Nineteenth-century Colonialism Research Articles

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.

Of Partisans and Paranoid Experts

Beginning in the 1970s, terrorism became an object of contested expert knowledge. Fears over this moralized and loosely defined phenomenon emerged at the very moment that Western states achieved a certain monopoly over legitimate political violence. This politico-epistemological framing itself drew on postwar counterinsurgency doctrine (COIN) that had enabled a shift from the figure of the allied partisan to the unconscionable terrorist. Terrorism as an object of knowledge thus fits within a longer story of Western military attempts—from late nineteenth-century colonialism through the early twentieth-century American revival of COIN in Iraq—to tame uncontrollable, asymmetrical threats in part by knowing them.

Spivakian Concepts of Essentialism and Imperialism in Gabriel Garcia's “The Autumn of the Patriarch”

In 1980, an Indian critic, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak announced strategic essentialism as a major concept in postcolonial theory. It is a special form of essentialism which involves greater scopes of post-colonial studies such as subaltern, otherness, and strategic essentialism; this term can become meaningful in an imperialistic context where oppression and suppressions are as part of thecountry. With the increase of colonialism in nineteenth century and its consequences in twentieth century, which was almost the end of this era, many writers try to demonstrate it through literature. The mentioned concepts are traceable in countries which were experiencing the imperialism; then strategic essentialism helps the margins of society to find their true identity and by using it, they can survive. This paper is an attempt to represent essentialism and imperialism in Gabriel Garcia’s The Autumn of the Patriarch. The findings of this paper may affect those countries which are still under the pressure of colonialism. The major conclusion is that if inferiors of the society unite with each other, find their true identity and stand against oppressions, then they can get rid of the oppressions.

Memory practices and colonial discourse: on text trajectories and lines of flight

ABSTRACTHow self-evident is a colonial rationality today? This paper begins by tracing a ‘text trajectory’ about nineteenth century imperialism and colonialism through several educational spaces: curricular guidelines, textbook, teachers’ reflections on history education, material discursive classroom interactions and pupils’ communication about the topic. In a first step, we observe how entrenched and common sensical a great-power discourse about imperialism and colonialism is in current educational practices. We suggest that pupils ‘hyperstate’ a discursive position on colonialism which appears shocking when stated explicitly, but which is already subtly entextualised in curricular and media discourse. However, in a second step, the analysis orients to the molecular lines and foldings, the unexpected intra-connections and unplanned ‘lines of flight’. In this way, the apparent stability of the colonial rationality begins to wobble (just slightly). The memory practices enacted by pupils, curricula, teachers, authors and the material affordances of textbooks repeat entrenched colonial hierarchies and racisms, ‘and also’ exceed any overly simple understanding of how colonial rationality plays out in contemporary discourse.

Planters, Eskimos, and Indians: Race and the Organization of Trade under the Hudson’s Bay Company in Labrador, 1830–50

Focusing on the history of the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) 1830–50, this paper examines the unsettling and reconstitution of racial categories in Labrador. It argues that in Labrador these categories reflected the particular class-based logic that emerged as the company sought to assert itself in this region in the face of resistance to encroachment. In particular, in this setting, social categories were tied to access to the distribution of credit in the prevailing system of merchant capitalism (“truck”) in the region. And, while understanding the foundations of colonial categories in Labrador is obviously important for grasping the history of this locale, the centrality of the credit system to racial distinctions in the region also has wider implications for our understanding of nineteenth century colonialism. After all, relations of exchange figured prominently as mechanisms through which Europeans asserted authority over colonial spaces in a wide variety of “contact zones,” especially in the middling years of the nineteenth century. It is likely that the pattern of relations and mode of categorization under the HBC in Labrador had parallels elsewhere.

Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment

Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment

Europeanisation and Secularisation of Immigrant Muslims in Western Europe

Every society produces its own concept of otherness. It is a universal fact, necessary for the social cohesion of the majority group. In recent decades, along with the development of a European consciousness and citizenship, the concept of ‘other’ relating to immigration is largely imposed on Muslims in Western Europe. There are historical reasons for this social enmity that trace their roots back to the Middle Ages and to nineteenth century colonialism. However, other contemporary reasons have reinforced these mind-sets; some of which are international events (e.g. the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Iranian revolution, the wars in Iraq and Syria, international terror of Islamic inspiration, and so on). These facts have – at least since 11 September 2001 – made the expression of Islamophobic opinions politically and morally more acceptable in Europe.

