Late Colonial Period Research Articles

ʿAbd al-Mājid Daryābādī’s Tafsir-ul-Quran and the daʿwalogy of Abū’l-Ḥasan ʿAlī Nadwī

Beginning especially in the early twentieth century, Qur'an translation emerged as a major facet of modern Islamic daʿwa (‘“inviting” to Islam’, or ‘Islamic mission’). With the increasing availability of new translations and commentaries as the century progressed, Muslim leaders often found themselves asked for, or simply offering, recommendations about which Qur'an translations were most suitable for different purposes. This article examines the case of one such recommendation: Sayyid Abū’l-Ḥasan ʿAlī Nadwī's endorsement of ʿAbd al-Mājid Daryābādī's early twentieth-century English translation-commentary, Tafsir-ul-Quran. In so doing, it sheds lights on Qur'an translation in relation to modern daʿwa and, more precisely, on how a thinker's ‘ daʿwalogy’ (Islamic missionary theology) might influence his or her translation and commentary preferences. Through a historical contextualisation of Daryābādī and Nadwī, along with close readings of the former's English Qur'an translation-commentary and the latter's endorsement, the article argues that Nadwī's endorsement of Daryābādī not only provides a useful window into Nadwī's – and by extension, Daryābādī's – daʿwalogy, but also that Nadwī's daʿwalogy helps to explain why he endorsed Daryābādī's translation-commentary in the first place. In studying this case, the article illustrates significant linkages between daʿwa, Qur'an translation, networks of Muslim thinkers, and rising inter-religious competition in the late-colonial period and beyond.

Skill, race, and wage inequality in British Tanganyika

High racial disparities between Europeans and Africans and high skill premiums are recurrent themes in the literature on inequality in colonial Africa. However, their determinants and effects on inequality remain underexplored. This paper investigates wage inequality, skill premiums, and racial discrimination in British Tanganyika from c. 1920 to 1960. It provides first estimates for wage inequality and race premiums in Tanganyika and extends the coverage of earlier skill premium estimates. Initially, wage inequality in Tanganyika was comparable to neighbouring Kenya and Uganda, but it remained higher in the late colonial period. A primary driver of wage inequality was racial wage disparity, which was partly caused by racial discrimination. Skill premiums also played an important and increasing role and were higher than previously thought. The Tanganyikan administration's failure to expand African education to meet skilled labour demand significantly contributed to racial income differences and wage inequality within the African labour force.

Colonial legacies and wealth inequality in Kenya

This article discusses the evolution of Kenya's wealth distribution from the late 1950s to the present. Utilizing previously untapped probate and administration sources, it measures the share of Kenyans leaving estates at death, and maps how this wealth-owning strata has changed over time. It shows a growth in African estates after independence, and by the 1980s roughly 8 % of Kenyans left estates at death, largely a consequence of land titling and land reform. Meanwhile, European estates dwindled as settlers divested. Since the 1990s, Nairobi-based estate-holders are growing in share, reflecting the importance of urban property to the portfolios of the wealthy. Measures of top wealth shares suggest high wealth inequality in both the late colonial period and the present, but today's wealth inequality is driven by the uneven distribution of housing wealth, more so than by agricultural land. These findings illustrate how a variety of colonial legacies influenced wealth accumulation in postcolonial Kenya.

French Imperial Statecraft, Capital, Corporate Taxation, and the Tax Haven that Wasn’t, 1920s–1950s

Abstract Towards the mid-1920s, a growing number of colonial firms began to transfer their headquarters from the metropole to French colonies to evade taxation on investment capital income. These transfers threatened to transform French colonies into tax havens. Why was this averted? This article explores the politics of corporate tax planning in the French colonial empire and shows that French colonial tax havens could have materialized on a large scale at two critical junctures: first in the inter-war period and then in the aftermath of the Second World War. It argues that they eventually did not come into being because successive administrations within the French Ministry of Finance did not let it happen. Broader structural determinants — the relative weakness of the French metropolitan fiscal state in the inter-war period and the unwillingness to let international capital dictate French development strategies in the late colonial period — crucially influenced the positions taken by the Ministry of Finance. Post-war dreams of restored grandeur made French authorities much more reluctant to outsource development and let go of state prerogatives. This unrealized possibility sheds light on the role of state power in the making and unmaking of tax havens and contributes to a fast-expanding historiography.

