Beyond race: constructions of ‘Europeanness’ in late-colonial legal practice in the Dutch East Indies

This article proposes to introduce the study of European identity into colonial history and vice versa. It analyses the ways in which the legal classification of the population functioned in late-colonial Indonesia. A close inspection of this case reveals that the oft-cited fundamental colonial difference between ‘ruler’ and ‘ruled’ was in reality not nearly as clear-cut. The concept of ‘Europeanness’ – as opposed to ‘Whiteness’ – is highlighted as the category at the center of colonial hierarchy. This leads to a re-evaluation of the relative significance of various differentiating categories in the colonial context, most importantly race and class. The author concludes that by not taking ‘Europeanness’ seriously as an independent category, scholars of ‘cultural racism’ have tended to overemphasise ‘race’, with the consequence of oversimplifying the complex, multi-layered nature of the colonial social hierarchy.     

Returning home: heritage work among the Stl’atl’imx of the Lower Lillooet River Valley

This article focusses on heritage practices in the tensioned landscape of the Stl’atl’imx (pronounced Stat-lee-um) people of the Lower Lillooet River Valley, British Columbia, Canada. Displaced from their traditional territories and cultural traditions through the colonial encounter, they are enacting, challenging and remaking their heritage as part of their long term goal to reclaim their land and return ‘home’. I draw on three examples of their heritage work: graveyard cleaning, the shifting ‘official’/‘unofficial’ heritage of a wagon road, and marshalling of the mountain named Nsvq’ts (pronounced In-SHUCK-ch) in order to illustrate how the past is strategically mobilised in order to substantiate positions in the present. While this paper focusses on heritage in an Indigenous and postcolonial context, I contend that the dynamics of heritage practices outlined here are applicable to all heritage practices.     

This is Not an Answer to the Question “Who is Indigenous?”

‘Indigenous’ is a colonial category, and it is always related to particular colonial configurations of diversity and in relationship to particular colonial/national states. In this paper, the many historical configurations in which the terms ‘Indian’ and ‘Indigenous’ have figured are traced, including the Spanish colonial state and the Argentine state. The ways in which these successive systems of categorization are juxtaposed is described. Finally, post-Western understandings of what it could mean ‘to be Indigenous’ are explored.     

Madness and colonisation: The embodiment of power in Pangia

The article considers two examples of ‘madness’ which occurred during the colonial era in Pangia district, Southern Highlands Province, PNG. The first, immediately prior to pacification, concerned outbreaks of madness among young Wiru men which were similar to the ‘wildman’ behaviour described in the Highlands ethnography. The second style of madness was associated with the so-called ‘hysteria’ accompanying revival activity by Christian missions. The two styles are compared using a Foucauldian perspective, primarily for the ways in which colonial technologies of power were inscribed on the bodies of Pangia people. The article presents an anatomy of colonial power, and suggests an ethnohistory of the body is possible. It examines the ways in which this power was created through discourses and practices involving concepts of the ‘primitive’ and ‘heathen,’ resulting in a transformation of the Wiru subject.     

‘In Defiance of the Highest Principles of Justice,Principles of Righteousness’: The Indenturing of the Bechuana Rebels and the Ideals of Empire, 1897–1900

This article explores the controversy around the suppression of the Langeberg Rebellion and subsequent punitive indenture of the ‘Bechuana rebels’, a serious episode of colonial violence which, like many others, has been forgotten. In recovering this episode, I argue that such controversies were crisis points in wider attitudes towards empire and colonial relationships. The article focuses on what the debate reveals about the articulation of four imperial ‘principles’ that those challenging the punishment argued had been undermined: ‘freedom’, ‘protection’, ‘civilisation’ and ‘justice’. By comparing reactions in Britain and southern Africa, I demonstrate that these values, evoked as if universally understood, were configured in ways that spoke to the specificities of different colonial sites and that their meanings differed, even within what may be described as ‘humanitarian’ networks, across places of Empire. I argue that violent episodes, such as the Bechuanaland controversy, created ruptures that exposed these discrepancies and contradictions.     