Violence, Moral Imperialism and Colonial Borderlands, 1770s–1820s: Some contradictions of humanitarianism

This article argues that the genealogy of a politics of non-violence might usefully consider the promotion of moral imperialism as a precursor that in turn highlights the structural difficulties of a truly non-violent humanitarianism. In the imperial case studies examined from colonial borderlands in the British empire from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, humanitarian intervention tended to be about working out how to manage violence, or the threat of violence, most appropriately. This in turn helps explain tight linkages between early nineteenth century philanthropy and colonialism, not least the transition from abolition to interventionist arguments. On colonial frontiers states were themselves violent, or at least always potentially violent. Therefore those who saw themselves as philanthropists or as humanitarian were often forced, sometimes reluctantly but more usually with conviction, into the position that empire should be made sufficiently moral to deserve a monopoly of violence. For Indigenous groups (and individuals) this often meant that they ultimately had to choose sides and thus a particular form of violence, rather than to escape from violence altogether. At the same time, international humanitarians, notably missionaries and abolitionists, often struggled with how overtly they should work within colonial structures and were often under pressure to serve as unofficial colonial bureaucracies. It is thus helpful to trouble somewhat the implicit paradigm of triangular relationships between individual agents of violence, individual victims of violence, and humanitarians who sought to protect the victims in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, even though there are important ways in which this was also true. Such “moral imperialism” not infrequently placed pressure on colonized men, in particular, to choose one form of violence over another, rather than to have the luxury of eschewing violence that was more readily available to the white humanitarian.

Congo Utopia

The pairing of Congo and utopia seems wilfully perverse in the context of nineteenth-century colonialism. The Congo Free State was the political outcome of a colonial discourse that represented Africa as the antithesis of civilization, a view subsequently reinforced by the sensational exposé by Edmund Morel and others of the regime’s own reliance upon coercion and violence. And yet, as this essay shows, the Congo has a long history as the object of utopian thought in fiction. Surveying this overlooked sub-genre of fantasy, I argue that the representation of the Congo by writers such as William Mayo, David Ker, William Le Queux, John Brisben Walker, and especially William Thomas Stead reveals not only the unique status of this colonial space in the European imagination but invites us to revisit the ideological underpinnings of colonial literature more generally.

Gibril R. Cole.The Krio of West Africa: Islam, Culture, Creolization, and Colonialism in the Nineteenth Century.

Gibril R. Cole.<i>The Krio of West Africa: Islam, Culture, Creolization, and Colonialism in the Nineteenth Century</i>.

Sin armonía no habrá crecimiento sostenido

La tradicional y marcada diferencia entre los países ricos del norte y los países pobres del sur, desde aproximadamente 1990 está desapareciendo, cada vez más. Esa marcada divergencia entre los cada vez países más ricos y los cada vez países más pobres, que se inició con la revolución industrial y el colonialismo a inicios del siglo XIX, se está revirtiendo por una nueva convergencia.Hoy en día se está produciendo un cambio estructural en la dinámica de la economía mundial, además de esta nueva convergencia por el comportamiento acelerado de la tasa de crecimiento económica per cápita de los países emergentes y en desarrollo que es mayor a la de los países desarrollados y que tiende a homogeneizar los crecimientos per cápita globales, sin embargo estos países no se han podido desvincular de la fuerte correlación cíclica en torno a la tendencia y tampoco se han podido aislar de los efectos de la creciente divergencia en la desigualdad en la distribución de los ingresos entre ricos y pobres.Las 85 personas más ricas del mundo poseen ahora más de la mitad de la riqueza disponible, la desigualdad en la distribución del ingreso está divergiendo, potenciándose y perpetuándose a un ritmo sin precedentes a nivel mundial, (a pesar de que el ingreso promedio global está convergiendo), dejando una impresión cada vez mayor de que es “moralmente incorrecta”, además está demostrado que frena la velocidad de crecimiento de los países.A pesar de que en este artículo nos centramos en la desigualdad del ingreso global, esta a menudo está asociada a otras desigualdades que también afectan globalmente y podrían eventualmente ser más importantes aún (carencia en el acceso a los alimentos, al agua, la sanidad, la educación, etc.).La propiedad del capital está más concentrada que la distribución de las rentas; el 10% de la población de la OCDE tienen más del 50% de la propiedad, por otra parte un 50% de la población no tiene ninguna propiedad, pero si está endeudada.

