Territorial Colonies Research Articles

Did Ethiopia Survive Coloniality: Eurocentric colonial interpretations of Ethiopian history; Struggle against territorial colonialism; The three unique historical aspects of Ethiopia; Challenges of modernization; Did Ethiopia Avoid Colonialism

What is unique about Ethiopia is, the history of survived colonial conquest. The Ethiopian patriotic forces defeated Italian army at the Battle of Adowa in 1896. Ethiopia has a long history of voluntarily pushing modernisation in the context of development. The major drive of modernization aimed at transforming Ethiopia from feudal ‘traditional’ society to ‘modern’ society. Hence, Ethiopia has been in-charge of its development trajectory, compared to other colonised Africans. Ironically, alike other African countries Ethiopia is still struggling with challenges of development. This is historical, an interpretive and conceptual study, executed in thematic terms. Theoretically, the study predicated on decolonial epistemic perspective, that articulates application of modernization to development, as its units of analysis. The findings indicate the need for epistimic decolonization to avoid the invasion of cognitive empire with its modernist influences of civilisation and development.

Review: Germany and the Ottoman Railways: Art, Empire, and Infrastructure, by Peter H. Christensen

Peter H. Christensen Germany and the Ottoman Railways: Art, Empire, and Infrastructure New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2017, 204 pp., 77 color and 66 b/w illus. $65 (cloth), ISBN 9780300225648 Indispensable—if ubiquitous and seemingly ordinary—components of everyday life, infrastructures shape how space and time are organized across multiple scales. As sizable interventions on the land, they require a sustained investment of substantial human, economic, and material resources. Consequently, infrastructures engender productive avenues of inquiry, and in recent decades, following the imaginative work of historians of technology and geographers, architectural and urban historians have begun demonstrating a keen interest in this subject. With his astute site and period selection, Peter H. Christensen introduces a valuable international geopolitical dimension to this literature. Germany and the Ottoman Railways presents the world of complex interactions and unexpected synergies that occurred between a waning, yet still sovereign, Ottoman Empire and the robustly industrial neophyte German state as it entered the colonial race long dominated by Britain and France. This was neither internal colonization to achieve territorial cohesion nor imperial colonialism for resource extraction and labor exploitation, but, in its ambiguity, Christensen suggests, the railway project opened up a vast gray zone for tactical interventions by actors from both countries, despite the obvious asymmetries between them. Examining railway construction from inception to completion, Christensen traces changing loyalties, opportunistic moves, and the ebbs and flows of enthusiasm, funds, and resources. The volume consists of two parts. In the first, chapters titled “Politics,” “Geography,” “Topography,” and “Archaeology” examine constructions of knowledge and imagination, moving from the abstract macroscale of geopolitics to the microscale of archaeological remains in specific sites. Next, chapters titled “Construction,” “ Hochbau ” (meaning aboveground structures), “Monuments,” and “Urbanism” explore the generation of physical form at successively larger scales. By the late nineteenth century, reform-minded Ottoman officials had recognized how railroads could …

Pathogens and disease defense of invasive ants.

Ant invasions are often harmful to native species communities. Their pathogens and host disease defense mechanisms may be one component of their devastating success. First, they can introduce harmful diseases to their competitors in the introduced range, to which they themselves are tolerant. Second, their supercolonial social structure of huge multi-queen nest networks means that they will harbor a broad pathogen spectrum and high pathogen load while remaining resilient, unlike the smaller, territorial colonies of the native species. Thus, it is likely that invasive ants act as a disease reservoir, promoting their competitive advantage and invasive success.

Variation in spatial scale of competing polydomous twig-nesting ants in coffee agroecosystems.

