Nineteenth-century Colonialism Research Articles

Discovering ‘Religion’: Nineteenth Century Colonial Attitudes Towards Religious Identity and Difference in Southeast Asia

ABSTRACTThis paper seeks to show how the example of colonial writings in Southeast Asia display, but also complicate, some already identified patterns in how religion, and the world religions paradigm (WRP), alongside such discursive terms as ‘superstition’, were applied to the religious practices and worldviews of indigenous Southeast Asians through the nineteenth century. Such figures as Sir Stamford Raffles and John Crawfurd, amongst others, from both the British and American colonial enterprise, are examined in terms of how both Islam and other forms of religiosity are framed in their writings. The paper focuses upon merchants, adventurers, and officials rather than scholars in terms of how they framed these traditions in their writings, and developed influential ways of representing this region and its peoples, which was also created in the process of so-called ‘discovery’. The imbrication of race, religion, and civilisation is critically discussed, alongside how mercantile pragmatics also played into the formation of categories.

The Transition to Free Labour in Puerto Rico: Class, Race and Politics in a Nineteenth-Century Colony

AbstractThis article analyses the abolition of slavery and the transition to free labour in late nineteenth-century Puerto Rico, seeking to understand the terms and timing of Puerto Rican abolition and the nature of society in its wake. Especially important in Puerto Rico, it argues, was the intertwined nature of slavery and other forms of forced labour as well as the predominance of foreign merchants and planters in the island's economy, which created multi-class alliances between working-class Puerto Ricans and creole elites. These class dynamics interacted with events in the metropole to influence the terms of labour on the island.

Nautch, Thuggee and Criminality in Nineteenth-Century Colonial India

Nineteenth-century colonial India witnessed the much-hyped anti-thuggee campaign, instrumental in creating an elaborate archive of frequent commentaries, opinions on banditry, prisoners and their trials, approvers’ accounts, administrative studies as well as fictional narratives. Re-reading such archival sources, this article explores how nautch, a hybrid form of dance, once glorified and later criminalised by the colonial powers, became a point of intersection between the Europeans in India and local thugs, who often benefitted from such dancers. The article shows the precarious position of the nautch performers as instrumental in collaborating with the colonial rulers and the outlawed thugs for controlling perceived ‘crime’ in the Indian subcontinent, while ending up as victims, too.

Imperial Beast Fables: Animals, Cosmopolitanism, and the British Empire

Imperial Beast Fables: Animals, Cosmopolitanism, and the British Empire

Excentrism

ABSTRACT Underwritten by global systemic inequities that contribute to climate change, regional violence, and catastrophic aftereffects of natural disasters, global mass migration has become one of the most urgent crises of our times. At a time when many of us expect global travel to be fast and comfortable, millions of women, men, and children walk or hitch rides on dilapidated vehicles over hundreds or thousands of miles, leaving homes that no longer sustain life for an illusory safety. The global systemic inequities driving these present-day exoduses are rooted in long nineteenth-century industrialism and colonialism. What happened in the Victorian period does not stay in the Victorian period. It is imperative for us as Victorianists to grapple in the classroom, in our research, and in other venues with how the long nineteenth century continues to be a force in the present.

Intimacies of Violence in the Settler Colony: Economies of Dispossession around the Pacific Rim, by Penelope Edmonds and Amanda Nettelbeck

