Colonial Territories Research Articles

Defending metropolitan identity through colonial politics: The role of Portuguese naturalists (1870-91).

This paper explores how João de Andrade Corvo and José Vicente Barbosa du Bocage, two nineteenth-century Portuguese naturalists, were able to reach prominent political positions in their country by means of their work in, respectively, botany and agriculture, and zoology. The authority they derived from their scientific activities and the knowledge they acquired in the process, favored by their proximity to particular political quarters, elevated them to important governmental offices, in the context of which they implemented policies that reinforced Portugal's identity as an imperial nation. The colonial policies and agreements signed by Corvo and Bocage aimed at securing Portuguese colonial territories, which, aside from their economic relevance, constituted a symbol of power that reinforced the sovereignty of a small nation in a Europe dominated by the rule of increasingly vaster and stronger states. In spite of their different scientific careers and personal interests, both naturalists played key roles in Portuguese foreign affairs and colonial negotiations of the late nineteenth century, especially during the Scramble for Africa.

Radio dla zagranicy – od hard power do soft power w międzynarodowej nadawczości radiowej

Shortly after its invention, radio began to be used for political broadcasting with an international range. It was used to exercise power at a distance, sending messages to overseas diplomatic outposts or colonial territories. In the inter-war period it became an instrument of propaganda, and during the II World War the countries engaged in the conflict began to broadcast propaganda to listeners abroad, trying to bring them to their way of thinking. Simultaneously, you could observe a change in the approach to the international use of radio. It was regarded that radio programmes didn’t have to be used for disinformation and manipulating foreign listeners, but that it could aid in building a positive image of a given country, by basing the messages on genuine information and presenting the country’s cultural attractions, as well as cultivating a positive opinion among among listeners abroad. In consequence the stations and programmes that emerged and which utilised soft power – in international communications, which was the impulse behind the development of a new public diplomacy treating the recipient of the message – the overseas public – as the object of the communicative process.

‘Our ancestors taught us the business know-how in Africa’: Continuity and Innovation in Ismaili Transnational Business Culture

Through a comparison between transnational business practices of Ismaili Muslim settled in the British and Portuguese colonial territories of East Africa and in contemporary Angola, we aim to discuss the impact of colonial experiences in the reconfiguration of postcolonial migrant entrepreneurial cultures. Articulating several guiding empirical questions, we will attempt to show that the continuing centrality in the (politico-economic, relational, and cultural) logic of the particular nation-state in which Ismaili business activities are embedded, the notion of a disadvantageous network closure, concomitant with the importance of face-to-face contacts, the mutual trust and understanding sustained through personal relations, and the tendency for national loyalty to prevail over religious belonging (whenever any potential conflict between the two exists) constitute crucial dimensions of an accumulated tacit knowledge (functional, behavioural, identitarian) which is significant in the analysis of the Ismaili competitive advantage in different colonial and postcolonial African contexts.

The Political Economy of Ending Headhunting in Central Borneo: Inter-colonial and Kenyah perspectives on the 1924 Kapit Peacemaking Agreement and its aftermath

AbstractThis article, largely based on archival research, highlights two contradictory outcomes of colonial state formation in central Borneo. The first is characterized by territorial consolidation and efforts to neatly sedentarize peoples within each colonial territory, while the second is characterized by pacification that unwittingly liberalized the flows and movements of people and commodities transgressing colonial state boundaries. The 1924 Kapit Peacemaking Agreement in colonial Sarawak is often noted for its significance in bringing a final end to the practice of inter-ethnic headhunting, principally between the Iban of Sarawak and the Kenyah from Dutch Borneo. While it marked the successful outcome of a long phase of colonial pacification and territorial consolidation for both colonial states in Borneo, the agreement's outcome simultaneously highlights the contradictory inter-colonial motives and expectations regarding the resulting increase of cross-border flows of people and commodities. The presented case highlights challenges facing Dutch colonial state formation when attempts to subjugate and sedentarize riverine peoples, who were geographically tied to fluid commodity chains and flows, directly undermined the former's own efforts to establish authority in its borderland frontier.

