Imagining an Imperial Modernity: Universities and the West African Roots of Colonial Development

This article takes the formation and work of the ‘Elliot’ Commission on Higher Education in West Africa (1943–45) to reconsider the roots of British colonial development. Late colonial universities were major development projects, although they have rarely been considered as such. Focusing particularly on the Nigerian experience and the controversy over Yaba Higher College (founded 1934), the article contends that late colonial plans for universities were not produced in Britain and then exported to West African colonies. Rather, they were formed through interactions between agendas and ideas with roots in West Africa, Britain and elsewhere. These debates exhibited asymmetries of power but produced some consensus about university development. African and British actors conceptualised modern education by combining their local concerns with a variety of supra-local geographical frames for development, which included the British Empire and the individual colony. The British Empire did not in this case forestall development, but shaped the ways in which development was conceived.     

“… but in its proper place. …”Religion,Enlightenment, and Australia's Secular Heritage: The Case of Robert Lowe in Colonial NSW 1842–1850

Over the last few decades historians have been rediscovering Australia's religious heritage, often in response to entrenched narratives depicting Australia's social, intellectual, and political history as a triumph of secular enlightenment over vestiges of Old World partnerships of religion, state, and society. That Australia has a rich secular heritage is indisputable, but to draw a sharp distinction between the “secular” and the “religious” is anachronistic and misguided, and any attempt to tell the story of Australia's secular heritage must acknowledge that the “secular” often found its justification flowing from more general religious premises grounded in enlightenment ideals such as rational religion, rational piety, and general Christianity. Indeed, when liberal democracy was emerging in the colonies the “secular” had to be justified in terms acceptable to the public square and these terms were broadly religious. Robert Lowe is an apt case study for divining the nature of the secular in colonial Australia, for his thought and political activity show the subtle and complex way that ideals such as “enlightenment,” “religion,” and “secular” entered into dialogue rather than warfare with one another and contributed to social institutions judged suitable for a fledgling pluralist nation.     

Enclosures from Below: The Mushaa’ in Contemporary Palestine

This article traces the declining fortunes of the mushaa’, a once‐prominent Levantine culture of common land. Palestinians managed to resist attempts by the Ottoman Empire and the British Mandate to break up the mushaa’. Under Israeli colonization, the remaining commons are now subject to another type of appropriation: individual Palestinian contractors seize hold of mushaa’ land and build on it. This article introduces the concept of “enclosures from below”, whilst looking at the dynamics of seizure of the commons by Palestinian refugees, who once were peasants practising mushaa’ on their lands and are now landless, some having become expert contractors. I show that the contractors consider their actions to be a form of resistance against the settler colonial project, manifested in the advancing of the Wall and settlement expansion. This is described through a case study of the Shu'faat area in Jerusalem. Changing uses of mushaa’ land reflect wider tendencies in the Palestinian national project that has become increasingly individualized.     

Economic Imperialism and Financial Citizenship: Reconsidering British Subjectivity in Martin Chuzzlewit and Lawrie Todd

During the tumultuous time of financial and colonial expansion between 1825 and 1855, both Charles Dickens and John Galt published picaresque novels depicting transatlantic travel and land speculation. If emigration is the act of permanently leaving one's homeland and living in another, then neither novels' eponymous protagonist Martin Chuzzlewit nor Lawrie Todd is an emigrant. By reading Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–44) and John Galt's Lawrie Todd (1830) alongside nineteenth-century developments of the geo-political and financial spheres, this article shows how these works form a counter-narrative to traditional novels of emigration. Both protagonists leave Britain with the explicit intent to seek their fortune in America through engagement with land speculation companies. Though the characters' experiences of transatlantic financial speculation is dichotomous (with Todd becoming rich and Chuzzlewit losing all he has), both characters ultimately return to Britain. In these counter-narratives, we argue that America is deployed as Britain's financial periphery, rather than an alternative imperial centre, working to entrench British nationalism through transatlantic financial speculation. It is through the act of returning from America that Dickens and Galt counter typified emigration narratives that represent the choice to emigrate to America as synonymous with abandoning the Empire for the ‘Great Republic’. Instead, Dickens and Galt show how America can be exploited as a financial extension of Empire where Britons can maintain national loyalty while simultaneously responding to an unstable global financial market that was increasingly dependent upon speculation and foreign investment practices.     

