Abstract: As tangible manifestations of past and present interactions between human beings and the material world, objects challenge us to engage with difficult and often contradictory aspects of history.1 Examining them can encourage a focus on the entanglements between Europeans and Indigenous communities, as in the case presented here in the developing colonial political economy of the Solomon Islands (Figure 1). Objects speak of intersecting histories and biographies and of how their enmeshment in historical processes of change helps mediate such events.2 Ethnographic collections are rich repositories of such histories. Utilizing objects (conceived widely to include ethnographic artefacts, artworks, texts both private ... Read More Keywords: Mahaffy, Arthur,; Australia; Solomon Islands; Material culture; Violence; Papua New Guinea; Kanaka (New Caledonian people); Insurgency; France; Vanuatu; Ni-Vanuatu; Great Britain; Benguela (Angola); Drainage; Indians of North America; Tupac-Amaru, Jo PubDate: 2017-04-26T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Violence occupies a prominent place in colonial historiography. The recourse to violence against Indigenous populations was variously rationalized in colonial discourses: some simply denied the humanity of the colonized; at times, the primary expressed goal of colonial violence was to protect Western property and lives; in other cases, it was supposedly part of a civilizing effort through exemplary punishment.1 Complementing Chris Ballard's genealogy of the concept of "punitive expedition,"2 this article focusses on the moral dimensions of the process of naming—or not naming—certain acts of colonial violence as punitive expeditions. By the early twentieth century, the expansion and consolidation of the British ... Read More Keywords: Mahaffy, Arthur,; Australia; Solomon Islands; Material culture; Violence; Papua New Guinea; Kanaka (New Caledonian people); Insurgency; France; Vanuatu; Ni-Vanuatu; Great Britain; Benguela (Angola); Drainage; Indians of North America; Tupac-Amaru, Jo PubDate: 2017-04-26T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: The punitive expedition that this paper examines occurred in the midst of two wars: the Great War of 1914–18 and the war of "1917" in New Caledonia, a French penal and settler colony in the southwest Pacific. It set out from Poindimié on the east coast of New Caledonia's mainland, the Grande Terre, on Bastille Day 1917 and disbanded nearly a month later. Its theatres were the Amoa, Koné, Pamalé and Tipindjé valleys in the Grande Terre's rugged interior. Involving about 345 Kanak "auxiliaries," a rearguard of about thirty "French" soldiers (including troops from "Tahiti"),1 and led by French civilian surveyors, its macabre achievements were the destruction of more than 170 dwellings and their surrounding gardens and ... Read More Keywords: Mahaffy, Arthur,; Australia; Solomon Islands; Material culture; Violence; Papua New Guinea; Kanaka (New Caledonian people); Insurgency; France; Vanuatu; Ni-Vanuatu; Great Britain; Benguela (Angola); Drainage; Indians of North America; Tupac-Amaru, Jo PubDate: 2017-04-26T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Violent clashes between Europeans and Indigenous populations across the archipelago of the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) (Figure 1) date from the earliest Spanish contacts in 1606. As elsewhere in the Pacific, these clashes can be attributed to many different reasons and motives, matched by an equally diverse range of reactions and outcomes.1 But as European empires encroached on the islands and their citizens settled there in increasing numbers, such clashes became more frequent and more deadly. Regular French and British naval presence in the southwest Pacific and associated punitive expeditions date from the 1840s.2 In my usage, "punitive expedition" covers all attacks on Indigenous New Hebrideans by imperial or ... Read More Keywords: Mahaffy, Arthur,; Australia; Solomon Islands; Material culture; Violence; Papua New Guinea; Kanaka (New Caledonian people); Insurgency; France; Vanuatu; Ni-Vanuatu; Great Britain; Benguela (Angola); Drainage; Indians of North America; Tupac-Amaru, Jo PubDate: 2017-04-26T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Portraits of colonial scholars in New Spain often depict Spanish and Creole men surrounded by books and manuscripts.1 With quill in hand they are poised to pen the history of America on European