Reparations and the Colonial Dilemma: The Insurmountable Hurdles and Yet Transformative Benefits

The Seventh Annual Latina and Latino Critical Race Theory (LatCrit) Conference held in May 2002 at the University of Oregon, not unlike other efforts in the movement, addressed a panoply of challenging, provocative, and controversial issues. Perhaps one the most intellectually interesting and yet troubling panels addressed reparations for the inhabitants of United States' colonial territories. Specifically, the panel was titled Reparations, Redress, and Remedies: Undoing the Legacy of Colonialism and Imperialism. Members of the academy as well as a representative of Puerto Rico's Independence Party participated in a lively discussion and debate. Although the articles resulting from this panel touch upon Puerto Rico's colonial dilemma, not all addressed the issue of It is the topic of reparations that is the focus of this cluster introduction. The topic of reparations provokes strong feelings because, among other reasons, it is a request of the dominant culture to atone for past wrongs, primarily through monetary relief. For many, the response to any request for reparations, but particularly for a request from the inhabitants of Puerto Rico, would be: Why reparations? Not unlike reparations claims for Native Hawaiians, opponents to a Puerto Rican reparations effort would probably deem the reparations claims unavailing because the opponents simply would fail to perceive that any legal wrong has occurred. This cluster introduction will address this question of why reparations. Before addressing the nascent Puerto Rican reparations debate, a brief description of LatCrit theory is in order.

Defending Empire at the United Nations: The Politics of International Colonial Oversight in the Era of Decolonisation

ABSTRACTThis article argues that, although anti-colonial delegations to the 1945 San Francisco Conference did not succeed in bringing all colonial territories under the umbrella of international trusteeship, the threat of expanding international oversight shaped the relationship between colonial governments and international organisations in powerful ways. By focusing on how the UN Special Committee on Non-Self-Governing Territories evolved as a de facto supervisory system for dependent territories, this article considers the ways that representatives at the United Nations defined dependency and self-government and explores the crusade that colonial governments led to justify imperialism in the post-war world. Through a consideration of the diplomatic actions of France, Great Britain and Belgium, this article explores the ways that colonial empires jointly mobilised to defend colonialism at the level of the United Nations. In the face of evolving supervisory mechanisms at the United Nations, the French, British and Belgian delegations joined forces in an attempt to expose some of the inherent contradictions in UN policy towards dependent populations, and to make the case that subject populations living in independent territories often endured worse conditions than those living in formal overseas empires.

Fotografi di Hindia Belanda

This research analyses photography in the Netherlands Indies since the mid-19th century and its development until the early 20th century. The rise of photography in the Netherlands Indies as part of its modernization, is not merely the development of the arts, but photography was also used to explore the colonial territory of the colonial government. European photographers were sent to document archeological artefacts in various expeditions in several places in the archipelago.Photography also began to be commercialized. European, Chinese and even indigenous photographers arose with their photo studios. They have produced a natural and anthropological landscape of the Netherlands Indies, from Europeans and indigenous people living there. The commercialization of photography expanded with a variety of photo subjects, sold to other parts of the world in the form of albums, souvenirs or postcards. This answered the curiosity of the outside world on the Netherlands Indies as a colonial area.

280 - Impact of Red Blood Cell Transfusions on Survival in Lower-Risk MDS Patients Included in the European Leukemianet MDS (EUMDS) Registry

This study represents the first investigation into the accumulation of chemical elements in small mammals inhabiting the territory of a great cormorant colony. Trapping was done in the Juodkrantė great cormorant colony, one of the largest colonies in Europe. The accumulation of 20 chemical elements in the bodies (muscle and bones) of yellow-necked mice (Apodemus flavicollis) was investigated using the energy-dispersive x-ray fluorescence equipment Spectro Xepos HE. Two groups of positively inter-correlated chemical elements (Mg, Al, P, Ca and Al, S, Cl, K) were identified. The concentrations of five elements differed significantly between mice trapped in different zones of the colony with differing intensities of cormorant influence: the values of K and Cu in A. flavicollis increased in line with an increase in the influence of the cormorants, while the concentrations of Rb and Pb decreased. The concentrations of Mn differed between zones, but were not related to the intensity of bird influence. Differences in the concentration of Zn (ANOVA F = 24.38; p < 0.001), Fe (F = 4.60; p < 0.05) and Mo (F = 4.47; p < 0.05) were related to the gender factor, all concentrations being higher in females. The concentrations of Zn were age-dependent, being highest in adult individuals (21.7 ± 4.5 μg g−1) and exceeding those in subadult (19.4 ± 3.4 μg g−1) individuals or juveniles (16.7 ± 1.3 μg g−1). In general, the concentrations of accumulated elements in A. flavicollis from the territory of the cormorant colony were lower than in rodents from industrially polluted sites.

