Imperial Landscape Research Articles

Rethinking imperial infrastructure: A bottom-up perspective on the Inca Road

The Inca road has been the iconic example of imperial infrastructure inthe prehispanic Andes. However, scholarly attention to its role in expanding and consolidating the Inca domain has overshadowed analysis of how locals may have appropriated the Inca road for their own private benefit. Based on a full-coverage survey and excavations, this article presents the case of small mining communities along the Inca road and the use they made of it. I argue that they most likely leveraged on emerging imperial infrastructure, in order to expand their existing lapidary and pigment production and exchange in the Atacama desert. The Inca Road may thus have served as an unintended stimuli for local economic activities, since it improved transportation logistics, and served as a linear exchange nexus. I further demonstrate how the Inca Road was, to some extent, appropriated to serve local economic purposes. This provides a unique “bottom-up” perspective of how the Inca infrastructure could not be fully controlled by the elites. Thus, the “imperial landscape” created by the Inca Road was more permeable than what the Incas expected and scholars have assumed, despite the physical or ideological coercion elites may have enforced.

Forgery and Impersonation in Imperial China: Popular Deceptions and the High Qing State by Mark McNicholas

Reviewed by: Forgery and Impersonation in Imperial China: Popular Deceptions and the High Qing State by Mark McNicholas William T. Rowe (bio) Mark McNicholas. Forgery and Impersonation in Imperial China: Popular Deceptions and the High Qing State. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2016. xiv, 265 pp. Hardcover $50.00, ISBN 978-0-295-99509-0. "You've won!" You open your email to find one from the representative of a Nigerian prince. The prince wants to get his considerable fortune out of his country, and asks your help in depositing funds in your bank account. In exchange for providing him with your banking information, social security number and other personal identifiers, and a small sum of money to assist in the transfer of funds, he offers you a sizeable percentage of his assets. If you agree to these conditions, of course, you've been had. Mark McNicholas reminds us in his rich new book that such "advance fee scams" did not originate with the internet age, nor are they peculiar to the modern West. In the eighteenth-century Qing empire it was not unheard of for a distinguished looking person, bearing impressive credentials with official seals, to show up at a substantial home with news that the resident had just been accorded a flattering imperial honor. All that is necessary to receive it is to provide the representative suitable up-front handling charges. Got you! This Qing equivalent of the Nigerian prince scheme was hardly the only type of fraud that dotted the late imperial landscape. McNicholas details—often very entertainingly—cases of phony princes, phony officials and yamen underlings, phony "secret agents" and imperial investigators, phony policemen, phony proxy agents for delivery of "contributions" (juanna) in return for civil service degrees and official ranks, and many others. Along with a growing [End Page 398] number of previous scholars, including Thomas Buoye, Melissa Macauley, Bradly Reed, and others, McNicholas has mined Qing archives—especially the case files of the Board of Punishments (xingke tiben)—to explore the variety of routine crime in early modern China. Drawing upon archival collections in Beijing and Taiwan by means of keyword searches and other sampling techniques, the author assembles a source base of some 266 legal cases, which he supplements by close reading of successive legal codes, bureaucratic correspondence, and other materials. The cases span the years 1645-1850, but are overwhelmingly concentrated in the era from late Kangxi through the Qianlong reign, that of the "high Qing" or "prosperous age" (shengshi). The prolonged crime spree that McNicholas depicts, that is, took place precisely in the period when things went right. Another authorial choice delimiting the subject is that all the crimes described entail, in some aspect or another, fraudulent claims of imperial or official agency. Given the ubiquity of contracts and property title documents in Qing society, there must have been countless instances of forgery of these, in which no invocation of official authority was advanced, but these are not the concern here. This is, in effect, a book about the early modern Chinese state. That state was the embodiment of what Pierre-Etienne Will has called "doing the most with the least." High Qing capacity to get things done was genuinely impressive. It managed with tolerable success to defend its vast and significantly expanding borders, to maintain and extend a sprawling and intricate hydraulic infrastructure, to provision its mushrooming population (a source for the throne of both gratification and alarm), to manage (albeit loosely) a booming and diversifying economy, to maintain for much of the period domestic peace, and, not least, to adjudicate many thousands of civil and criminal legal cases. It did this while remaining small, in terms of the percentage of the population in formal state employ and of the domestic product under state fiscal control. This smallness was not only a function of limited technological capacity but also of deliberate choice—"benevolent governance" (renzheng) meant, in the Qing, light governance. Indeed, the Kangxi emperor's famous 1713 pledge to never raise the land tax (yongbu jiafu), and the frequent tax rollbacks of the early Qianlong decades, may well have contributed to a formal state presence on the...