The Politics of Religious Non-Interference: Islamic Legal Reform in Colonial India

Abstract The 1929 Child Marriage Restraint Act (cmra), initially propounded as the Sarda Bill, became the first law related to marriage enacted in colonial India to be universally applicable to all subjects regardless of personal religious affiliations. Though formally adopted before Indian independence, the crma was advanced and passed by the newly formed Central Legislative Assembly which consisted primarily of Indians. As a result, the cmra garnered vociferous debates within both Muslim and Hindu communities and signaled a new challenge for religious communities which was distinct from British colonial legal logics. The focus of this article will be on one Muslim scholarly engagement with the cmra, that of Mufti Kifāyatallāh Dihlawī, the President of the Jamʿiyyat-i ʿUlamāʾ-i Hind (juh) and a highly influential Deobandi scholar. By navigating the contours of his legal debate surrounding the cmra, this article explores how the process of Islamic legal reform in the late colonial period in India was met with a new set of challenges as Indians gaining legislative authority sought to enact legal reforms that were seen as impinging on the rights of religious communities. And while, in this case, Muslim juristic opinions were sought, they could ultimately be trumped by larger social and political forces. More broadly, this article demonstrates that as India inched towards self-governance, competing groups and entities sought to claim communal representation of Muslims, and in the process, arguments made by religious scholars, even if they were recognized as being representative of broad Muslim sentiments, could be dismissed by emerging legal logics which supported the nationalizing tendencies of the Imperial Legislative Assembly over and above the rights of religious communities.

Race, Time, and Architecture: Dilemmas of Africanization in Ghana, 1951–66

Abstract This article discusses the Africanization of architectural labor in Ghana during the late colonial and early postindependence periods (1951–66). It focuses on the state-supported emergence, advancement, and emancipation of Indigenous architects and institutions in the context of decolonization and the Cold War. Using archival materials held in Accra, Kumasi, and London, the article shows how professionals and administrators negotiated between their double obligations: to fast-track governmental development plans and to Africanize the Public Works Department and its successors. These decision makers addressed temporal dilemmas concerning recruitment, standards, allocation, and racialization of architectural labor. In so doing, they redefined both colonial-era racial categories and racialized Cold War imaginaries of who counted as an African and who counted as an Other. This study advances the architectural history of postcolonial Ghana and broadens the debate about racialization of architecture beyond North America and Western Europe.

Tadābīr al-dawlah al-‘Uthmānīyah li ḥalli al-qaḍāyā al-mu’aqqadah li ḥujjāj al-Jāwī 1849–1916: Dirāsat fī ḍaw’i wathā’iq al-Arshīf al-Uthmānī

This article examines the challenges faced by hajj pilgrims from the Malay world and the efforts of the Ottoman Empire to accommodate them amidst the intervention of Dutch and British colonial powers in the 19th century. Utilizing documents sourced from the Ottoman Archives of the Presidency of the Republic of Turkey in Istanbul from 1849 to 1916 CE and employing historical research methods, this study delves into the economic dimensions of the Hajj during the late colonial period in Indonesia and the declining years of the Ottoman Empire. The article reveals the socio-economic difficulties experienced by Muslims from the Malay world in performing the Hajj due to exploitation by colonial powers and local government elites in the Hijaz region at that time. Although the documents indicate efforts by the Ottoman government to ensure the comfort of the pilgrims and prevent abuse of authority by local and colonial governments, it did not fully resolve the chaos in the Hajj implementation system at that time. These situations caused by Ottoman limitations in the global political arena and inflamed by their involvement in World War I.

Beyond Colonial Politics of Identity: Being and Becoming Female Youth in Colonial Kenya

This paper draws on biographical research among the Akamba and the Luo communities in Eastern and Western Kenya, respectively. Our research explored how practices of adolescence as a process, an institution, and a performance of identity interact with colonial modernities and imaginaries in complex ways. The biographical research was carried out predominantly with women born in the late colonial period in Kenya. We provide critical reflections on the process and affordances of our embodied storytelling approach, which we position as an Africanist methodology and a decolonial research practice. This research and approach provided women with a space to narrate and perform their lived experience, potentially disrupting epistemic inequities that are embedded in the way research on growing up in the past is carried out. The discussions show how colonialism interacted with other factors, including gender and generational power, tradition, girls’ agency, and other life characteristics like poverty and family situation, in order to influence the lived experiences of women. Going beyond the narratives of victimhood that characterise coming of age in similar spaces, we present women’s emergent, incomplete, and incongruent agency. We position this agency as the diverse ways in which people come to terms with their difficult contexts. The discussion also points to the need for unsettling the settled thinking about girlhood and coming of age in specific historical spaces in the global South.

