Imperial Practices Research Articles

“Peace Is Dangerous”: Toward a Du Boisian Theory of Colonial Post-fascism

This article asks: “How was the rhetoric of post or anti-fascism used to develop colonial projects in the inter and postwar period?” Through investigating the Du Bois archive, I answer this through producing a Du Boisian theory of colonial post-fascism. While many have written about the connections between European fascism and colonialism in theories of “colonial fascism,” a Du Boisian approach leads us to the concept of colonial post-fascism, demonstrating the array of colonial practices which were instigated in the name of world peace in the inter and postwar era. Colonial post-fascism is characterized by three processes that Du Bois wrote about. First, colonial post-fascism involves a bifurcation between colonial violence and peace, such that Western powers in the inter and postwar period could make commitments to world peace without interrogating the actions of their empires. Second, colonial post-fascism involves the process by which empires developed their imperial practices to rebuild from the effects of the war against fascism. Finally, colonial post-fascism involves the U.S. empire increasing its militarization, which developed in the fight against fascism, to secure colonial power under the rhetoric of maintaining world peace. This article makes several contributions. First, instead of highlighting the link between European fascism and colonialism, I demonstrate how colonialism shaped European post-fascism. Second, I contribute toward the project of undoing bifurcated histories of the West which elide discussions of colonial violence. Finally, I highlight how Du Bois’s involvement in the peace movement was not just activism, but also generative to social theory.

Amazon Journeys and Poetic Re-Discoveries in Jan Conn’s 'Jaguar Rain' and Malu de Martino’s 'Margaret Mee e a Flor da Lua'

The year 2023 marks the thirty-fifth anniversary of botanical artist Margaret Mee’s final expedition to the Amazon. On this trip, she was at last able to paint the rare night-flowering of Selenicereus wittii, commonly known as the Amazon moonflower. Such an accomplishment was not only significant due to the rare nature of the event, but also because it was the final piece created by an artist who renewed the practice of botanical painting. Originally from Britain, Mee lived in Brazil for more than thirty years, embarking on fifteen expeditions to the Amazon region between 1956 and 1988, painting while travelling in dugout canoes deep in the forest and becoming a fervent activist for the protection of the environment. Her work has influenced many artists, e cologists, and biologists, and has served as inspiration for literary and filmic creations. In 2006, Canadian poet Jan Conn published Jaguar Rain: The Margaret Mee Poems, in which she poetically recreates Mee’s journeys to the Amazon. As both a scientist and a poet who has also extensively travelled in the region, Conn reimagines Mee’s wondrous encounters while situating them as part of a tradition of travel and exploration in South America. A few years later, in 2012, the documentary Margaret Mee e a Flor da Lua, directed by Brazilian filmmaker Malu de Martino, was premiered. In the film, Martino reconstructs Mee’s final journey to the Amazon in search of the moonflower while also reinstating the artist’s important contributions as an artist, environmentalist, and contemporary explorer. The connections between the biographical, poetic, artistic, and professional Mee are closely woven throughout the documentary, which can be seen as inserted in a new documentary tradition, less analytical and more poetic, in which notions of truth, history, and reality are problematised and rendered through different lenses. Bearing in mind that both Conn and Martino re-read Mee’s journeys through the tropes of exploration and discovery, which are commonly associated with imperial practices and colonial narratives of the New World, in this paper, we propose to discuss in which ways these tropes are brought into context and problematised, especially in relation to the depiction of Amazonian nature.