APHASIA,HISTORY, AND DURESS

This essay celebrates the publication of Duress, explores its concepts and themes, focuses on the way Ann Stoler rejects the notion of historical forgetting and develops a heuristic of “colonial aphasia” in an ethnographic chapter on the emergence of France's Far Right near Marseille in the 1990s. The essay also tracks how postcolonial scholars are using the notion of aphasia, drawing on Stoler's colonial usages in contexts like the Netherlands and Britain as well as using the notion to periodize. Those who came to aphasia before and without Stoler are also present here, and their contributions suggest a range of ways to think through radical, countercultural, and philosophical thought. That Gilles Deleuze and Paolo Virno use aphasia in contrary ways suggests that once aphasia departs from clinical settings, its poetics are rather up for grabs even if contained within activist gestures; both rethink matters of politics, dissent, and language. The example of Kurt Goldstein is also imported to show that clinical aphasia may go with the “detours” of patients, those stricken by war, catastrophe, and these peculiar speech disorders. That “detour” is also a Deleuzian word opens wide a “minor” register to history, speech, and forms of oppression. The semantic spectrum for aphasia in histories of politics and language is wide, from Stoler's colonial version that applies most to the privileged, to Deleuze's poetic transpositions that propose aphasia as an accomplishment, a rebellious refusal of communication. Aphasia has much promise as a historical category in and outside of colonial forms of duress.     

“Much in Blood and Money”: Necropolitical Ecology on the Margins of the Uganda Protectorate

Increasingly, political ecologists invoke the concept of “green grabbing” to refer to the ways in which processes of accumulation by dispossession articulate with various imperatives for environmental protection. This paper traces these contemporary processes to their roots in the colonial era, focusing on how dispossession in the name of environmental protection intersects with complex historical geographies of state formation and internal territorialisation. Drawing upon the case of Mount Elgon in Britain's Uganda Protectorate, in particular, we reconstruct the ways in which the interrelated “birth” of both conservation and transcontinental agrarian markets were intimately connected to the emergence and normalisation of the colonial state itself. In doing so, we propose the term necropolitical ecology as a framework to encompass the ways in which contemporary “green grabs” partially emerge from racialised modes of colonial appropriation, the violence of which often still lingers in agencies and institutions of environmental governance in the contemporary postcolony.     

“An auxiliary,not an usurper”: John Saunders,Temperance, and Secularisation

In his influential account of the political history of early colonial Australia, Michael Roe identified the temperance movement of the 1830s–1840s as a pivotal factor in the secularisation of Australian culture and institutions. The belief system that drove the movement, he argued, was not traditional Christian doctrine but a “new faith” of “moral enlightenment.” In this article I test the validity of Roe's claim, drawing on the work of a more recent generation of historians and sociologists who have argued for more “porous” and “reciprocal” accounts of concepts such as reason, religion, the Enlightenment, and the secular. Its focus is on the writings and activities of John Saunders, whose endeavours on behalf of the temperance cause were such that he was described by his contemporaries as the “life and soul” of the society, the “father” of the movement, and the “apostle of temperance.” It examines the role played by key Enlightenment motifs such as improvement, optimism, reason and cooperation within the rhetoric of Saunders's writings and the reasoning that informed his actions, exploring the various and complicated ways in which he articulated the relationship between evangelical religious conviction and the quest for the common good.     

Excavations in the Church of St Augustine's Abbey,Canterbury 1955–58

THE EXCAVATION of Anglo-Saxon structures below the W. end of the 11th to 12th-century nave of the church of St Augustine's Abbey, Canterbury, occupied three seasons between and 1957. Further, small-scale, excavation took place subsequently on the site of the pre-Conquest church of Sts Peter and Paul to test particular points. The need for the excavations in 1955 arose unexpectedly out of routine consolidation of the upstanding remains (which are in the care of what is now the Department of the Environment), when there were discovered by chance the voussoirs of an arch a few inches below ground level in the ill-defined mass of masonry at the extreme SW. corner of the Norman church.     

Jihadism au rebours: Orientalism and Occidentalism for a Counter‐Hegemonic Liberation Theology

Following its colonial project, Western Europe imposed a political and cultural understanding of state nationalism and religious homogeneity on the entire world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In parallel with this twofold process, “Religious Nationalism” emerged during the Cold War, affecting the Middle East and framing an updated Abrahamic version of religious supremacism: Wahhabi Islam, the Iranian Revolution, and Israeli Orthodox Judaism were politically backed, becoming the frontrunners of a new Global‐Religious narrative of conflict. This article aims to critically analyse the Western‐Islamic manipulation of “Jihadism” as an artificial and fabricated product, starting from the “deconstruction” of Jihad–Jihadism as an anti‐hegemonic narrative. The anti‐colonial “Islamic” framework of resistance to the Empire (United States) has effectively adopted the same colonial methodology: using violence and sectarianism in trying to reach its goals. Is the Islamic Supremacist “narrative” more influenced by Western thought than by a real understanding of Islam? At the same time, this article aims to stress the historical reasons why the Arab world has been artificially affected by a peculiar form of “Religious Revanchism” which can be understood only if O. Roy's Holy Ignorance dialogues with Steve Biko's Consciousness in emphasising the need for an updated Islamic Liberation Theology.     

