence in colonial era contracts, I contend with the materiality of how Chinese bones are literally and figuratively calcified in the Caribbean archipelago and the geology of the Americas in a process of transformation I call racial sedimentation. Through an excremental logic of accretion and accumulation, a mosaic of lives becomes part of the histories and bodies sedimented in the geologies of the hemisphere that critically interrogates the boundary between human and nonhuman, freedom and unfreedom.

Commemoration, Nation Narration, and Colonial Historiography in Postcolonial Denmark

Commemoration, Nation Narration, and Colonial Historiography in Postcolonial Denmark

Did Municipal Elites Intermarry? A Case Study of Marriage Practices among the Political Elites of San Pablo, Laguna, 1853–1854

This article provides a quantitative counterpoint to the existing historiography’s qualitative consensus that colonial-era municipal elites were endogamous in terms of status by presenting a case study based on 402 marriage outcomes from the parish register of one community, during one twelve-month period, along the political dimension of status. It finds that from 1 August 1853 to 31 July1854, political elite status in San Pablo, Laguna, was positively but moderately correlated with marriage outside the status group. This practice was likely aided by the limited catchment area from which these political elites found partners and the group’s numeric scarcity within that space. KEYWORDS: EXOGAMY • INTERMARRIAGE • COLONIAL HISTORIOGRAPHY • QUANTITATIVE CASE STUDY • POLITICAL ELITE

Sources for Colonial Historiography: Museums and Colonial Collections, a Mapping and Memory Project on the Italian National Territory

L’obiettivo di questo lavoro è sottolineare l’importanza di musei e collezioni coloniali presenti sul territorio italiano come vettori di memoria e nuove fonti per la storia coloniale del paese. Pur non vantando un grande museo coloniale nazionale come quelli europei di Leiden, Bruxelles o Parigi, l’Italia ospita sul suo territorio circa sessanta collezioni dalle ex colonie, divise tra musei militari, musei di antropologia e scienze naturali, collezioni appartenenti ad ordini religiosi, ecc. La varietà delle collezioni e la loro pervasività in tutta la penisola fanno sì che attraverso di esse sia possibile raccontare in modo concreto storia coloniale italiana.

