Abstract: In a translated 1784 history of the Afghan people, the former Governor General of Bengal Henry Vansittart tellingly observed, "I conceive that the knowledge of what a nation suppose themselves to be, may be interesting to a society like this, as well as of what they really are."1 The motivation lurking behind questions of historical representations raised by Vansittart—the way in which a society would like to portray itself—demonstrates how the act of writing history is fraught with political and ideological meanings. These implications are particularly significant in imperial contexts such as the British Empire because of their comparative nature. Colonial histories not only contributed to British perceptions ... Read More Keywords: Ireland; Great Britain; History; India; Historiography; Farmers' spouses; Malaya; Health care reform; Public health; Exile (Punishment); Indonesia; Penal colonies; Penal transportation; Nahuas; New England; China; Peru; Urbanization; Eurasians; Sex; PubDate: 2018-01-09T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: On 22 May 1922, an article entitled "Women as Empire Builders" appeared on the front page of The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser (henceforth Free Press). The author used the pen name "Dona Quixota," suggesting a conscious choice to pose herself as the female version of a well known idealist and impulsive character—Don Quixote in the novels of Miguel de Cervantes (1605, 1615). In the article the author described the everyday challenges faced by a rubber planter's wife in British Malaya (henceforth Malaya). The author demanded that the empire confront the grinding conditions suffered by the planters' European wives, which included separation from family, confinement, monotony, boredom, disease and ... Read More Keywords: Ireland; Great Britain; History; India; Historiography; Farmers' spouses; Malaya; Health care reform; Public health; Exile (Punishment); Indonesia; Penal colonies; Penal transportation; Nahuas; New England; China; Peru; Urbanization; Eurasians; Sex; PubDate: 2018-01-09T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: The "third British Empire," or the stage of British colonialism from the end of World War I to the post–World War II period, was a time fraught with tension as Britain struggled to pay the costs of imperial occupation and maintenance while colonial peoples made increasing claims for expanding the rights of British subjecthood.1 This tumultuous period in British imperial history began dramatically, as the spread of anticolonial and radical movements around the globe contributed to a general sense of imperial crisis. The senseless violence and destruction of World War I led colonial subjects to mount critiques of European civilization, myths of supremacy and the entire political-economic order of the West. ... Read More Keywords: Ireland; Great Britain; History; India; Historiography; Farmers' spouses; Malaya; Health care reform; Public health; Exile (Punishment); Indonesia; Penal colonies; Penal transportation; Nahuas; New England; China; Peru; Urbanization; Eurasians; Sex; PubDate: 2018-01-09T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, colonial powers around the world organized a massive and forced transfer of people within their dominions using the mechanism of penal exile. Rather than—or in addition to—punishing convicted criminals with execution, prison terms, flogging or confiscation of property, colonial powers dispatched men and women to distant parts of their empires as formal punishment for crimes. This flow of humanity played a major role in the foundation and settlement of Australia, Bermuda, New Caledonia, Singapore and French Guiana. It has been estimated that a quarter of a million people were transported across the sea from Britain and France as convicts in the century from 1820. In ... Read More Keywords: Ireland; Great Britain; History; India; Historiography; Farmers' spouses; Malaya; Health care reform; Public health; Exile (Punishment); Indonesia; Penal colonies; Penal transportation; Nahuas; New England; China; Peru; Urbanization; Eurasians; Sex; PubDate: 2018-01-09T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: The Sudans have undergone major upheavals over the last fifteen years. By 2005, fifteen years of civil war was brought to an end in South Sudan, but conflicts escalated across Sudan's other borderlands, particularly in Darfur and in the Nuba Mountains. President Bashir's regime has continued to entrench itself in Khartoum, moving from a sanctioned pariah state to a partner in Europe's attempts to control north African migration. South Sudan has taken the opposite trajectory. From its secession in 2011, its state- and nation-building project has foundered: its