Imperial History Research Articles

Welfare ruination, debris and Europeans’ make-shift practices: A research agenda

The mainstream literature on welfare retrenchment, austerity and post-welfare states proposes that since the mid 1970s, welfare states are in a state of ‘permanent austerity’. To offer an alternative to such stories of loss and their problematic nostalgic retelling of recent European history, leaving out its imperial histories, this article proposes to look instead at welfare as the object of ruination. This approach builds on literatures that focus on the experience of austerity and institutional violence to take a step further towards everyday responsive practices. Building on the work of Ann Laura Stoler, studying ruination and debris opens up the possibility to look at (1) the long durée of the colonial heritage of welfare, (2) ruination as an active and violent process and (3) welfare debris and how European dwellers use it and live in it. For Europeans, living amidst ruins and in a time of ruination, then, the question is: how can they build a life with the welfare debris that they are left with? Who is able to navigate the ruins and who is not? For researchers, this perspective can inform a new research agenda: a redirection of attention from welfare as ‘organized provision’ to, instead, how people organize the provisional, improvising with the rubble that remains.

“I Was Born!”: Personal Experience Narratives and Tree-Ring Marker Years

This essay, co-written by a dendrochronologist (Nick) and a narrative theorist (Erin), considers how these two disciplines can meet to illuminate alternative narratives in tree rings. At the basis of our conversation is a desire to tease apart tree experience and the signification entangled within human practices of storytelling. First, Nick explains recent developments in dendrochronology and critical physical geography (CPG) that call attention to the ways in which tree-ring sciences often naturalize imperial narratives and demand alternative methodologies. Second, Erin dives into the imperial narratives of two case study tree bodies, throwing light upon the human and vegetal stories that these dominant narratives obscure and silence. Third, Nick turns to an experiment in critical participatory action research (CPAR) to suggest an approach to tree-ring dating—material dating—that takes its cues not from imperial histories but from a simultaneous interest in community engagement, anticolonial scholarship, and tree agency and signification. Fourth, Erin explains how material dating, via foregrounding personal experience, stands to produce a narrative more sensitive to a particular tree’s situated experience and better able to foment understanding among tree body viewers for the tree as a living and communicating organism. Finally, Nick and Erin use material dating to produce an alternative narrative for one of our case studies and provide directions for other scholars to replicate our process.

“Purely cultural and economic in nature...”: Russian agricultural colonisation and land ownership of the Caspian provinces of Iran and the category of “cultural conquest”

In this article, the author examines the concept of “cultural conquest” in the context of the Russian Empire’s policy towards the Caspian provinces of Iran, both prior to and during the Great War. In the period preceding the outbreak of hostilities, Russian peasant colonists began to settle in the Astarabad province, while concurrently, significant Russian land ownership emerged in the southern Caspian region. These developments were subjected to rigorous scrutiny by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Resettlement Department, and other pertinent authorities. The phenomenon is not adequately represented in historiography, despite its significance in the context of New Imperial History. One of the pivotal concepts employed in analysing and comprehending the processes of Russian expansion into the region was the notion of “cultural conquest”. This category was actively employed by both state and non-state actors to conceptualise the ongoing economic, political, and cultural interactions in a crucial frontier region. The analysis of a wide range of materials, including archival and published sources such as diplomatic correspondence, concession projects, and publications by officials from the Resettlement Department, has been conducted with the aim of investigating the contexts of the use of the category “cultural conquest” (and related terms) as well as proposed options for optimal policy in the region. The author indicates that this concept was of a framework nature and comprised three principal components: political, economic, and civilisational. He demonstrates that despite significant similarities in the interpretations of the concept by different actors, there were differences in understanding the methods and optimal ways of “cultural conquest” of the Caspian provinces.