Arboreal ants are both highly diverse and ecologically dominant in the tropics. This ecologically important group is particularly useful in ongoing efforts to understand processes that regulate species diversity and coexistence. Our study addresses how polydomy can influence patterns of nest occupation in competing arboreal ants. We examined the spatial structure of nest occupation (nest distance, abundance and density) in three polydomous co-occurring twig-nesting ant species (Pseudomyrmex simplex, P. ejectus and P. PSW-53) by mapping twigs occupied by ants from each species within plots in our study site. We then used two colony structure estimators (intraspecific aggression and cuticular hydrocarbon variation) to determine the relative degree of polydomy for each species. All work was conducted in coffee agroforests in Chiapas, Mexico. Our results revealed that the two species with highest abundance and nest density were also highly polydomous, where both species had either single or multiple non-aggressive colonies occupying nests on a large spatial scale (greater than the hectare level). Our results also indicate that the species with the lowest abundance and density is less polydomous, occupying several overlapping and territorial colonies at the hectare level in which multiple colonies never co-occur on the same host plant. These results contribute evidence that successful coexistence and highly polydomous colony structure may allow ants, through reduced intraspecific aggression, to successfully occupy more nests more densely than ant species that have multiple territorial colonies. Furthermore our study highlights the importance of considering intraspecific interactions when examining community assembly of ants.

A World Without “Dependant Kings”: Eighteen Hundred and Eleven and the Forms of Informal Empire

IT HAS BEEN ROUGHLY TWO HUNDRED YEARS SINCE THE PUBLICATION OF Anna Laetitia Barbauld's explosively controversial poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, and the same span has elapsed since the Latin American wars of independence, an event her poem prophesies, celebrates, and closes with. This dual bicentennial is a reminder that we have yet to do justice to the impact of the Latin American revolutions on Barbauld's poem, or on Romantic literature more generally. Bringing Latin America into our understanding of the nineteenth-century Atlantic world--something transatlantic studies have only sporadically attempted (1)--shows Eighteen Hundred and Eleven to be part of a lively conversation about the networks of imperialism rapidly emerging between Great Britain and the Spanish American colonies in revolt. In fact, the narrative form of Barbauld's poem offers a remarkable resistance to the discourses of what has recently come to be known as informal as they first began to circulate. It is therefore a profitable lens through which Romantic-era questions of revolution, sovereignty, and empire can be freshly complicated to account for a new and troubling configuration of global influence. At the time Barbauld was writing Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, Latin America (2) was beginning to revolt against Spain, creating a flurry of transatlantic activity. Writers and revolutionaries like Francisco de Miranda, Andres Bello, and Simon Bolivar went to London to seek financial partnership, while British officials and Romantic poets began to think seriously about how such newly opened Atlantic relations might create an opportunity for Great Britain to seize control over American markets and resources. Critics have identified this as the birth of what we now call modern neocolonialism or empire. (3) In Barbauld's day these terms did not exist, but it was no secret that if the Spanish American colonies were to win independence, the British might re-subject them to financial control. As early as 1809 James Mill had written in the Edinburgh Review: fate of Spain is sealed.... The only question remaining for Britain is whether it will take Spanish America for itself ... whether Spanish America will become free under the auspices of British protection. (4) Throughout the nineteenth century Great Britain would enact this very fantasy; Latin America emerged politically sovereign into waiting structures of financial subjugation. These mechanisms of financial dependence had been employed sporadically before, within and without Great Britain's formal empire, but the nineteenth century would witness an unprecedentedly vast institutionalization of empire as a primary means of exerting influence in the new world. In other words, Latin American revolution reorganized the Atlantic network in two crucial ways: it shifted control of the Americas from Spain to Britain, and it made way for empire to step out of the shadow of territorial colonialism as a unique and perhaps even more effective means of overseas dominance. British-Latin American relations offer dynamic ways to revive the well-worn questions of imperial power. Robert Aguirre's 2006 Informal Empire and Rebecca Cole Heinowitz's 2010 Spanish America and British Romanticism both remind nineteenth-century scholars that Great Britain had powerful imaginative and material ties to the southern Americas. Alongside several other key voices in the field, (5) they have noted that while British empire in Latin America had forceful impacts that merit a sustained inquiry such as the formal empire has received, empire also operated under strange and distinct logics. Unlike traditional colonial targets, Latin America entered the Romantic imagination as a powerful symbol of liberty from oppression. Those who wished to return the region to a state of dependency under British imperial power, therefore, faced a unique rhetorical and logical problem, one that began to spark subtle reconfigurations of what sovereignty might mean and how it might be undermined in new ways. …