Mental arithmetic and juggling with figures statistics in French and British policy towards colonial immigration in the 1950s

In the 1950s, Britain and France faced a comparable development of increasing immigration from current or former colonial territories, which was perceived as problematic. Immigration statistics had a central role in governmental or administrative discussions; however, both for general difficulties inherent in immigration statistics and for specific problems due to ‘post‐colonial’ nationality arrangements, these statistics are of limited reliability. The ways statistics were used differed as reactions to ‘colonial’ immigration in Britain and France differed, corresponding to their respective post‐war experiences and political aims. The official use of statistics against this background serves to reveal certain national characteristics in their reaction to ‘colonial’ immigration.     

Local Intermediaries? The Missionising and Governing of Colonial Subjects in South Dutch New Guinea, 1920–42

This paper will show that the colonial project in south Dutch New Guinea was a joint project in which evangelisation, education, ‘civilisation’ and ‘pacification’ were taken up by the Dutch Catholic mission in close collusion with the colonial government. This was also a project in which a few Dutch missionaries deployed many goeroes (teachers) from elsewhere in the Dutch East Indies. These goeroes had an important position assigned to them by the Catholic mission and colonial government in the development of the Papuans and the area. This colonial structure utilised by both Dutch colonial administrators and missionaries has been labelled in the literature as a system of ‘dual colonialism’. Drawing on records held in missionary and colonial archives, the paper explores this dual colonial structure by analysing the roles of Catholic goeroes from the Kei and Tanimbar islands. This is done by taking Felix Driver’s concept of local intermediaries as the point of departure. While this concept makes visible the key role of goeroes, it is not without its issues, which will also be explored.     

‘Get into a Crack Force and earn £20 a Month and all found…’: The Influence of the Palestine Police upon Colonial Policing 1922–19481

The development of a ‘colonial’ police model has typically been linked to the Irish Constabularies. Little consideration has been given to the influences of the Palestine Police. The British section of the Palestine Gendarmerie was created in 1920 with the recruitment of former members of the Royal Irish Constabulary and Black and Tans. Meanwhile training for colonial police officers continued in Northern Ireland until 1932. At this point it was the Palestine Police that provided the recruiting and training ground for senior colonial policemen until its disbandment in 1948. Thereafter, its ‘colonial’ policing practices and traditions were carried throughout the British Empire and Commonwealth by its former members.     

Special Days of Worship and National Religion in the Australian Colonies, 1790–c. 1914

Throughout the period between 1790 and 1914 the governments of the Australian colonies asked their populations to suspend work and amusements and join in collective acts of prayer. Australia’s special days of prayer have much historical significance and deserve more scholarly attention. They had an enduring popularity, and they were rare moments when a multi-faith and multi-ethnic community joined together to worship for a common cause. This article builds on recent work on state prayers in Britain by considering what the colonial tradition of special worship can tell us about community attachments in nineteenth-century Australia. ‘Fast days’ and ‘days of thanksgiving’ had both an imperial and a regional character. A small number of the Australian days were for imperial events (notably wars and royal occasions) that were observed on an empire-wide scale. The great majority, such as the numerous days of fasting and humiliation that were called during periods of drought, were for regional happenings and were appointed by colonial authorities. The article argues that the different types of prayer day map on to the various ways that contemporaries envisaged ‘Greater Britain’ and the ‘British world’. Prayer days for royal events helped the empire’s inhabitants to regard themselves as imperial Britons. Meanwhile, days appointed locally by colonial governments point to the strength of regional attachments. Colonists developed a sense that providence treated them differently from British communities elsewhere, and this sense of ‘national providence’ could underpin a sense of colonial difference—even a colonial nationalism. Days of prayer suggested that Greater Britain was a composite of separate communities and nationalities, but the regional feelings they encouraged could still sit comfortably with attachments to an imperial community defined by commonalities of race, religion and interest.     

