Hokkien Merchants and the Kian Teik Tong: Economic and Political Influence in Nineteenth-Century Penang and Its Region

This article explores nineteenth-century Penang's Hokkkien merchants and their secret society or hui-the Kian Teik Tong (Jiande Tang)-which had a variety of roles and an extensive network.It contextualizes the merchants' secret society as a transnational socioeconomic and political organization rather than as an overseas Chinese criminal group in the wider Penang area.By recovering Kian Teik Tong and its network,it can be shown how these merchants secured and mobilized labour,capital,and allies in a way that cut across linguistic,ethnic,class and state boundaries in order to establish control of coolies and the lucrative opium,tin,and rice businesses,in order to exert political influence in the colonial and indigenous milieus of the nineteenth-century Penang region.They established a social contract through their Kian Teik Tong relief activities and initiation rituals,and thus were able to recruit thousands of members who were mainly labourers.With such a substantial social force,the merchants launched organized violence against their rivals to attain dominance in opium revenue farming and tin mining businesses in Penang,Krabi,and Perak.The widespread and strategic location of the Kian Teik Tong in Burma also enabled the same merchants to monopolize the Penang-Burma rice trade.The versatility of the Kian Teik Tong's functions allowed them to operate as an alternative political order vis-a-vis the colonial and indigenous powers.This arrangement allowed the Hokkien merchants to gain significant political clout in confronting the Siamese and Dutch authorities.     

Gendering resistance: British colonial narratives of wartime New Zealand

In 1850s New Zealand, the British Crown forced the purchase of indigenous Maori land at Taranaki, an event that hastened the brutal land wars of the 1860s. A group of British church and government officials and their wives voiced their opposition to this land confiscation, participating in what became known as the «pamphlet war» over Taranaki. The authors compare the anti-colonial writings of a number of prominent colonial men and women, drawing out the significance of both ideological and embodied gendered differences and the discursive representations of place produced out of them. In addition to differences and similarities in genre, content, and audience, the authors highlight the significance—and spatiality—of anti-colonial Maori testimony that appeared in one of the pivotal texts.     

‘The first duties of persons living in a civilized community’: the Maya, the Church, and the colonial state in southern Belize

In recent years, historical geography has been at the forefront of new scholarship on the spatiality of colonial power and its complex relations with indigenous communities. This literature shows that imperial policies – emerging through state and scientific institutions, cultural practices, and capitalist ventures – required particular ways of conceptualizing, mapping, and organizing spaces and territories which transformed the geographies of indigenous communities, livelihoods, and identities. Through a close reading of archival texts from the late 19th and early 20th century, this paper examines the spatial and political relations between three groups: the Catholic Church, the British colonial state, and the Maya communities of southern British Honduras. Differences between the Catholic Church and the British colonial state – in their aims and approach to winning hegemony over the Q'eqchi' and Mopan Maya – were accommodated and assuaged by a tacit agreement: that the Maya must be settled in permanent communities. Colonial power, in both its spiritual and statist modalities, was imminently geographical, and this geography comprised the common ground between Church and state in their approach to the Maya.     

In Search of ‘Affectionate Regard’: American Merchant Lobbies and the State during the Atlantic Imperial Crisis*

This article revisits the politics of British merchants trading to North America in the period between 1763 and 1783. Their political success and failure in this critical period have been examined primarily in terms of their impact on the escalation of imperial crisis, with the day‐to‐day operation of merchant politics rarely taken into full account. This article takes an alternative approach of studying the political influence of merchants trading to North America within the context of their interaction with the state. By looking into the organisation, the process of lobbying, and the arguments that the merchants adopted, the article highlights how, in response to many sources of tension and uncertainty inherent within their relationship with the state, they demarcated their own areas of contribution to the shaping of commercial and colonial policy. Through the case study of merchants trading to North America, this article sheds further light on the necessity to understand the evolution of such modern political institutions as commercial lobbies in their specific economic and political contexts.     

The Duration of Book Credit in Colonial New England

Account books show that merchants frequently used book credit in exchanges with consumers. The ability of credit to act as a substitute for currency in payments depends on the terms attached to the credit, such as its duration. To investigate duration more systematically, the author employs life table analysis and the singulate mean age at marriage, methods commonly used in demography, to analyze debt records from eighteenth-century Connecticut and Massachusetts. He arrives at expected duration estimates in excess of those in the literature. Given the expected duration, book credit seems to be a good substitute for other forms of payment. If this is so, a major revision of literature on colonial monetary matters may be in order.     