Reconceptualising localised Cold Wars in southern Africa

This article aims to examine how localised conditions contributed to the shaping and maintenance of the Cold War in southern Africa during the last three decades of the Cold War. In particular, its focus is on the period 1961 – 1989, during which ‘brushfre’ conficts erupted in the Portuguese colonial territories of Angola and Mozambique, in Rhodesia (and later Zimbabwe), South-West Africa (now Namibia) and the Republic of South Africa. The result of colonisation and decolonisation, racial and ethnic tension and the wider East - West confrontation, the Cold War in southern Africa was never one homogenous confict – evidence strongly attests that it comprised many ‘little Cold Wars’. The forces and governments of the regional states, as well as international powers such as the United States, the USSR, the People’s Republic of China and, most remarkably, communist Cuba, all had clashing geo-political and geo- strategic interests in the southern African region during the last three decades of the Cold War. Their political, economic and military manoeuvring meant that the region played host to some of the most complex localised conficts of the Cold War period. This article will reconceptualise the history of Cold War southern African by demonstrating that, although intrinsically linked, these southern African conficts constituted not one homogenous but several little Cold Wars and that localised conditions were the driving forces for confict, not the wider East-West ideological confrontation.

A Digital History of Anglophone Demography and Global Population Control, 1915–1984

A Digital History of Anglophone Demography and Global Population Control, 1915–1984

The Nationalism Debate: Past and Present

The nation states have emerged and been shaped through an evolutionary process. The major factors triggering their emergence have been rise of capitalism, breakdown of empires, independence of colonial territories and, in recent years, the disintegration of large federal states. The character and the authority of nation states have been shaped initially by the interstate system of the Treaty of Westphalia and largely by the French Revolution and the United Nations (UN) Charter, rise of regionalism and globalisation. Nationalism continues to thrive and remain dominant all over the world mainly because its possible substitutes such as global capitalism, socialist internationalism and UN multilateralism did not prove viable. The major challenges the nation states face today are coping with new problems arising within their territories and those which affect the very survival of mankind. The Indian nationalism embraces the entire variety of elements which go into the making of a nation state. It has been a subject of bitter controversy starting from India’s independence movement. To be true to its ethos reflected in the Indian Constitution, it must remain pluralistic, inclusive and humanitarian.

Watching the astonishment of the native: early audio-visual technology and colonial discourse

In this paper, I give an overview of early exhibitions of phonographs, kinetoscopes and cinematographic devices in colonial Singapore. Beyond giving an overview of the different exhibitions, the paper also sets them in the context of the colonial discourse prevalent in Singapore and many parts of the world. In the newspaper discourse these new technologies from Europe and United States were depicted as an illustration of ‘Western’ progress and civilisation. These technologies, be it railways, roads, steamships, telegraphs or cinematographs, were used to impress and astonish the colonised, and functioned as a way to signal Western power in colonial territories, something Brian Larkin calls the colonial sublime. Newspaper reports frequently commented on the amazement and perplexity of the local, ‘native’ population when encountering public exhibitions of phonographs, kinetoscopes and cinematographs. This was largely a constructed narrative as it helped create and emphasise differences between coloniser and colonised, and justify colonial structures. The paper demonstrates how new technological devices within a few years were exhibited by people from different Asian backgrounds, and thereby diminished perceived and constructed differences between European and Asian people.

Managing Agency Capitalism and Malayan Rubber: Harrisons &amp; Crosfield, Ltd. (1900–1940)

In Britain’s colonial empire, managing agency capitalism linked businesses that had no presence in the colonial territories with suppliers of commodities produced there. Firms such as Harrisons and Crosfield, Ltd., one of the major agency houses in British Malaya, provided a crucial link between British capital and the Malayan rubber industry in the early twentieth century. Drawing on the archives of Harrisons and Crosfield, this article explains the mechanisms that allowed such firms to generate great profits based on the services they provided, and to control the management of plantations.