Debating the Bascom controversy: revisiting the expropriation and repatriation of the Ifẹ̀ bronzes

AbstractIn 1937–38, the American doctoral candidate William R. Bascom conducted anthropological research in the sacred Yorùbá city of Ilé-Ifẹ̀, Nigeria. Bascom’s visit was a decisive moment in the history of African art, as, in 1938, he observed the chance discovery of unique copper and copper alloy heads, two of which he acquired and exported to the USA. Bascom’s actions in 1938, and his subsequent conflicts with British officials who demanded the return of the heads in the 1940s, have become matters of controversy and scholarly debate. Historian Robert Tignor and anthropologist Simon Ottenberg have presented contrasting arguments regarding the affair. This article draws on material from several archives to shed further light on this discussion, resolve remaining areas of dispute, and explore what the study of this controversy tells us about the nature and practice of anthropology, the impacts of Western exhibitions of African art, and early cultural preservation and repatriation efforts of the late colonial period. At a time when colonial-era collecting practices are facing increased critical re-examination, and with intensified calls for the repatriation of Nigerian cultural patrimony in Western museums, this article reflects on how the study of this controversy contributes to present restitution efforts.

Becoming the Father of Modern India: Rammohun Roy and the Politics of Paternity

Abstract This article examines the posthumous reception of India’s most famous religious reformer, hailed as the ‘Father of Modern India’, Raja Rammohun Roy, from the 1830s to the present decade. During the late colonial period, the British administration and Bengali elites used class networks and print capitalism to establish Roy as the father to show compradorship amidst calls for independence. After independence, the INC retained Roy to counter the rise of more popular Hindu movements. In the period of INC decline, the BJP elevated Swami Vivekananda instead of Roy as a representative of majoritarian Hinduism. Economic and political coalitions in control of legitimating institutions elevate and sustain fathers as positive cultural symbols in response to competing claims. By emphasising party competition and issue ownership within multi-national federalism, this article complements decolonisation, cult-of-personality, and regime change as explanations for the rise and fall of public fathers.

Revisiting the ideological negotiation of Indonesian identity, 1900–1942

ABSTRACT This paper examines the discourses on Indonesian identity as they were negotiated by Indonesian intellectuals in the late colonial period, 1900–1942. During this period, ethnic diversity and Islamism constituted key issues in which different intellectuals exchanged their thoughts as to what it meant to be an Indonesian. This paper argues that, while various ideological discourses for the formation of Indonesian national identity had developed in the early twentieth century, the depth that these discourses were debated and agreed upon by the Indonesian intellectual elite was asymetrical. Strong nationalist discourses had promoted a key political instrument by which to unite a people of diverse ethnicity, race, and religion. On the other hand, the debates on the discourse of Islamic identity during the same period lacked consensus among Muslim scholars and between Islamists and secular nationalists, especially concerning the concept of unity, nationalism, and independence, and the role of women and polygamy. Notwithstanding this, Javanese Islamic syncretism and the colonial containment policy towards Islam also contributed as external factors which served to constrain Islamists from positing an overt Islamic identity. Concurrently, it raised the nationalists’ racial transcendence as a shared value of being Indonesian.

From “Sin Street” to “Education Street”: Music, Politics and Transgression in Maputo’s Red-Light District, Mozambique (c.1960–86)

ABSTRACT This article analyses the cultural practices developed within a particular street in Mozambique, Rua Araújo, once the symbol of colonial nightlife, transgression, pleasures and excesses, but renamed Rua do Bagamoyo after independence in 1975, signifying a shift towards FRELIMO’s education values. By focusing on “transgressive” expressive practices developed within a specific street, as a privileged locus to re-evaluate various aspects of Mozambique’s cultural history, this article differs from most studies focused on music and politics in Mozambique. Using the “ethnography of the past” as our primary methodological strategy, and drawing on interviews and documentary sources, this article includes three main sections: the first presents a brief historical contextualisation of the street; the second delves into the musical, expressive and performative dimensions that took place during the late colonial period; while the third focuses on the so-called “socialist experience”, namely Samora Machel’s term as the first president of the country (1975–86), when this street underwent a “purification process” that aimed to “purge” its so-called “maligned” cultural practices.

Knowledge Production and Forced Labor: The Intellectual Work and Worlds of Andean Mitayos in the Late Colonial Period.