Gender and Colonial Space

The aim of this article is to highlight the gendered nature of colonial space. I aim to destabilise the assumption that imperial masculine idealised/desired space is the only spatial relation within colonial contexts, by focusing on the spatial relations of British and indigenous women at an idealised level and at the level of the 'contact zone'. Through an analysis of the complexity of different spatial relations within the colonial context, I hope both to bring to the fore different kinds of actors and actions from those generally considered within post-colonial theory, and also to make it possible to inflect the theoretical terminology developed within post-colonial theorising in a more materialist way.     

Tracking ethno-cultural differences: the Lagos steam tramway, 1902–1933

The Lagos steam tramway project (1902–1933) is examined against the background of British colonial town-planning policy in early twentieth-century Nigeria, with reference to the effects of its layout and services on Lagos's street morphology and ethnic tapestry. Drawing on contemporary evidence regarding colonial plans as well as local physical and social circumstances, the article shows that the tramline was used by the British colonial authorities to reinforce a pre-existent informal residential segregation in Lagos between the indigenous and the expatriate populations. By examining both social and morphological structures in order to understand the political and ethno-cultural implications of the tram, this article contributes to the recently growing literature on the history of European modes of planning outside Europe. In this literature, interdisciplinary in its character, sub-Saharan Africa has relatively limited representation.     

The Influence of ‘Benthamite’ Philosophies on British Colonial Policy on New Zealand in the Era of the Treaty of Waitangi

Most of the recent historiography on the British presence in the South Pacific in the first half of the nineteenth century rightly reflects the dichotomy of private commercial enthusiasm for imperial expansion set against a backdrop of official hesitance and vacillation over any possible enlargement of the empire—a stance manifested in Britain's stance on New Zealand prior to 1840. However, such analyses, which emphasise the reactive, unplanned and incremental extension of British interests and involvement in New Zealand, tend to bypass consideration of the particular philosophical influences that helped to shape British colonial policy during this time. This article surveys those social philosophies formulated by Jeremy Bentham—and advanced by his followers—which prescribed a distinct form of colonial intervention and government. It focuses specifically on Bentham's utilitarianism, and his notions of colonial trusteeship, and explores how these ideas insinuated their way into British colonial policy relating to New Zealand in the 1830s, culminating in the Treaty of Waitangi (1840).     

‘For Purposes of Political Camouflage’: Intelligence Gathering in Colonial Burma, 1933–35

Histories of colonial rule in Burma have noted the difficulties the British government had in ruling the population of that country and the state's reliance on the colonial army to suppress uprisings. However, the role of intelligence in sustaining colonial rule has been neglected in the historiography of Burma. This article discusses the efforts by the colonial state in Burma during the years 1933–35 to develop an intelligence-gathering bureau that reported on the affairs of the indigenous population with a view to preventing the outbreak of anti-government disorder. It illustrates the reliance of the colonial government on information gathered from indigenous informers in order to rule the country and the limitations of over-reliance on that intelligence.     

Ten Square Miles Surrounded By Reality? Materialising Alternative Economies Using Local Currencies

This article examines the success of paper‐based alternative currencies in facilitating convivial, sustainable localised economies. Based on fieldwork in the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany, it discusses the capacity of activists to create alternative forms of currency that communicate the organisers’ visions of a localised economy, before examining material practices: for whom do the currencies work, and who struggles to use them? Using insights from a diverse economies perspective, the article argues that we cannot read off the likelihood of an economic actor using the currency from the extent of their local economic embeddedness: economic actors in similar positions respond to the same stimuli in different ways, and local business owners and activists can form productive alliances to develop their shared project. The article concludes by arguing that local currencies should be used more proactively to stimulate new forms of concrete local production to meet locally identified needs.     

From Kings to Kids: Refashioning Akan Adinkra Symbols as ‘African’ Motifs in a Nineteenth-Century British Cloth Design

In the nineteenth century, British textile companies began making factory-printed cloth with adinkra motifs for African consumers. These symbolic designs were previously reserved for hand-stamped cloths among Akans of present-day Ghana. Such textiles illustrate the complexities of re-presenting history and shaping cultural knowledge through cloth and colonial exchanges. This article focuses on the design and circulation of one specific British textile design with adinkra symbols made during the 1890s to 1930s, the earliest recorded evidence I have found of adinkra in factory-printed cloths. This textile pattern reveals how merchants, designers and printers historically transformed adinkra symbols from Akan society to become global markers of Africa.     