German Colonial Wars and the Context of Military Violence by Susanne Kuss

Reviewed by: German Colonial Wars and the Context of Military Violence by Susanne Kuss Adam A. Blackler German Colonial Wars and the Context of Military Violence. By Susanne Kuss. Translated by Andrew Smith. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017. Pp. 1 + 386. Paper $45.00. ISBN 978-0674970632. Academic debates over alleged links between Germany's overseas empire and the Third Reich have dominated German colonial historiography since the early 2000s. Prominent historians such as Isabel Hull, Jürgen Zimmerer, and Benjamin Madley have drawn considerable interest to the field, suggesting in their respective studies that total warfare and systematic violence in the colonies acted as genocidal antecedents to the Nazis so-called "New Order" in Eastern Europe. While scholars have more recently started to turn their attention to other aspects of Germany's global empire, the "Windhoek to Auschwitz" thesis remains a powerful thematic undercurrent in the historical literature. Queries about German colonialism and its violent status relative to other contemporary colonial powers, in particular, continue to inspire curiosity, as well as direct much of the scholarly research on German imperialism. Susanne Kuss's German Colonial Wars and the Context of Military Violence is an important example of this historiographical reality. In contrast to advocates of the "continuity thesis," Kuss argues that German imperial violence emerged in relation to the particular sociopolitical and geographic circumstances in each respective [End Page 147] Kriegsschauplatz or theater of war (8). She supports this thesis with a detailed analysis of Germany's three best-known colonial wars, specifically the Boxer War in China, the Maji Maji War in German East Africa, and the Herero and Namaqua War in German Southwest Africa. Kuss devotes a chapter to each imperial theater and assesses how the individual campaigns altered the mental and psychological disposition of soldiers toward local populations (5). In this manner, her study demonstrates that extreme violence in the colonial sphere did not follow a premeditated strategy contrived in the metropole, but was instead the result of shifting war aims, poor planning, economic concerns, and racist fantasies that failed to materialize once German settlers and soldiers arrived overseas en masse (107–108). Kuss organizes her study into three parts: "Three Wars," "The Colonial Theater of War," and "Evaluation and Memory." Part 1 offers concise overviews of the three military campaigns in question. In this section, Kuss pays careful attention to the unique regional dynamics, such as the specific intentions colonial leaders had for each colony, which she contends made it impossible for German leaders to conduct imperial policy monolithically. The quality of this study rests on Kuss's ability to combine primary source-based research of China, German East Africa, and German Southwest Africa into one analytical narrative. She writes, for instance, that German soldiers in China unquestionably participated in violent expeditions against Chinese militias, but given Germany's general "irrelevance to the outcome of the [Boxer] war" due to its late arrival in Asia, boredom motivated troops to commit selective episodes of brutality "for enrichment" and to "vary an otherwise dull routine" (36). In sharp contrast, the wars in German East Africa and German Southwest Africa were more systematic in their conduct and orientation. Part 2 sharpens the analytical comparison of the Kriegsschauplätze and how distinct conditions in each location fashioned disparate occupational strategies, as well as mixed attitudes toward the use of extreme violence against colonized populations. As an example, Kuss reminds readers that African soldiers (askari) comprised a significant number of colonial forces in German East Africa (105). She explains that the askaris' knowledge of the region and terrain allowed German authorities to deploy their forces methodically against enemy settlements, supply lines, and Maji Maji guerillas. By way of contrast, Kuss shows that this approach was not possible in China due to the Germans' lack of "reliable familiarity with the Chinese population" and the "ethnic homogeneity" of the Shandong Province (161). She argues that imperial officers in German Southwest Africa, meanwhile, decided not to classify ethnic peoples hierarchically because the military had already defeated the two most powerful groups (Herero and Namaqua) at the turn of the twentieth century (164). Kuss also rightly emphasizes the importance of biological racism in...

In “Savage” Company: Sublime Aesthetics and the Colonial Imagination

ABSTRACTEdmund Burke’s speeches and writings during the trial of Warren Hastings—from 1788 to 1795—remain one of the most comprehensive assessments of the effects of colonial trade and territorial expansion on Britain’s nationalist self. A rhetorical reading of his prosecution speeches reveals how they affected the public response to the trial by evoking the sublime and framing terror as the basic feature of Britain’s mercantile imperialist agenda in the colonies. Moreover, by associating Hastings’s governance of Bengal with sublime terror, Burke altered the interpretations of virtue and corruption, thus distancing both Britain and India from the rampant profiteering of the East India Company. Burke’s critique of the degenerative influences of commercial imperialism along with the reformulation of his ideas in subsequent colonial historiography is crucial for assessing how the aesthetics of the sublime conferred greater moral force to the sporadic and fragmented reports about the Company’s abuses of power in India.

Reinterpreting Kuki Chieftainship of Northeast India in relation to Colonial Historiography: Media Theory Perspectives

Reinterpreting Kuki Chieftainship of Northeast India in relation to Colonial Historiography: Media Theory Perspectives

Decolonizing interwar anticolonial solidarities: The case of Harry Thuku

This essay suggests that a focus on the transnational and transcultural dimensions of twentieth-century interwar anticolonial movements in Africa creates opportunities to decolonize a historiographical tendency to foreground certain elitist accounts of the period that continue to pervade contemporary anticolonial scholarship. The essay explores the case of Harry Thuku, an early Kenyan nationalist and pan-Africanist active in Kenya Colony in the early 1920s, and subsequently imprisoned and exiled by the British colonial administration. Contemporaneous accounts largely painted Thuku as an insignificant lone agitator, being manipulated by East African Asian organizations, whilst more contemporary scholarship continues to depict him and his movement in strictly methodologically nationalist terms. This essay presents evidence to suggest Thuku’s actions were constituted across domestic cultural and class boundaries, as well as transnational anticolonial and pan-African networks. As such, the essay constructs an account of transcultural, transnational anticolonial solidarities that have thus far largely been confined to analyses of more obviously globally networked interwar spaces (i.e. imperial metropoles, West Africa, South Africa, and Ethiopia) and which thus unwittingly risk perpetuating a colonial historiography of the period.