paper by candle light. Generations of historians have closely followed this image by imagining colonial intellectuals—normally cloaked in religious habits—as bookish men and antiquarians ensconced in their convent and college libraries. But do the printed and unedited materials surrounding these men offer an alternative vision of scholarly activity in New Spain? The four books under review complicate traditional views of colonial scholars by recognizing the collaborative process of intellectual production and the formation ... Read More Keywords: Mahaffy, Arthur,; Australia; Solomon Islands; Material culture; Violence; Papua New Guinea; Kanaka (New Caledonian people); Insurgency; France; Vanuatu; Ni-Vanuatu; Great Britain; Benguela (Angola); Drainage; Indians of North America; Tupac-Amaru, Jo PubDate: 2017-04-26T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: On the pages of An African Slaving Port and the Atlantic World, Mariana Candido provides fundamental improvement to the expanding research field on the history of West Central Africa. The book is the first full-length history of Benguela and its hinterland to appear in English, facing therefore all the success as well as the challenges offered by trying to cover more than two hundred years of history.The reader will soon find out that Mariana Candido has taken the best of her training as an historian both in Brazil and in North America, not only incorporating and questioning several historiographical debates but also revealing a meticulous approach to her sources. Dealing with questions that emerged while she was ... Read More Keywords: Mahaffy, Arthur,; Australia; Solomon Islands; Material culture; Violence; Papua New Guinea; Kanaka (New Caledonian people); Insurgency; France; Vanuatu; Ni-Vanuatu; Great Britain; Benguela (Angola); Drainage; Indians of North America; Tupac-Amaru, Jo PubDate: 2017-04-26T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In the 13 November 2015 issue of The Guardian, Mexico City architect Alberto Kalach describes his vision for the restoration of the lakes that were once the dominant feature of the city's landscape and the foundation of its productive ecosystem. Kalach contends that "the way the city has evolved is basically fighting against its environment."1 This centuries-long battle has had destructive consequences, extending from the city's vanishing supply of potable water to its sinking buildings and the draining and poisoning of its aquifer.Vera Candiani's impressive book details the origins of the crisis Kalach would like to resolve. In an exhaustively detailed study of the Desagüe, as the ambitious engineering project ... Read More Keywords: Mahaffy, Arthur,; Australia; Solomon Islands; Material culture; Violence; Papua New Guinea; Kanaka (New Caledonian people); Insurgency; France; Vanuatu; Ni-Vanuatu; Great Britain; Benguela (Angola); Drainage; Indians of North America; Tupac-Amaru, Jo PubDate: 2017-04-26T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In his insightful analysis of seventeenth-century Anglo-Native relations in North America, Jeffrey Glover casts a wide net over what he understands as treaty-making: Native ceremonies such as dancing and feasting that included English visitors; Anglo-Native marriages, illustrated with case of Pocahontas and John Rolfe; property deeds transferring land from Native peoples to English colonists; and Anglo-Native trade agreements. All these interactions, Glover shows, can be usefully analyzed as forms of intercultural negotiation and treaty-making. Through a close reading of dozens of letters, reports, pamphlets and petitions composed by English colonists, traders and promoters between 1604 and 1664, Glover argues that ... Read More Keywords: Mahaffy, Arthur,; Australia; Solomon Islands; Material culture; Violence; Papua New Guinea; Kanaka (New Caledonian people); Insurgency; France; Vanuatu; Ni-Vanuatu; Great Britain; Benguela (Angola); Drainage; Indians of North America; Tupac-Amaru, Jo PubDate: 2017-04-26T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Since I am writing this review in Argentina and it is the Christmas season, which in our barrio of Buenos Aires at least is celebrated with fireworks, grilled meat, malbec, and books, it seems appropriate to begin with this quote from Roger Chartier's interview of Pierre Bourdieu, recently translated to the English:"It is likely that, if I were a historian, I too would take part in the production of Christmas