Imperial Sovereignty Research Articles

The Return of the Repressed: Political Deportation in the 
Indian Ocean during the Age 
of Revolutions

Abstract Between the second half of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Indian Ocean became a theatre of the global war waged by European imperial states. This article compares how three colonial powers, in French, Danish, and British colonial territories, dealt with interconnected political threats, in a region where the limits of imperial sovereignty and jurisdictions were often blurred and frequently renegotiated. Rather than a formally sanctioned doctrine and legal category, deportation should be understood as a crude tool for solving a variety of problems. Although the forced removal of criminals, religious minorities or political opponents was not a new instrument to the late eighteenth century, it is often ignored that political deportation was also a widely used legal practice in the Indian Ocean during the ‘age of revolutions’. In this region, deportation was used by imperial centres to get rid of political enemies, but also by regional authorities, without referring to metropolitan orders. It was usually not a judicial punishment, but an administrative measure justified in the name of political necessity. This article focuses on three small colonial enclaves, French Reunion, Danish Tranquebar, and British Pondicherry, where a siege mentality and fear of political sedition were omnipresent in this period. Contemporaries believed, with some justifications, that a single conspiracy linked these three colonial theatres, involving the same set of protagonists, who redeployed their projects as they were removed from one place to the next. But in these three sites and societies, deportation raises different issues. Dumping radicals on a foreign shore might have been a short-term fix, but it rarely solved problems in the long term: deportees often returned after some time, which was a direct consequence of the colonial authorities’ reluctance to take irreparable decisions, and of the entanglement of empires and polities in the Indian Ocean.

Nobody is leaving! Ottoman officials, their families and the struggle over Ottoman imperial sovereignty in Yemen after the Mudros Armistice, 1918–1924

ABSTRACT This article explores the struggles over Ottoman sovereignty in Yemen from the October 1918 armistice to the proclamation of the Republic of Turkey in October 1923. The governor-general (vali), Mahmud Nedim, and Imam Yahya, the principal local ally of the Ottomans, succeeded in upholding Ottoman sovereignty over most of highland Yemen against the Armistice terms, the Treaty of Sèvres, and their local and British rivals, while receiving the political backing of the Ottoman resistance movement in Anatolia under Mustafa Kemal. Efforts of the vali, the imam, and the British to prevent ordinary Ottomans from leaving and entering Yemen were at the centre of these struggles. This changed in 1923 when Mustafa Kemal and Yahya turned to state-building projects emphasising post-Ottoman forms of sovereignty. I thus highlight several aspects of ordinariness. First, the continuation of daily governmental routines in Yemen was a key element of Ottoman efforts to resist British attempts to impose a post-Ottoman political order. Further, Yemeni Ottomans and Ottoman officials were reduced to different degrees of ordinariness because the disintegration of the Ottoman state after the war often eliminated their sources of income. Finally, struggles against the consequences of the Armistice are often reduced to a ‘Turkish War of Independence’ and the actions of policy makers in administrative centres, like Istanbul and Ankara. Studying the end of the Ottoman Empire from the vantage points of Yemen’s ‘spatial ordinariness’ as an imperial borderland and of ordinary Ottomans disrupts this ‘methodological nationalism’ and allows for a more nuanced understanding of the post-Armistice years.

Sovereignty, human rights and the regulation of transnational corporations: a critical spatial analysis of civil society proposals for a binding treaty

ABSTRACT This article develops a critical spatial analysis of contemporary proposals to regulate transnational corporations (TNCs). Following an analysis of the existing topology of international regulatory space, the article develops a model of alternative spatial orders which would enable TNC regulation and uses this model to critically assess the different spatial orders implicit in the major proposals being tabled by two civil society groupings in the current treaty negotiations at the UN Human Rights Council. It shows that the proposals of the Human Rights NGOs would elaborate an ‘imperial sovereignty’, with the horizontal extension of the sovereignty of Northern states into the territory of Southern states, while the proposals of the Global Campaign would elaborate a ‘global sovereignty’ through the vertical dispersal of sovereignty, both upwards and downwards, to elaborate a more emancipatory universal spatial order. Understanding these implicit spatialities enables a deeper assessment of the implications of the different proposals.

