Imperial Expansion Research Articles

A Chronological Model for Inca Provincial Expansion: The Case of the Copiapo Valley

Abstract This article examines a new dataset of radiocarbon dates that provides insights into the progressive installation of Inca infrastructure in the Copiapo Valley, situated at the southern edge of the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. It shows that the Inca imperial expansion in this region was not a linear process and was likely shaped by local negotiations and conflicts. The findings describe three main stages of Inca expansion. The first is the construction of the North–South Inca Road and the establishment of high-altitude mountain shrines. The next stage consisted of a physical intervention in a local village located in the upper valley, including the construction of administrative buildings and public spaces. The last stage involved indirect intervention in local villages, characterized by the presence of isolated administrative buildings that were potentially used for diplomacy and negotiation. I argue that the Inca imperial expansion, characterized by evolving strategies across regions and time periods, not only demonstrates the state's capacity for learning but also suggests the pivotal role of local actors in positions of power who wielded agency to shape these developments.

Himalayan Mountaineering, Imperial Masculinity and Altitude Records Before Everest

ABSTRACT Across the nineteenth century, European surveyors, explorers and mountaineers often sought to constitute the Himalaya as spaces of imperial duty, escape from civilisation, and manly experiences against and in nature. Rather than focusing on the homosociality of the better known climbing ventures of the twentieth century, this article instead considers the period before Mount Everest became the main prize. In particular, it examines an eclectic mix of Himalayan expeditions that made claims to the world ‘altitude record’: that is, the highest height ever climbed above sea level. The different ways that climbers discussed and doubted these record-seeking climbs in their accounts, and especially in talks at the Royal Geographical Society in London, provide a series of snapshots into manly self-fashioning around suffering and self-reliance at the edge of the British Empire. Here the masculinities of non-European guides and porters (especially Gurkhas) also always provided both a foil and a challenge. Ultimately, attempts on the altitude record reveal the way that casting the Himalaya as a space for the narration of masculine ideals and imperial expansion could be both mutually reinforcing and in conflict. Expressions of homosociality nevertheless also shifted across the nineteenth century, with the filling in of the last ‘blank spaces’ on the map seemingly narrowing the canvas for manly outdoor experiences. This was compounded by the way the Himalaya were constituted and maintained as spaces for manly experiences in part by the exclusion of women, even as women like Fanny Bullock Workman were themselves climbing towards record heights.

Inter-Imperial Entanglement: The British Claim to Portuguese Delagoa Bay in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract: Over the nineteenth century, England and Portugal contested the possession of Delagoa Bay in south eastern Africa. Using documents from a British hydrographical survey mission of the east coast of Africa, and British Parliamentary Papers recording the dispute over possession of the bay in the 1870s, I demonstrate that bordermaking in the region was rooted in interimperial claims and disputes reaching back to the 1820s. The English claim to Delagoa Bay highlights how hydrography and cartography were used as tools of empire in the new imperial expansion and land appropriation of the nineteenth century. The production of the colonial border between Portuguese Mozambique and British South Africa interrupted and disconnected indigenous networks of relation, trade, and movement, while simultaneously entangling imperial projects of white worldmaking through racialized dispossession.

Gallant Officers and Benevolent Men: Royal Navy officers, voluntarism and the launch of the Shipwrecked Mariners Society in the early Victorian era

This article examines the relatively unexplored relationship between Royal Navy flag and commissioned officers and shore-based secular and civic voluntary societies in the early Victorian period using the case study of the Shipwrecked Fishermen and Mariners’ Royal Benevolent Society. Portrayed in the literature as heroes and objectivized symbols of the glory of nation, naval officers instead had agency of their own. They were active facilitators, employing personal experience, naval culture and patronage networks to drive forward philanthropic initiatives for the society. They were crucial to the society’s success, moving it forward to incorporation by an act of parliament in 1850, and to national and imperial expansion. It suggests that naval associative voluntary service needs to be considered more fully not only in naval history, but also within broader historical studies.