Il fronte meridionale della Grande guerra : la Libia come teatro del primo conflitto mondiale

In recent years the international historiography on the First World War has widened its interest to non-European theaters of war, emphasizing the global nature of the conflict. The theme of war in the colonies provides an interesting perspective, challenging the thesis of the victory of the Entente, which if it is indisputable in the Old Continent, is less obvious in the colonial territories. The article analyzes the war that took place in Libya during the period 1914-1918 by including it in the context of World War I and highlighting the connections between the anticolonial resistance movement and the political strategies of the Ottoman Empire and Germany in north Africa.

Is Extraction Bad? Encomienda and Development in Colombia Since 1560

We explore the impact of encomienda, a forced-labor institution imposed by the Spanish throughout Latin America during three centuries, on long-term development outcomes in Colombia. Despite being a classically extractive institution, municipalities that had encomiendas in 1560 have higher development indicators than otherwise-similar, neighboring municipalities without. Encomienda is associated with higher municipal GDP/capita, lower poverty and infant mortality, and higher secondary school enrolments today. Further probing implies a mechanism by which encomenderos founded the local state in the colonial territories they dominated. This stronger local state persisted through Colombia’s war of independence and the chronic instability of the early republic. It mobilized resources and invested in public goods in ways that initially suited encomenderos, but over long periods of time also spurred economic and human development. Our results highlight the benefits of disaggregating “institutions” to analytically discrete components, and of pushing analysis to the subnational level.

Critical Refugee Studies and Native Pacific Studies: A Transpacific Critique

Critical Refugee Studies and Native Pacific Studies:A Transpacific Critique Yến Lê Espiritu (bio) When I started my research on the Vietnam War and its refugees, I conceptualized the Vietnam War as a dyadic war between the United States and Vietnam—an asymmetric dyad to be sure, but a nevertheless. What I came to realize was that the war, and the subsequent US-led refugee rescue operation, involved a constellation of US former and current colonial territories in the Asia-Pacific region. This realization led me to reconceptualize the Vietnam War not as a dyadic but as a transpacific war that inflicted collateral damage on the Vietnamese and also on indigenous and (formerly) colonized subjects in the circuits of US Empire. This reconceptualization of the Vietnam War advances a transpacific critique that knits together diverse memories of historical violence—settler colonialism, military expansion, and refugee displacement—into a layered story of US Empire in the Asia-Pacific region. My own refugee flight—from Vietnam to the Philippines to Guam and then to California, moving from one US military base to another—illustrates the reach, and destruction, of the US military empire in the Asia-Pacific region. In 1975, about 92 percent of the first-wave refugees who fled Vietnam via US military aircraft trekked through the Philippines, Guam, or Wake Island—all islands in the Pacific, all with prominent US military bases.1 Not mere happenstance, these stopovers followed the dictates of a “militarized organizing logic” that reflected—and revealed—the layering of US past colonial and ongoing militarization practices in the Asia-Pacific region.2 As many scholars have documented, US military bases form one of the most visible connections that link the United States, Asia, and the Pacific Islands, with outposts stretching from Okinawa and South Korea to Hawai‘i and San Diego.3 Indeed, it was the enormity of the military buildup in the region that enabled the United States to launch and sustain its war in Vietnam and to handle the large-scale refugee rescue operation immediately after the Fall of Saigon in April 1975. Situating Vietnamese refugees within the longue durée of US military colonialism in Asia and the Pacific, I bridge critical refugee studies and Native Pacific [End Page 483] studies by conceptualizing “the refugee” as a site of transpacific critique, whose emergence exposes the linked processes of colonization, militarization, and forced displacement. Transpacific Studies and Native Pacific Studies During the 1980s and 1990s, critics working in Asia-Pacific and Pacific Rim studies point out how the largely economistic approach to the transpacific, with its focus on rising Asian economies and the transfer of peoples and goods across and around the Pacific, elides and excludes the more fluid and dynamic transcultural exchanges and Oceanic movements from below. In the introduction to their 1995 seminal collection Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production, Rob Wilson and Arif Dirlik pointed out how the “Asia-Pacific” formulation, circulated and fortified by market planners and military strategists, fails to capture the transpacific cultural experiences and innovations wrought at the grassroots level.4 More than a decade later, Setsu Shigematsu and Keith Camacho made a similar argument, contending that the Asia-Pacific term, while useful for economic analyses of industries and transpacific networks of power along the Pacific Rim, makes invisible the multiplicity of Pacific Islander contributions to these regional economies and polities.5 More recently, Viet Nguyen and Janet Hoskins propose a framework for transpacific studies that considers both domination and resistance in the geopolitical struggle over the Pacific.6 Native Pacific studies critics have long pointed out that discussions of the Asia Pacific have “habitually excluded” those within the Pacific Ocean, opting to focus instead on societies situated on its boundaries.7 When Pacific Islanders figure into the transpacific formulations, they are often absorbed into the rubric of Asian/Pacific Islander, Asian Pacific, or Asian Pacific American, panethnic categories used primarily in US public policy, mass media, and social activism circles and that prioritize Asian/American concerns.8 Amy Ku’leialoha Stillman, Vicente Diaz, J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, and others have indicated how the contemporary formulations of the transpacific in Asian American studies have largely...