militarised elites have continued patterns of violent and repressive government of an alienated and impoverished citizenry, while competing over resources and ... Read More Keywords: Ireland; Great Britain; History; India; Historiography; Farmers' spouses; Malaya; Health care reform; Public health; Exile (Punishment); Indonesia; Penal colonies; Penal transportation; Nahuas; New England; China; Peru; Urbanization; Eurasians; Sex; PubDate: 2018-01-09T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Annals of Native America concerns the histories written by Indigenous writers from central Mexico in the roughly two centuries after the Spanish conquest. Written in alphabetic text in Nahuatl—the language of the major cultural-linguistic group in central Mexico at the time Spaniards arrived—these histories constitute rich and unique sources for the study of Nahua culture and society before and after the Spanish conquest. The Nahua histories reflect the persistence into the colonial period of the Indigenous tradition of history-telling organized year-by-year (known in Nahuatl as xiuhpohualli, or "yearly account") that combined pictorial texts with oral performance. Today, we refer to these colonial-era histories as ... Read More Keywords: Ireland; Great Britain; History; India; Historiography; Farmers' spouses; Malaya; Health care reform; Public health; Exile (Punishment); Indonesia; Penal colonies; Penal transportation; Nahuas; New England; China; Peru; Urbanization; Eurasians; Sex; PubDate: 2018-01-09T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: If ever there were a topic that has received more than enough scholarly attention, the Great Awakening should be it. The story of Old Lights and New Lights, of Edwards and Whitefield, is so familiar, and has been examined from so many angles, that it cannot possibly merit new attention and a fresh look—or can it' In this epic study of the Great Awakening in New England, Douglas Winiarski reinterprets the revivals and reframes them as a popular insurgency: one in which the people, inspired by new religious styles and experiences, seized control of a region's religious culture and refashioned it to suit their own sensibilities. In doing so, he shows that there is much more to these well-studied revivals than ... Read More Keywords: Ireland; Great Britain; History; India; Historiography; Farmers' spouses; Malaya; Health care reform; Public health; Exile (Punishment); Indonesia; Penal colonies; Penal transportation; Nahuas; New England; China; Peru; Urbanization; Eurasians; Sex; PubDate: 2018-01-09T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Stephen Halsey poses a provocative question to scholars of Chinese, imperial and global history: Why did China not succumb to Western imperialism' By 1914, Europeans had conquered 84.4 percent of the world, and much of what remained unconquered was Chinese. China was one of only six non-Western countries to retain its independence (along with Japan, Thailand, Ethiopia, Persia, and what became modern Turkey). Given the "developmental gap" produced by Europe's industrial revolution and its global dominance (40), Halsey asserts, "[a] cursory glance at the historical record suggests that China should have collapsed in the 1800s and become a formal colony of one or more of the great powers" (27). That it did not, and ... Read More Keywords: Ireland; Great Britain; History; India; Historiography; Farmers' spouses; Malaya; Health care reform; Public health; Exile (Punishment); Indonesia; Penal colonies; Penal transportation; Nahuas; New England; China; Peru; Urbanization; Eurasians; Sex; PubDate: 2018-01-09T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Orlando Bentancor investigates how an empire legitimizes and sustains the colonial project. His work reconciles the scholastic, legal and intellectual discourse on Spain's religious and legal right to invade the Americas, subjugate the Indigenous population, and appropriate its matter (mineral resources). And while many of the treatises and natural histories he consults apply broadly to Spain's sovereignty in the Americas, Chapters Three, Four and Five tailor the conversation to Cerro Rico (Rich Mountain), also known as Potosí, Peru. Potosí's silver mine became the empire's most lucrative source of wealth during the sixteenth century, while the physical process of mining fostered an infamous reputation for the mita ... Read More Keywords: Ireland; Great Britain; History; India; Historiography; Farmers' spouses; Malaya; Health care reform; Public health; Exile (Punishment); Indonesia; Penal colonies; Penal transportation; Nahuas; New England; China; Peru; Urbanization; Eurasians; Sex; PubDate: 2018-01-09T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Nineteenth-century Calcutta, the