Good Geography, Good Institutions? Historical Evidence from Nineteenth-Century British Colonies

This paper uses a historical natural experiment – the opening of the Suez Canal – to investigate the relationship between geography and the formation of institutions. While the conventional view is that good geography (commodity endowment) inevitably favours the creation of extractive institutions, we discover that a second aspect of geography – location – may in fact encourage the establishment of non-extractive institutions when rent extraction by elites depends on the productivity of non-elites. Specifically, we find that entrepot colonies (Hong Kong and the Straits Settlements) received larger public investments in the post-Suez period than resource colonies (British India, Ceylon, and West Africa), after accounting for year effects and permanent differences across colonies. We demonstrate, using supplementary data, that the entrepot colonies’ locational advantage, coupled with their lack of extractable resources, plays a key role in explaining our empirical findings, even after accounting for other possible confounding factors.

Using child labor to save souls: the Basel Mission in colonial Ghana, 1855–1900

The notion that Europeans had a duty to civilize “slaves, sinners and savages” was used as a justification for nineteenth-century colonialism and evangelization. Wherever European missionaries traveled, they carried the message that slavery and slave trading were morally abhorrent. Despite deep antislavery sentiments in Britain, the abolition of slavery in colonial Ghana did not end the forced labor of children in the colony. The process and consequences of abolition in the Caribbean and in India shaped the steps that were taken when slavery was outlawed in colonial Ghana. Following the Emancipation Ordinance, the use of children as slaves was particularly common. The Basel Mission, in particular, often relied on the labor of unpaid children. These children were largely students at the mission schools who split their time between general education, Bible study, and unpaid labor. The conflict between the missionaries' philosophical opposition to slavery and their need to support the continued growth of the Mission through trade, led to a complicated relationship between the missionaries and African children. Despite its opposition to slavery, the Basel Mission was often directly involved in mediating the exploitation of child labor through established African institutions such as slavery, pawnship, and debt bondage.

Forging Counter-Discourse in Colonial India: Cases of Lower-Caste Elites, Jotirao Phule and Bhimrao Ambedkar

This study attempts to probe the differences in the ideologies of Jotirao Phule and Bhimrao Ambedkar, the two most significant ideologues of lower-caste movement, while reviewing the formation of counter-discourse of lower castes with its interrelation with the mainstream discourse. It suggests us the meaningful clue to understand not only the early context of lower-caste movement but the contradictory factors in its contemporary developments as well.BR The counter-discourse of lower caste has been forged mainly through forming their identity and probing their origin and history. Jotirao Phule, the nineteenth-century Non-Brahman activist and ideologue, argued the ‘original-dwellers’, and thus ‘owners-of-the -land’ identity by reversing Aryan theory widely circulated among the British and the Indian intellectuals. Bhimrao Ambedkar, the twentieth-century late colonial politician and national leader of lower-caste movement, established unique historical identity of Dalits as ‘Buddhists’ and ‘beef-eaters’, which could not be dissolved in the all-inclusive Hindu identity. At the same time, Dalits were set to be an equal entity of independent India by sharing the concept of Aryan and the Indian identity with the mainstream Hindu nationalists.BR Phule-Ambedkar ideology, the pivotal axis of the contemporary lower-caste movement, shares the common aims of annihilation of castes, the oppressive and exploitive social system, and the improvement of status of Avarna and Shudra. The combination of two ideologies has dissimilar and contradictory factors, however. Phule and Ambedkar developed the distinct lower-caste identities from the different points of view on their origin and history. These dissimilarities seem to be resulted from the difference of social context of their periods and the mainstream discourses each period had produced-the Aryan theory to support the colonialism in the late nineteenth century and the Hindu nationalism to advocate the independence of India in the early twentieth century.BR Counter-discourses produced by Phule and Ambedkar articulated the voices of lower-caste groups, therefore functioned as ideologies of the resistance against the mainstream social strata and their discourses which exerted the considerable influence over both the upper-caste intellectuals and the mass. But the contents of counter-discourses were not entirely opposite to those of mainstream discourses, rather somewhat overlapped with them. The lower-caste ideologues produced their counter-discourses in the context of and as a reaction to the contemporary mainstream discourse as we have reviewed the identity formation of lower castes by Phule and Ambedkar.