“Shadow of the Empire”: Rethinking Russian Imperial Sovereignty in the Context of the War against Ukraine, 2022

Abstract Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine demonstrated the Kremlin’s imperial ambitions. The invasion was not only a shocking event, but also a process of geopolitical transformation. Russia, which has a long history of imperialism, in the 21st century is trying to break the established global world order and propose an alternative one. But the tools it uses are tools of violence, domination, blackmail, and intimidation. This is particularly important to explore in the context of the Russian leadership’s construction of imperial sovereignty, a form of political power used to expand and consolidate the empire’s influence in a particular geopolitical space: the post-Soviet space. This article aims to show the nature of Russian imperial sovereignty as well as the mechanisms of its dissemination, which are modus operandi – dynamic structures of reproduction of the system of power relations.

Two Theories of Self-Determination: The Discourse of Democratic Peoplehood in Colonial Korea

This article examines two distinct ways in which anticolonial thinkers in early twentieth-century Korea reconstructed their nondemocratic tradition in an attempt to justify (rather than take for granted) the claim of self-determination. The exposure to modern education and ideas of democracy prompted these thinkers to critically engage their tradition in the struggle for self-determination. That said, they could not simply abandon the cultural foundation of their nation. Japanese colonial rule drew its legitimacy from not only an assimilation ideology that the Japanese and Koreans shared the same ethnic origin but also a developmentalist conception of the colonized that they were premodern and incapable of self-rule. To reject imperial domination, Korean anticolonial thinkers needed to invent out of their country’s nondemocratic tradition (1) an unassimilable nation/people (2) capable of self-rule. Drawing upon the political writings of two early twentieth-century thinkers in colonial Korea, Yi Kwang-su (1892–1950) and Cho So-ang (1887–1958), I discover from their political thought two nuanced approaches to this project of inventing “the people” in the colonial world. I argue that while Yi succeeded in rebutting the colonial ideology of assimilation, he fell into the trap of developmentalism. I contend that Cho, on the contrary, sidestepped this trap with his revisionist reading of the Confucian past as a history of democratic transformation, thus providing an immediate alternative to imperial sovereignty.

The Incoherence of Empire. Or, the Pitfalls of Ignoring Sovereignty in the History of the British Empire

AbstractThis article argues for an essentially political definition of empire with sovereignty at its core, which recognises that British assertions of sovereignty were multiple, mutually contradictory and thus, taken together, incoherent. Tracing the history of conflict between different archetypes of sovereign authority, we argue that imperial crises occurred when empire's different ideas were forced to speak to one another, during world war, for example. The emphasis here on sovereignty and incoherence contrasts with conceptions of the history of the British empire which assert to the contrary that empire was a coherent entity. Such coherence can, we argue, only be maintained by treating empire as a metaphor for broader conceptions of power and thus collapsing the history of empire into other totalising meta-concepts such as global capitalism or Western cultural dominance. Recognition of the incoherence of imperial sovereignty offers new, more nuanced, readings of central concerns in the literature such as imperial violence and the economics of empire.

American Imperial Sovereignty and Militarised Land Dispossession During the Korean War

ABSTRACT During the Korean War (1950-53), the American-led United Nations Command requisitioned vast areas of land and property in Korea for the purpose of constructing military infrastructures. Requisitions occurred not only in the war’s combat zone, but also in parts of the country understood by the United States to be under the sovereign control of the Republic of Korea. Many of these requisitions formed the basis of a permanent US military base network in Korea. This article responds to conventional scholarship on militarization and military bases and engages critical conceptions of territory and sovereignty to examine the constellation of forces that made American militarized dispossessions possible during the Korean War. It draws on archival evidence to show that the United States and Korea never reached a bilateral agreement on land or property requisitioning during the war, but that the US military nonetheless wove its own system of requisitioning through a certain conception of Korean sovereignty even in the face of contestation from the Korean government. The US military mobilized Korean forces under its operational control through the UN Command to carry out civilian land expropriations while contending that the Korean soldiers under its control were agents of their own state acting in accordance with domestic law. It then portrayed militarized dispossessions as Korean domestic problems and domestic liabilities. Evidence from the Korean War opens broad questions about the nature of American imperial sovereignty and territory both through and beyond the spatial unit of the military base.