Pengaruh Misi Abad XVII terhadap Perspektif Misi CM di Madagaskar

The focus of this study explores the influence of the Church's mission perspective on the Congregatio Missionis (CM) mission perspective in Madagascar in 1648. The mission of the Church in the context of that time had a negative meaning. The motivation for the proclamation of faith overlapped with the political motivation of Western imperialism. The process of colonization of countries in the Asian, American and African continents is difficult to separate from the influence of Christianity in them. The mission of the Church coupled with the practice of colonization and Western imperialism influenced the perspective of mission and spirituality of the congregation at that time. Every congregation has a constitution and basis for its ministry. This foundation has a distinctive charismatic character. The signs of the times and the pressing needs of the Church affect the spirituality and charismatic character of a congregation. This study wants to examine the extent to which the missionary state of the Church at that time affected the charism of the Congregatio Missionis (CM). The method used in this study is the qualitative-comparative method. The letter of St. Vincent to the Congregatio Missionis missionaries in Madagascar in 1648 is analyzed and assessed in the perspective of the mission of the Church in the XVII century. The study found that the mission perspective of the XVII century emphasized the spread of the faith, the conversion of unbelievers, the expansion of the reign of God, and the establishment of new churches. In particular, the study found that the mission perspectives of the XVII century Church were similar to those of the Congregatio Missionis (CM) in Madagascar based on St. Vincent's letter to his missionaries. If traced further, the seeds of the Church's current mission perspective and the principle of inculturation in the understanding of mission according to St. Vincent are also found.

The Keeper of the Imperial Body: The Russian Geographical Society as an Entrepreneur of Imperial Nationalism

Abstract The goal of this article is to show Russia’s civilizational turn in the broader context of imperial nationalism. The “turn” is a manifestation of imperial nationalism that today feeds not only on political ideas and history but also on geography. In the mass perception, geography is seen as an objective, non-ideologized scientific discipline less prone to political manipulation. Because of this, it can be employed to influence the Russian self-identification process in a much more subtle and efficient way than references to the more abstract notion of civilization. This article presents the Russian Geographical Society (RGS) as an identity entrepreneur managed by the ruling elite with a well-developed regional structure. It functions as a community of imperial practice. With its discursive and material practices, the RGS contributes to reproducing imperial nationalism, including in its civilizational version. The RGS is the keeper of the imperial body. By referring to the imperial body, I mean not just the physical territory but also the ways it is imagined in discourse and made material in numerous practices.

The resettlement policy of Tsarist Russia on the Kazakh steppes of the late XIX � early XX centuries (based on the materials of periodicals and scientific articles)

Relevance. After the conquest of Turkestan in the second half of the XIX century, the tsarist government began to take concrete action. The tsarist government sent special research expeditions to the Kazakh steppes and began to collect a lot of information about the geographical, economic and social situation. The Myrzashol and Kyzylkum districts in the south, notable for their proximity to the fertile and bird-rich banks of the Syrdarya River, offer convenient water access and deserve special attention. The materials collected by the researchers were processed, summarised and published in the Russian periodical �Turkestan Collection�.Purpose. The aim was to show the results of research expeditions and to introduce rulers, military personnel, peasants and peasants of vast Russia in search of work and land in the virgin steppe, where they have not yet plowed.Methodology. This research utilizes a historical review methodology, examining archival materials, periodicals, and previously published scientific articles.Results. The findings suggest that the resettlement was extensively facilitated by the division of Kazakh lands into administrative territories and the systematic imposition of state property laws. The analysis shows that this not only disrupted the traditional nomadic lifestyle of the Kazakhs but also paved the way for significant Russian migration and agricultural development, particularly in cotton cultivation.Conclusions. The study concludes that the resettlement policy was a form of imperial strategy that had lasting impacts on the region's demographic and economic landscapes. It underscores the dual role of economic exploitation and cultural domination in Tsarist colonization efforts, reflecting broader patterns of European imperial practices in Asia. The research highlights the need for a nuanced understanding of these historical dynamics to appreciate the complex legacy of colonial policies in Central Asia.

Confirmation of the Kazakh Khan Nuraly in 1748—1749

The article considers the problems of transformation of imperial policy in the field of symbolic integration of dependent Kazakh rulers into the common political space through the concept of acculturation. During the 18th century, based on the real, extremely limited opportunities to actually keep the Kazakhs in dependence, the Russian border authorities made attempts to exert their influence on the process of election and legitimization of Kazakh khans. The main attention in the article is paid to the institution of khan's power, efforts of Russian administration to change the form and order of election and approval of Kazakh khans by Russian monarchs. An important innovation is the introduction and gradual adoption of a new imperial practice — the confirmation of Kazakh khans by Russian monarchs. A precedent is the confirmation of Khan Nuraly in 1749. Taking into account the generally undeveloped issues related to the very procedure of election and confirmation, it was important to show on the basis of archival and published documents the ritual itself and specific practices. The whole process of confirmation, as the sources show, was carefully designed by the frontier administrators, who attached great importance to it. Although confirmation of Kazakh khans by Russian monarchs was not immediately introduced, as the presence of the Russian Empire in the region increased, the tradition of confirmation was increasingly practiced until the liquidation of the khan's authority in the first decades of the 19th century.