Religion, Same-Sex Desire, and the Imagined Geographies of Empire: the case of Constance Maynard (1849–1935)

Although a devout Evangelical, living in an era that largely predated the dissemination of sexological discourses of female same-sex desire, Constance Maynard (1849–1935), the prominent Victorian educational reformer, pursued a series of same-sex relationships. This essay focuses on Maynard's relationship with the Anglo-Irish Marion Wakefield (1876–1956), exploring the role of Maynard's erotic imagination in the constitution, contestation, and consolidation of the imagined geographies of imperialist discourse. Maynard's erotic positioning of her lover in diverse imperial landscapes reveals the ostensibly ‘private’ discourses of the erotic imagination to be profoundly implicated in the ‘public’ discourses of empire. At the same time, the domestic settings in which these landscapes were imagined and in which the women's illicit desires were enacted, pose a challenge to the gendered spatial dichotomies—private/public, domestic/imperial, and home/away—of both imperialist discourse and the historiography of empire.

Textbook difference: Spatial history and national education in Panchayat and present-day Nepal

This article examines the transformation of the diverse imperial landscape of the Gorkha Kingdom into the more uniform and integrated space of the Nepali nation. It argues that nationalised schooling, as it was introduced under Panchayat rule (1960–90), was central to the production of national space. However, it also highlights how this schooling concomitantly extended a language of ‘anthropological’ and ‘ecological’ difference with which to organise and negotiate this space. Below the textbook surface of unity-in-diversity, remnants of imperial caste and racial hierarchies remained. And, along with novel notions of national development, new hierarchies were introduced that separated developed centres from remote and backward peripheries. Through its engagement with Nepali history, the article thus contributes to our understanding of the continued interaction between the production of national space and historical developments in governmental differentiation. Approaching ‘spatial history’ as a combined emphasis on the history of spatial production and the spatial productivity of historical representation, it highlights the contingencies of national connections between time and space. In conclusion, the article suggests how the languages of difference built up across Panchayat and present-day schooling continue to shape contemporary re-imaginings of national space, in the midst of political uncertainties.

The Prisoner Dilemma: Britain, Germany, and the Repatriation of Indian Prisoners of War

Between October 1914 and December 1915, nearly 135,000 Indian riflemen—known as sepoys—fought in the trenches of France and Belgium at the battles of Ypres, Festubert, Givenchy, Neuve Chapelle, Second Ypres and Loos, suffering some 34,252 casualties. At a prisoner of war camp outside Berlin, Indian revolutionaries and emissaries from the Ottoman Empire attempted to convert the allegiances of the sepoys in their custody with a combination of pan-Islamic and nationalist appeals. Although this campaign ultimately failed, it profoundly shaped British repatriation policy at the end of the war when, cautioned Secretary of State for India Austen Chamberlain, the British could not allow men who had been exposed to ‘strongly hostile influences’ to return home unmonitored. The 1918 armistice and British repatriation policy therefore presented a host of new challenges to Britain’s colonial subjects from South Asia as they navigated the post-war imperial landscape and secured what was most important to them—safe transportation home.

Churchill and Roosevelt in Africa: Performing and Writing Landscapes of Race, Empire, and Nation

During the months from October 1907 through March 1910, first Winston Churchill and then Theodore Roosevelt traveled through British East Africa on nearly identical routes. Both published a series of magazine articles and widely read books from their travels. At that time both were not only politicians but also popular authors who wrote and spoke on race, nation, and empire, and their travel accounts reflect these interests. This article analyzes the materials (visual, textual, published, and archival) produced from these travels to achieve two overarching objectives. One goal is to use these materials to understand how embodied encounters with and representations of imperial landscapes interact in mediating the performance of national and racial subjectivities. A second, more explicitly theoretical, purpose is to engage with the current “landscape debate” regarding representational and nonrepresentational approaches. Landscape's dual meaning as domain and scenery creates tension that can be productively explored through engagement with both representational and nonrepresentational approaches. I investigate how the tension between dwelling and scenery manifests in specific ways among different subjects in different contexts and reflect on what this might mean for integrating representational and nonrepresentational approaches to landscape.