Colonial education in the Congo - a question of “uncritical” pedagogy until the bitter end?

Our approach is a historical, and not a theoretical or a philosophical one. But such an approach might be of help to understand the complexities and ambiguities of the pedagogical mentalities in the course of the twentieth century. As is usually the case in historical research the groundwork has to precede the formulation of hypotheses, let alone theories about the nature of pedagogical practices. Therefore, since the 1990s, “we” (as a team) have been busy studying the history of education in the former Belgian Congo. Of course since then we have not only closely monitored the theoretical and methodological developments in the field of colonial historiography, but have ourselves also contributed to that history. This article tries to give an overview of some of our analyses, concentrating on the question to what extend the Belgian offensive of colonial (i.e. mainly Catholic) missionary education, which was almost exclusively targeted at “paternalism”, contributed to the development of personal life, individual autonomy and/or emancipation of the natives. From the rear-view mirror of history we are, among other things, zooming in on the crucial 1950s, during which decade thoughts first turned to the education of a (very limited) “elite”. The thesis we are using in this respect is that the “mental space” of colonialism was not of a nature as to have a very great widening of consciousness among the local population as its effect.

Internal colonisation: The intimate circulations of empire, race and liberal government

This article proposes that ‘internal colonisation’ provides a necessary lens through which to explore the relationship between violence and race in contemporary liberal government. Contributing to an increasing interest in race in International Relations, this article proposes that while racism remains a vital demarcation in liberal government between forms of worthy/unworthy life, this is continually shaped by colonial histories and ongoing projects of empire that manifest in the Global North and South in familiar, if not identical, ways. In unpacking the concept of internal colonisation and its intellectual history from Black Studies into colonial historiography and political geography, I highlight how (neo-)metropolitan states such as Britain were always active imperial terrain and subjected to forms of colonisation. This recognises how metropole and colonies were bounded together through colonisation and how knowledge and practices of rule were appropriated onto a heterogeneity of racialised and undesirable subjects both within colonies and Britain. Bringing the argument up to date, I show how internal colonisation remains diverse and dispersed under liberal empire — enhanced through the war on terror. To do this, I sketch out how forms of ‘armed social work’ central to counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and Iraq are also central to the management of sub-populations in Britain through the counterterrorism strategy Prevent. Treating (neo-)metropoles such as the UK as part of imperial terrain helps us recognise the way in which knowledge/practices of colonisation have worked across multiple populations and been invested in mundane sites of liberal government. This brings raced histories into closer encounters with the (re)making of a raced present.

Archaeology and Inka Origins

The recent proliferation of Andean archaeological research presents new interpretive opportunities for reconstructing different aspects of Inka origins. Early colonial historiography reveals that “Inka origins” refers to multiple aspects of the past, including the first appearance of Andean people, Inca ancestors, and the imperial title. The intellectual history of Inka archaeology demonstrates the lasting influence of Spanish colonial interpretive values, even with the gradual introduction of new scientific methods during the 20th century. Since 1970, significant advances in the archaeology of Cuzco, the Inka capital region, and other parts of the Andes have established an independent database that highlights the long-term and regional aspect of Inka origins, as well as areas where interpretive questions remain. The shift from colonial chronicles to archaeological data improves the accuracy of reconstructions of Inka origins, but it also raises some epistemological questions for the future relationships between history and archaeology in the study of ancient empires.