Orphanages of the Empress Maria's Department in the Imperial Practice of Acculturation on the National Outskirts of the Russian Empire (on the Example of the Samarkand Region of the Turkestan Governor-General) in the Late 19th — Early 20th Century

In the imperial practice of Russia in the Turkestan Governor-General, acculturation was envisaged, which presupposes the process of cultural interaction between the newcomer Russian and the local population. Due to the significant difference in the cultural characteristics of the peoples, the Russian Empire preferred to test its laws first on the Russian-speaking population of the governorate. This concerns issues of charity and the creation of orphanages. In the proposed article, based on archival material introduced into scientific circulation for the first time, the problems arising in the Samarkand regional guardianship and the Samarkand orphanage at the turn of the 19th — 20th century, concerning all aspects of children's lives, are considered.

Rethinking the "production of knowledge" as a methodological approach in historical research

The article is devoted to theoretical approaches in contemporary works of foreign authors who study the issues of "knowledge production" within the constructivist methodology. The historiography of this topic is quite extensive. It is based on the study of the relationship between science and power. One of the main aspects of this problem is the consideration of scientific interpretations that could serve to justify political regimes or the transformation of knowledge to serve the interests of power. Especially the study of this aspect of the connection between knowledge and power was expressed in studies on the interaction of authorities with the scientific community, which ensured the interests of empires in the conquered territories. In the proposed analysis of articles, attention is focused on the sources of clichés that were formed within the framework of evolutionary theory, colonial explanatory schemes, which have not yet received a complete rethinking. In this regard, the article mentions the theoretical roots of discourse analysis. The attention is paid to the study of the British scholar Bernard Cohn, who undertook a study of the imperial practices of the British in India. The article also analyzes the works devoted to the rethinking of statements relating to some pages of the history of Kazakhstan, formulated in the colonial period. The relevance of popularizing the deconstruction of colonial knowledge lies in the fact of its presence in contemporary interpretations of history in a huge range of topics that require critical analysis. In this regard, the analysis of foreign works, including those related to the history of Kazakhstan, is likely to be useful and increase interest in such studies

Globalni kapitalizam – država u doba globalizma i desupstancijalizacija politike / Global Capitalism – the State in the Age of Globalism and Desupstantialisation of Politics

In this paper I will analyze geopolitical factors and systemic contradictions that contribute to the creation of imperialist practices. I will explain the concept of imperialism and the interweaving, as noted by David Harvey, of territorial logics and the molecular processes of capital, which points to the continued key role of the nation- state in the reproduction of the capitalist system. I will explain the multiple importance of imperialism, which is simultaneously a means of profitable realization, subjugation, systemic reparation, etc. Such a position requires re-examination of the role of the national state, its transformation and power relations within it, which opposes the views of its insignificance in the age of globalism. I will point out two conditions that generate the impotence of autonomous politics and its de-substantialization: the sub-political power of global capital, which is transformed into political influence through various mechanisms; the limitation and transcen-dence of the understanding of politics within the “methodological nationalism” that exists with the insistence on globalization. Finally, the paper touches on the responsibility and limitations of left-wing policies and their capitulation to the forces of capital.