The Imperial Precipice: Jurists and Diplomats of the French Empire at the United Nations War Crimes Commission

Abstract Delving into world-spanning legal agencies, histories of exiled diplomats and lawyers, this paper explores how Free France defended at the United Nations War Crimes Commission the vision of the interwar liberal order, one that reached across the global territories of the mandate system administered by the League of Nations, into the colonial territories of the French empire. From London to Chongqing, facing Vichy collaborationist authoritarian dictatorship in metropolitan France and anti-colonial pressures from the turbulent colonial frontiers, a handful of Free French jurists and politicians worked day and night to establish the imperial sovereignty of the French exile committee of general Charles de Gaulle, and restore French republicanism rooted in the legal tradition of Nicolas Fouquet, Jacques de Maleville and Léon Duguit. Drawing upon newly-unsealed UN and French archival materials, this paper documents Free France’s intervention at the UNWCC, the activities of its representatives and reflection on empires, race and international law.

Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met: Border Making in Eighteenth-Century South America by Jeffrey Alan Erbig Jr.

Reviewed by: Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met: Border Making in Eighteenth-Century South America by Jeffrey Alan Erbig Jr. Santiago Muñoz-Arbeláez (bio) Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met: Border Making in Eighteenth-Century South America jeffrey alan erbig jr. University of North Carolina Press, 2020 280 pp. The lowland plains of Rio de la Plata in South America, along the territories of modern Uruguay, northern Argentina, and southern Brazil, were borderlands in the eighteenth century: a terrain of shifting distributions of power between Jesuit-Guaraní missions, Portuguese and Spanish cities and ranches, and, importantly, the settlements of a diverse set of Indigenous peoples whose names were recorded as Bohanes, Charrúas, Guenoas, Minuanes, Yaros, and others. Europeans called these last encampments tolderías, from the word toldo (tent). In his book Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met: Border Making in Eighteenth-Century South America, Jeffrey Alan Erbig Jr. argues that while Rio de la Plata in the eighteenth century was an Indigenous area dominated by tolderías, power shifted toward the control of European empires during the century, as the borderlands were replaced by agreed-upon imperial borderlines between the Spanish and the Portuguese. In many ways, this process took place in maps. The book is a deep exploration of the shifts of Indigenous and European power by studying eighteenth-century mapmaking and using current-day mapping technologies (and specifically Geographic Information Systems) as a method. The plains of La Plata were crisscrossed by rivers and small hills, with abundant feral livestock. The missions, Spanish and Portuguese settlements, and tolderías all relied on cattle herding that spread over ample, overlapping territories in seasonal migrations. In the eighteenth century, the founding of the Portuguese city Colônia do Sacramento, together with an increasing Spanish desire for the cattle-derived products like hides or jerky (this last product specifically to feed enslaved plantations in the Caribbean), triggered disputes over imperial sovereignty and led to the development of more concrete lines of demarcation between the two empires. Erbig shows that throughout the century a transition from borderlands to borderlines shifted control away from tolderías to the Spanish and Portuguese. After the 1750 Treaty of Madrid and the 1777 Treaty of San [End Page 605] Idelfonso—which defined a ten-thousand-mile boundary between Brazil and Spanish America—the Portuguese and the Spanish designed joint ventures to establish those boundaries. These expeditions traveled through territories commanded by tolderías. Despite the efforts of the Spanish to "reduce" them to fixed settlements to live under the surveillance of Spanish friars and officials, the tolderías maintained their autonomy and dominated the landscape. It was Native ground, mastered by a series of Indigenous people that the Spanish and Portuguese officers did not know well, could not name accurately, and could describe only through a vague term that alluded to the structure of their mobile homes. European cartographers paid taxes to cross and to lodge on Indigenous ground. Yet the maps they produced emphatically did not include the presence of those who governed the territory. Instead, they created clear-cut lines between the Spanish and the Portuguese. These acts of erasure were the most basic expression of colonialism. In the Spanish and Portuguese colonialist rationale, the mobile tolderías could not be legitimate, sovereign polities. The tolderías were understood as barbarians, relics of an earlier stage of human development, left out of maps, and excluded from the negotiation tables where the interimperial treaties were outlined and the border lines were drawn. The map, heavily involved in colonialism, ratified who was seen as a legitimate sovereign nation. I see this very insight into the silence and violence of the map as one of the book's main contributions. The book explores even further the complex relation between the map and the territory. Even though dismissed from European legal treaties and silenced in the maps, the tolderías maintained the actual control over much of La Plata. The Spanish tried to enforce their sovereignty by removing tolderías from what they believed to be their territory; the Portuguese made pacts with caciques (the leaders of the tolderías) to try to get some real control...