Operation Torch, 8 November 1942: America’s Encounter with a Divided France and Africa and the Middle East in Transformation

The Maghreb Review, Vol. 42, 2, 2017 © The Maghreb Review 2017 This publication is printed on FSC Mix paper from responsible sources OPERATION TORCH, 8 NOVEMBER 1942: AMERICA’S ENCOUNTER WITH A DIVIDED FRANCE AND AFRICA AND THE MIDDLE EAST IN TRANSFORMATION ALLAN CHRISTELOW* On 8 November, 1942, American and British troops landed in Morocco and Algeria. It was the first step toward an Allied victory in Europe. But it also marked the beginning of the end of the French colonial empire. Studies of Operation Torch by Western scholars have largely focused on how it fit into the conflict between the Allied and the Axis powers.1 Yet it was less than three years later that we see the first event of the conflict leading to Algerian independence – the brutal suppression of Algerians calling for independence following VE Day in May of 1945.2 American President Franklin D. Roosevelt stressed the importance of self-determination, but he was ambivalent about where and how soon this principle should come into effect. One needs to recognise that Operation Torch was not a single, isolated event. It fit into other military campaigns in Africa: the movement of British forces into the Italian colonial territories of Ethiopia and Libya, and the movement of Free French forces from Equatorial Africa through Chad into Libya.3 Also, just three years after Operation Torch, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima in Japan. The uranium used to make it had come from the Belgian Congo, just to the south of the Free French base in Equatorial Africa – a story fully examined only recently.4 Part of the problem is that scholars focusing on the European conflict and using conventional sources fail to recognise the magnitude of the social and cultural changes that took place among French colonial populations in the early 1940s – in Africa, Indochina, and the West Indies. This includes looking at the psychological impact of new military technology, above all aeroplanes, on these * Idaho State University, Idaho, USA 1 Among such studies are Rick Atkinson, An Army at Dawn: the War in North Africa, 1942– 1943. New York: Picador, 2002; Andrew Buchanan, America’s Grand Strategy in the Mediterranean During World War II. Cambridge University Press, 2004 and Anthony Verrier, Assassination in Algiers: Roosevelt, Churchill, De Gaulle and the Murder of Admiral Darlan. New York: W.W. Norton, 1990. 2 Studies focusing on how this period helped pave the way for the Algerian revolution include Annie Rey-Goldzeiguer, Aux origines de la guerre d’Algérie, 1940–1945: de Mers-El-Kebir aux massacres du Nord Constantinois. Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 2001; and Mahfoud Kaddache, Histoire du Nationalisme Algérien: Question Nationale et Politique, 1919–1951. Algiers: Société Nationale d’Édition et de Diffusion, 1980. 3 Eric T. Jennings, Free French Africa in World War II: the African Resistance. Cambridge University Press, 2014. 4 Susan Williams, Spies in the Congo: America’s Atomic Mission in World War II. New York: Public Affairs, 2016. 100 ALLAN CHRISTELOW populations. Another part of the problem is that these scholars tend to view Algeria and Morocco as individual ‘nations’ separate from others, rather than considering their connections to other parts of the Arab world through migration, study, travel, and Arabic language media – which became a lot more important with the development of printed material in Arabic starting in the late 1800s. Also, there is a lack of historical perspective. To understand Operation Torch it can be useful to go back to the early 1900s when the French and the British finally ended their rivalry in Africa, and began building the Entente Cordiale, and when the United States made its first appearance on the scene with President Teddy Roosevelt sending battleships to Tangier, and America helping to promote a solution to Morocco’s problems at the Algeciras Conference in Spain in 1906. Morocco had become, in effect, the door through which America entered North Africa as a mediator. Algeria’s most important ties were with Syria, where there was a large population of Algerian refugees centred on the family of Amir `Abd al-Qadir, leader of the Algerian resistance against the French invasion...