Political vs intellectual? Russia’s late Imperial archaeology and the Russian Cause

Drawing on the writings of the founding representatives of late Imperial Russia’s Oriental studies, and documents from Russian archives, this article first traces Professor Nikolay Veselovsky’s (1848-1918) formative origins as an influential historian and archaeologist of the East on the national level. He came to be, as pointed out by Vasily Barthold (1869-1930), one of those scholars ferociously ‘counteracting the influence of the West through reliance on the study of the Orient’. The article then studies the impact of his educational background and of the nationalist discourses that were widespread among Russian intellectuals during Veselovsky’s academic formation and mature professional activities. The ongoing international debates on Russian Orientalism and the imperial practices of the time help re-examine the Veselovsky case from new theoretical perspectives and situate it within the broader methodological context of relationships between knowledge and power, academic institutions and state as well as political ideas and scholarship. This further allows us to investigate how Veselovsky’s controversial contribution to Russian scholarship was perceived by his contemporaries as well as the generations of Soviet and post-Soviet scholars, and to conclude by identifying the reasons for such perceptions and the impact of Veselovsky’s scholarship and activities.

Turkestan Urban Self-Government Institutions in the late 19th – Early 20th Century

At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, the process of urbanization was actively advancing in the Russian Empire. The city reform of 1870 expanded the competence and representativeness of city self-government, represented by the City Duma, with the aim of involving the propertied into the initiative of the urban community addressing urban improvement issues. The development of urban self-government institutions in several cities in Turkestan adhered to the general course of modernization in the Russian Empire, while also reflecting the specific administration and socio-cultural environment of the region.
 The author’s objective is to analyze the correlation between general imperial principles and regional specifics in the legal status and activity trends of city self-government bodies in Turkestan. In comparison with the general imperial practice, city self-government bodies were limited both in terms of spatial factors and in terms of their level of independence from the administration and the representativeness of the indigenous population. The Tashkent City Duma serves as a case to study that best aligns with the research objectives. The article examines the activities of the city self-government based on this example.
 The predominance of the indigenous population in most cities of the region was the main reason for the reluctance of local administration to extend the city self-government system to other cities. Nevertheless, even in its limited form, city self-government served as another platform for interaction between two cultures, “tradition” and “modernity,” and as an instrument for the gradual modernization of Turkestan cities.

Topoi and Toponyms: The Rhetoric of the City in Isa 1 and Assyrian Imperial Practices

Abstract The influence of Assyrian ideology on First Isaiah has received extensive treatment over the past few decades. I present another possible datum to explain a rhetorical argument that unfolds in Isa 1:21–28 through the addition of the later supplement in vv. 29–31, namely the shift in Jerusalem from being labeled a »faithful city« to an »unfaithful city«. In light of the political grounding of the passage, the historical backdrop of the intermittent Assyrian practice of changing the toponyms of subjugated cities becomes more transparently important for unlocking the meaning and significance of this passage.

All Things in Common: A Canadian Family and Its Island Utopia by Ruth Compton Brouwer (review)