From Heroic to Romantic: Reynolds’s Captain the Honourable Augustus Keppel (1753) and its Legacy

Joshua Reynolds’s second portrait of Augustus Keppel (1752-53) – which masterfully blended portrait and history painting, as well as heroic and pre-Romantic mood – contributed to the construction of a semantically fluid pictorial identity, a type of dominant masculinity that could assume a multiplicity of roles, not only in the context of Britain’s imperial expansion, but also in an age of social and intellectual transition. This paper examines its influence on naval portraiture, focusing on John Hamilton Mortimer’s group portrait of Captain James Cook, Sir Joseph Banks, Lord Sandwich, Dr Daniel Solander and Dr John Hawkesworth (1771) as well as depictions of Horatio Nelson. Further transformations of the paradigm are analyzed, with an emphasis on its ability to depict new types of national celebrities in its Romantic adaptations, as suggested by portraits of Lord Byron, to conclude with John Everett Millais’s ultimate revisitation of the iconography of the naval portrait in his 1874 North-West Passage.

Fen Plantation: Commons, Calvinism, and the Boundaries of Belonging in Early Modern England

AbstractIn the first half of the seventeenth century, several foreign plantations were established on wetlands drained during a wave of ambitious state-led projects across eastern England. The lines of solidarity and separation forged by this little-known episode in the history of migration pose important questions about how emergent notions of nationhood intersected with local and transnational, religious and economic communities. This article investigates the causes and consequences of the settlement of Calvinist refugees on drained commons in Hatfield Level. It argues that fen plantation expands understanding of the relationship between English agricultural improvement and imperial expansion in the British Atlantic, as migrant communities acted in the service of empires and states while forging transnational Protestant networks. As Calvinists and cultivators, however, the settlers were met with hostility in England. While the crown encouraged foreign plantation as a source of national prosperity, Laudian church authorities identified it as a threat to religious conformity, the state, and society, muddying depictions of English governors as guarantors of refugee rights. Local efforts to violently expel settlers from Hatfield Level, meanwhile, were rooted in fen commoners’ defense of customary rights, as parallel communities sought to enact rival environmental and economic models. The settler community interpreted these experiences through the lens of transnational Protestant adversity, entangling their quest for religious freedoms with their remit as fen improvers. Moving beyond dichotomous arguments about xenophobia, this article traces the transnational imaginaries, national visions, and emplaced processes through which collective identities and their sharp edges were constituted in early modern England.

“A Ceremony of National and Representative Character”: The Four-Nations Politics of Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee

AbstractIn June 1887, Britons crowded the streets of London to celebrate Queen Victoria's fiftieth year on the throne. It was an opportunity to publicly revel in the social, political, economic, and imperial progress Britain had made during her historic reign. The Lord Chamberlain was tasked with organizing a formal jubilee ceremony at Westminster Abbey representative of the queen's diverse subjects. But this proved a difficult undertaking for a multinational kingdom with a vast overseas empire. Grievances over seating in Westminster Abbey, jubilee honors, and an absent royal family fostered varying degrees of solidarity and rivalry among the United Kingdom's four constituent nations. The Irish Question and imperial expansion—matters in which Victoria was personally invested—heightened four-nations sensibilities and influenced participation in the festivities. The queen's Golden Jubilee both reflected and inspired four-nations thinking, and it revealed public concerns that the British union might exist as a hierarchy of nations rather than as a collaborative venture among equal members. As the institutional embodiment of tiered society, the Crown became an outlet for subjects to explore questions and modes of belonging within the global British world. A four-nations analysis of Victoria's 1887 jubilee shows that despite its unifying function, the modern British monarchy has struggled to harmonize the United Kingdom's multinational perspectives.

Radical Mercantilism and Fascist Italy’s East African Empire

AbstractThis article traces the evolution of Italian strategies for imperial expansion from the decades after unification—when many came to believe that imperial conquest would more advantageously position Italy in the liberal capitalist global economy—to the height of the fascist colonial project in the Horn of Africa—when the fascists tried to break with the liberal global economy and construct a new, radical mercantilist and corporatist empire. Taking inspiration from their predecessors, the fascist regime extracted capital, resources, and labor from Africans and Italians to finance its war against the Ethiopian empire and its colonization of the Horn. While the war temporarily stimulated Italian industry, employed hundreds of thousands of work-hungry Italians, and consolidated the regime’s many corporatist institutions, it drained Italy’s reserves and alarmed the Duce’s allies among Italy’s industrial and financial elite. The regime, thus, shifted strategies, focusing on reducing the cost of the empire by exploiting African workers, eliminating inefficient small enterprises, and creating vast concessions for Italian industrialists. Conquering new territories and markets, acquiring a variety of primary resources, and empowering industry, Mussolini and the radical mercantilist-corporatists aimed to resolve Italy’s perceived under-development, by placing Italy at the center of a great fascist Eurafrican empire that could dictate the terms of its engagement with the rest of the world.