From Upper Camp to Mountain Estate: recovering historical narratives in Qing imperial landscapes

From Upper Camp to Mountain Estate: recovering historical narratives in Qing imperial landscapes

Chemical Composition by Neutron Activation Analysis (INAA) of Neo-Assyrian Palace Ware from Iraq, Syria and Israel

Neo-Assyrian Palace Ware is an 8th-7th century B.C.E. fine-ware which originated in Northern Mesopotamia and spread throughout the greater Levant. The mechanism by which Palace Ware moved across the Neo-Assyrian imperial landscape (trade or local imitation/emulation) is of great archaeological interest. This dataset provides chemical compositional data, generated using instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA), for Palace Ware vessels from Nimrud and Nineveh, in the Assyrian imperial core (Iraq), Dūr-Katlimmu, in one of the annexed provinces (Syria), and Tell Jemmeh, located outside the Neo-Assyrian provincial system (Israel).

<em>Codification, Macaulay and the Indian Penal Code: The Legacies and Modern Challenges of Criminal Law Reform</em>, edited by Wing-Cheong Chan, Barry Wright, and Stanley Yeo

Reviewed by: Codification, Macaulay and the Indian Penal Code: The Legacies and Modern Challenges of Criminal Law Reform ed. by Wing-Cheong Chan, Barry Wright, and Stanley Yeo Douglas M. Peers (bio) Codification, Macaulay and the Indian Penal Code: The Legacies and Modern Challenges of Criminal Law Reform, edited by Wing-Cheong Chan, Barry Wright, and Stanley Yeo; pp. xv + 371. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011, £75.00, $134.95. In 1860, the Indian Penal Code was introduced into India, the brainchild of Thomas Babington Macaulay who had drafted the code during his time in Bengal in the 1830s. Viewed by many as the best example of Benthamite legal principles put into action, with its emphasis upon “lucidity and accessibility of provisions, and consistency of expression and application” (vii), the Indian Penal Code would later be replicated in other colonial territories, notably Nigeria, Pakistan, Zimbabwe, and Malaysia (including Singapore). It provided the foundations for a stillborn attempt at codification in Great Britain in the late nineteenth century and would inform the evolution of criminal law in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The Indian Penal Code is consequently examined here through a very wide-angle imperial lens. Codification, Macaulay and the Indian Penal Code consists of four parts. The first consists of two chapters that provide a historical framing for the Indian Penal Code, locating its origins within efforts at legal reform in early nineteenth-century Britain. The following three parts, which comprise the bulk of this book, address the legacies of the Indian Penal Code, and in particular seek to provide some guidance as to how the Indian Penal Code, and those codes modeled upon it, can be refreshed and made more suitable to the societies in which they are operating. The essays are consistently of very high quality, and as they originated in a 2010 conference at the National University of Singapore that was expressly held to look at the Indian Penal Code on its 150th anniversary, the collection as a whole has a higher degree of coherence than is often the case with collections of essays. The discussions in many of the essays are underpinned by a concern over the fact that one of Macaulay’s key objectives was that the Code would be periodically revisited and revised by the legislative rather than the judicial branch of government. This foundational principle, however, was largely absent when it was enacted in 1860. Consequently, the history of the Indian Penal Code has been a “narrative of neglect and uneven amendment,” both in its original Indian form and its subsequent appearance elsewhere within the Empire (7). The stated aim of this collection is to encourage the articulation of a set of “general principles of criminal law” that could be implemented and which would be true to what Macaulay had laid out in the 1830s (13). Ironically, while legal scholars such as those assembled here are quick to recognize the significance of the Indian Penal Code, principally because of its current impact and capacity to inform further legal reform but also because of its potential to serve as a means through which we can explore nineteenth-century governmentality across a wide imperial landscape, historians of India and of empire more generally [End Page 749] have skipped over it. Macaulay is much better known for his sweeping denunciation of Indian learning: his statement “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabic” has become akin to boilerplate text in many works that detail the increasingly antagonistic views of India by Britons in the nineteenth century (“Minute on Higher Education” in Selected Writings, edited by John Clive and Thomas Pinney [1972], 241–42). Macaulay’s efforts to use education as a means to Anglicize Indians have been the subject of many studies, and as an example of colonial intent, its analysis is certainly merited. But the actual impact of his “Minute on Education” (1835) can be easily overestimated as compared with its rhetorical value. Not only was there a lack of consensus over who best and how best to educate (James Mill, the other great utilitarian figure associated with India in this period, disagreed...