Increasing Student Learning Activities Through Model Application Problem Based Learning (PBL) Material on the History of Colonialism and Imperialism in Class XI Asteroid at SMA Negeri 2 Medan

This study seeks to detail how class XI Asteroids students at SMA Negeri 2 Medan were able to increase their learning activities by using the Problem Based Learning (PBL) paradigm to content related to the history of colonialism and imperialism. The classroom action research (PTK) approach is used in this study to address a range of issues that transpire inside the educational setting. The four steps of this PTK are preparation, execution, evaluation, and review. Increasing students' historical learning activities is the primary goal of this study, and these four steps repeat themselves in a cycle to achieve this goal. The study was place in July and August of 2024 at SMA N 2 Medan and included students from class XI ASTEROID. Each of the two cycles of this study included two sessions. The study shows that with each cycle, pupils get more engaged in learning about history. The average proportion of student learning activities, which was 48.91% in cycle I and 75.78% in cycle II, shows this growth. Based on these findings, it can be concluded that the research success indicator has been met, with an average proportion of student learning activity reaching or above 70%, during cycle II.

Application of Wordwall Media to increase learning motivation in learning the History of Colonialism and Imperialism in class XI-6 SMA Negeri 5 Medan

This research aims to increase student motivation in studying in class XI-6 students at SMA Negeri 5 Medan in studying the history of colonialism and imperialism through the use of the Wordwall web media. The classroom action research method was applied in three stages. The research results showed a significant increase in students' learning motivation after using Wordwall. In the second stage, student learning motivation reached 81%, an increase from 50% in the initial stage. These findings indicate that Wordwall has the potential to be an effective tool for increasing student interest and engagement in history learning.

Top Boy Crossdressing: The Life of Heliogabalus in the Historia Augusta

Focusing on the Life of Heliogabalus in the so-called Historia Augusta or Imperial History, an anonymous late fourth century CE work, the chapter argues that beautiful rulers who cross dressed with abandon were part of late Roman imperial masculinity and its representation. This was so because the Christian emperor Theodosius was very aware of same-gender or homoerotic attraction as unifying force, which he also employed to strengthen the rule of his sons, made full co-rulers as children. However, as the highly satirical Life of Heliogabalus makes clear, gorgeous, soft young emperors had to maintain and make visible specific power relations. If they could not demonstrate that they controlled their generals rather than the other way round, the power of homoerotic attraction could backfire.

Religion and the American Revolution: An Imperial History

Religion and the American Revolution: An Imperial History

China's Age of Counterreform

ABSTRACT: China is steadily sliding deeper into the counterreform era. Economically, it is slowing down. Ideologically, it is closing up. Politically, it is steadily pivoting back toward personalistic one-man rule. As these trends deepen, Beijing's leaders are erasing core elements of both the reform and revolutionary eras, reviving ruinous Maoist governance practices of the 1950s, and turning back to China's imperial history in an effort to build a new ideological foundation for their authoritarian rule. Far from paving the way for China's twenty-first-century rise, Beijing's counterreforms are exacerbating its structural problems, weakening the nation and undermining its stability.

‘Know the Game—Boxing’: Boxing in Colonial Kenya, 1895–1963

The history of organized boxing in colonial Kenya is complicated. The complexity stems from multiple facets undergirding colonialism. Until the last decade of British colonial rule in Kenya (1953–1963), organized boxing belonged to a tiny cadre of opulent white settlers in the colony. It became a sport for Blacks in the mid-1950s, especially impecunious Africans who appeared to colonial officials as lacking the qualities constituting morally acceptable citizens. This observation challenges the insinuation that British colonizers—administrators, missionaries, and settlers—introduced organized boxing in colonial Kenya exclusively for the indigenous people. This essay historicizes boxing in colonial Kenya (1895–1963). It is a socio-cultural history that grounds boxing within the broader history of colonization and contributes to the general history of sports and imperialism in Africa. The dynamics of class, race, citizenship, gender, power, and masculinity flow through the essay. Boxing in colonial Kenya is undocumented and undertheorized. The present work attempts to break this circle.