"We Will Show the Country": Bringing History to Life

"We Will Show the Country": Bringing History to Life

Maji Maji War, Ngoni Warlords and Militarism in Southern Tanzania

As we come to an end of the celebration of a centenary and ten years since the end of the Maji Maji War against German colonialism, it is apparently clear that the historiography on the Maji Maji War focuses on appreciation of the Ngoni heroism against German cruelty and colonialism, as well as the loss of life caused by hunger, casualties of the war and German atrocities. It is however, noted that this view of nationalist historiography is outdated and needs to be corrected because it has outlived its usefulness as local histories and identities reveal the Ngoni atrocities, militarism, and wars against local inhabitants similar to the German rule between 1850–1890s. The nationalist historiography, like colonial historiography, pays little attention to history of victims, rather is the story of powerful state formation, states, and statism. In the nationalist case, historical investigations pay little attention on the Ngoni aggression and plunder or on this aggression’s effects on the conditions of life and the demographic dynamics on Lake Nyasa area and East to Indian Ocean from 1850s to 1907. In particular, these wars had a profound effect on the shaping of relations between 1850s and 1907. The article analyses war, militarism, and atrocities of the Ngoni on the conditions of life in East Lake Nyasa to Indian Ocean region between 1850 and 1907. The article demonstrates that during this period the people of area were harassed by Ngoni attacks and slave trade conflicts which disrupted their ways of life. And that after the German subdual of the regional powers including the Ngoni, Yao and Arab traders, relative peace and stability were restored briefly until the Maji Maji war brought further war calamities, instability and confusions. All in all, the Ngoni warlordism and militarism played large part in shaping history of modern southern Tanzania.

Projecting order in the pericolonial Philippines: An anthropology of Catholicism beyond Catholics

In a majority Catholic country like the Philippines, it can be difficult to appreciate the true impact of Catholicism, beyond the obvious presence of Catholics. For the ‘unchristianised’ indigenous minorities in its peripheral upland regions, the role of the Catholic thought‐world in shaping who they are today is masked substantially by their cultural distinctiveness. Missionary‐dominated narratives in colonial historiography configure our understanding of the present, structuring our approach to anthropology in these peripheral spaces. This article argues that the diachronic component is necessary to make sense of how Catholicism has not only shaped the diversity of modern Philippine cultures, but also how it has configured cultural and political spaces so completely that, as anthropologists, we at times reproduce this thought‐world uncritically through our own ethnographies. A focus on the so‐called unchristianised Lumad ethnic minorities of Mindanao argues that it is essential to look beyond Catholics as obvious subjects when undertaking an anthropology of Catholicism.

Some Thoughts on the Representation and Misrepresentation of the Colonial South Asian Labour Diaspora

This paper explores the representation and misrepresentation of indentured Indian labour migration in the colonial archive and subsequent historiography, and offers some suggestions for alternate ways of viewing the origins of the South Asian labour diaspora. Drawing on ongoing research, it emphasises the need to move away from well-worn dichotomies of ‘slavery’ and ‘free labour’ and instead to re-centre the role of human agency and creativity, even in the face of structural opposition. By reflecting on the limitations of the colonial archive, and emphasising the role of pre-existing networks, returnees and recruiters in facilitating and informing patterns of migration, it suggests ways to move beyond the persistent popular misrepresentations of this process, and find alternative, subaltern perspectives on the indentured labour experience.

Secrecy and absence in the residue of covert drone strikes

By focusing on the materials and practices that prosecute drone warfare, critical scholarship has emphasised the internal state rationalisation of this violence, while positioning secrecy and absence as barriers to research. This neglects the public existence of covert U.S. drone strikes through the rumours and debris they leave behind, and the consequences for legitimisation. This article argues that by signifying the possible use of covertness, the public residue of unseen strikes materialises spaces of suspected secrecy. This secrecy frames seemingly arbitrary traces of violence as significant in having not been secreted by the state, and similarly highlights the absence in these spaces of clear markers of particular people and objects, including casualties. Drawing on colonial historiography, the article conceptualises this dynamic as producing implicit significations or intimations, unverifiable ideas from absences, which can undermine rationalisations of drone violence. The article examines the political consequences of these allusions through an historical affiliation with lynching practice. In both cases, traces of unseen violence represent the practice as distanced and confounding, prompting a focus on the struggle to comprehend. Intimations from spaces of residue position strikes as too ephemeral and materially insubstantial to understand. Unlike the operating procedures of drone warfare, then, these traces do not dehumanise targets. Rather, they narrow witnesses' ethical orientation towards these events and casualties, by prompting concern with intangibility rather than the infliction of violence itself. A political response to covert strikes must go beyond 'filling in' absences and address how absence gains meaning in implicit, inconspicuous ways.