Illustrators of the New World. The Image in the Spanish Scientific Expeditions of the Enlightenment

In the Eighteenth Century, with the boom in the exploration of the Earth, most travellers and explorers had painters and illustrators at their sides who recorded their adventures, even their deaths, the exotic locations they visited, the aborigines, the landscapes or the strange creatures or plants that inhabited them. The presence of artists would increase in these types of exploration companies, sent by Spain, in order to recognise the natural resources and the imperial control of their territories. We take as a starting point Lofling’s expedition, in which naturalist artists seek to comply with the requirements of the Linnaean classification system then, looking at the case of Francisco Requena, who cartographically represented the territory and drew the activities of his own expedition members along the boundaries with the Portuguese empire. Likewise, we analyze expeditions known as “Botanical” to the different viceroyalties, which attempted to transmit the American nature idealized in a few “types” that were drawn and recorded to make the new species and the wealth of the Empire known, until finally arriving at the expedition of Malaspina, in which there is a step towards the depiction of the imperial landscape.

Between knowledge of landscape production and representation

Between knowledge of landscape production and representation

The Symbolic Possession of the World: European Cartography in Mughal Allegory and History Painting

Abstract From their earliest contacts with Europeans, the Mughals sought to obtain maps, atlases, and globes. They were, however, concerned with cartography less as a scientific tool than as a means to convey messages of status and power. Both cartographically correct and cartographically manipulated globes feature prominently in the allegories of Emperor Jahāngīr. Emperor Shāh Jahān added another dimension: European cartographical devices were introduced into history painting, to structure the imperial landscape and to document the emperor’s conquests.

Imperial Landscapes of Health: Place, Plants and People between India and Australia, 1800s–1900s

Imperial Landscapes of Health: Place, Plants and People between India and Australia, 1800s–1900s

Imperial Landscapes of Health: Place, Plants and People between India and Australia, 1800s–1900s

In the nineteenth century, place bore immediately and urgently on questions of imperialism, race, and health. This article considers European strategies to control local environments and improve healthiness through the exchange of people, plants, ideas and garden designs between India and Australia. Migration removed Europeans from unhealthy environments, either permanently (to Australia and elsewhere) or temporarily (to hill stations in India). Trees like the eucalyptus were introduced into India to enhance European health, based on belief they drained sources of disease. I argue a crucial new understanding of the intersection between health and place in the nineteenth-century British Empire can be provided by tracing the networks through which people, plants, and ideas moved to consider the broader imperial frameworks.

Re-placing imperial landscapes: colonial monuments and the transition to independence in Kenya

Public monuments in colonial Nairobi were visual links to the British empire, and served as a means of asserting imperial power. During this period, colonial memories and identities were inscribed into Nairobi’s landscape by the dominant group, the elite of the European population. However, at the moment of Kenya’s achievement of independence from colonial rule, such identities and assertions of power were challenged as statues were removed from the city. This paper examines the forces behind the decolonisation of Nairobi’s monumental landscape and how this landscape visualised the changing political and cultural contexts of the city. Comparisons are made with the removal of statues from Sudan, India and the Democratic Republic of Congo in order to situate the Kenyan experience. Through a comparative examination of the decolonisation of Nairobi’s monumental landscape, this paper illustrates how the removal of public monuments from the city was exploited by both the coloniser and the colonised.