Colonial Constructions of Masculinity: Transforming Aboriginal Australian Men into ‘Houseboys’

In Darwin in the Northern Territory of Australia, Aboriginal men made up more than half of the domestic servant population by 1938. They replaced the Chinese and Malay male servants who had worked for British colonists in the early colonial period. Much of the historical work on male domestic servants in colonial situations plots the construction of the ‘houseboy’ as emasculated, feminised and submissive. In contrast, colonial constructions of Aboriginal men as ‘houseboys’ in Darwin emphasise the masculinity of the Aboriginal hunter. Aboriginal men were characterised as requiring constant discipline and training, and this paternalistic discourse led to a corresponding denial of manhood or adulthood for Aboriginal men. While male domestic servants in other colonial settings were allowed some privileges of masculinity in relation to female workers, amongst Aboriginal domestic workers, it was so‐called ‘half‐caste’ women who, in acknowledgment of their ‘white blood’, received nominally higher wages and privileges for domestic work. Aboriginal men were denied what was referred to as a ‘breadwinning’ wage; an Australian wage awarded to white men with families. Despite this, their role as husbands was encouraged by the administration as a method of controlling sexual relations between white men and Aboriginal women. These sometimes contradictory images can be understood as manifestations of the racialised construction of gender in Australia.     

‘Uncircumcised boys’ and ‘girl Spartans’: Youth,Gender and Generation in Colonial Insurgencies and Counterinsurgency,c. 1954–59

Both male and female youth were significant actors in anti-colonial insurgencies, but their involvement has been neglected in existing historiographies due to the marginalisation of youth voices in colonial archives. This article analyses the causes of youth insurgency and colonial counterinsurgency responses in two British colonies, Kenya and Cyprus, in 1954-59, providing a gendered and relational study of youth as cohort, as liberation generation, as life stage and as kinship position. It argues that a ‘gen[d]erational’ lens is necessary to properly understand how age and gender intersected to shape boys' and girls’ experiences of youth insurgency, and how colonial states punished and tried to ‘rehabilitate’ such rebellious youths. This article argues that colonial responses to youth in insurgency were implicitly shaped by colonial understandings of gender and generation as well as by race and ethnicity, but that counterinsurgency policies failed to effectively integrate gendered and generational perspectives sufficiently into either their security, peno-legal or welfare and developmental responses. The only successful ‘rehabilitation’ programmes focused on male youth, and combined colonial and local understandings of age and gender to provided pathways towards the forms of adulthood desired by youth, rather than just treating them as unthinking, impressionable or irrecoverable children.     

The ‘Migrated Archives’ and a Forgotten Corner of Empire: The British Borneo Territories

The ‘migrated archives’, previously concealed files related to former colonies of the British Empire, were released over the period 2012–13. The first flurry of academic and journalistic interest, focused on possible revelations of the misuse of colonial power, soon subsided. Nevertheless, the archives have been valuable in enlarging knowledge of colonial policy-making. They have also aided exploration of the interstices between the official records of colonial administration and the often unrecorded life of peoples and communities. In this sense the ‘migrated archives’ are a rich resource in prompting a new look at established historical narratives of the British Borneo territories of Brunei, North Borneo and Sarawak. These territories have received scant attention in the historiography of British colonialism. This has been to the detriment of wider scholarship in studying issues such as the expansion of the wartime colonial state; the ‘second colonial occupation’ and the evolution of post-war British colonial governance; the development of anti-colonialism; the formation of Malaysia; counter-terrorism conflicts; and the nature of the colonial legacy. The colonial period may seem a fleeting phase in the age-old cultural and economic formation of the Borneo states, yet it continues to have contemporary relevance in a strategically sensitive part of the world. This article seeks to show that the Borneo territories merit greater attention from historians of British colonialism and that the ‘migrated archives’, used in conjunction with other sources, can make a significant contribution towards the history of colonialism in a previously neglected area.     