‘Natural’ disasters, ignorance, and the mirage of Italian settler colonialism in late nineteenth-century Africa

ABSTRACT This article places the origins of Italian settler colonialism and its defeat in the battle of Adwa (1896) in the global perspective of the environmental history of European imperialism. It argues that the Italian project to turn the highlands of the Horn of Africa into a settler colony was an “imperial mirage”: the perception that the momentarily depopulated landscape of Ethiopia, produced by “natural” disasters that were in fact the social products of colonial warfare, would be available to Italian settlers in the future. This mirage was based on a domino effect of environmental catastrophes connecting climate history, animal disease, and the politics of European imperialism. Italians’ introduction of rinderpest in Eritrea in the wake of an El Niño-related drought triggered “the Great African Rinderpest Panzootic” and the “Great Ethiopian Famine”. The mixture of willful ignorance and wishful self-deception that fueled Italian projects explains Italy’s defeat in the battle of Adwa. Building on the methodology of environmental historians and scholars in Science and Technology Studies, this article shifts focus from the power of the state to the techno-politics of colonialism in its impact on natural environments and African communities through the lens of the cultural production of ignorance.

The Rise of Decolonial Image: Postcolonial Reading to Django Unchained Movie by Quentin Tarantino

This paper provides postcolonial analysis of Django Unchained movie which is written and directed by American Film writer Quentin Tarantino in 2012. More specifically, the analysis focused on three primary components: firstly, Quentin Tarantino’s critique for slavery of blacks and racial discrimination, secondly, Orientalized Oriental discourse via postcolonial lens, and thirdly, decolonization discourse which is represented by Django, the protagonist of the movie. Throughout the movie, the viewers can see many scenes of slavery and racial intolerance which reflects many historical facts in the era of American slavery; including how blacks were obliged to work and how they were treated inhumanely. In a similar vein, the viewer can see the spirit of Orientalized Oriental phenomenon through Stephen as one of the major actors of the movie who embodies the phenomenon which supported abusing with blacks although he is a black actor. Quentin Tarantino gives a spectacular role to Django who becomes a symbolic emancipation of blacks and earns his freedom and frees his wife, Broomhilda. Postcolonial critics react against the imperial history of colonization, like the structure of racism as well as colonial power which reshaped itself by Orientalized Oriental discourse. After all, Django Unchained Movie contributes to the discourse of postcolonialism in which Quentin Tarantino reveals some historical facts about African American slavery, and in contrast to many other Film Makers, he gives a good role to non-European hero, Django.

Beyond the big tent: recontextualizing settler colonial studies

ABSTRACT This reflection on the field of Settler Colonial Studies uses the “big tent” metaphor to ask what is seen to be encompassed in the field; who is left out and how attached its practitioners are not just to teleology but to the dialectic logics of colonialism itself. Drawing on Burton's 30 years of work in the field of colonial and imperial history, it queries some of the premises of settler colonial studies' remit asks how attention to gender and sexuality impacts the direction of the field and posits the dialectic alongside telos as a site of critical tension for thinking about approaches to subject and method.

The value of the concept of discrimination in contexts of migration: the case of structural discrimination

ABSTRACT This article considers the question of the value and limits of the concept of discrimination for the ethics of migration by drawing attention to the need for a conceptualization of discrimination that can encompass forms of group-based disadvantage that are enabled and reproduced by the three central norms of our contemporary regime of global migration governance: the state’s right to unilateral control over its border regime, birthright citizenship and rights of (re)entry to one’s own state, and the individual right to leave a state. I sketch an historical account of the forging and yoking together of these norms as bound up with the history of European imperialism and argue that they function to enable the reproduction of the advantage of states of the Global North. I illustrate this argument by reference to the example of the transnational migration of medical professionals from sub-Saharan Africa and argue that this may amount to structural discrimination against the human right to health of the populations of these states of emigration before considering two responses to this condition: ‘no recruitment’ and ‘no disadvantage’.