Demic Diffusion, Diplomatic Sociability, and an Emergent Trans-National Political Culture in Tenth- and Eleventh-Century Northeast Asia

Demic Diffusion, Diplomatic Sociability, and an Emergent Trans-National Political Culture in Tenth- and Eleventh-Century Northeast Asia Nicolas Tackett An increasing volume of scholarship has examined the question of sinosteppe cultural exchange. Indeed, it is not difficult to identify elements of a common culture shared by political elites on both sides of the border. But whereas there is an extensive tradition of writing about sino-steppe culture as concerns the Tang, with its mixed Särbi-Chinese "northwestern" aristocracy, and also as concerns the Mongol Yuan, somewhat less has been written on the intervening tenth and eleventh centuries, an era dominated by the competition between the Khitan Liao, Chinese Song, and Tangut Xia states. This article will focus on three less well-known examples of trans-border diffusion dating to this intervening period: 1) the bidirectional diaspora of people from Hebei and Hedong and its impact on Song and Liao elite culture; 2) the incorporation of steppe ethnic categories into Song political discourse; and 3) the adaptation of a particular Chinese model of imperial sovereignty at multiple Eastern Eurasian courts. These examples offer an opportunity to rethink the forms, dynamics, and mechanisms of cultural diffusion across the steppe frontier. Traditional Chinese political theory imagines the civilizing sway of the imperial center as spreading out like wind over grass, to cite a well-known passage from the Analects.1 But assuming we do not ourselves believe that wind can serve as a vehicle to disseminate culture, it is necessary to come up [End Page 125] with a clearer understanding of the dynamics of cultural transmission, one that takes into account the historical particularities of tenth- and eleventh-century Northeast Asia. The Hebei-Hedong Diaspora and the Demic Diffusion of Mortuary Culture The decades following the Huang Chao Rebellion and the collapse of the Tang Dynasty were marked by very large-scale migrations of people. The best-known migrants, alluded to in countless accounts of the "Tang-Song Transition," are those who relocated to south China, thereby contributing to the great southward demographic shift of the Chinese population. But perhaps equally significant, especially in terms of their immediate impact on the politics and elite culture of the tenth and eleventh centuries, was the exodus of migrants out of Hebei and Hedong to other parts of the north. As we will see, individuals from this swathe of territory north of the Yellow River would come to play a disproportionately large role at the courts of both the Song and the Liao dynasties. One consequence of these migrations was a new metropolitan elite culture shared by both the "Chinese" Song and the "Khitan" Liao. The first large wave of migrants from Hebei and Hedong accompanied the Shatuo invasion of north China. In the final years of the Tang, the Shatuo Turk Li Keyong 李克用 (856–908) had built up a power base around Taiyuan in central Hedong. Over the course of the Later Liang Dynasty (907–923), his successor, Li Cunxu 李存勗 (884–926), expanded Shatuo control into neighboring Hebei. Whereas most of the military commanders of the emergent regime had steppe origins, the civilian administrative staff included large numbers of local Chinese. Thus, when the Shatuo invaded all of north China in 923, overthrowing the Later Liang and establishing their own new dynasty, the Later Tang, large numbers of people from Hebei and Hedong came in tow. The impact of the 923 invasion on the composition of the political elite was striking, as Wang Gungwu first noted several decades ago.2 Table 1 presents data from standard history biographies. It identifies the regions of origin of officeholders of the most important Henan-based regimes of the tenth century, [End Page 126] Click for larger view View full resolution Table 1. Region of origin of officeholders with standard history biographies (by regime) including the Five Dynasties, as well as the subsequent Song Dynasty. The data reveals a sharp increase in the representation of men from Hebei and Hedong immediately following the 923 Shatuo invasion. The fraction of officeholders from these regions continued to increase through mid-century, reaching a peak of 68% under the Later Han Dynasty. It only declined late in the century, primarily...