Out of The Shadow of Vasari: Towards A New Model of The ‘Artist’ in Colonial Latin America

Within shifts affecting colonial studies, a ‘life-work model’ employed in colonial art history has been left unexamined. Developed by a contemporary of Michelangelo, Giorgio Vasari (Italy, 1511–1574), this methodology was grounded in particular European social conditions that allowed the creation of the ‘artist’ whose ‘artwork’ was the inalienable product of a single mind and hand. Following the art historical paths laid by Vasari in the viceroyalties leads to dead ends: indigenous artists who efface their individuality; painters who exist with little social or historical context; and artworks whose conservation denies finding the traces of the hands that made them. Because artworks were and are the connective tissue of complex social networks, reconfiguring concepts of ‘artist’ and ‘artwork’ and recasting them in accordance with social practices within Latin America, gains us purchase on how colonial subjects, in their engagement with their material worlds, came to be constructed.

Resemblance to European prototypes is an essential historical reality of colonial artworks: much artwork, particularly the painting, of colonial Latin America ‘looks’ like that of early modern Europe and thus has generated a foundational expectation, laid out in purest form by Manuel Toussaint (Mexico, 1890–1955), that Latin American art history might also look like Europe's. We argue that a mismatch with Europe and its methodologies means that certain, foundational historiographic assumptions about writing art history for Latin America need to be reassessed, in particular the ‘artist’ and ‘artwork.’     

Colonial Servicemen and their British ‘War Brides’: First World War Marriages in the British Empire

This article uses the phenomenon and failure of war marriages between British women and ‘colonial’ servicemen, mostly from the settler dominions, to explore the gendered, classed and racialised conditions of migration after the First World War. Positioning this migration of British war brides as part of the continued normalisation of settler occupation, the article demonstrates the patriarchal social expectations to which white women were subject. Fears of ‘khaki fever’ were extended to the protection of naïve ‘colonial’ soldiers from the manipulative sexuality of white, particularly working-class, women and girls. At the same time, ‘respectable’ women were prepared for frontier life and protected from the indignities of bigamy and desertion. The emphasis on their role as ‘daughters of Empire’ meant ‘undesirable’ matches and marital failure, as reported by the press, had consequences for the closeness of the imperial family and the maintenance of white superiority. The mediation of mobility in cases of mixed-race marriage indicate a more explicit, and sometimes violent, policing of the sexual independence of women and Black and indigenous men of colour. In doing so, the article makes an important contribution to understandings of the legacies of global mobilisation and colonial encounters during the First World War.     

Designing Constitutions in Britain’s Mid-Nineteenth Century Empire – Indigenous Territorial Government in New Zealand and Retrieving Constitutional Histories

Focusing on the striking instance of colonial New Zealand, this article examines constitutional design for colonies of European settlement, arguing about such design in two key respects. First, this article examines the proposals of so-called ‘colonial reformers’ endeavouring to influence constitutional framing, including how their notions on ‘local self-government’ or ‘municipal government’ were reflected or not, while also illuminating their concepts of how to accommodate indigenous territorial governance and indirect administration of indigenous territories in the late 1840s and early 1850s. Second, recovering traces of these disputes and ways of thought from the archives, and how they were operationalised in grounded constitutional drafting or design, rather than resorting to analysing abstract canonical, high-level texts, such as those of Henry Maine and John Stuart Mill, is ultimately more rewarding for evaluating constitutional emergence and design. It reveals tensions within ‘colonial liberalism’, as characterised by Edward Gibbon Wakefield. How putative settler interests informed these metropolitan-Westminster constitutional enactments or not, assessed through cabinet-level discussions, in Colonial Office deliberations on settler agitation, illustrates missteps and failures as well as the particular ways in which diverse features of imperial constitutional design emerged. Examining these points is timely given Linda Colley’s focus on a ‘contagion of constitutions’ in the late eighteenth and early to mid-nineteenth centuries.     