Mission and Colonialism

This article focuses on two British colonial territories in southern and central Africa, Mashonaland and Nyasaland in the late 19th to early 20th centuries. It concerns the history of Afrikaner missionaries from South Africa’s Dutch Reformed Church (DRC), and their relationships with opposing interest groups. The period in question saw some inter-ethnic conflict among indigenous peoples, which included an underground slave trade, as well as much colonial-indigenous strife. The article particularly considers the balancing act missionaries sought to achieve in terms of their paternalistic, yet interdependent relationships with indigenous rulers over against their equally ambiguous relationships with the colonial authorities. As such this article presents a novel way of looking at Afrikaner missionaries and their entanglements with indigenous leaders.

HISTORY, ANTHROPOLOGY, COLONIALISM, AND THE STUDY OF INDIA

ABSTRACTAutobiography of an Archive is a collection of essays by Nicholas B. Dirks written since 1991, preceded by an autobiographical introduction. This review article discusses the collection in relation to Dirks's overall scholarship and the wider intellectual field in which history, anthropology, and colonialism intersect in the study of India. Dirks has written three books: The Hollow Crown (1987), an “ethnohistory” of a “little kingdom” in south India; Castes of Mind (2001), about colonialism, anthropology, and caste in India; and The Scandal of Empire (2006), which discusses the foundations of British imperial sovereignty. In The Hollow Crown and other writings, Dirks significantly contributed to the debate about the “rapprochement” between anthropology and history, which was prominent in the 1980s. But in the 1990s, Dirks thought, the rapprochement ground to a halt; the relationship between anthropology and colonialism then came to the fore, and Castes of Mind, as well as some of these essays, were influential critical studies of colonial anthropology. In recent essays, Dirks has examined the “politics of knowledge” and the postwar development of South Asian area studies in the United States. This article argues that although the relationship between anthropology and history is now rarely debated, historical anthropology has continued to develop since the 1980s. Moreover, anthropologists in general now recognize that history matters, and that colonialism crucially shaped modern society and culture in India, and other former colonial territories. Many of Dirks's conclusions about, for example, Indian kingdoms and caste in colonial discourse, have been criticized by other scholars. Nonetheless, anthropological writing, especially on India, is no longer unhistorical, as it once often was, and Dirks's scholarship has played a valuable part in bringing about this change.

Testing settlement models in the early Roman colonial landscapes of Venusia (291 B.C.), Cosa (273 B.C.) and Aesernia (263 B.C.)

This paper examines settlement density and settlement patterns in the Roman colonial territories of Venusia, Cosa and Aesernia, located in three different landscapes of central southern Italy (modern Basilicata, Tuscany and Molise). Using a series of GIS tools, we conducted a comparative analysis of the density and spatial distribution of sites dating to the Hellenistic period (ca. 350–50 b.c.). We used the legacy settlement data collected by previous large-scale, intensive, site-oriented field surveys to test the validity of two competing rural settlement models of early Roman colonization: the conventional model of neatly organized settlements regularly dispersed across the landscape and the recently proposed theory that colonists adopted a polynuclear settlement strategy. After calculating the extent to which the archaeological datasets conform to the regular or polynuclear model, we conclude that only a very small portion of the colonized areas actually meets traditional expectations regarding the organization of early colonial settlements. Our analyses show that the legacy survey data is more consistent with the polynuclear settlement theory, but the data also reveals some completely unexpected patterns, suggesting that early Roman colonial landscapes were more diverse than previously thought.