This article, which focuses on silver mining in the colonial Andes, attempts to bring silo-ed conversations in the history of science and labor history into a shared dialogue. In so doing, it offers a way to reassess the traditional historiographic consensus that independent wage laborers were “high skilled” and forced laborers were “low skilled.” Through linguistic analysis and legal case studies, it shows that miners often crossed back and forth between labor categories and positions, and that frameworks like skills and wages are inadequate to understand workers’ experiences and expertise in highly coercive extractive industries like mining in the colonial period.

Collecting copper alloy portrait heads

Abstract Much has been written about the spectacular naturalistic copper and copper alloy heads of Wúnmọníjẹ̀ Compound, Ilé-Ifẹ̀, Nigeria, which stunned the art world after they were unearthed in 1938, on the cusp of the Second World War. However, little scholarly attention has been afforded to the controversial aftermath of their discovery, when multiple foreign parties endeavoured to collect and export many of them from Nigeria, while legislation to prohibit the export of antiquities was lacking. Drawing on archives from the USA and the UK, this article reveals important details of the collecting of several of the heads in the late colonial period. Coinciding with renewed calls for the restitution of Nigerian cultural patrimony from foreign institutions, it sheds light on the British Museum’s acquisition of one such head, the acquisition of two by the American anthropologist William R. Bascom, and the purported export by a German export company, of several heads which remain unaccounted for to this day.

A Social Space for Religious Reform: Maktaba-i Durkhan and the Emergence of a Vernacular Print Culture in Colonial Balochistan (1882–1948)

Abstract The development of manuscript and print cultures in colonial Balochistan have eluded scholarly attention due to the representation of the princely state of Kalat as a savage frontier space. Despite a Baloch nationalist awakening in the late colonial period and the flourishing of Balochi and Brahui language books and periodicals in postcolonial Pakistan, only a handful of scholars have taken note of these developments and their transformative effects on Baloch society. Understanding these dynamics in a frontier space is important not only in its own right but also to help shed light on the politics of religious and nationalist reform in South Asia. This paper seeks to understand these dynamics by exploring the emergence of the Maktaba-i-Durkhan (1883–1960), a madrasah and publishing house in the village of Durkhan in eastern Balochistan that pioneered the use of books in Balochi and Brahui languages for teaching Quran, Hadith, and other religious literature.

War and Control: A Study of Chinese Migrants in Assam in the Late Colonial Period

World War II (WWII) directly impacted the lives of Chinese migrants living in Assam, the Northeastern frontier of British India. The major wars that impacted the lives of Chinese migrants in Assam were the Sino-Indian War of 1962 and WWII. Most of the literature focuses on the Sino-Indian War of 1962, its impact, internment and sociopolitical and cultural aspect of the community afterwards. This study shifts its attention to WWII and its effect on the community. This article investigates the relationship between the colonial state and the migrants. While the state tried to control the population, the community found many ways to negotiate with these control mechanisms, though they were vulnerable. It argues that the community’s experience during WWII is central to understanding their experience during the Sino-Indian War of 1962. The control mechanism, like registration, provided them with legal status in Assam but did not ensure legal activities. Sometimes, these activities can be seen as reacting to the control mechanisms.

Classifying and counting the Dalits in the late colonial period: The conundrum of the Jatavs

The Jatavs of the United Provinces were not legally recognised as a separate caste until 1942; and then only as a consequence of an exceptional revision of legislation. Yet, for some considerable time before, the provincial authorities had routinely treated Jatavs as if they had already been granted the status of an officially recognised distinct caste grouping. This was despite a ruling in 1933, endorsed jointly by the India Office, the Government of India, and the provincial government, that the Jatavs were not a separate caste. The case of the Jatavs is examined here in the context of the contradictions and confusion in the policies of the colonial authorities, first towards the Depressed Classes, and later in the construction of the category that eventually became the Scheduled Castes. In addition, it is argued that those contradictions also created interstices of ambiguity that many Dalit representatives explored, interrogated, and exploited as they generated the space in which to assert their agency. The history of the Jatavs is an important instance of subaltern politics participating in the procedures of the colonial regime rather than operating in some separate autonomous domain of activity. By engaging with the existing power structures and processes, Jatav leaders created the opportunity to expose and take advantage of the contradictions generated by the confusion in the exercises of classifying and counting conducted by the colonial state.