British colonialism in East-Africa during nineteenth century

British colonialism in East-Africa during nineteenth century

Multiple colonialism in Western Sahara

The Sahrawi are a hybrid people found in parts of northwest Africa, mostly Western Sahara and they are victims of multiple colonialism. The decision by European powers to include parts of their land in various colonies subjected many Sahrawi to different French and Spanish colonial policies and experiences in Morocco, Algeria, Mauretania and Western Sahara. The Spaniards took control of Western Sahara and when they decided to leave, Morocco, with its irredentist dreams stepped in. Morocco became the new colonial power as it claimed Western Sahara territory as a province. It behaves in the same way as the French did when they claimed that Algeria was a province of France. Morocco exploited the prevailing international climate to advance its colonialistic proclivities at a time when territorial colonialism had become anathema internationally. That climate made the big powers, whether communistic or capitalistic, appear to support Morocco. This way their perceived interests seemed to dictate that they be in good books with Morocco and they thus condoned Morocco's annexationist designs. The fact that Morocco itself used to be colonized by the French and the Spaniards tends to hide the fact that it is a colonial power imposing itself on the Sahrawi. Key words: Western Sahara, colonialism, Morocco, Spain

Tunisia, Contested: Italian Nationalism, French Imperial Rule, and Migration in the Mediterranean Basin.

This article explores the contradictions in Italy’s relationship with the Mediterranean basin, taking Tunisia as a focal point. Tunisia was a paradoxical case at the intersection of Italy’s foreign policy: it was a former Roman imperial colony with a strategic location, but it also possessed a large and vibrant Italian emigrant settlement, like the Italian “colonies” of Buenos Aires, Sao Paolo, New York, and San Francisco. This situation caused much confusion in debates over how Italy should develop its international influence. Faced with a choice of priorities, the Italians of Tunisia called for Italy to concentrate on establishing territorial colonies in the Mediterranean, rather than cultivating Italian emigration worldwide. In 1881, France surprised Italy by seizing control of Tunisia, skewing Italian policy and fomenting a sense of weakness and insecurity. Italy’s “loss” of Tunisia encouraged the belief that Italian imperial motives were more deserving and more sincere, and Nationalists used the wealthy and successful Italian community of Tunisia as a model of what Italians would be able to achieve in neighboring Libya. Fascist representations of Italians in Tunisia, however, finally discredited the Italian expatriates’ claims to rights and representation under French colonial rule. This case study thus illustrates how Mediterranean Europe and North Africa became enmeshed in multiple layers of competition and integration through trends in colonialism, migration, and the formation of transnational communities.

A França Antártica, o corso, a conquista e a "peçonha luterana"

Em fins de 1555, alguns navios franceses sob o comando de Nicolas Durand de Villegagnon chegaram à Baía de Guanabara. Havia muito que embarcações francesas navegavam por estas bandas, realizando escambo com populações indígenas, embarcando grandes quantidades de pau-brasil. A expedição de Villegagnon e a criação da França Antártica, embora possuíssem objetivos muito mais complexos e duradouros, serão aqui analisadas com base na disputa luso-francesas pela riquezas, pelo comércio e pelo domínio ultramarino. Em outras palavras, esse artigo se propõe a discutir, a partir da experiência da França Antártica, as recorrentes ameaças representadas pelo corso francês, no Atlântico Sul. A abordagem da dinâmica do corso permite que se compreenda o movimento maior de disputa européia por mares e territórios coloniais. O sentimento de medo dele decorrente, ao influenciar a tessitura do colonialismo moderno, possibilita a interpretação das marcas e dos significados impressos no Rio de Janeiro e nos séculos XVI, XVII e XVIII.