The Red Deal: Decolonising Climate Action

AbstractCalifornian academics specialising in environmental geopolitics, Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió and Danika Cooper explore the Red Deal proposed by The Red Nation that declares that decolonisation of Indigenous peoples and their land is at the heart of solving the climate crisis. It argues against neoliberalism, is left‐facing, supports the plural nature of our societies, and advocates for the end of exploitative private wealth structures and imperial sovereignty dominating land ownership.

Контуры многоцивилизационного мира

Since the beginning of the 21st century an objective process of the formation of a “plurilat­eral world order” has been starting in the non-Western world (China, Russia, India). It is based on new world structures – “Сivilization-States”, which fixed the “split of moder­nity”, the new challenge for the European modernity as a non-alternative universal develop­ment model. This process coincides with the logic of F. Braudel, who argued for the exis­tence of self-sufficient “World-Civilizations” (Russia, China, India, Turkey) which were up to now “zones of silence”, “sleeping” civilizations. This approach justifies the equality of these civilizations with the Euro-Atlantic civilization, whose only benefit consists of thorough “historiographical” study of this civilization in comparison with others. The essential characteristics of the Euro-American “World-Civilization” include the suc­cessive displacement of the center and the periphery, which culminated in the rise of the USA; the idea of a “blank slate”, “empty” space as a source of the American na­tion’s exclusivity and messianism; the category of “frontier”, coupled with the principle of “cleaning out the territory” as a basis of the modern American conquest policy; imple­mentation of the “terra nullius”, “nobody’s land” principle for the transformation of the global frontier into an open space of imperial sovereignty; a rigid division of peo­ples within the “civilization” – “barbarism” dichotomy. According to the historical logic and methodology of F. Braudel, Euro-American “World-Civilization” has stable material and cultural-identical limits of spread. At the same time Russian, Chinese, Indian civilizations preserve their identity through “civilizational” or “long-term” refusals. The main task of Russia is to find a new energy impulse for self-identification based on a change of the ontological vector of development, formulated by N.S. Trubetskoy in the concept of “geopolitical task” of the people. Today it may be implemented by the idea of the “Russian North” and “Northern Eurasia”.