(De)constructing the "Otherness”

The problem of social and cultural diversity has been a classic issue in the humanities and the social sciences throughout the entire human history. Starting with the 1970s academics were interested in a specific feature of this inter-cultural problem, namely how Western societies have understood and interpreted oriental societies through the period of imperial expansion. Even nowadays, some of the most complicated academic dialogues (and not only) are centered around the theories of post-colonialism and nationalism. The ‘subjects’ of these debates are mainly the Middle Eastern states and the predominant variable is the region’s main religion, Islam. The Orient signifies a system of representations framed by political forces that brought the Orient into Western learning, Western consciousness, and Western empires. The Orient exists for the West, and is constructed by and in relation to the West. The critics of Orientalism consider this theory to be a manner of regularized (or Orientalized) writing, vision, and study, dominated by imperatives, perspectives, and ideological biases ostensibly suited to the Orient. This article proposes a brief introspection into the creation of alterity in Western literature and a review of the perspective offered by the best-known critic of this paradigm, Edward Said.

Nineteenth-Century Contextualization of “Race-Religion”

In her wide-ranging article, “An Imperial History of Race-Religion in International Law,” Rabiat Akande delves into the realms of history illustrating how the “race-religion” constellation became formative in current international law, specifically in Western discrimination toward minorities. As Akande writes, “the legacy of that past survives in the continuing interplay of the racial and religious othering of the non-Euro-Christian other.”1 This racialized-religious heritage, for instance, is evident in Western debates on the Hijab, Jewish circumcision (Brit Milah), and various other rituals practiced by religious minorities in the West. As a historian of the nineteenth century, in this essay I mainly focus on Akande's reconstruction of the historical aspect of the “race-religion” nexus. I begin by partially validating Akande's argument concerning the emergence of race-religion during the end of the nineteenth century, and by emphasizing Western racial discrimination against Islam and Judaism—the two “sister Semitic” religions. I then add what I see as important nuances that must be considered in the historical analysis of race-religion. Primarily, I illustrate how race-religion was “fluid” at times, allowing specific groups to “enter” Western civilization, while in other cases, race-religion was rigid, barring the inclusion of groups. Akande argues that the nineteenth century colonial expansion (in Africa, the Middle East, and India) dramatically contributed to the rise of the shared European categories of whiteness and Christianity. This emerging Western identity was antagonistic to the alleged “barbarism” of the non-whites and non-Christians. Nevertheless, further nineteenth-century inner-European contextualization is needed since the exclusion through race-religion also targeted, exactly at the time of this European imperial expansion, other “fellow Christian whites,” such as the Catholic Irish and Poles. It is not only “whiteness” per se that became prevalent, but a specific form of “whiteness” (e.g., Anglo-Saxon, Teutonic, Aryan) that was constantly reimagined and redefined.

"The State of Their Stomachs": The Politics of Consumption in Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym

ABSTRACT: From gorging gulls to masticated men, appetitive concerns litter Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket . And yet, critics have infrequently attended to the metaphors of eating at play in Poe's only novel. This article takes its place at the critical table through a literary and theoretical analysis of consumption in Pym , a work composed against the backdrop of early nineteenth-century dietary reform movements that sought to advance nationalist ideologies. Using critical eating studies as a framework, I contend that acts of ingestion in Poe's only novel often destabilize nationalist rhetoric linked to imperial expansion and subject-making. Beginning with a brief examination of Poe's testy relationship with literary nationalism and its correlation with Pym's ironic embodiment of emerging US nationalist attitudes, this article then closely reads instances of cannibalistic, spatial, and animalistic consumption. In so doing, it parses the differences between an impersonal hunger often ascribed to animals and "appetite"—defined herein as a culturally encoded desire often concretized through imperious, extractive behaviors. In locating these differences, I identify how various modes of eating within Pym disturb that nationalism which Poe found so unpalatable.