capital of colonial India until 1911, was a city of divergent interests. For British colonialists the cosmopolitan city represented economic and technological successes, which included a thriving jute trade and the introduction of modern infrastructure. Conversely, among the native bhadralok, or the educated upper and middle class "gentlefolk," Calcutta symbolized immorality and decay, configured in their representations as the space where traditional values broke down. Alongside colonialists and the bhadralok, an urban poor, composed of marginal groups such as migrant workers, sex workers, and low paid occupational groups, also populated the colonial city.Anindita Ghosh's book ... Read More Keywords: Ireland; Great Britain; History; India; Historiography; Farmers' spouses; Malaya; Health care reform; Public health; Exile (Punishment); Indonesia; Penal colonies; Penal transportation; Nahuas; New England; China; Peru; Urbanization; Eurasians; Sex; PubDate: 2018-01-09T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: National boundaries have always been more porous on the ground than in maps or in traditional discourses at the interface between politics, culture and writing. Trends in literary and cultural studies have been changing for a while now, and Aarthi Vadde's densely written but clearly argued book explores not territories but interstitial positions. It focusses on authors and texts for how they exemplify positionalities that look for new toeholds—for their time, and retrospectively—in dealing with cultural predicaments of in-betweenness. In such predicaments, to favour this or that side of a binary pull proves the wrong choice, because it would be unjust to the complex interconnections between rival claims, and also ... Read More Keywords: Ireland; Great Britain; History; India; Historiography; Farmers' spouses; Malaya; Health care reform; Public health; Exile (Punishment); Indonesia; Penal colonies; Penal transportation; Nahuas; New England; China; Peru; Urbanization; Eurasians; Sex; PubDate: 2018-01-09T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Christina Firpo's book is a reconstruction of the history of the removal of Eurasian children in French Indochina from the late nineteenth century to the postcolonial era. The mixed-blood children at the center of this near century long saga, known in the colonial parlance as "métis non reconnus," were the illegitimate offspring of Frenchmen and their Native concubines. Born out of wedlock, many of the métis had been abandoned by their European fathers, who, for various reasons, did not legally recognize them as their progeny. As a result, these children were denied French citizenship and its many legal, social and economic privileges. Raised by their mothers in the Indigenous milieu, they were given the lower ... Read More Keywords: Ireland; Great Britain; History; India; Historiography; Farmers' spouses; Malaya; Health care reform; Public health; Exile (Punishment); Indonesia; Penal colonies; Penal transportation; Nahuas; New England; China; Peru; Urbanization; Eurasians; Sex; PubDate: 2018-01-09T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In his 241-page book, Saheed Aderinto looks at the historical significance of illicit sexuality and the structures put in place by the British colonial administration in Lagos, Nigeria to control the obnoxious practice. This book is an important contribution to Sexuality Studies and the colonial history of Nigeria. This work, the first full book dedicated to researching sexuality in colonial Nigeria, is centred on sex, sexuality, sexual politics, class conflicts, urbanisation, and gender. When Sex Threatened the State analyses Nigerian responses to British sexuality laws and the contradictory ways in which the British and African reformers advocated for the regulation and/or prohibition of prostitution. Aderinto ... Read More Keywords: Ireland; Great Britain; History; India; Historiography; Farmers' spouses; Malaya; Health care reform; Public health; Exile (Punishment); Indonesia; Penal colonies; Penal transportation; Nahuas; New England; China; Peru; Urbanization; Eurasians; Sex; PubDate: 2018-01-09T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: When it gained independence from France in 1962, Algeria immediately faced a mass exodus of the pieds noirs, the European inhabitants of French Algeria. Soon afterward, it encountered an influx of outsiders referred to as pieds rouges ("red feet"), a hodge-podge of leftists, revolutionaries and other idealists from around the globe attracted to the "Mecca of Revolution," Algiers, a city full of radical possibilities. In Mecca of Revolution, Jeffrey James Byrne traces the emergence and evolution of Algerian nationalists' connection to broader Third World