Imperial Russian Rule in the Kingdom of Poland 1864–1918 by Malte Rolf

Reviewed by: Imperial Russian Rule in the Kingdom of Poland 1864–1918 by Malte Rolf Theodore R. Weeks (bio) Malte Rolf, Imperial Russian Rule in the Kingdom of Poland 1864–1918, Trans. Cynthia Klohr (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021). 441 pp., ill. Bibliography. Index. ISBN: 978-0-8229-4701-1. For the Russian Empire, the Poles were always a problem. Catholic, arrogant, with a well-developed historical identity, and living between "Russia" and "Europe," the Poles gave Russian officialdom and the tsars themselves heartburn. For official Russia, the uprisings against Russian rule in 1830–1831 and 1863–1864 corroborated their view of persistent Lechite perfidy and an eternal "hatred for all things Russian" (a phrase that one encounters with Kilroy-like frequency in official documents) among the Polish people. And yet the Russian Empire had to deal with this obstreperous nation and the region it occupied. A generation or two back, Russian policy in this region (and in general in the western regions of the empire) tended to be summed up with the rather murkily understood concept "Russification." Happily, since the pathbreaking works of Edward C. Thaden and in many excellent studies in the past few decades, a more nuanced portrait of the complex give-and-take between local population [End Page 307] (here, the Poles–but also the Jews!) and Russian officialdom has developed. And one significant contributor to this more nuanced understanding of Russian policy in the "Vistula Land"– or Kingdom of Poland–is the Bremer historian Malte Rolf. The publication of his book on Russian officialdom in Warsaw and the Polish provinces of the Russian Empire is thus a cause for celebration among historians of the Russian Empire whose German is not quite up to snuff. Rolf divides his book into four parts. First, he provides an excellent overview of Russian rule there in the final half century of Imperial Russia. In particular his coverage is strong at showing the various ways in which official Russia had an impact on these provinces, including censorship and religious policy. The second part of the book considers the city of Warsaw–one of the largest cities in the Russian Empire at this time and by all accounts a flourishing urban center– and the paradoxical situation of a modern city that was administered in an entirely bureaucratic manner. A separate, though rather short section focuses on Russian Warsaw specifically. The impact of the Revolution of 1905 is then examined and the "calm of the graveyard" period up to 1914. The book concludes with remarks on the peculiar nature and development of the "Vistula Land" as a "kingdom within an empire." The longest part of the book looks at imperial rule, in particular the tsar's servitors in the Polish provinces. As is well known, after 1863 ethnic Poles (and often anyone of Catholic faith or married to a Catholic) were barred from highest administrative positions in these provinces. As Rolf points out, salaries paid to these bureaucrats were considerably higher than to those in similar positions within the empire; as one contemporary remarked, the Polish provinces were a Beamtenkalifornien for Russian bureaucrats.1 In official documents one constant complaint concerns the low quality of these men (all men, I'm afraid) who often left positions in the Russian provinces under pressure because of their lackluster performance. At the same time, Russian officials here complained of high prices, hostility expressed in direct and indirect ways, and the distance from their homes and families back in central Russia. Rolf provides excellent short biographies of the governors-general (and others), showing that while they had much in common (such as previous military careers), their outlook on [End Page 308] the "Polish question" often differed quite significantly. As Rolf makes clear, building on previous studies, Russian administrators quite consistently denied a plan to "Russify" the Polish population. Their main task, rather, was to maintain order and prevent threats to imperial sovereignty. One may ask: "Why should we take their word for it?" Of course we should not–but we should also not ignore how these officials saw their own role and policy. In particular Rolf gives a number of excellent and telling details showing...

A Global History of Runaways: Workers, Mobility, and Capitalism, 1600–1850

A Global History of Runaways: Workers, Mobility, and Capitalism, 1600–1850

Nations must be defended: public health, enmity and immunity in Katherine Mayo’s Mother India

This essay explores repressed hostility and punitive fantasies in the discourse of international health, using Katherine Mayo’s Mother India (1927). Multiple tendencies in interwar thinking converge in Mayo’s book, making...

India and overseas Indians in Ceylon and Burma, 1946–1965: Experiments in post-imperial sovereignty

AbstractDespite the existence of a large Indian diaspora, there has been relatively little scholarly attention paid to India's relations with overseas Indians after its independence in 1947. The common narrative is that India abruptly cut ties with overseas Indians at independence, as it adhered to territorially based understandings of sovereignty and citizenship. Re-examining India's relations with Indian communities in Ceylon and Burma between the 1940s and the 1960s, this article demonstrates that, despite its rhetoric, independent India did not renounce responsibility for its diaspora. Instead, because of pre-existing social connections that spanned the former British empire, the Government of India faced regular demands to assist overseas Indians, and it responded on several fronts. To understand this continued engagement with overseas Indians, this article introduces the idea of ‘post-imperial sovereignty'. This type of sovereignty was layered, as imperial sovereignty had been, but was also concerned with advancing norms designed to protect minority communities across the world. India’s strategy to argue for these norms was simultaneously multilateral, regional, and bilateral. It sought to use the United Nations, the Commonwealth, and the 1947 Asian Relations Conference to secure rights for overseas Indians. As those attempts failed, India negotiated claims for citizenship with governments in Burma and Ceylon, and shaped the institutions and language through which Indians voiced demands for their rights in these countries. Indian expressions of sovereignty beyond the space of the nation-state, therefore, impacted on practices of citizenship, even during the process of de-recognition in Asia.