The ‘Migrated Archives’ and a Forgotten Corner of Empire: The British Borneo Territories

ABSTRACTThe ‘migrated archives’, previously concealed files related to former colonies of the British Empire, were released over the period 2012–13. The first flurry of academic and journalistic interest, focused on possible revelations of the misuse of colonial power, soon subsided. Nevertheless, the archives have been valuable in enlarging knowledge of colonial policy-making. They have also aided exploration of the interstices between the official records of colonial administration and the often unrecorded life of peoples and communities. In this sense the ‘migrated archives’ are a rich resource in prompting a new look at established historical narratives of the British Borneo territories of Brunei, North Borneo and Sarawak. These territories have received scant attention in the historiography of British colonialism. This has been to the detriment of wider scholarship in studying issues such as the expansion of the wartime colonial state; the ‘second colonial occupation’ and the evolution of post-war British colonial governance; the development of anti-colonialism; the formation of Malaysia; counter-terrorism conflicts; and the nature of the colonial legacy. The colonial period may seem a fleeting phase in the age-old cultural and economic formation of the Borneo states, yet it continues to have contemporary relevance in a strategically sensitive part of the world. This article seeks to show that the Borneo territories merit greater attention from historians of British colonialism and that the ‘migrated archives’, used in conjunction with other sources, can make a significant contribution towards the history of colonialism in a previously neglected area.

‘It’s a resting place, where our spirits go’: Bringing back lost ancestor memories to Western Australia’s Great Southern – Noongar boodja

Abstract This article considers the dynamic relationship between Aboriginal Australia identity, western history and the recuperation of lost ancestral memories. In recent decades many Australian cultural institutions have supported Aboriginal community groups in the revival of Aboriginal languages, songs and stories. The reclamation of heritage from archival collections has helped strengthen Aboriginal claim and control of ancestor histories – especially when significant materials are returned to people of a descendant community and given meaningful social context. Often set in place from these interactions are cultural protocols and ethics formulating future material access, return and usage. Looking more closely at intercultural practices of repatriation, this article relates Aboriginal pathways of ancestral memory restoration (and invention of memory) to living story. In particular, it examines the cultural decision-making of two Australian Aboriginal family groups – Wirlomin Minang (Noongar) families from the Great Southern of Western Australia and Gunai Kurnai (Koorie) families from the Gippsland region of Victoria – who characterize kin reactions to the returned colonial historiography of their shared ancestor Bessy Flowers (c. 1849–95), as well as family grief and shame at her absent memory. The difference between the archival material of photographs and letters that represent Bessy and the ways her Wirlomin Minang and Gunai Kurnai families imagine themselves created context for the mixed-media co-production, No Longer a Wandering Spirit. This article explores how intercultural efforts to strengthen family story might widen circles of knowledge about Aboriginal cultural dislocation, historical exclusion and the ever-present action of resistance and recovery.

‘ … half-sick of shadows’: figure and ground in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s imagination of the subaltern

ABSTRACTThis essay moves the category of the subaltern out of the exclusive domain of colonial historiography and resituates it in the context of contemporaneity. Taking my cue from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s insistence on the dream of postcoloniality in the realm of the global, I examine two ‘empirical anomalies’ that redefine subaltern insurgency, cultivate democratic reflexes, and defeat the expectations of their moment and milieu. Vivek Chibber’s Postcolonial theory and the specter of capital serves as a framing device to elicit the still-persuasive dimensions of Spivak’s landmark essay for our historical moment. While I remain unpersuaded by both his premises and his conclusions, his argument does throw Spivak’s interventions in the project of Subaltern Studies into relief. My method throughout, in the manner of Spivak and Paul de Man, is one of interruption and undoing; my aim is to delineate what Spivak describes as ‘the resistance fitting our time’.