Entering the Pale of Literary Translation

Entering the Pale of Literary Translation Susie Jie Young Kim (bio) Translation is a literary practice that has been abused and mistreated in many ways. Literary translations have often been viewed as subordinate and inferior forms that straddle the line separating what is “literature” from what is not. They have often been kept out of standard literary histories because the translator didn’t have the appropriate birthplace, and because translations have been plagued by a discourse of equivalence, which assumes that for any given word, there exists an exact equivalent in another language. For translation to operate in this artificial way, one would have to assume that language lacks any adaptability and flexibility [End Page 89] and is therefore impervious to the influences of its cultural context; that the meanings of literary texts are fixed and therefore there is only one possible interpretation of every story, novel, play, or poem; and that a translator is able to suppress all the experiences she would normally bring to a text so as to be a sterile medium through which this mechanical process can take place. Literary translation is, of course, a bit more than a mechanical, formulaic, or clinical process in which one text is seamlessly transformed into its equivalent in another language. In my own academic work, I have encountered translation in one of its most creative forms. In turn-of-the-century Korea, translators were translating just about everything into Korean. Their creations transcended strict notions of “translation”: some would technically be considered “adaptations,” that is, liberal transformations in which only a skeleton of the “original” text remained. Translators wrestled with a multitude of foreign languages, and some did not even know which language the text that they were translating had originally been written in. Some translators based their work on previous translations done in Japanese, Chinese, English, and even Esperanto. These early translators understood the process as one of literary creation and went about their work with the freedom usually associated with more conventional literature. Rather than gain their rightful place in literary history, however, their role has been simplified to that of helping to introduce Western literature to Korea and thereby make Korean literature more “modern.” Besides the two languages and cultural traditions involved in the translation process itself, there are external factors that affect literary translations. The historical relationship of the two literary traditions also influences the translator’s approach to or attitude toward the process. As a translator of Korean poetry and fiction into English, I am very aware of the uneven power relationship between Korean literature and its European and American counterparts that resulted from the cultural imperialism accompanying territorial colonialism in early twentieth-century Korea. And of course, the translator’s own position comes into play. Unlike some adherents of more standard notions of translation, I am very aware of the fact that my various identities as a Korean, a scholar of Korean literature, and a woman all leave their respective traces on my translations. To restate, the act of translation is not merely a process of copying contingent on the linguistic principle of equivalence. The text is filtered and contaminated through the translator and thereby transformed, most obviously in its physical appearance and more subtly in its content. Literary translation, which for practical purposes is an arrested moment of such fluidity, also maintains a fluidity of its own. It is this aspect of the translation process that I aim to achieve in my own work. What often occurs when I ask people to read drafts of my translations is that they assume the attitudes discussed above. The most frequent comment I get is some version of “We don’t say that in English,” “We don’t [End Page 90] have that expression in English,” or “This doesn’t sound right.” Such comments are often justified. I have misread the original text, become myopic —as one inevitably does when spending too much time concentrating on a translation—or, more simply, mistyped. My reader then does her job as a reader: to point out a sentence or phrase that is incorrect. However, it is also often the case that the wording of a phrase or...