and revolutionary currents and how Algeria shaped the evolution of the international system from the early twentieth century to the mid-1960s.The book is organized ... Read More Keywords: Ireland; Great Britain; History; India; Historiography; Farmers' spouses; Malaya; Health care reform; Public health; Exile (Punishment); Indonesia; Penal colonies; Penal transportation; Nahuas; New England; China; Peru; Urbanization; Eurasians; Sex; PubDate: 2018-01-09T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: This little book is intensely disturbing.West starts off introducing readers to Papua New Guinea (PNG), theories of capitalist accumulation and dispossession, and a critique of the anthropology of Melanesia and PNG as "link[ed] to an anachronistic kind of anthropology" (28). Reviewing Marx'1 and Rosa Luxemburg's ideas2 on capitalism's relentless need for growth, West fast-forwards to understandings of dispossession focusing on ideological terrains. In his work on gentrification,3 geographer Neil Smith shows how urban renewal in New York involved casting inner city residents as "outside the natural order" and new residents as "discoverers" and "pioneers." West argues that similar representational strategies are at ... Read More Keywords: Ireland; Great Britain; History; India; Historiography; Farmers' spouses; Malaya; Health care reform; Public health; Exile (Punishment); Indonesia; Penal colonies; Penal transportation; Nahuas; New England; China; Peru; Urbanization; Eurasians; Sex; PubDate: 2018-01-09T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: For people who do not live or work in Africa, or have no direct or ongoing connection to the work of international conservation organizations trying to conserve African wildlife, stories about the steady and perhaps inexorable decline of large mammal populations, and most especially of the iconic African elephant, are bound to seem puzzling. On the face of it, the treatment meted out to African elephants, most especially since the European colonization of Africa in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the advent of powerful firearms, has been positively Hobbesian: nasty, brutish, and short. Things always seem to get worse, never better, to the point that the extinction by human agency, aided by environmental ... Read More Keywords: Ireland; Great Britain; History; India; Historiography; Farmers' spouses; Malaya; Health care reform; Public health; Exile (Punishment); Indonesia; Penal colonies; Penal transportation; Nahuas; New England; China; Peru; Urbanization; Eurasians; Sex; PubDate: 2018-01-09T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In their new edited volume, World Histories from Below: Disruption and dissent, 1750 to the present, Antoinette Burton and Tony Ballantyne present a highly readable collection of essays that will challenge both scholars and students to rethink traditional approaches to world history. Like any good piece of scholarship on world history, this volume does not purport to provide an exhaustive account of its subject matter, but instead traces key themes through an impressive array of historical case studies from around the globe. Ambitious in scope but meticulous in detail, this collection functions equally well as a primer for undergraduate students or as a resource for advanced scholars seeking to draw wider ... Read More Keywords: Ireland; Great Britain; History; India; Historiography; Farmers' spouses; Malaya; Health care reform; Public health; Exile (Punishment); Indonesia; Penal colonies; Penal transportation; Nahuas; New England; China; Peru; Urbanization; Eurasians; Sex; PubDate: 2018-01-09T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: The relevance of studying European empires and so-called legacies of the past has been at the heart of debates in Africa and Europe over the last few years. The discussions within and outside academia have been linked to the notion of reparations and to ideas about decolonising minds. Stoler's book is both timely and innovative. She centres her argument around two main points: Firstly, she seeks to examine the overt, covert, occluded and even unsuspected duress that are at the core of colonial and postcolonial histories and settings. Secondly, she makes a case for a re-imagining of our conceptual approach to the study of empires and post-colonial presence.Stoler looks at traces of the past that serve several ... Read More Keywords: Ireland; Great Britain; History; India; Historiography; Farmers' spouses; Malaya; Health care reform; Public health; Exile (Punishment); Indonesia; Penal colonies; Penal transportation; Nahuas; New England; China; Peru; Urbanization; Eurasians; Sex; PubDate: 2018-01-09T00:00:00-05:00
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