presents."1This quote came to mind when an Argentine historian friend posted on Facebook an image of the second Spanish edition of Charles F. Walker's thick book inserted in a red Christmas stocking. My friend was sharing a post that in turn had shared the Christmas reading list of a noted Peruvian journalist ... Read More Keywords: Mahaffy, Arthur,; Australia; Solomon Islands; Material culture; Violence; Papua New Guinea; Kanaka (New Caledonian people); Insurgency; France; Vanuatu; Ni-Vanuatu; Great Britain; Benguela (Angola); Drainage; Indians of North America; Tupac-Amaru, Jo PubDate: 2017-04-26T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: The novelty of Jodi Weinstein's book, Empire and Identity in Guizhou: Local resistance to Qing expansion, lies in its adoption of a "livelihoods approach" to understand Zhongjia attempts to negotiate Qing dynasty rule through resistance or collaboration. The Zhongjia were a minority ethnic group residing in central and southern Guizhou and are now known as the Buyi. The livelihoods approach, borrowed from human geographers and anthropologists working on contemporary southeast Asia, involves considering "not only the activities that people use to make a living, but also the social, ethnic and religious resources at their disposal, and the decisions they make in view of local conditions and external forces" (5). ... Read More Keywords: Mahaffy, Arthur,; Australia; Solomon Islands; Material culture; Violence; Papua New Guinea; Kanaka (New Caledonian people); Insurgency; France; Vanuatu; Ni-Vanuatu; Great Britain; Benguela (Angola); Drainage; Indians of North America; Tupac-Amaru, Jo PubDate: 2017-04-26T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: La Escalera, a nineteenth-century slave rebellion, has long been the subject of debate, even to the point of doubts over its existence. Aisha K. Finch's history of La Escalera makes clear that those doubts are misplaced. In writing that history of La Escalera she has provided tremendous insight into the operation of the Cuban slave society and the colonial state, exploring the unexamined and revealing the hidden.In 1843, Cuban slaves twice rose up against the horrific oppression they endured. Moreover, they planned a third time, in 1844, though discovery of that conspiracy occurred before it came to maturation. Such a course of events was not unknown in Cuban history, but the repression that followed was. By the ... Read More Keywords: Mahaffy, Arthur,; Australia; Solomon Islands; Material culture; Violence; Papua New Guinea; Kanaka (New Caledonian people); Insurgency; France; Vanuatu; Ni-Vanuatu; Great Britain; Benguela (Angola); Drainage; Indians of North America; Tupac-Amaru, Jo PubDate: 2017-04-26T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Martha Few's fascinating book establishes the colonial precedents of Enlightenment-era humanitarianism and medical science, and describes public health campaigns initiated and executed far from imperial centers of power. She details the contributions of remarkable individuals like Chiapas-born Creole physician José Flores, Maya diviner-healer Miguel Chonay, Franciscan friar and ethnobotanist Mariano José Herrarte, and other Central American men and women of European, Mesoamerican and African descent who drew on and contributed to medical knowledge that circulated the globe. Successful inoculation campaigns against smallpox in Central America in the 1780s and 1790s influenced future medical humanitarian efforts ... Read More Keywords: Mahaffy, Arthur,; Australia; Solomon Islands; Material culture; Violence; Papua New Guinea; Kanaka (New Caledonian people); Insurgency; France; Vanuatu; Ni-Vanuatu; Great Britain; Benguela (Angola); Drainage; Indians of North America; Tupac-Amaru, Jo PubDate: 2017-04-26T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In his 1983 classic, Settler Capitalism, Donald Denoon explored the colonial encounter between settler pastoralists and Indigenous hunter-gatherers. Could the settler capitalist and hunter-gatherer modes of production be articulated into a functioning colonial formation? While settler communities absorbed some Indigenous people as labourers, Indigenous communities themselves, he argued, were not exploitable. No articulation between settler capitalism and Indigenous hunting and gathering could be fabricated: the emergent social formation did "not permit the survival of an earlier mode of production."1 Does a study of the articulations of