Making White Bread by the Bomb's Early Light: Anxiety, Abundance, and Industrial Food Power in the Early Cold War

This article explores U.S. policymakers and consumers’ engagements with global bread politics in the early Cold War. This provides a glimpse into the making of a particular form of postwar “American alimentary exceptionalism” premised on the universal choiceworthiness of industrial foodways. This alimentary exceptionalism did not assume that the U.S. industrial diet was gastronomically superior to other countries’ diets, but rather that it offered a unique foundation of strength, stability, choice, and abundance on which world peace could rest in the uncertain postwar world. Thus, the article contends that Americans’ confidence in industrial foodways and industrial food production systems—something whose legacies we still grapple with today—was forged, in part, on the imperial landscape of Cold War competition. In that sense, the article traces the largely unexamined flipside of postwar food imperialism: how the exercise of food power abroad shaped Americans’ understandings of their own diet and its place in the world.

First Impressions:

They say first impressions always matter. Americans acquired an empire of tropical islands in the Pacific about which they knew little and cared even less. Yet they set to almost immediately to understand and harness these new environments for their own purposes. This paper looks at the processes through which these strange new worlds in the Philippines and Guam were incorporated and subordinated into a comprehensible imperial framework through the diaries of two environmental managers, Gifford Pinchot and William Safford. Both men wrote about their first encounters with the tropics, recording its strange flora and fauna, noting its seismic convulsions and climatic extremes, and trying to manage it by making sense of what they saw, heard, smelt and touched. As diarists, scientists and, above all, imperialists, they give us rare insight into the initial attitudes of the men who managed these new imperial landscapes.

Martial and Moral Complexities: Changing Certainties in Changing Imperial Landscapes

Martial and Moral Complexities: Changing Certainties in Changing Imperial Landscapes

Representing slavery: art, artefacts and archives in the collections of the National Maritime Museum

Contents: Foreword Introduction, Douglas Hamilton and Robert J. Blyth Slavery and mass consumption: the dynamics of the Atlantic world, James Walvin Slavery and African society, Paul Lovejoy Through African eyes: the Middle Passage and the British slave trade, David Richardson Slave life in the Caribbean, Douglas Hamilton Abolition and emancipation, John Oldfield The Royal Navy and the global suppression of slave trades, Robert Blyth Black people in Britain, Hakim Adi The material culture of slave shipping, Jane Webster The lie of the land: slavery and the aesthetics of imperial landscape in eighteenth-century British art, Geoff Quilley Popular graphic images of slavery and emancipation in nineteenth-century England, Marcus Wood. Catalogue: Artefacts Books, pamphlets and official publications Coins and medals Ethnography Manuscripts Maps and charts Material culture Newspapers and press illustrations Oil paintings Photographs Prints and drawings: Africa Prints and drawings: Caribbean Prints and drawings: North and South America Prints and drawings: abolition campaigns Prints and drawings: caricatures and social satires Prints and drawings: portraits Prints and drawings: ships and naval actions Bibliography List of contributors Index.

COMIC ACTS OF (BE)LONGING: PERFORMING ENGLISHNESS INWONDERFUL ADVENTURES OF MRS. SEACOLE IN MANY LANDS

THE POWER THAT COMES FROMbeing English in the Victorian period is crucially dependent on a categorizing imperative that establishes and structures a series of distinctions such as those between citizen and foreigner, colonizer and colonized, and metropole and colony. These distinctions have epistemological borders that require policing, as do all cross-border interactions that threaten to muddy the imperial landscape with unsanctioned forms of knowledge and affiliation. It is against such a framework of constraints for understanding the regulation of Englishness that the story of the Jamaican-born Mary Seacole and her self-styled role as “Mother” Seacole to British soldiers during the Crimean War appears particularly pregnant with bothersome possibilities. Seeking self-consciously to identify herself with the “mother” country and the imperial metropole, she constantly tests the waters of reception by English society in the mid-nineteenth century. Seacole deploys the image of her racially different body in various noticeably frontier places, mainly Panama and the Crimea, to induce a recognition of herself, if not as English, then as at least functionally so. In so doing, she disrupts the claim to cultural or national identity that is frequently grounded in racial and geographical specificity. She puts strain on the idea of Englishness as foreclosed essence, demonstrating through performance and reiteration its irreduciblyperformativenature as discourse.