Abstract: In Power, Culture and Modernity, Oluwatoyin Oduntan challenges the conventional interpretation of colonial African history by mapping the instructive responses of the Egba people of South West Nigeria to European sociopolitical and religious forces that sought to shape and appropriate their sociocultural and political systems.In six engaging chapters, Oduntan explores the socio-political development among the Egba people of Abeokuta in the southwestern part of Nigeria. The new settlement, established in 1892, consisted of various sub-Egba groups: the Ake, Oke-Ona, Gbagura, Oshile, and later the Owu. Oduntan argues that the Egba nation was negotiated out of various groups that migrated into Abeokuta (31). The ... Read More PubDate: 2020-05-06T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Reflecting an astonishing breadth of knowledge, this study offers a provocative, epistemological reassessment of anticolonial agitation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From the outset, Gopal invites her reader to reconsider the foundational mythologies that continue to inform British perceptions of the empire. Decolonization, she asserts, did not proceed from any benevolent "imperial initiative"; paternalist policymakers did not simply bestow rights and privileges on colonized populations who had supposedly matured under their political tutelage (3). Rather, those freedoms were won through the vigorous "self-assertion" of dissidents in India, Africa and the Caribbean. During periods of colonial crisis ... Read More PubDate: 2020-05-06T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: The foundational assumption of scholars who study the past via the senses is that the human experience cannot be fully understood without reference to the entire sensorium—not just sight, but also sound, smell, taste and touch—among particular populations in various places at different times. Imperial projects, involving as they did extended encounters between peoples possessing often radically different sensory and related cultures, accompanied to a greater or lesser extent by efforts by the colonizers to "civilize" the colonized, are ripe for exploration of this kind. Adding a comparative dimension, in this case between the Britain in India and the United States in the Philippines, offers the prospect of an ... Read More PubDate: 2020-05-06T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: The power of water—in the form of oceans, rivers and rainfall—has played a vital role in shaping the physical contours of our planet. Coastlines and islands, as well as flood plains and river valleys, have been moulded by moving water over aeons. The essays in Negotiating Waters remind us that waterways of all kinds have also had a huge bearing on human power structures and identities; they are contested and transformative spaces, rich with interpretive possibilities. In pointing to the oceans, seas and rivers of the world as spaces where identities are formed and calibrated, altered and challenged, Negotiating Waters makes a valuable contribution to what Steve Mentz has termed the "blue humanities": a discernible ... Read More PubDate: 2020-05-06T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: On 11 August 1827, a man in his early thirties disembarked from the convict ship Manlius at Sydney Cove. He stood over five foot seven inches in height, his complexion was described by the ship's surgeon as "D[ar]k, Ruddy," his hair and eyes were listed as brown, and he had "much hair on his breast."1 He was Thomas Cust, previously a British army officer, more recently a private enlisted in the East India Company's service, and more recently still a thief. In 1824 he was sentenced to three months' imprisonment for larceny.2 A year later Thomas was sentenced to death at York's Lent Assizes for cattle stealing.3 The sentence was commuted but within two years he was convicted of larceny again at Kingston Upon Hull and ... Read More PubDate: 2020-05-06T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In Nothing to Write Home About, Laura Ishiguro works with more than two thousand letters from dozens of colonial families to chart the ways that "British people came to understand a familiar everyday in a once unfamiliar place" and "made feasible and imaginable long-term individual and collective belonging in British Columbia" (147). The book is divided into three parts that move from more general themes to specific case studies. At the same time, Ishiguro experiments with shifting from a more formal to a more personal analytical and authorial tone. The first section focuses on the pitfalls, opportunities and complexities that came with a reliance on letters and the post as constitutive elements of transimperial ... Read More PubDate: 2020-05-06T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Truth will not make us free, but taking control of the production of truth will.In settler societies, coming to grips with historical wrongs continues to pose an enduring dilemma. Powerful scripts and events of redress, forgiveness and reconciliation are used to petition for and engage with narratives of the "post" settler nation state. The scope, substance, and politics of reckoning with settler colonial wrongs have garnered an intense controversy, and by turns, precipitated vibrant and creative scholarship. In Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, Canada, and to a lesser extent, the United States, scholars have recognized the distinctive roles of reconciliatory efforts in settler societies, and attempted to untangle ... Read More PubDate: 2020-05-06T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Film in the Colonies is the most comprehensive and detailed study of the British Colonial Film Unit (1939‒55) and its extensions. The CFU, as it was known, was part of a complex array of nonfiction film initiatives in Britain and throughout empire that the author carefully disentangles and traces in illuminating detail. The volume positions the colonies at the center rather than in the margins of British film history. British colonial cinema is an academic subfield with its own wide-ranging critical histories, but the author's remarkable access to films and documents is unique. While other researchers in this area such as Rosalind Smyth have excavated the history of the CFU in segments and others have probed ... Read More PubDate: 2020-05-06T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: It is well known that land was the major economic resource of mandate Palestine, the basis for the livelihood of the vast majority of the population and consequently the subject of much discussion by British rulers about its ownership. The major piece of land legislation was the 1928 land settlement ordinance. This legislation launched a cadastral survey of agricultural land, with the aim of ensuring that ownership of all landed property was secured by a government-issued title deed. There is a large and growing body of literature on land in mandate Palestine,1 but the full complexity of the land settlement process remains understudied.This article argues that the main problem remains one of frames of reference.2 ... Read More PubDate: 2020-05-06T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Jessica Hinchy's book Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India considers the relationship between the colonial state and the transgender Hijra community. Since 2014 Hijras have been officially recognised as the third gender in India but in the nineteenth century were known to the British as a small community of eunuchs primarily identified by wearing female clothing and associated with public performance and blessings of fertility at weddings and births. Providing a history of this understudied group and its interactions with colonial officials in the North West Province in the late nineteenth century, Hinchy convincingly argues that the interest in Hijras was more than an eccentric colonial obsession with ... Read More PubDate: 2020-05-06T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: "I cannot but consider Mr. Turton like a stone tied to Lord Durham's neck," began an ominous 9 June 1838 letter to the editor of the Montreal Herald. "The metaphor will stand the test of strict criticism," an individual identified only as E continued: "Lord Durham must either cast off Mr. Turton or sink with him." Days earlier Governor General Lord Durham had appointed Thomas Turton, a former East India Company barrister in Calcutta, to Lower Canada's unelected Executive Council. E did not begrudge Turton a salary, but took offense that Turton, "of whom even Lord Melbourne was more ashamed in London than of a lie, [had] been deemed by Lord Durham good enough for Quebec."1 The Herald was the premier conservative ... Read More PubDate: 2020-05-06T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: The title of this work translates as The White Tsar's Burden: Russian Ideas of an Imperial Civilizing Mission in Central Asia.1 It is a clever play on words, combining "The White Man's Burden," Rudyard Kipling's notorious poetic encapsulation of the British Empire's supposed duty to "civilize" its colonial subjects, with the term "White Tsar" (belyi tsar'), used since the sixteenth century to "legitimate Russia's claims to dominion over... Inner and Eastern Asia."2 In The White Tsar's Burden, Hofmeister interrogates "Russian-language debates about Central Asia" (present-day southern Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan) from the region's conquest by the Russian Empire in the 1860s to the ... Read More PubDate: 2020-05-06T00:00:00-05:00
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