The Cuban melting pot in the late colonial period

Between 1774, the date of the first official enumeration, and the end of the following century, the population of Cuba grew ninefold to 1.6 million, mostly because of the slave trade, and immigration from Spain. While census data offer a relatively dependable mass of data, although spare in details, vital statistics are rare and of very poor quality. The paper attempts an analysis of the factors of growth of the three major “racial” groups—the White, the Mulatto, and the Black—and of their mixing. It confirmed the commonly accepted notion of the higher mortality, and lower fertility, of the Black population (mainly slaves): its losses due to the negative natural balance were more than offset in the first phase by the inflow of slaves. But the Black population declined in the second part of the nineteenth century with the demise of the trade. The theory of the fastest growth of the Mulatto group because of the frequent intrusion of the White males in the Black reproductive pool, could not be clearly verified, although it is fully supported by the developments of the following century.

Atlantic Masters: Three Early Modern Afro-Brazilian Artists

Brazil received the largest number of Africans enslaved into the Americas: nearly five million by some estimates. Thus, Brazil became the world’s largest slavocracy. But slavery was not the only experience available to Africans and Brazilians of African descent in slavery-era Brazil. Numerically, Afro-Brazilians dominated the arts in colonial Brazil. However, very few of those artists and artisans, many of whom were enslaved, are known by name today. Free Afro-Brazilian artists, such as Aleijadinho, Mestre Valentim, and Teófilo de Jesus, on the other hand, fared far better. In this article, I turn to these three mixed-race artists’ works and what little is known of their lives, not only as exemplary Afro-Brazilian artists but also as some of the most important artists of Brazil’s late colonial period, where they had the greatest impact on the artistic developments in their home regions. These artists’ careers thus illustrate how artists of African descent contributed to and defined urban and sacred spaces in the early modern Atlantic. This is therefore an invitation to look at Afrodescendants’ role in early modern art beyond the anonymity of slavery and static representation.

Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States by Laura F. Edwards

Reviewed by: Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States by Laura F. Edwards Eva Sheppard Wolf Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States. By Laura F. Edwards. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. xviii, 433. $34.95, ISBN 978-0-19-756857-6.) In Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States, Laura F. Edwards marries [End Page 361] two of her longtime interests: her award-winning work in legal history, including in this journal, and her fascination with needlework and textiles. It might seem an odd combination, but Edwards shows that the law interacted in distinct and important ways with textiles, making it possible for people who had no property rights to produce, buy, sell, trade, invest in, and protect their ownership of textiles. The title refers to women and clothing, but the book actually addresses more capacious subjects—all people without full legal standing or on the margins of the economy, especially white women but also enslaved people and poor white men; and textiles of all sorts, meaning everything one wore or could wear on one’s body as well as household items such as sheets and table linens. Useful as a clearly written, engaging, and often humorous introduction to an aspect of early American material culture, Only the Clothes on Her Back also demonstrates the centrality of textiles to economic and social life, and it reveals how important nineteenth-century changes in law and economy diminished the economic power of those who had previously used textiles to their advantage. In Part 1, “Old Clothes in a New Country,” Edwards describes how, in the late colonial period and early republic, those without full rights relied on a long-standing tradition, barely noted in written law but well understood and respected in local courts, that people owned their clothing and also any textiles they made or purchased for later use. In 1842, when Polly, an enslaved woman in upcountry South Carolina, found that some yarn that she had spun was stolen from her yard, she took the matter to court. Her owner’s name was on the complaint, but Polly asserted that the “spun cotton belonged to her” and the court agreed (p. 21). Although Edwards acknowledges that marginalized people owned items beyond textiles, she does not fully explain her assertion that “textiles were different” from other material goods in law and practice (p. 37). The second section, “Protective Coverings in a Hostile World,” opens up a new view of the early American economy by showing how almost everyone used textiles as money, capital, and credit. Historians have largely missed this story because they have looked for economic activity in ledgers and account books, when it can also be found in women’s diaries, pawnshop records, and criminal court cases, which were open to women and enslaved people who could not bring civil suits to recover property. Although the American Revolution did not change how people used textiles, the rights-based legal principles of that era slowly grew dominant in American law and—along with a changing economy in which textiles became more numerous and their value became less stable—altered the fabric of American life. As described in Part 3, “Rags,” behaviors that had once been common, such as pawning or selling one’s clothes in order to leverage their value, had by the 1850s become suspect. The ability of people on the margins to use textiles to advance their economic interests diminished as their status outside the realm of rights-holders became more important. Women remained without rights the longest and after the Civil War were left with “only the clothes on their backs” (p. 289). Edwards’s historiographical point is that if we want to understand “the actual relationship of most Americans to law and economy,” we need to look [End Page 362] well beyond white male property owners (p. 299). She thus contributes to the recent form of economic history that places ordinary, and often struggling, people at the...