Infrastructure and influence: China's presence on the coast of East Africa

This paper investigates the notion that China's proposed development of ports and supporting hinterland infrastructure on the East coast of Africa serves greater geostrategic interests within Africa and the Indian Ocean. It cautions against a trend which accuses Chinese commercial infrastructural and resource development of being symmetrical with an almost colonial-like political influence. Through a comparison with nineteenth-century German and British colonialism in the region, the paper argues that, while there are certain affinities, the Chinese presence today is significantly different. Central to the argument is that Chinese port and hinterland developments are supplemented by a host of other actors, including host states, multinational corporations and regional development funds. The broader market economic system in which China and Africa engage today entails that Chinese unfettered access to projects is complicated by the interests of multiple stakeholders. The Chinese presence has been exaggerated at the expense of other actors and thus, in any future conflict, it cannot be assumed that China will be able to mobilise this infrastructure in its interests. This has implications for the broader analysis of China's growing presence in the Indian Ocean.

Sister-in-Law Marriage in the Empire: Religious Politics and Legislative Reform in the Australian Colonies 1850–1900

In 1835, a statute was passed in the parliament of the United Kingdom making it illegal for a widowed man to marry his sister-in-law.1 Marriage to a sister-in-law after a wife's death was common practice in nineteenth-century England and colonial Australia and aunts often took on the responsibility of raising children after a sibling's death. In the 1840s, a protracted parliamentary and social debate began over whether a widowed man's marriage to his sister-in-law should be made legal and this debate lasted over seven decades. In the Australian colonies, where English law had been inherited,2 a similar debate occurred in the 1870s. The marriage was legalised in most of Australia in the 1870s while it remained illegal in England until the turn of the century. The parallel debates in each country provide a window into the comparative effect of religious culture on the development of marriage law. One of the primary reasons for the protracted nature of the struggle for marriage reform in England was its significance for the relationship between church and state. This article explores the implications of the relationship between church and state in Britain and the colonies for marriage legislation.

Queering Natal

The media coverage of President Jacob Zuma and the “problem” of his foreign and potentially threatening polygamy reveals the long-extant gendered and raced fault lines of the presumably postcolonial relationship between Britain and South Africa. The discourses in the British press that marked Zuma as a “buffoon,” “barbaric,” and less civilized than his “distinctly monogamous” hosts can be traced to nineteenth-century settler colonial regimes and their violent attempts at reordering the lands and peoples they sought to occupy and replace. The arrival of British settlers in the nineteenth-century colony of Natal brought them into conflict with the Zulu peoples they sought to supplant and exploit. A reading of emigrant letters, missionary pamphlets, and newspaper correspondence reveals that the persistence of the practice of isithembu (polygamy) and ilobolo (the ritual exchange of cattle upon marriage) among Zulus in the face of British attempts to control their social and political formations challenged the very heart of the settler project. As British settlers sought to create and define a “modern” sexuality predicated on a heteronormative family unit, polygamy became the flashpoint in a biopolitical battle between colonists and indigenous peoples in Natal. For settlers, polygamy failed at being properly heteronormative, instead indicating an overweening hyper-heterosexuality in Zulu men. As a result, to white observers, polygamy presented a dangerous and disruptive challenge to the gendered, raced, and sexual order they wished to construct — in short, it became queer. The destabilizing queer potential of indigenous polygamy to the settler project reveals the assumptions about sexuality, civilization, and conjugality that underwrite colonial aspiration and postimperial anxieties.