An Interview with Peter Carey

Peter Carey was born May 7, 1943, in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, Australia, to two car dealers. He attended Geelong Grammar School and Monash University. He is the author of a short story collection, The Fat Man in History, and Other Stories, published in 1981 by Picador Books, and five novels. The first three were published by Harper: Bliss (1982), Illywhacker (1985), and Oscar and Lucinda (1988), which won the Booker Prize. Carey's two most recent novels were published by Knopf: The Tax Inspector (1991), and The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994). He has helped to write two screenplays: Bliss, an adaptation of his novel, and Until the End of the World. Carey lives in New York City with his wife, theater director Alison Summers, and their two sons. The following interview took place in June, 1995. LISA MEYER: Do you see the position of an artist as always one of self-exile, of being on the outskirts, since you are an expatriate in many ways? PETER CAREY: Part of me wants to reject that as a romantic notion, but yet I suppose if I look at the story of my life, I've always been an expatriate in one way or the other, so it's certainly consistent with my life. LM: Much of your work deals with the dynamics of our present post-colonial world. You investigate these dynamics in imaginary worlds, avoiding direct correlation to any one country. What are the advantages and disadvantages of transferring such an investigation into an imagined context? Does this displacement help highlight one of your major points in your fiction, that all belief systems are imaginary? PC: The last bit let's deal with later. I'm not even sure I know what to say about that. But for the first part, it's funny - for me, it's always been very boring to report. One of the things that I most enjoy about fiction is that it really is an imagined world. If I can say to somebody that something is very made up, to me that's a great compliment. In the case of the most recent book, The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, I was interested in how I might write about America. And of course I couldn't do it, because I don't know nearly enough. But I thought I was free to write about an idea of America. And so it was that: the notion of wanting to write about this, but not feeling entitled to do it, that led me to think that I could make an invented America. Then the most important point, in this journey that ends up with this book is being in Disney World - and seeing Mickey and Minnie walking around like royalty through the crowd, and trying to see this in a new and sharp way, and then thinking, Well, maybe in my imagined America, I could have creatures like these having some kind of mythic significance, wandering the streets like holy men and women. So once I started to think that, I began on a journey, which is to make something that relates to my ideas about America, but it's already on the way to definitely not being America. I don't wish that to be a cute parallel, where one can say - oh, that's America and that's Australia - I set out to prevent an easy closure. LM: Do you believe your latest book, The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, is a cautionary tale about the harms of post-colonialism? Or rather, an investigation of the dynamics of post-colonialism? PC: The dynamics, yes. A cautionary tale - well.... LM: I saw Tristan's deformed body, as perhaps symbolizing the damage caused by economic, political and territorial colonialism. PC: I think you're right about that. If I might dodge the first part of that question, and we can come back to it - I was not blind to the possibility of that reading: this monstrous little body representing, at least in my Australian readers' minds, something to do with the damage done. LM: Do you see Tristan yearning for the world to like him but being rejected by that world, on a very personal level, reflecting the dynamic of a colonized country? PC: It's very much the Australian condition: the passion to be loved by the parent that's rejected you. …

Morality and American Foreign Policy: The Role of Ethics in International Affairs, by Robert W. McElroy

This monograph attempts to demonstrate that moral norms can, and do, significantly affect international affairs by their influence on individual decision-makers, domestic public opinion and national reputation abroad. It investigates four cases of American foreign policy-making in the 20th century: US food aid to the Soviet Union during the Russian famine of 1921, President Nixon's decision to alter US policies on biochemical weapons production in 1969, the signing of the Panama Canal Treaties in 1978, and the bombing of Dresden during World War II. Three of these cases illustrate the influence of ethics in foreign policy: questions of conscience led US decision-makers to provide food aid to the Soviets despite its potentially stabilizing effect on a regime they despised; domestic support for the international moral norm against chemical warfare persuaded Nixon to endorse a radical revision of US biochemical policies, and the existence of a moral ban on territorial colonialism enabled the Panamanian leader Omar Torrijos to rally international opposition to continued US occcupation of the Panama Canal Zone. The limits of international norms are demonstrated in the case of Dresden, where the US Air Force felt compelled to violate the moral norm of non-combatant immunity.

Between Colonizers: Hong Kong’s Postcolonial Self-Writing in the 1990s

Most debates on postcolonial politics center on issues that are by now familiar to those working in cultural studies. There are, first, the disputes and conflicts concerning the ownership of particular geographical areas, an ownership whose ramifications go beyond geography to include political representation as well as sovereignty over ethnic and cultural history. Though these “postcolonial” disputes and conflicts date back to the days of territorial colonialism, they remain the reality of daily life in places like South Africa, Israel, Lebanon, and Jordan. Second, there are the debates around reclaiming native cultural traditions that were systematically distorted by the colonial powers in the process of exploitation. In the case of India, for instance, historians argue for the need to wrest India’s past from colonialist historiography—that is, from the ways in which India was ideologically as well as economically and territorially dominated by the British. In other words, even though India has been territorially independent since 1947, the Indian people’s “postcolonial” struggle against British colonialism remains an urgent cultural task. Third, there is the question of neocolonialism in countries that were once European colonies and that, after national independence, have been targeted for aggression and exploitation by the United States during its period of global power. We think here especially of its “client states” in Central and Latin America, and the Middle East.