modes of production, then, provide us with a link between settler colonialism ... Read More Keywords: Mahaffy, Arthur,; Australia; Solomon Islands; Material culture; Violence; Papua New Guinea; Kanaka (New Caledonian people); Insurgency; France; Vanuatu; Ni-Vanuatu; Great Britain; Benguela (Angola); Drainage; Indians of North America; Tupac-Amaru, Jo PubDate: 2017-04-26T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Published in the prestigious "Studies in Imperialism" series, where an emphasis on the cultural histories of empire has always been to the fore, Emily Manktelow's important contribution reflects recent interest in missionary families as sites of historical investigation. Her thorough and imaginative use of London Missionary Society (LMS) official records, as well as private papers, have generated two principal questions: What were the ideal families promoted by the society's leadership, and how were actual missionary families formed and sustained during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries?Manktelow provides brief introductions to the geographical contexts of her study: the LMS headquarters in London, the ... Read More Keywords: Mahaffy, Arthur,; Australia; Solomon Islands; Material culture; Violence; Papua New Guinea; Kanaka (New Caledonian people); Insurgency; France; Vanuatu; Ni-Vanuatu; Great Britain; Benguela (Angola); Drainage; Indians of North America; Tupac-Amaru, Jo PubDate: 2017-04-26T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: The flowering of colonial-missions history is increasingly acknowledged and oft mentioned in broader fields of colonial and global history. Mission archives are particularly rich, providing grassroots perspectives on the colonial encounter, and the wider dynamics of the cultural, social and political "contact zone." Mission sources are not without their problems, challenges and difficulties (cultural and racial arrogance being just one of many), but this book once again demonstrates that such sources also provide a unique culture-scape with which to approach modern global and colonial history. One aspect of the mission archive's value is the introspection of its actors, whose personal papers are often so fraught ... Read More Keywords: Mahaffy, Arthur,; Australia; Solomon Islands; Material culture; Violence; Papua New Guinea; Kanaka (New Caledonian people); Insurgency; France; Vanuatu; Ni-Vanuatu; Great Britain; Benguela (Angola); Drainage; Indians of North America; Tupac-Amaru, Jo PubDate: 2017-04-26T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: During a recent overland visit to Cambodia I was completing an immigration form at a border checkpoint near Anlong Veng in the northeast of the country, just across the Thai-Cambodia border, when a stern-looking immigration official asked me where I had entered from. I told him the name of the checkpoint on the Thai side of the border, "Chong Sangam." The official immediately corrected me, giving the Khmer pronunciation, adding in a harsh tone, "You are not in Thailand now. You are in Cambodia!" Not wanting to jeopardize my visa application I repeated the name to him, this time according to the Khmer pronunciation. I got my visa.This incident brought home to me the strength of the feelings that the drawing of ... Read More Keywords: Mahaffy, Arthur,; Australia; Solomon Islands; Material culture; Violence; Papua New Guinea; Kanaka (New Caledonian people); Insurgency; France; Vanuatu; Ni-Vanuatu; Great Britain; Benguela (Angola); Drainage; Indians of North America; Tupac-Amaru, Jo PubDate: 2017-04-26T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Visions of Sápmi is a beautiful book! The almost opaque dust jacket reveals a cover consisting of Anders Bureus' map of Sápmi1 from 1611 with Sverre Fjellheim's new interpretations on seasonal movements in the South Sámi area printed on top. The rear side shows a free-style motor cyclist in present day Sápmi. The cover clearly signals that this book aims at a discussion on presentation and self-representation. What is Sámi identity in the colonial past and the present politics of northern Europe?It was with great expectations I first held this coffee-table-sized volume in my hands and generally I was not let down. In the thought-provoking introductory article Lydia Svalastog introduces the reader to the more recent ... Read More Keywords: Mahaffy, Arthur,; Australia; Solomon Islands; Material culture; Violence; Papua New Guinea; Kanaka (New Caledonian