Genocide in nineteenth-century Algeria

While the French colony of Algeria was known to have been a violent place, historians have rarely compared the specificities and contours of its violent culture with those of other nineteenth-century settler colonies such as Australia and America. This review article asks why this has been the case and whether new definitions of genocide that have emerged from the study of other colonies might not be applied to Algeria. It contends that the systematic qualities of organised French violence—chiefly in the form of massacres known as ‘razzias’—have been underestimated and that the Algerian case merits study by functionalist and intentionalist scholars of genocide. While work still needs to be undertaken connecting French ‘exterminationist’ literatures to the practice of mass killing in the colony, a series of recent histories of Algeria have suggested that traditional literatures underestimated the scope and effects of French violence upon the indigenous peoples of Algeria.

They need nothing: Hispanic-Asian encounters of the colonial period

The first comprehensive study of Spanish writings on East and Southeast Asia from the Spanish colonial period, They Need Nothing draws attention to many essential but understudied Spanish-language texts from this era. Robert Richmond Ellis provides an engaging, interdisciplinary examination of how these writings depict Asia and Asians as both similar to and different from Europe and Europeans, and details how East and Southeast Asians reacted to the Spanish presence in Asia. They Need Nothing highlights texts related to Japan, China, Cambodia, and the Philippines, beginning with Francis Xavier's observations of Japan in the mid-sixteenth century and ending with Jose Rizal's responses to the legacy of Spanish colonialism in the late nineteenth century. Ellis provides a groundbreaking expansion of the geographical and cultural contours of Hispanism that bridges the fields of European, Latin American, and Asian Studies.

Theatres of violence: massacre, mass killing and atrocity throughout history

List of Tables, Illustrations, and Maps Acknowledgements Introduction:The Massacre and History Philip G. Dwyerand Lyndall Ryan PART I: MASSACRE AND ATROCITY IN THE ANCIENT AND PRE-MODERN ERAS Chapter 1. Origins of Massacres John Docker Chapter 2. Massacres in the Peloponnesian War Brian Bosworth Chapter 3. The Abominable Quibble: Alexander's Massacre of Indian Mercenaries at Massaga Elizabeth Baynham Chapter 4. Roman Concept of Massacre: Julius Caesar in Gaul Jane Bellemore Chapter 5. Atrocity and Massacre in the High and Late Middle-Ages Laurence W. Marvin Chapter 6. A Sea of Blood? Massacres during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, 1641 - 53 Inga Jones PART II: THE COLONIAL FRONTIER Chapter 7. Looking the Other Way: Gnadenhutten Massacre and the Contextual Interpretation of Violence Rob Harper Chapter 8. Settler Massacres on the Australian Colonial Frontier, 1836-1851 Lyndall Ryan Chapter 9. Tactics of Nineteenth Century Colonial Massacre: Tasmania, California and Beyond Benjamin Madley Chapter 10. A Blueprint for Massacre: United States Army and the 1870 Blackfeet Massacre Blanca Tovias de Plaisted Chapter 11. When Massacre Appears: Representations of Australian Indigenous Massacres in Fiction Katrina Schlunke PART III: CONTESTED NARRATIVES: MEMORY, ATROCITY AND MASSACRE Chapter 12. Memories of Massacres and Atrocities during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars Philip G. Dwyer Chapter 13. Stalin's Trap: Katyn Forest Massacre between Propaganda and Taboo Claudia Weber Chapter 14. Great Secret: Sites of Mass Killings in Stalinist Russia Francois-Xavier Nerard Chapter 15. Spectacular Atrocities: Making Enemies during the 1965-1966 Massacres in Indonesia Annie Pohlman Chapter 16. A Necessary Salve: 'Hue Massacre' in History and Memory Scott Laderman Chapter 17. A Battle for Perceptions: Revisiting the Cassinga Controversy in Southern Africa Gary Baines PART IV: THE DYNAMICS OF MODERN MASSACRE AND MASS KILLING Chapter 18. Method in their Madness: Understanding the Dynamics of the Italian Massacre of Ethiopian Civilians, February-May 1937 Giuseppe Finaldi Chapter 19. Algerian War on French Soil : Paris Massacre of 17 October 1961 Helene Jaccomard Chapter 20. Wedding Massacres and the War in Afghanistan Stephen J. Rockel Select Bibliography Notes on the Contributors Index