Historiography and Political Discourse The history of Roman imperialism in the thought of Theodor Mommsen and Tenney Frank

This article explores the nexus between power and historiography, particularly ancient Roman imperialism, in the German and American historical writings from the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Scholars have intensively explored the use of the roman imperialism in supporting the British imperialism. However, the relations between Roman imperialism and its usage in German and American historiography remain critically unexplored. Through the of Michel Foucault’s power-knowledge and discourse analysis, this paper aims to delves into the relationships between power of those traditions and historical productions. The central questions are: How does the narrative surrounding Roman imperialism shape discussions on the nation-state building and expansion beyond state borders? And how does the discourse on Roman imperialism incorporates racial theories? particularly in the works of German scholar Theodor Mommsen and American scholar Tenney Frank. Despite their different approaches, both scholars drew from Roman history to achieve similar political aims. This paper contends that history, as exemplified by Roman imperialism, serves as a powerful tool in justifying political actions.

REALISM AND THE FANTASTIC

Nineteenth-century Spanish literature was characterized by decades-long continuities stemming from revolutionary political and aesthetic impulses. The fantastic was central to these continuities. However, in advocating for “Realism”, Galdós and Pardo Bazán successfully rewrote literary history to their own ends, occluding swathes of inventive nineteenth-century literature and ideology, deemed extravagant and lacking serenity. The great deletion included the fantastic, along with a spectrum of literary and political explorations of imaginative freedom to which it belonged. Too often taken as near-literal accounts, Galdós and Pardo Bazán’s essays were polemical interventions in long-standing debates. Their “Realism” primarily aimed for a new balance of serenity and fantasía, a quest shared with literary writers, historians, aspects of “realist” practice, as exemplified in El amigo Manso, may seem perplexing.But, re-situated amid nineteenth-century debates, Spanish “Realism” is an attempt, not to suppress either fantasía or the fantastic but to re-invent them, and so re-imagine Spanish and imperial history and society.

The Impact of Mental Models on the Transition from Communism to Capitalism. The Comparative Case Study of Azerbaijan and Poland

The purpose of the article. The breakdown of the so-called Eastern Bloc, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and the demise of communism fueled transition processes in Central and Eastern Europe, Western Asia, and Central Asia. The great majority of transformation difficulties across different areas demonstrate that when pursuing the process of a structural change, it is important to take into account diverse sets of formal and informal institutions preserved in each country. Each country has a unique set of formal and informal institutions. These differences are easily observed between Poland and Azerbaijan. The aim of this paper is to compare and contrast the outcomes of Poland and Azerbaijan's transitions from communism to capitalism and to identify the primary factors driving these two different transformations. Methodology. The paper presents two complementary methods to compare the transitions from communism to capitalism in Poland and Azerbaijan. The first method involves secondary analysis, where existing data from reputable sources such as the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) database, the Bertelsmann Transformation Index (BTI), and country reports are compiled to provide insights into economic, political, and social indicators. Additionally, a comparative case study approach is employed, using Geert Hofstede's six cultural dimensions framework to explore the cultural influences on transition outcomes. By integrating these methods, the study aims to offer a comprehensive analysis of the transformation processes in Poland and Azerbaijan. Results of the research. The results of the analysis presented in the paper support the hypothesis that the historically-shaped differences in mental models and strong ties to international protectors determined the paths of transformations in Poland and Azerbaijan. The primary similarities and contrasts in the mindset are justified by the colonial or imperial history of the nations.