people); Insurgency; France; Vanuatu; Ni-Vanuatu; Great Britain; Benguela (Angola); Drainage; Indians of North America; Tupac-Amaru, Jo PubDate: 2017-04-26T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Jawaharlal Nehru, whose own experience of colonial imprisonment ran to almost nine years, remarked in a letter to his sister Vijayalakshmi in June 1930 that "Life is prison is not meant to be exciting—it is about as uneventful as the existence of the average turnip" (cited by Hasan in Roads to Freedom, 179). Nehru's remark was no doubt intended to be flippant, even if it revealed an inner truth about the spirit-breaking boredom and crushing isolation of prison life. But, over the last twenty years, scholars have begun to see in the history of the colonial prison something more momentous than the "existence of the average turnip." One factor in this must surely have been the impact of Michel Foucault's Discipline ... Read More Keywords: Mahaffy, Arthur,; Australia; Solomon Islands; Material culture; Violence; Papua New Guinea; Kanaka (New Caledonian people); Insurgency; France; Vanuatu; Ni-Vanuatu; Great Britain; Benguela (Angola); Drainage; Indians of North America; Tupac-Amaru, Jo PubDate: 2017-04-26T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In a memoir of his service as a senior judicial officer in Britain's Western Pacific colonies between 1907 and 1920, Gilchrist Alexander caricatured the conventional trajectory of a punitive expedition as a violent reaction by colonial authorities to receipt of news "that a white planter or trader had been murdered by natives on the island of Malekula or some equally wild place":After due inquiry a man-of-war would be dispatched to the place of the crime. A party of bluejackets would be landed. Heavily loaded with rifles, ball ammunition, and kit, they would be marched from the beach up to a native village through a bush so dense that they could not see more than a yard or two. When, pouring with perspiration and ... Read More Keywords: Mahaffy, Arthur,; Australia; Solomon Islands; Material culture; Violence; Papua New Guinea; Kanaka (New Caledonian people); Insurgency; France; Vanuatu; Ni-Vanuatu; Great Britain; Benguela (Angola); Drainage; Indians of North America; Tupac-Amaru, Jo PubDate: 2017-04-26T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: This article addresses the praxis and representation of military operations (expéditions) conducted by French naval forces against Pacific Islanders in legally ambiguous precolonial settings before 1850.1 From the late 1820s, naval expeditions or their threat became intermittent tactics in emergent French imperial strategies to police, chastise or dominate Pacific Islanders. Almost invariably despatched in reaction to actual or reputed Indigenous violence against Frenchmen, such actions usually drew on local guides or allies. Three exemplary episodes typify the range of operations known to me empirically as an historian of New Caledonia and scientific voyages in Oceania. Two occurred in Tongatapu (Tonga) in 1827 ... Read More Keywords: Mahaffy, Arthur,; Australia; Solomon Islands; Material culture; Violence; Papua New Guinea; Kanaka (New Caledonian people); Insurgency; France; Vanuatu; Ni-Vanuatu; Great Britain; Benguela (Angola); Drainage; Indians of North America; Tupac-Amaru, Jo PubDate: 2017-04-26T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Punitive expeditions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries featured along a spectrum of military operations referred to variously by contemporaries as "little," "small," "savage," "hill," "forgotten" or "uncivilized" wars—and, by more recent writers, as "counter-insurgency operations."1 What distinguished the "punitive expedition" from these other actions was its specific salience in contexts where empires sought to manage their unruly boundaries. The immediate impetus for the research described here has been the converging interest, shared with a number of colleagues, in the origins of the label and practice of the punitive expedition, at least as it has been applied in our field of Pacific history ... Read More Keywords: Mahaffy, Arthur,; Australia; Solomon Islands; Material culture; Violence; Papua New Guinea; Kanaka (New Caledonian people); Insurgency; France; Vanuatu; Ni-Vanuatu; Great Britain; Benguela (Angola); Drainage; Indians of North America; Tupac-Amaru, Jo PubDate: 2017-04-26T00:00:00-05:00
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