Social Careers Across Imperial Spaces: An Empire Family in the Dutch-British World, 1811-1933

Here the object biography of a scale model of an old Dutch colonial sugar factory directs us to the history of an extended family, and demonstrates the connectedness of people and identities across and within European imperial spaces in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This case study shows how people in colonial Indonesia became ‘Dutch’ through their social networks and cultural capital (for instance a European education). They even came to belong to the colonial and national Dutch elites while, because of their descent, also belonging to the British colonial and national elites. These intertwined Dutch and British imperial spaces formed people’s identities and status: the family discussed here became an important trans-imperial patrician family with a broad imperial ‘spatial imagination’, diverse identities and social circles. It was mostly women who played important roles in these transnational processes— roles indeed that they played well into the early twentieth century when colonial empires ceased to exist and the nation-state became the ‘natural’ social and political form of the modern world, obscuring these transnational processes.     

A critical view of the anthropology of religion

Anthropologists who write textbooks or teach undergraduate courses on the topic of ‘religion’ ought to be more aware of the tradition of critique by religious studies academics of their shared central category. There is a large and growing literature on the modern invention of religion and religions since the colonial era, and the radical shifts in meaning that have occurred in English and other europhone vernaculars since the 17th century. This literature is widely ignored by anthropologists who claim expertise on ‘religion’. ‘Religion’ is a complex, contested product of colonial and class power relations and has been used to control and classify peoples everywhere. The author suggests that the category religion emerged as a placeholder during the colonial era for any institution or practice that impeded (male) private property interests. The idea of ‘religion’ is by no means as innocent and neutral as it appears.     

The Scientisation of Culture: Colonial Medicine's Construction of Egyptian Womanhood, 1893–1929

From Great Britain's colonial takeover of Egypt's School of Medicine and adjoining hospital in 1893 until its return to Egyptian control in 1929, this study argues that colonial medical discourse constructed a trope of the ‘modern Egyptian woman’ as a byproduct of the discursive exchange between Victorian and Egyptian medicine. As evidence, this study identifies the colonial reforms of Egyptian medical institutions. Through analysis of governmental documents, medical treatises, curriculum, periodicals, travel literature and memoirs, this foray argues that Egyptian medical institutions were Anglicised, creating for the ‘modern Egyptian doctor’ an unprecedented level of socio‐political authority. Paradoxically, this same process of medical professionalisation disempowered the Egyptian midwife. Furthermore, through the modern authority of the doctor, Egyptian discourse constructed medico‐nationalist rationalisations of female domesticity, or ‘republican motherhood’.     

(Post)Colonial [1] Encounters: gendered racialisations in Australian courtrooms [2]

This article identifies how the Australian legal system has generated knowledge about ‘traditional’ gender relations in Aboriginal Australia. Using a sample of artefact cases from the Australian judicial system, constructions of Aboriginal gender relations are mapped. By tracing knowledge production in these cases, it demonstrates how the non-Aboriginal Australian legal system has fabricated its own versions of ‘Aboriginal Customary Laws’, or Aboriginal ‘traditions’ about violence committed by Aboriginal men, against Aboriginal women. (Post)colonial understandings about the Aboriginal ‘other’ have occupied spaces in legal understandings and then been enforced in law. The Australian judicial system itself is therefore guilty of perpetuating and privileging the ‘colonial’ in these encounters.     

At Once Human and Not Human: Law,Gender and Historical Becoming in Colonial Egypt

This article explores two approaches to the gendered human that occupied the historical stage of colonial Egypt. The first was juridical, the second was Islamic and mystical. Elaborating on the first, ‘juridical humanity’, this article probes the constitutive force of modern law in cementing the human as its teleology as well as the colonial operations of this force. Fashioning itself as an answer to the question ‘who is the human?’, juridical humanity took on particular salience in relation to women while engendering disciplinary operations: the humanising powers of colonial law instituted a system of bondage between the law and the woman‐human. The mystical articulation, on the other hand, offered a competing vision for the human, one that constituted an answer to the question ‘where is the human?’, thereby making impossible the unleashing of colonial humanising powers.