Reviewed by: Intimacies of Violence in the Settler Colony: Economies of Dispossession around the Pacific Rim ed. by Penelope Edmonds and Amanda Nettelbeck Philip Steer (bio) Intimacies of Violence in the Settler Colony: Economies of Dispossession around the Pacific Rim, edited by Penelope Edmonds and Amanda Nettelbeck; pp. xi + 285. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, $119.99, $99.99 paper, $79.99 ebook. The growth of comparative scholarship on settler colonialism has been accompanied by methodological divergences over questions of scale and approach. On the one hand, there is what might be called the gargantuan-economic approach of British World scholarship. This is exemplified by James Belich's Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 (2009), which offers a broad-brush model of "explosive colonization" as an explanation of settler expansionism in both the British Empire and the U. S. ([Oxford University Press, 2009] 182). On the other hand, there is the socialnetwork approach of the new imperial history. Associated especially with the work of Antoinette Burton, this approach focuses on transnational webs of culture, gender, and reproduction. Penelope Edmonds and Amanda Nettelbeck place their collection of essays, Intimacies of Violence in the Settler Colony: Economies of Dispossession around the Pacific Rim, squarely in the latter camp, as part of the effort to "move beyond" the British World [End Page 281] men's club and its whiff of imperial nostalgia (6). As they point out, such approaches have overlooked "the crucial forces of gender, reproduction, and biopolitics that were centrally constitutive of settler colonialism" (14). Instead, their lucid introduction makes the case for a more granular view of the settler frontier, hinging on the concept of "moral economy" as a means of understanding the complexity and messiness of cross-cultural violence and intimacy as foundational to settler states (4). This framework enables a rich and varied series of interventions in a collection structured around three "economies" with considerable overlap: the moral economies of cross-cultural pastoral labor, the emotional economies of cross-cultural domesticity and intimacy, and the economies of colonial knowledge circulation and exchange. As is often the case with edited collections, however, the individual essays strain at the conceptual framework meant to encompass and unify them. In this case, the subtitle's promise of looking "around the Pacific Rim" is somewhat misleading. The Pacific Rim turns out to be virtually synonymous with Australia, and includes the bits of it that face the Indian Ocean; there is some engagement with New Zealand, but Hawai'i and the Pacific coast of North America are notably absent. Is the Pacific Rim even a valid concept in the context of settler colonialism in the long nineteenth century? It is hard to know, because not a single essay employs the term, and it is absent from the index. Even the commitment to the settler colony is brought a little into question by the end, for the final essay awkwardly focuses on the British reception of Arctic explorers' news. These are by no means fatal flaws, and the sheer breadth and complexity of the settler empire make it fiendishly difficult to neatly demarcate the borders of any project. But the strengths of this collection lie less in its insights into processes of transnational exchange and more in the local stories it tells of the particular bodies brought into contact by Empire. The editors stress their goal of asking "what forms of Indigenous agency might be recovered" from the history of emerging settler economies (9). Yet while all of the contributors focus on aspects of cross-cultural encounter and interaction, and many have undertaken deep archival labor, in general Intimacies of Violence still approaches these questions from the perspective of what white people did and felt. Two essays stand out, however, for their galvanizing accounts of the complexities of frontier intimacy. Victoria K. Haskins offers a stunning reconstruction of two white women's experiences of Indigenous "captivity" in colonial Queensland in the 1830s and '40s, counterpoising the "toxic parable" of Eliza Fraser's sensational account of ill treatment with the little-known tale of Barbara Thompson (154). Haskins's painstaking attention to fragmented linguistic and anthropological sources...

Manly Pursuits: Rhodes, queer Victorian manliness and the homosocial politics of settler colonialism

ABSTRACT Ann Harries’ surfacing of Cecil John Rhodes’s homosexuality in Manly Pursuits (1999), a neo-Victorian biofictional rendering of his decline after the failed Jameson Raid (1895), is integral to her portrayal of nineteenth-century British settler colonialism as an essentially male homosocial endeavour. In this paper, I argue that Harries’ ironic, self-reflexive use of the entangled discourses of literature and history instantiates multiple, shifting intertextual significations that draw past and present into a perpetual, mutually constitutive dialogue, which is, as Linda Hutcheon points out, definitive of historiographic metafiction’s ‘critical reworking’ of the past. Historical fictions such as these register and engage current concerns pertinent to settler colonial studies and I view them as an essential body of work for consideration within this field. The foregrounding of gender and sexuality in Manly Pursuits is a salient example of what I propose as their strategic presentism and its articulation with settler colonial studies.

Evolutionary history of Mycobacterium leprae in the Pacific Islands.

As one of the oldest known human diseases, leprosy or Hansen's disease remains a public health concern around the world with over 200 000 new cases in 2018. Most human leprosy cases are caused by Mycobacterium leprae, but a small number of cases are now known to be caused by Mycobacterium lepromatosis, a sister taxon of M. leprae. The global pattern of genomic variation in M. leprae is not well defined. Particularly, in the Pacific Islands, the origins of leprosy are disputed. Historically, it has been argued that leprosy arrived on the islands during nineteenth century colonialism, but some oral traditions and palaeopathological evidence suggest an older introduction. To address this, as well as investigate patterns of pathogen exchange across the Pacific Islands, we extracted DNA from 39 formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded biopsy blocks dating to 1992–2016. Using whole-genome enrichment and next-generation sequencing, we produced nine M. leprae genomes dating to 1998–2015 and ranging from 4-63× depth of coverage. Phylogenetic analyses indicate that these strains belong to basal lineages within the M. leprae phylogeny, specifically falling in branches 0 and 5. The phylogeographical patterning and evolutionary dating analysis of these strains support a pre-modern introduction of M. leprae into the Pacific Islands.This article is part of the theme issue ‘Insights into health and disease from ancient biomolecules’.