Lamas,Empresses and Tea: Early Twentieth-Century Sino-British Encounters in Eastern Tibet

At the turn of the twentieth century, the Tibetan plateau was a zone of intense imperial contact—and competition—between British India and Qing China. Even before the 1904 Younghusband Expedition to Lhasa, Indian rupees had become the primary currency of commercial exchange across the plateau, and British explorers had gathered detailed knowledge of both the presumed natural resource bounty of eastern Tibet and the lucrative border tea trade traversing it. This article explores models manifested by these interactions between British and Qing officials, merchants and explorers in the Kham region of ethnographic Tibet and the role empires played in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century global spread of Euro-American norms. Although Sichuan officials directly engaged with administering Kham shared a common perception of Khampa society with their British counterparts, they also recognised the encroachment of Indian rupees and British explorers as challenges to Qing authority, if not a prologue to territorial expansion paralleling the contemporaneous scramble for concessions in coastal China. Beginning with the establishment of the Zongli Yamen in 1861, close Sino-British interaction along two tracks, British ‘lessons’ in statecraft and diplomacy in the imperial capital Beijing and commercial and political actions in the imperial borderland of Kham, provided models for Qing assertion of exclusive authority on the plateau. Two globalising norms inflected in these British models—territoriality and sovereignty—fostered transformative policies in the borderland during the first decade of the twentieth century. Implemented by Sichuan officials, these policies sought to undermine Lhasa's local challenge to Chinese authority via monasteries, thereby legitimising appeal to international law to repel regional challenges from both British India and Russia. This article analyses in depth two examples of these policies in action: a silver coin modelled on the Empress Victoria Indian rupee and a monopoly tea company partly modelled on British Indian tea firms and the Indian Tea Association. Both contributed to weakening the political, social and economic power projected into Kham by British India and Lhasa. The adaptation of these models in Qing policies fostered by the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Sino-British encounter in Kham reveals the conduits through which Euro-American norms of authority were shared, and demonstrates their power to transform relations in the interstices of global power, where empires met empires and states met states.     

Intimate colonialisms: the material and experienced places of British Columbia's residential schools

The theoretical premise of this paper is that place is an unbounded material, social and cultural agent within and through which practices of colonialism were enacted in British Columbia. Specifically, the places of British Columbia's 'Indian' residential schools, and the subjects who occupied them, are conceptualized as intimate sites nested within Canadian colonial and nation-building agendas that were predicated on policies of assimilation, enculturation or annihilation of indigenous people. Such conceptualizations allow for an understanding of both how colonialism was actualized against First Nations' peoples and how First Nations' peoples actively navigated and resisted that colonial project. In order to access experiences of residential school places, the article draws from published First Nations' testimonial literatures. It also draws from creative materials produced by students within the schools in order to understand how First Nations' students articulated against assimilative educational processes. The article concludes with a consideration of how nested place, First Nations' resistances, and Euro-colonial concepts of gender are circulating today with reference to a Dakelh woman (and former residential school student) under consideration for beatification in northern British Columbia.     

Police and power in the pre‐war Papua New Guinea highlands

Abstract

In public life Europeans are occupation oriented, which has meant that colonial officials then and European researchers since have tended to think of indigenous servants in terms of their occupations — of a catechist as a Christian missionary, for example, or a man in a police uniform as a policeman. Papua New Guineans are clan or village oriented. In taking European jobs, how far did they change worlds? This article argues that indigenous policemen did acquire new allegiances in police service, making the police almost a clan, but that traditional imperatives and objectives remained key motivations. For space reasons the paper focuses on the period of ‘influence’, of early contact and administration, rather than the succeeding period, of ‘control’. For good discussions of both see Kituai, ‘Innovation’, 156–66, and ‘My gun’.     

Settlers,Workers, and the Logic of Accumulation by Dispossession

This article offers a critique of the Wolfe-an model, which has become so dominant within contemporary Settler Colonial Studies (SCS). It focuses particularly on the central claim made by Patrick Wolfe, and others after him, that settler colonialism is categorically differentiated from other forms of colonialism by its drive to “eliminate the native”, instead of exploiting them. This paper builds on the literature that shows how settler colonies have used elimination as well as exploitation in their relations with indigenous peoples—even transitioning from one to the other. Instead, the paper argues that focusing on accumulation by dispossession allows for an analysis of the specificity of settler social relations to emerge. It highlights the specific ways in which settlers collectively expropriate indigenous peoples and struggle amongst different settler classes over the distribution of the colonial loot.     