IMPACTS OF IMPERIALISM, CAPITALISM, AND ANTHROPOCENE IN THE COLONIAL WORLD

Environmental history is a new emerging field in academia. However, historians before the 1970s did not include nature as an essential aspect of analysis, especially in the academic field, due to the lack of primary sources that did not give them evidence of the nature aspect. So, we can say that natural elements were missing in the primary sources before the 1970s. However, when we look at the Colonial Archival data, we get evidence of deforestation, illegal exploitation of different resources, and the conquest of islands for the expansion of imperialism.

Empire of Portland Cement, Concrete Blocks, and Specialty Shingles

Abstract The article examines the close collaboration between Protestant missionaries and expatriate American construction entrepreneurs in the early 1900s in Puerto Rico. The construction work done by the Czech American architect Antonin Nechodoma (1877–1928), the builder Frank Bond Hatch (1871–1925), and Protestant missionaries represent an instance of this collaboration, which led to the adoption of Portland cement products in the construction of church buildings (Beatriz del Cueto, 2016). Nechodoma’s contribution to the development of a religious architectural language on behalf of Protestant missionaries has been largely neglected. While Nechodoma’s figure has gathered popular attention of late, the aim of this article is to situate changes in the design and construction of ecclesiastic structures associated with Methodism within the larger context of American imperialist expansionism and political change in Puerto Rico. Examined collectively, the new religious buildings of the period 1898–c. 1927 reveal the implantation of a new religious colonialist architectural aesthetic.

The "Colored American Asiatic Traveler": Peter K. L. Cole and American Empire in Japan

Abstract: This article examines African Americans' participation in US empire-building in the nineteenth-century Pacific World. It uses the life story of Peter K. L. Cole, a Black world traveler and a resident of Yokohama, Japan, to explore how notions of race, empire, modernity, and citizenship circulated around the Pacific Ocean from the 1850s to the 1870s. Cole deployed the intertwined discourses of Black settler colonialism and Black orientalism to stake claims to African American equality in the post-Civil War United States. His efforts to build equal citizenship on the basis of Black men's service to American empire abroad gained little traction as the white supremacist logics of the US settler state excluded Black people from national belonging and erased their participation in imperial expansion.

On the genealogy of geoeconomics

AbstractThis commentary on Felix Mallin and James Sidaway's (2023) article on ‘Critical geoeconomics’ returns to the German Historical School of economics to recall their emphasis on geography, history and culture, but also their frequent advocacy for imperial expansion and colonial annexation. It revisits the divide between the Historical School's vision of the world economy and that of Austrian School marginalists and suggests that we can understand geoeconomics as the expression of a desire for sovereignty in an era of mutual interdependence.

‘Delicate ironies quite imperceptible on its surface’: Henry S. Whitehead's weird tales and American empire in the Caribbean

AbstractThis article mounts an initial exploratory engagement with the weird fiction of Henry S. Whitehead, framed by American imperial expansion into the Caribbean in the interwar years. It situates Whitehead and his work within the wider historical context and shows how Whitehead himself used and played with history as part of his fiction. The article considers the role of light in Whitehead's fiction and imperial projects, as well as the way that Whitehead's work, as horror fiction, both shapes and seeks to dispel notions of the Caribbean as a space of horror. As well as offering some initial conclusions, the article seeks to open further lines for future investigation.

‘Native’ Vladivostok vs. ‘Alien’ Dal’nii – the Pacific Porto-Franco and the Search for ‘Russian Interests’ in the Far East (1901–1904)

ABSTRACT This article examines the 1901–1904 discussions about free trade in the Priamur region and the territories in Chinese Manchuria leased to the Russian Empire. The discussions are placed in the contexts of nationalising empire, Russian imperialism, and cosmopolitan society of the globalised free port of Vladivostok. The piece traces the place of ideas about free trade in the social and political imagination of contemporaries in the Priamur region to show how these images were challenged by imperial expansion in Manchuria. It also analyses the rhetorical strategies used by regional actors to re-negotiate the borders of economic and political expansion, as well as the internal and external comparisons they made. The article demonstrates how debates about free trade in the Russian Far East offer deeper insight into how ideas about free trade and free ports as institutions affected not only the economic but social and political transformations in the late imperial period.