People of the Footprints

Using a case study from one of Australia’s most significant deep history sites, “People of the footprints” shows how reconciliatory efforts to share the western scientific kudos attached to discovery have proved an uncomfortable fit with Indigenous cultural values. When a young Mutthi Mutthi woman was credited with discovering an ancient human trackway at Lake Mungo in western New South Wales, Australia in 2003, it exposed not only the footprints of her ancient ancestors of approximately 20,000 years ago, it also revealed the difficulties posed by discovery narratives for Indigenous people. Celebrating a “discovery”, with its associated “first observer” implications, is thought to be prestigious in mainstream European histories and science, yet such narratives are steeped in the justifications and mythologies of imperial sovereignty – the very ones that led to Indigenous dispossession. They are also fundamental to the kinds of western scientific paradigms that refuted Indigenous knowledge systems. Contrasting Indigenous ideas of the deep past with those of archaeologists and historians, this essay explores the problematic nature of attributing a deep time “discovery” to an Indigenous individual. Following Indigenous rewritings, and other acts of displacement and resistance, it argues the ongoing nature of the Indigenous custodians’ affective, intimate and living relationships with their ancient past.

Vâlâ Nureddin’s Comic Materialism and the Sexual Revolution: Writing across Turkey and the Soviet Union

Abstract Focusing on the life and work of the Turkish novelist and translator Vâlâ Nureddin (1901–67), this article provides a historical overview of Turkish and Soviet literary entanglement in the early twentieth century. A collaborator of the globally acclaimed Turkish communist poet Nâzım Hikmet, Vâlâ was educated at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East from 1922 to 1924. Returning to Turkey in 1925, he launched his career in the daily Akşam (Evening), bringing Soviet and Turkish literature into conversation in his serialized translations and literary adaptations of Soviet erotic fiction. In reading Vâlâ’s neglected 1928 erotic historical comedy Baltacı ile Katerina (Baltacı and Catherine), unique among Vâlâ’s writings in its direct and explicit imagination and specification of an entangled revolution, this article suggests, by way of specific attention to this work’s comedic elements, that Vâlâ imagined the collapse of both Russian and Ottoman imperial sovereignty in terms of sexual revolution. It argues that a study of this unjustifiably neglected erotic comedy not only deepens our knowledge of early republican Turkish literature and culture, but provides a more nuanced understanding of the Moscow-centered transnational literary space produced in the aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution, or what scholars in Slavic studies have called the “Soviet republic of letters.”