Colonial Rule,Cultural Relations and the British Council in Cyprus, 1935–55

ABSTRACT

This article offers an examination of the British Council’s early stages of expansion in Cyprus under British rule, from 1935 to 1955, before the start of the Greek Cypriot anti-colonial struggle (1955–59). It argues that the British Council’s development and quality of activities in the British colony were affected by various factors such as the peculiar political difficulties encountered in the island due to the rise of Greek nationalism and the growing influence of the Church of Cyprus over the local public; the mismanagement of the local British Institutes by some of the Council’s representatives; and the financial stringencies hindering the Council’s ambitions. Through the investigation of primary material, accessed at the Cyprus State Archive in Nicosia (Cyprus) and at the National Archives in London (UK), the article traces and critically analyses for the first time the Council’s early steps in colonial cultural policy-making, using Cyprus as a case study. During the 20-year period under examination, British experiments in culture attempted to attract the Cypriots’ interest and convince them of the importance of the British connection. The British and colonial governments envisaged that through cultural influence they could safeguard the consent of the governed. In this way, British presence in Cyprus could be retained and Britain would be able to protect its strategic, political and economic interests in the region. However, research reveals that the Council’s efforts in the colony were more often than not misguided, its activities proving ineffective, its hopes misplaced. Although the aspiration was that the British Council should be a powerful instrument of Britain’s foreign policy in the colonies, this article shows that in Cyprus it had a tumultuous childhood. Caught up in the realities of the Second World War, the rise of nationalism, the thread of communism, and amid the climate of Cold War, the British Empire was coming at an end, while the British Council was fighting to survive.     

Currency Culture: Australian Identity and Nationalism in New South Wales before the Gold Rushes

This article examines the white, native-born population of New South Wales, known as ‘the currency’, between the 1820s and the discovery of gold in the 1850s. While Britishness was the dominant cultural influence before, and after, the gold rushes, the ‘currency lads and lasses’ often found their identity in opposition to British-born colonists, known as ‘the sterling’. This early incarnation of Australian nationalism is significant, it will be argued, as it reveals how quickly indigenous roots were claimed at the expense of Aboriginal Australians. Further, rather than a sense of Australianness within a larger British identity, the currency community held Britishness as part of their larger Australian identity. Drawing on examples of popular culture from the theatre, the press, and the sporting arena, this article explores the nature of this unique community who held Britishness as a secular religion but identified most strongly as white Australians.     

Impersonating a Voter: Constructions of Race,and Conceptions of Subjecthood in the Franchise of Colonial New South Wales,c. 1850–1865

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the treatment of Aboriginal Australians as politically entitled subjects within New South Wales during that colony's first elections under ‘universal’ male suffrage. Using the case of Yellow Jimmy, a ‘half-caste’ resident prosecuted for impersonating a white settler at an election in 1859, it examines the uncertainties that surrounded Aboriginal Australians’ position as British subjects within the colony's first constitutions. By contrast to the early colonial franchises of New Zealand and the Cape – where questions of indigenous residents’ access to enfranchisement dominated discussions of the colonies’ early constitutions – in the rare instances in which indigenous men claimed their right to vote in New South Wales, local officials used their own discretion in determining whether they held the political entitlements of British subjects. This formed a continuity with the earlier treatment of Aboriginal Australians under settler law, where British authority and imperial jurisdiction was often advanced ‘on-the-ground’ via jurists and administrators rather than via the statutes or orders of Parliament or the Colonial Office.     

(RE)MAPPING INDIGENOUS ‘RACE’/PLACE IN POSTCOLONIAL PENINSULAR MALAYSIA1

ABSTRACT. This paper focuses on how indigeneity has been constructed, deployed and ruptured in postcolonial Malay(si)a. Prior to the independence of Malaya in 1957, British colonial administrators designated certain groups of inhabitants as being ‘indigenous’ to the land through European imaginings of ‘race’. The majority, politically dominant Malays were deemed the definitive peoples of this geographical territory, and the terrain was naturalized as ‘the Malay Peninsula’. Under the postcolonial government, British conceptions of the peninsula were retained; the Malays were given political power and recognition of their ‘special (indigenous) position’ in ways that Orang Asli minorities—also considered indigenous ‐ were not. This uneven recognition is evident in current postcolonial political, economic, administrative and legal arrangements for Malays and Orang Asli. In recent years, Orang Asli advocates have been articulating their struggles over land rights by drawing upon transnational discourses concerning indigenous peoples. Recent judicial decisions concerning native title for the Orang Asli potentially disrupt ethno‐nationalist assertions of the peninsula as belonging to the ‘native’ Malays. These contemporary contests in postcolonial identity formations unsettle hegemonic geopolitical ‘race’/place narratives of Peninsular Malaysia.     

咸丰年间货币流通的民间形态——徽商志成号商业账簿研究

本文依据咸丰年间徽商志成号经营账簿中的有关货币资料,研究了银钱流通的民间形态、民间用币的类型和种类,以及货币的比价变化,从中揭示出行会组织、民间约定惯例对银钱民间流通的影响;洋钱等民间货币的流通,显示出民间用币多样性,以及货币制度的紊乱;货币比价的变动,既是地方金融市场货币流通规律的反映,也与战争的影响密切相关。