Fostering Unity and Leadership: Borneo's Cultural Diversity and Youth Leadership

The unique geographical and cultural significance of Borneo, the third largest island in the world, located in the Malay Archipelago and shared by Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei, is highlighted. This geographic linkage facilitates multifaceted interactions and fosters cultural exchange and deeper understanding among different ethnic groups and indigenous communities. Borneo's historical connections have resulted in the sharing of cultural practices, music, cuisine, etc. Festivals and cultural events held across borders strengthen the unity between Malaysians, Indonesians, and Bruneians. A vibrant art scene and religious diversity contribute to interfaith dialogue and mutual respect. Linguistic diversity provides avenues for cross-cultural communication. Borneo's historical background in trade networks, imperial expansion, and colonialism underlines its importance in fostering cultural exchange. Today’s Borneo is a hotbed of biodiversity and home to vital rainforests. The common historical, environmental, and cultural threads of the island weave a picture of continuity, cooperation, understanding, and stable relations. The Borneo Youth Leadership Camp, organized by the Borneo Studies Network, is an example of the island's role in empowering the youth across borders and fostering leadership skills, cultural appreciation, and environmental responsibility. The camp's interdisciplinary approach integrates Science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), and the arts and imparts critical thinking, compassion, and adaptability. As participants embark on this transformative journey, they emerge as empowered global citizens ready to contribute positively to their communities and the world. This camp repeats the call for unity, progress, and a common commitment to a better future. Overall, Borneo acts as a small space of unity, demonstrating the power of shared heritage, cultural exchange, and youth leadership in fostering cooperation, understanding, and sustainable relations between neighboring countries.

Archaeology of the Late Local Landscapes of the Hualfín Valley (Catamarca, Argentina): A Political Perspective from Cerro Colorado of La Ciénaga de Abajo

Abstract As seen in many examples of imperial expansions throughout history, the Inkas applied a whole range of policies strategically adapted for the different local organizations, in every corner of their empire, and local groups, in turn, were reconfigured based on the new conditions. Starting from the investigation of a group of late local landscapes of the Hualfín Valley (Department of Belén, Catamarca) in the Northwestern Argentina, from a critical perspective of the sociopolitical definitions classically given to these societies, the aim of this study consists of describing the spatial, social, and temporal dimensions of these landscapes and advancing the discussion about how local groups socially and politically organized themselves, in immediately pre-Inka times and after the incorporation of their territories into the Inka state. To this end, a brief discussion on the Late and Inka periods in Northwestern Argentina and theoretical guidelines for landscape analysis are presented. Then, we address the analysis of one of the landscapes in particular: the Cerro Colorado de La Ciénaga de Abajo and its surroundings, and we briefly analyze the cases of Asampay, Palo Blanco, and Puerta de Corral Quemado, and the regional landscape network.

Spatializing social reproduction theory: integrating state space and the urban fabric

This article sets out to extend the core ideas of social reproduction theory (SRT), an increasingly influential strand of scholarship within and beyond critical geopolitical economy. It suggests that while SRT productively addresses longstanding debates within Marxist feminism, it has yet to adequately theorize the shifting spatialities of reproductive work and the relationship between social reproduction and the state. To address this relative weakness, this article stages a dialogue between SRT and the emergent neo-Lefebvrian literature on state space and the multiscalar geographies of capitalist urbanization. The primary claim at stake in this context is that reproductive work is periodically and systematically reorganized and re-spatialized in relation to the broader crisis dynamics of capital, and the reweaving of the urban fabric; and, moreover, that this process of reorganization and re-spatialization is profoundly mediated, managed, and canalized by state spatial practices. To concretize this theorization, this article closes with a brief historical reading of US imperial expansion and urbanization between roughly 1898 and 1925.