Te Karere o Poneke: Creating an Indigenous Discursive Space?

AbstractOver sixteen months in 1857 and 1858, Walter Buller produced a weekly newspaper for Māori of the Wellington region in their own language. Although he was the son of a Wesleyan missionary and an official interpreter, the niupepa was neither a church nor a government publication, although it promoted discourses favoured by both. A number of niupepa had preceded Buller's Te Karere o Poneke, the first appearing in 1842, but his paper was distinctive in the sizable platform he provided for correspondence. Over half of the items printed comprised letters from Māori, many of them commenting on, and occasionally critiquing the colonial milieu.The concept of “public sphere” is heavily theorized, often postulated in acultural terms (although suspiciously European in form) and it is debatable if Te Karere o Poneke's readership and their engagement with the textual discourse meet the theory's required criteria of constituting a public sphere. New Zealand was annexed to the British Empire in 1840, meaning that by 1857 colonization was still a relatively new phenomenon, but with substantial immigration and a developing infrastructure, change was both extensive and dynamic. According to the theory, it may be difficult to apply the concept of “public sphere” to Māori anytime during the changing contexts of nineteenth-century colonialism, and indeed other colonised cultures for whom the advent of literacy, Christianity, market economy and colonial administration had been sudden and unexpected. Of course this does not mean that Māori lacked a voice, at times critical. Using Te Karere o Poneke as a case study, this essay argues that Wellington Māori of 1857 do not readily fit the Western model of the “public sphere”, but they nevertheless utilized the discursive spaces available to them to discuss and evaluate the world they now encountered.

Tintin and Corto Maltese

The Tintin and Corto Maltese series are among the most famous European adventure comics. The adventure genre – both in novels and comics – is deeply related to nineteenth-century colonialism. This article compares the ways in which colonialism and the relationship to the colonial Other appear in Hergé’s and Pratt’s creations, focusing on Tintin and Corto Maltese’s adventures in Africa and Latin America. The comparison between Tintin and Corto shows that although Hergé developed an ambivalent view of European colonialism, Eurocentrism is constant through all his work. Pratt’s Corto, in contrast, shows a more critical, though ambiguous, view of colonialism, and a more egalitarian, though also ambivalent, conceptualisation of the colonial Other.

Settler Anxiety at the Outposts of Empire: Colonial Relations, Humanitarian Discourses, and the Imperial Press

While New Zealand historians have sometimes been influenced by the new imperial history, this increasing body of work focusing on empire in its international and comparative dimensions has remained on the periphery of the country’s historical imagination. This is even true in the study of nineteenth-century colonialism. Despite the central role of humanitarianism in New Zealand history, many historians have been more concerned with exploring Māori history in increasingly local settings than considering the broader pattern of imperial relationships. Tony Ballantyne’s work is a leading exception, and a number of legal historians have explored issues of Aboriginal title, while sharing a limited subset of the concerns explored by the new imperial history.

Milkmaid Bears and Savage Mates: The Cultural Exploitation of Real and Fictive White Bears from the Elizabethan Period to the Present

ABSTRACTThe paper considers the cultural exploitation of bears, especially white ones, from the late sixteenth century to the present, both in drama and literary fiction and in the bear pits, theatres, circuses, zoos, and natural habitats in which real biological bears have found themselves mythologized and marketed. Beginning and ending with Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson’s art project nanoq: flat out and bluesome (2006), the argument explores the use and abuse of fictive and real white bears in the changing contexts of Elizabethan and Jacobean politics and performance history, eighteenth and nineteenth century colonialism, and present day anxieties about habitat degradation and global warming, and also in the light of the perennial and “almost inescapable anthropomorphism” which, as Snæbjörnsdóttir and Wilson point out, causes us to see the bear as “a potent symbol” rather than a creature with its own life experience and autonomy. In addition to nanoq: flat out and bluesome, which attempts to break its audience out of that mind-set by confronting them with the mortal remains and individual histories of 34 taxidermic bears, the paper discusses George Peele’s The Old Wives Tale (c. 1594), the anonymous 1590s play Mucedorus, Ben Jonson’s masque Oberon, the Fairy Prince (1611), Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1760), Robert Bage’s Jacobin novel Hermsprong (1796), James Hogg’s novella The Surpassing Adventures of Allan Gordon (1834), Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights (1995), Yoko Tawada’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear (2016), and Martin Rowe’s The Polar Bear in the Zoo (2013).