Reviewed by: All Things in Common: A Canadian Family and Its Island Utopia by Ruth Compton Brouwer Beth Moore Milroy Brouwer, Ruth Compton–All Things in Common: A Canadian Family and Its Island Utopia. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021. 207 p. Two exemplary contributions to Canadian social history stand out in Ruth Compton Brouwer’s All Things in Common. One is her illustration of how several research areas, such as family, religion, migration, land occupation, and rural life are connected to the utopian form of settlement, a type largely absent from Canadian historical research. Those connections are evident in the case she presents of a built utopia in Prince Edward Island (PEI), which incorporates all those areas. She argues for recognizing the relevance of utopian settlements to the country’s social history. Brouwer’s second contribution is to show how a utopian case can be explored sensitively yet dispassionately by a professional historian who is also a descendant of the family at the centre of the story. In this book, readers will find a richly documented and experientially grounded discussion of the Compton community because the author could use records and participants’ insights that would be unavailable to a non-family writer. Brouwer has published widely on Canadian social history. In this instance she uses both her formal training and personal experience to illuminate why and how one of the truly unusual settlements in this country came into being, and what it tells us about utopia and one corner of Canada. The book comprises two parts. Together, they give readers a penetrating history of this built utopia from the gradual articulation of its aim, through its implementation, to the settlement’s eventual dissolution in 1947. Part I provides necessary background starting with a family of Comptons arriving on the eastern seaboard of the United States in the early 1600s. The subsequent century of religious turmoil and revolutionary upheaval provoked a strand of the family to migrate to Atlantic Canada as part of the 1783 wave of United Empire Loyalists. Early on, a theme emerges that will run through the book. This is the resistance on the part of many Comptons to certain social norms related to religion, family, and the organization of labour. For example, unlike most of their relatives and neighbours living in New Jersey, the first Comptons to come to Canada chose not to support the revolutionary aspirations of the American states. Instead, William, Sarah, and their children became destitute refugees in New York and later in Atlantic Canada. Even when it might have served their financial interests to be a little more [End Page 198] conformist, they tenaciously held on to their beliefs in millenarianism and an old style of “godly” Christianity. These Comptons refrained from membership in any institutionalized Christian churches, which, in their view, had lost sight of true Christianity, offering merely a superficial, coddling “Churchianity,” as they called it. Their aim was to hold fast to their interpretation of early Christianity as found in bible passages, including this one: “‘And all that believed were together, and had all things in common’ (Acts 2:44)” (p. 100). When in the late 1820s, a successive generation of Comptons was putting down roots in PEI, they finally found the religious “home” they had long sought. William, Mary, and their children became followers of Donald McDonald, a pastor trained in Scotland who preached a kind of old Scottish Presbyterianism mixed with various idiosyncrasies and millenarianism. The mélange was so distinctive that his adherents were called McDonaldites. When McDonald died in 1867, some of the Compton clan decided to put together their own “unchurched” manner of worshipping God, inspired by their McDonaldite experiences and their own preferences. Throughout Part I, the author references the effects of imperialist practices regarding land and settlement, as well as how the fracturing of Christianity played out in the lives of generations of Comptons in North America. Part II describes the physical and social development of the Compton communal settlement, its maintenance, and evolution. The land they settled on was of questionable ownership with regard not only to the Indigenous Mi’kmaq who, prior to about 1800, used the whole island...

Abolishing Settler Imperialism: Review of Red Scare

Abolishing Settler Imperialism:Review of Red Scare Juliana Hu Pegues (bio) Joanne Barker's Red Scare: The State's Indigenous Terrorist, Oakland: University of California Press, 2021 Joanne Barker's Red Scare: The State's Indigenous Terrorist is a significant and necessary examination of state power's consolidation through the criminalization and surveillance of Indigenous peoples. Focusing on the historical and contemporary contexts in the United States and Canada, Barker argues that Indigenous peoples are both represented as terrorists and made representable as terrorists in order to establish, organize, and maintain state imperialism. Barker looks specifically to two figures, the Murderable Indian and the Kinless Indian, who act in tandem to fortify the authority of the state to regulate identity, punish opposition, and condition the possibilities for life itself. Red Scare offers an important analysis of state power through an intersectional Indigenous studies, which is in conversation with feminist studies, carceral studies, critical ethnic studies, and anti-imperialist scholarship. Readers familiar with Lenape scholar Joanne Barker's work will recognize her incisive critique of colonialism and capitalism grounded in an Indigenous feminist framework. While her previous book Native Acts focused on Indigenous peoples' subjectivity within state formations of recognition and membership, in Red Scare she hones in specifically on how, and to what ends, state and corporate actors (often working together) deploy discourses of national security and public safety in order to enact materially and epistemically violent reprisals against Indigenous activists and Indigenous peoples' self-determination. Since the 1998 publication of Luana Ross's (Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes) foundational book, Inventing the Savage: The Social Construction of Native American Criminality, very few scholars have focused keen attention on the criminalization of Indigeneity and [End Page 221] Indigenous peoples. Such analyses are critical, given disparities within the system of mass incarceration and the alarming yet underreported instances of police violence experienced by American Indian, Alaska Native, Hawaiian, First Nations, Métis, and Inuit persons and communities. Barker joins scholar-activists in Indigenous studies, such as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Alderville First Nation), Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe), and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, in centering the criminalization of Indigenous peoples as both sign and instantiation of colonialism's longue durée in the United States and Canada. Red Scare, moreover, locates the state's current strategies of counterterrorism, particularly in response to the pipeline opposition of Indigenous water protectors, as a continuation of ongoing imperial processes of anti-Indigenous invasion, occupation, extraction, and sexual violence. Throughout the book, the concept of Red Scare functions as both an organizing analytic and a reading practice for studying state formation through this polysemantic phrase that invokes the fearmongering fueled by the discursive and affective imagery of, alternately, the red communist and the racialization of the Native Red Man/Woman. Though an inventive play on words, Barker moves past analogizing the multivalent meanings of the term to offer a historical reiteration of anti-Indigenous criminalization located in the shift from government scapegoating and the (extra)legal disciplining of communists, socialists, and anarchists during World Wars I and II, to a post–Cold War refashioning of subversive threat attached to a new cohort of racialized radicals, namely Indigenous, Black, Muslim, or queer. From the late 1960s forward, Indigenous activists in particular were considered communist sympathizers, or unknowing patsies for communist organizers, because of what was viewed as the inherently socialistic and anti-capitalist nature of Indigenous communities. In relation to state imperialist practices, Barker goes even further to explicate an additional Red Scare genealogy through the lens of extractive capitalism. In a section under the heading "Capital Oil," Barker brilliantly traces the development of oil economy and infrastructure alongside the ascendancy of American military hegemony, resulting in the equating of energy security with national security. Not only does this securitized economy depend disproportionately on energy and mineral extrication from Indigenous territories, but it underscores the reasons underlying the creation of the Indigenous terrorist, whose protection of the environment undermines national inviolability and public freedom. These are not incidental constructions. Barker excels in [End Page 222] drawing these types of unexpected and nuanced linkages that, once understood, are the only way one can view them. Joanne Barker most...

Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine by Jim Downs

Reviewed by: Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine by Jim Downs Sean Morey Smith (bio) Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine. By Jim Downs. ( Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2021. Pp. 272. Cloth, $29.95.) In 1854, John Snow mapped cases of cholera in the Soho neighborhood of London. His map revealed that the cases were clustered around a single water pump. This led Snow to believe that the pump's water was the source [End Page 109] of cholera, so he removed its handle, preventing Soho residents from using it. Cases of cholera quickly disappeared, Snow's theory was proved, and modern epidemiology was born. Or so the canonical origin story goes. In Maladies of Empire, Jim Downs rebuts this hagiographic narrative by arguing that earlier investigations of health and disease in places outside the British metropole led to the development of epidemiology. In particular, Downs stresses the role that a variety of forgotten informers—including soldiers, sailors, enslaved people, and Hajj pilgrims—played in revealing patterns of disease. He further argues that the data collection from these forgotten sources was enabled by colonialism, wars, and slavery. Moreover, U.S. and Confederate medical practices during the Civil War were informed by British imperial practices. Maladies of Empire is most interested in recovering the lost informants that supplied the data that allowed physicians to develop epidemiology. The book's chapters deftly narrate how various people—from British soldiers imprisoned in the Black Hole of Calcutta, to Africans enslaved in the Middle Passage, to washerwomen on Malta and Boa Vista, Cape Verde—provided testimony of their conditions and the spread of disease to physicians and surgeons who reported it in publications. As those observations were iteratively remade into theory, the identities of the informers were stripped from the medical record. Downs's revelations follow other recent efforts to name forgotten medical subjects, such as Deirdre Cooper Owens's Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology (2017), which details the forgotten subjects of James Marion Sims's gynecological surgery experiments. These efforts remind us that medical knowledge has always been made from the experience of individuals, most of them stigmatized by their illness, race, or social standing. Furthermore, as Downs points out, the forced movement of enslaved people, soldiers, and other colonial subjects precipitated many of the disease events that would spur physicians to become medical investigators and eventually develop modern epidemiology. Maladies of Empire positions medical practices of the U.S. Civil War as nationally unique versions of emerging practices adopted from Britain and Europe. The first five chapters focus on early cases of mostly British medical investigations that prefigured epidemiology, while the sixth and seventh shift to the U.S. Civil War. The final chapter then explores the 1865–66 cholera outbreak using both British and U.S. sources. Methodologically, this approach challenges historians of health and medicine in the nineteenth-century United States to break out of a national framework and contextualize their subject in terms of global European colonialism. For instance, while Charles E. Rosenberg, in The Cholera Years: The United [End Page 110] States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (1962), explains the largely successful U.S. response to this cholera outbreak as the result of changing political, religious, and social norms, Downs traces parallel efforts by British and U.S. Army officials to track the outbreak geographically and construct narratives of its spread; this renders the response as more bureaucratic and based on colonial and military experience than in Rosenberg's telling. While Americans followed British examples in their epidemiological investigations, they also transformed the practice. Downs argues that "US doctors, unlike their British counterparts, formally classified racial difference as a key hallmark in examining the spread of infectious disease" (114). Downs allows that British physicians and surgeons collected racialized data related to diseases, but they "did not use these categories in an explanatory way" (122–23). He indicts the U.S. Sanitary Commission for injecting racial difference into a discourse that had focused on external, environmental causes of infectious disease. This conclusion is especially striking given the historiography of race and disease...

Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb. Epidemic Empire: Colonialism, Contagion, and Terror, 1817–2020.

Over recent decades, many social inconveniences have become known as epidemics. But when, where, and how does something become framed as epidemic, and what does it mean for the spread of ideas, of violence, of fashion trends, or of diseases to become objects of epidemiological concern? Important reflective work on the meaning of epidemic has been carried out beyond the narrow disciplinary bounds of formal epidemiology. Charles Rosenberg’s seminal framing of epidemics through the narrative arc of drama theory, or Paula Treichler’s idiom of the “epidemic of signification” have not only shaped historical and critical approaches but also substantiated that neither the epidemic itself, nor its critical appraisal, should ever be solely a medical matter. It is one of the outstanding achievements of Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb’s Epidemic Empire: Colonialism, Contagion, and Terror, 1817–2020 to not only deepen and continue this academic legacy but also to turn it on its head. Much has been written about the origin of epidemiology in colonial regimens of power, on the techniques of epidemiological surveillance stemming from the bureaucracy of imperial practices, and about the not-so-noble origins of global health. But Epidemic Empire is not concerned with the metaphorical residues of colonialism in epidemiological reasoning (or vice versa), but rather invites the reader to read the history of colonialism “epidemiologically.” This does not mean to eschew the brutal participation of epidemiologists in the violence of settler colonialism but renders effectively—and rightfully—the empire into an epidemiological matter of concern.

The Phenomenon of Colonialism in World History: Themes and Trends in Recent Historiography

In this article, the author examines a range of issues related to the study of the phenomenon of colonialism in contemporary historiography. On the one hand, he analyses existing intellectual trends, historiographical schools, and methodological approaches, and, on the other hand, outlines new research fields and identifies promising directions for further research. He also points out that the study of the phenomenon of colonialism in all its systemic integrity and structural heterogeneity remains an essential objective for modern scholarship. The author assesses the impact of Edward Said's ideas on the formation of new approaches to the study of colonialism. He argues that his works led to a shift in the focus of research from socio-economic and political history to the study of cultural and intellectual history, and to an increased appreciation of the relationship between knowledge production and imperial expansion. The author examines contemporary research trends such as New Imperial History, Subaltern Studies, Transnational History (Histoire croisée) and analyses their strengths and weaknesses. Thus, in his view, the representatives of the “New Imperial History” tend to present colonialism primarily as a cultural project oriented towards superiority and domination. The proponents of Subaltern Studies focus on the history of people who were oppressed and exploited. Colonialism, imperialism, and decolonisation are presented in their studies exclusively as a history of violence and domination. In the context of transnational history, the phenomenon of colonialism is presented as an interwoven, interconnected history of a multitude of diverse civilisations and communities, making the world-system from the sixteenth to the twentieth century appear as a living mixture of European and non-European elements. The Histoire croisée rediscovers a seemingly obvious fact, namely the inseparability of mother countries and colonies, imperial practices at the local level and situations within and between European states themselves. The history of civilisations, states, and societies of the Afro-Asian region — the former colonial world — revisited in research in recent decades shows a multitude of trajectories, often branching, of their own paths of long and fruitful adaptation to different environments, of their own ways of developing rational economy and politics, which are particular to them. The author observes that the task of modern historiography is to strive to study the phenomenon of colonialism in all its diversity and to free itself from the perspective of its predecessors, who viewed the world only in the focus of binary relations between the European colonial empires on the one hand and the former colonies on the other. The historical study of the colonial world needs to continue, not as a collection of heterogeneous experiences reflecting the diversity of non-European countries, but as a significant part of the history of a single world where all people, whatever their origin, played equal roles.