In a Sea of Empires: Networks and Crossings in the Revolutionary Caribbean

Using the Leeward Islands as a case study, Jeppe Mulich's In a Sea of Empires offers a new model for understanding late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century globalization. Focusing on the British Virgin Islands, the Danish Virgin Islands, and Swedish Saint Barthélemy as an example of what he terms an “inter-imperial microregion,” Mulich argues that the connections that people forged at the peripheries of European empires were “not an aberrant challenge to imperial rule but an inherent feature of colonial practice” (p. 2). By tracing how these on-the-ground links became embedded in increasingly wider networks, Mulich convincingly casts early globalization not as an abstract process but as the product of intensifying commercial and legal connections that frequently bypassed formal channels.In its “ideal-typical” form, which Mulich illustrates in the form of a graph, an inter-imperial microregion consists of layered and overlapping transimperial, interimperial, and intercolonial networks (p. 18). Because these networks often developed across formal political boundaries, Mulich argues, they created relationships that could undermine or act as an alternative to direct colonial control. This was especially true in regions where imperial sovereignty was thin and boundaries porous, such as the maritime borderland of the Lesser Antilles. Asserting that individual Caribbean islands “were not discrete entities at all,” Mulich eschews imperial comparisons in favor of focusing on the myriad entanglements that emerged when colonies took shape across narrow and frequently traversed channels (p. 6).After offering a detailed explanation of his model, Mulich devotes five tightly written chapters to examining how regional connections respectively shaped commerce, warfare, court systems, slave law, and slave trafficking in the Leeward Islands. Arguing that “networks of commerce trumped imperial allegiances time and again,” Mulich traces how a desire for profit also promoted cross-polity cooperation in the areas of law and defense (p. 27). This, in turn, fostered regional stability even during moments of broader disruption such as the Napoleonic Wars. A desire for protection against enslaved insurgency also encouraged considerable mimesis, as weaker European powers such as Sweden and Denmark-Norway worked to ensure that their slave codes would be intelligible to other empires. In short, trade networks forged as the subjects of different crowns settled in proximity to one another also helped give rise to military and legal relations that were decidedly transimperial in nature.At times, these regional connections proved strong enough to supersede imperial directives. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, as Great Britain deployed its naval power to exercise greater hegemony, British authorities used their 1807 ban on slave trafficking as a reason to police Caribbean waters. Yet as Mulich shows in chapter 6, long-standing interimperial routes allowed this traffic to continue illicitly for two decades after British abolition, as imperial authorities struggled to control “a maritime landscape that was almost made for clandestine commerce” (p. 156). By using abolition to highlight the tensions between top-down policy and local interest, Mulich calls attention to how the geographic and spatial realities of inter-imperial microregions shape global processes.Central to Mulich's model is a critique of Atlantic history, which he argues can obscure connections that extend well beyond a single sea. By instead emphasizing how global connectivity arose as inter-imperial microregions became embedded in broader networks, Mulich illustrates how the processes he describes for the Leeward Islands could be usefully applied in other contexts, including West Africa's Gold Coast, Mauritius and Seychelles, and nineteenth-century Shanghai.Yet in choosing to focus on networks, Mulich sometimes allows ordinary people to fade from view. While Mulich argues that his model allows him to highlight structural realities, institutional influences, and individual autonomy without having to rely on the “character-driven narratives” that often serve as the basis for traditional microhistories, the individuals who do appear in his text are overwhelmingly white men (p. 21). In addition to the magistrates, governors, and privateers who pepper Mulich's work, providing more detail on the many enslaved and free people of color as well as on any women who traversed this microregion could have further illustrated globalization as a lived experience.Despite this minor shortcoming, Mulich's succinct study makes several signal contributions to Caribbean historiography. In addition to offering information on the Swedish and Danish-Norwegian Antilles, about which there is precious little English-language scholarship, Mulich's focus on islands dominated by ports helps diversify understandings of the colonial Caribbean beyond the plantation contexts more familiar to historians.Informed by an impressive range of Danish-, Swedish-, French-, and English-language sources scattered across Europe, the Caribbean, and the United States, In a Sea of Empires will be of interest to scholars in the field of Caribbean history and well beyond. Through his case study of the Leeward Islands, Mulich convincingly uses a little-studied region to offer a fresh perspective on how early globalization was enacted on the ground and at sea.

“Supreme in Ruin”: Empire’s Afterlife in Romantic Encounters with Imperial Ruins

ABSTRACT Registered in Romantic depictions of imperial ruins is the endurance of empire in its immateriality: the imageries of empire’s ruination announce a future where imperial sovereignty maintains its presence spectrally. Using Jacques Derrida’s notion of hauntology, and recruiting further insight from political theory, this essay argues that empire manifests in Romantic vision as an ontological dynamic, that is, an obscured yet efficacious force that impinges on the subject’s relationship with the world. My discussion traces this abstraction of power in the works of Felicia Hemans, Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, and Robert Southey, clustered together through their mutual influence and shared source, Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. In the light of these authors’ reflections on the ruins of empire, this article focuses the ontological dimension of imperial sovereignty to extend the critique of imperialism in Romantic studies beyond its familiar historical-material terrain, toward sites where empire prevails even after its presumed disintegration as an official, political entity.