Nineteenth-Century Colonialism and the Great Indian Revolt. By Amit Kumar Gupta. New York: Routledge, 2016. xi, 195 pp. ISBN: 9780815376590 (paper, also available in cloth and as e-book).

Nineteenth-Century Colonialism and the Great Indian Revolt. By Amit Kumar Gupta. New York: Routledge, 2016. xi, 195 pp. ISBN: 9780815376590 (paper, also available in cloth and as e-book).

Playing against empire

ABSTRACTThis paper uses the concept of mimicry to explore the ways in which the tensions of empire were ‘played out’ through the West India Regiments’ performance of military music and cricket. Both tools and products of the British Empire, cricket and military music could be used at cross-purposes and gained meaning and ideological significance in practice. Attention to the cultural practices of the West India Regiments sheds significant light on the connections between early twentieth-century social change and the dynamics of nineteenth-century colonialism. Moreover, it opens up new – and possibly counterintuitive – connections between Caribbean military history and scholarship on the social and cultural forces that have shaped Caribbean society.

The Dutch Reformed Church and the Protestant Atlantic: Revivalism and Evangelicalism in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony

This article argues for understanding the nineteenth-century, evangelical DRC as an outward looking church, firmly positioned within the Protestant Atlantic. Not only were DRC ministers and congregations in contact with clergy, missionaries, and converts in Africa, Europe, and North America, but they drew inspiration from events and movements abroad. More specifically, this article focuses on a series of revivals which swept the DRC in 1860, 1874, and 1875, fundamentally transforming Dutch-Afrikaners’ religious experience. Although the subject of specifically local forces, this revivalist movement was encouraged by ministers who had witnessed and read about similar revivals abroad. As a result, revivalism offers a way of writing a history of the nineteenth-century DRC which is attentive both to its positions within the Cape Colony as well as the wider Protestant Atlantic. In doing so, this article contributes to a growing body of scholarship which seeks to position Dutch-Afrikaners’ social and cultural worlds within wider contexts, working against arguments that the DRC and its members – most of whom were Dutch-Afrikaans – existed in a state of intellectual isolation.

War in a ‘white man’s country’: Australian perceptions of blackness on the South African battlefield, 1899–1902

Australians volunteered to fight in the South African War at a time when transnational constructions of whiteness determined policy within the British Empire and its colonies towards non-whites. However, the commencement of war in 1899 necessitated a shift in the definition of ‘other’ to justify combat against the white Boer enemy. This article analyses late nineteenth-century settler colonialism in Australia alongside the letters and diaries of Australian South African War soldiers to demonstrate the effect of both affinities with the Boers as inhabitants of a ‘white man’s country’ and conventional perceptions of blackness on their reactions to the South African ‘other’.

Mephisto

ABSTRACTThis article explores the resonances of objects that travelled between continents and the entangled imaginaries tied to them – here a 30-tonne German military tank captured by Australian soldiers during the First World War in France and shipped to Brisbane to be exhibited at the Queensland Museum. The author ‘reads’ the tank, intriguingly named ‘Mephisto’, as the apotheosis of nature/culture divide entrenched in nineteenth-century colonialism, which exported the taxonomies of the Enlightenment to the antipodes and in return repatriated objects of flora and fauna all over Europe. Mephisto thus also marks the manifestation of a German–Australian modernity: developed from the agricultural tractor, the tank remains a brutal and clumsy device designed purely to subdue and conquer territory.

"An Engine of Immense Power": The Jamaica Watchman and Crossings in Nineteenth-Century Colonial Print Culture

"An Engine of Immense Power": The Jamaica Watchman and Crossings in Nineteenth-Century Colonial Print Culture

"We Will Show the Country": Bringing History to Life

"We Will Show the Country": Bringing History to Life

Capitalism as Nineteenth-Century Colonialism and Its Impacts on Native Californians

AbstractThis article analyzes the impact of colonialism on nineteenth-century Native California communities, particularly during the American annexation of the West and capitalist ventures in mining and milling towns. Using the case study of Mono Lake Kutzadika Paiute employed by the Bodie and Benton Railroad and Lumber Company at Mono Mills, the lasting legacies of colonialism and its impacts on contemporary struggles for self-determination are explored. The study highlights the role of capitalism as a potent form of colonialism and its enduring effects on tribes’ ability to meet federal acknowledgment standards. This approach contributes to a richer understanding of colonial processes and their impacts on indigenous communities both historically and today.