Incursions, incisions, omissions: liberal imperialism, violence and British Southeast Asia in Francis Leggatt Chantrey, Major General Robert Rollo Gillespie , and Joseph Edgar Boehm, Richard Southwell Bourke, sixth earl of Mayo

This article considers the sculpted monuments in St Paul’s Cathedral to nineteenth-century protagonists in Britain’s invasion and rule of Southeast Asian territories (including Burma (Myanmar), Indonesia and the Andaman Islands). It focuses on two works in particular: Sir Francis Leggatt Chantrey’s monument to Major General Robert Rollo Gillespie, and the monument to Richard Southwell Bourke, sixth earl of Mayo and viceroy of India, attributed to Joseph Edgar Boehm. The first commemorates the man considered by his supporters to be the hero of the British East Indies after smashing a hole in the Indigenous power structures of the Indonesian archipelago so that it could be claimed for British India. The second remembers a man who was one of the British East Indies’ many victims, even as he ran the place. His story and his monument indicate the extent to which Southeast Asia became a region to which British India despatched its problems – and in which the liberal ideology used to justify nineteenth-century British imperialism met its limits. These two men’s imperial histories and sculpted memorials are read in turn as distinct and divergent instances of liberal imperialism’s simultaneous dependence upon, and denial of, its own capacity for brutal violence. The article argues that, viewed up close and in context, both monuments bear traces of that violence, its consequences, and the alibis, omissions and occlusions with which it was – and, in the neoliberal present, continues to be – cloaked in public discourse.

The Romanovs on Contemporary American TV

Abstract This article analyzes the Netflix six-part docudrama The Last Czars as well as the Amazon Prime anthology drama The Romanoffs for its representations of Russian imperial history and its heritage. Using an intersectional lens, it utilizes a close watching of the TV shows to identify a nostalgia for Russia's imperial legacy as core element of both series. Embedding the findings within popular culture, the analysis further shows that the nostalgic depiction of the last Russian imperial family and the mourning of their loss has a century-long history within American media. Comparing these depictions further to recent commemorations of the last Romanovs through the exhibitions Russia My History points to the Western complicity in Russian imperialist and colonial ideology through the recent shows in liberal American media.

Agroecology beyond the statist quo? Transforming U.S. imperial agricultural policy

Agroecology—with its diverse, multifaceted, and liberatory principles, methods, and commitments—seems incommensurate with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), with its settler colonial origins, imperial histories, racist legacies, neoliberal hegemonies, and contemporary reproduction of the unjust and ecocidal agricultural status quo. And yet, is it possible to make use of what the behemoth department has to offer, in its attempts, albeit paltry, at reform and restitution? More pressingly, can we engage and demand more from the non-monolithic ministry—call for it to stave off further corporate capture of markets, land, germplasm, data, and water? Can we pressure the USDA to protect farmworkers from exploita­tion, animals from abuse, cooperatives from corpo­rate co-optation, and small-scale farmers from farmgate price degradation? Is abandoning the USDA tantamount to ceding its resources to agro-industries intent on dispossessing Black, Indige­nous, and other essential agricultures? Shouldn’t we at least attempt to obstruct the USDA’s obstruc­tionist international stance, as it thwarts the right to food, climate justice, labor rights, and redistributive reforms globally? . . .

Market integration, empire and industry in the colonial economic development of the Buenos Aires meat industry (1770s–1800s)

ABSTRACT Building on recent literature on the history of political economy and Spanish imperial history, the article reconstructs the ideas that supported the colonial development of the meat industry in the Río de la Plata. Archival and printed sources are employed to illustrate the different arguments revolving around colonial economic development and imperial rule, in the words and practices of merchants, explorers, administrators and ministers. This way, it is possible to disclose the multiple imperial visions circulating in the Spanish Atlantic. The analysis suggests that economic reformism was not only a European intellectual and political movement but was shared and appropriated by Spanish Americans. They employed arguments in political economy to foster their agenda, namely the economic improvement of their territory in the broader context of the Spanish commercial empire. If a shared consensus around imperial political economy between Spanish and Spanish American vassals provided arguments supporting this colonial industry, the diverging economic interests, imperial rivalries, and the different geographical spaces of enunciation determined a variable dialectic between projects for the expansion of salted meat production and their realisation.