From Colonialism to Professionalism: The Public-Private Dynamic in United States Foreign Financial Advising, 1898-1929

This chapter analyzes the forms that United States foreign financial advising took during the transitional period from 1898 to 1930, after territorial colonialism had ceased to seem a viable way of imposing financial arrangements, but before the advent of post–World War II international financial institutions. It focuses on Latin America in order to develop a structural framework for understanding the different relationships from which North American financial advisory missions to various nations drew authority and legitimacy. In 1904, the Dominican Republic became a laboratory for working out new means of reforming the backward financial practices of foreign nations. The Dominican government accepted the foreign receivership in order to get the loan; the bankers extended the loan only because the convention's guarantee of government involvement minimized the risk; and policy makers used the loan to force a financial rehabilitation that would, they felt, advance the strategic concerns of the United States in the Caribbean.

Africa Between Nationalism and Nationhood

Africa is caught between the birth of her modern nationalism and the quest for nationhood. Her nationalism is a reality that played a part in ending territorial colonialism but nationhood itself is an ambition rather than a reality. The agonies of Africa in the second half of the twentieth century have been ultimately derived from the pains of intermediacy between nationalism and nationhood. We shall discuss in this article the rise of the new political consciousness in Africa, its potential, and its limitations. We shall also examine the fortunes of political parties in the continent across that historic divide between colonialism and formal independence. We shall grapple with the emergence of new social classes in Africa, and the impact of civil-military relations on this system of stratification.

A path analytic model of international violence

Hypotheses regarding international violence are plentiful. However, quantitative study of these relationships lags far behind what is necessary for proper examination. This study takes several important variables (territorial disputes, colonies, multinationals, intergovernmental organizations, nongovernmental organizations, trade, military alliances, arms expenditures and political similarity) and quantitatively examines their relations to international violence by means of path analytic models. The initial development of the models is done with global data from 1951–1965. Then the equations of these models are used to estimate the values of each of these variables in 1925–1939. The estimations are checked against the historical data. This critical test of the models was successful. Consistent results of the models are that arms expenditures, military alliances and colonies are positively related to international violence at a later time. Political homogeneity is negatively related to international violen...

Group Organization of a Territorial Damselfish, Eupomacentrus Planifrons

1. The damselfish Eupomacentrus Planifrons develops dense territorial populations in staghorn coral (Acropora cervicornis). 2. Field surveys and field experiments revealed that individuals preferred to maintain a territory in an inferior position within a large group than to be isolated on prime habitat. 3. Individuals in inferior positions within the group often meandered about the colony ("forays") in search of vacancies within superior habitats. 4. The size of the damselfish was correlated with habitat quality with larger individuals being found in superior portions of the staghorn colony. As areas became vacant, they were populated by individuals of similar size to the previous owner and to surrounding individuals. 5. As both males and females maintained territories within a colony, the larger colonies gave individuals greater access to potential mates. This has support since an individual's mobility outside the boundaries of its colony was limited and the most courtship was observed in the largest colonies. 6. Similarities between permanent territorial colonies and dominance systems are discussed.

Social factors in population regulation of the Silver Gull, Larus novaehollandiae Stephens

Intraspecific hostility in the silver gull, Larus novaehollandiae, occurs at the individual level in relation to all its activities. The degree of dispersion that results varies from close range during resting to various distances in different feeding situations and territorial colonialism during breeding. It is suggested that the factor primarily responsible for limiting colony size is food supply within foraging range, and that feeding rights gained through hostility between individuals, not competition for nesting sites, determine which birds can breed.