ADAM SMITH, COLONIALISM, AND LIBERAL IMPERIALISM

AbstractAdam Smith had a longstanding interest in colonialism and more generally relations between Europe and the rest of the world. It was through engagement with these issues that he worked through some of the central elements of his thought. This paper examines both Smith’s contexts and our own and argues that Smith’s work provides an important resource for reflecting today on relations with distant and diverse others today. It identifies three aspects of Smith’s thought that are particularly relevant: the political and economic costs of colonial ventures to the colonisers themselves, the question of whether and how imperialism had encouraged ‘progress’, and the question of how social and cultural differences should be understood and judged. The paper teases out Smith’s sometimes uncertain arguments in these areas and suggests that they can contribute to our own reflections on the troubled practices of liberal imperialism.

On the question of the imperial rivalry (based on materials of British exhibitions at the last third of the XIX – early XX centuries)

In the practice of British imperial propaganda, international and colonial exhibitions occupied a prominent place, which made it possible to demonstrate the prosperity and unity of the vast possessions of the metropolis. The 1886 Exhibition was the first event of its kind and left behind a huge amount of sources which made it possible not only to present exhibition sites, but to draw conclusions about the theory and practice of British imperial building. The last third of the 19th century is characterized by the intensification of colonial rivalry between the great powers, which was expressed not only in trade, economic and military, but also in ideological confrontation. In this regard, it is interesting to analyze what assessment was given in the context of the exhibitions to «other colonialists» and by what parameters British imperial practices were compared with the policies of the competing powers. The article concludes that colonial exhibitions were indeed based on opposition, but it was not an opposition between Britain and other modern empires, but an opposition between the past and present of the British possessions themselves. In the past there was savagery and barbarism by the «uncivilized» natives or oppression by «bad» colonizers such as the French and Dutch. In the present, everything testified to progress, prosperity and peace within the British family.International exhibitions have always been an effective way to establish cooperation and have not been a method of demonstrating conflicts. The experience of the 1908 exhibition clearly demonstrated the peaceful potential of such projects.

«Verso una nuova pentecoste»: celebrare insieme nel 2025, la memoria del primo Concilio di Nicea (325), facendo diventare questa ricorrenza comune a tutti i cristiani un evento di Universalità e Inclusione

"“Toward a New Pentecost”: celebrating together in 2025, the memory of the first Council of Nicaea (325), making this memory common to all Christians an event of universality and inclusion. “Towards a new Pentecost”! The article takes up these words of Pope Francis during his visit to Romania and develops a hypothesis: the celebration in 2025 of the 17th centenary of the Council of Nicaea (325) could be an opportunity for Christians together, Catholics, Orthodox and Protestants, to live a “new” Pentecost. New because it would manifest that some obstacles of the past can be removed if the Holy Spirit is allowed to act. The article addresses the issue of the dogma of homoousios defined at Nicaea with a formula that concerns faith in Jesus Christ, but in the same context it shows that an imperial practice is emerging that will increasingly accentuate the divisions within the church (Orthodox and heretics) and in society (citizens or outlaws). The imperial mentality identified in the type of religiosity of the two emperors Constantine and Theodosius persists throughout the centuries in the sensitive relationship then is established between state and church and this leads to reproduce within the church, through the curial culture, the same dynamics of absolutization of power. The final part reflects on Pope Francis who points Christians today toward a different direction, that of overcoming the power conflicts of the past and recalls the urgency of a witness of brotherhood in the confession of the one faith in God the Father and in the Son of the “same substance as the Father”, a faith that can be confessed together only with the power of the Spirit that generates communion. Keywords: Pentecost, Council of Nicea, State-Church, Christian unity "