Forging the Missionary Ideal: Gender and the Family in the Church Missionary Society Gleaner

The missionary press in Britain served not only to diffuse knowledge, but to create identity. For an emergent evangelical middle‐class, notions of masculinity, femininity, and family were negotiated and refined through the representations of missionaries and their lives in the field. Evangelical identity was configured through the ideologies and practices of gender and domesticity in the mission context. This article explores the representations of gender and the family in the philanthropic press in Britain through the case study of the Church Missionary Society Gleaner. For the missionary public at home, the pages of the missionary press contained the exemplary normativity of gender, culture, and family. In forging those ideals through the work and representation of mission endeavour, notions of gender and family became both implicitly and explicitly linked to Empire. By once again taking the colony and metropole into the same analytical space, we can consider the ways in which colonialism “out there” structured Britishness not only “at home.” but in the heart of the home as well.     

PARADIGMS BEHIND (AND BEFORE) THE MODERN CONCEPT OF RELIGION

This essay identifies five paradigms that are basic to understanding the historical emergence and uses of the generic idea of “religion” in the Christian cultures of Europe and America. The spread of this concept has been sufficiently thorough in recent centuries as to make religion appear to be a “social fact,” to use Durkheim's phrase, rather than so many cultural expressions and different social practices. The supremacy of Euro‐American culture—and an academy still saturated with Christian ideas—has enjoined other cultures and forms of religiosity to conform to this idea of religion; for these cultures contentment with the status quo can vie with the anxieties of influence, including “modernization.” The key paradigms discussed are the following: Christianity as the prototype; religion as the opposite of reason; the modern formulation of “world religions”; the cultural necessity of religion; and critical analysis of the Western “construction” of religion. These paradigms demonstrate the limits on theoretical variety in the field, the difficulty in making real changes in set ways of thinking, and productive foci for interdisciplinary methods of study.     

Arcangelo Ghisleri and the “Right to Barbarity”: Geography and Anti‐colonialism in Italy in the Age of Empire (1875–1914)

This paper addresses the work of early critics of colonialism and Eurocentrism within Italian geography in the Age of Empire. At that time, a minority but rather influential group of Italian scholars, influenced by the international debates promoted by the anarchist geographers Reclus, Kropotkin and Me?nikov, fumed publicly at Italy's colonial ambitions in Africa. Their positions assumed, at least in the case of Arcangelo Ghisleri, the character of a radical critique of both political and cultural European hegemony. These approaches were linked to a similar critique of “internal colonialism”, both Austrian in the Italian‐speaking regions of Trento and Trieste, and Piedmontese in southern Italy. Based on primary sources, and drawing on the international literature on imperial geography and colonial and postcolonial sciences, this paper conjures up the Italian example to discuss how some European geographers of the Age of Empire were also early critics of racism, colonialism and chauvinism, and how these historical experiences can serve current debates on critical, radical and anarchist geographies.     

Missionaries of the Millennium: Israelite Preachers in the English‐Speaking World, 1823–1863

This article recovers the global history of the English millennial religion of Southcottianism. After Joanna Southcott died in 1814, leaving thousands of English followers still expecting the millennium that she prophesied, elements of her movement generated further prophets and a dynamic missionary division known as “Israelite Preachers.” From the 1820s onwards, these preachers took Southcott's ideas and new doctrines developed by her successor, John Wroe, throughout the British Isles, then the English‐speaking world, most notably Australia and North America. Drawing mission approaches (and recruits) from revivalist dissent, Israelite preachers forged first a Britain‐wide sect, then a global movement which followed the British settler diaspora and competed with rival American millennialisms. The spread of Southcottianism is a forgotten episode in the story of nineteenth‐century British colonial missions, and an argument for examining millennial movements beside more mainstream Christianity.     

A recently excavated odontome from medieval Canterbury,Kent

During archaeological excavation of St George's church, Canterbury, 269 skeletons ranging from early medieval to late nineteenth century were recovered. A medieval female aged ca. 23–28 years displayed an unusual dental anomaly, an odontome. Odontomes are infrequent in clinical dentistry. A search of the literature suggests that very few archaeological examples have been published and our specimen is the first excavated case reported from Britain. Archaeological material, if subject to radiographic examination, provides a unique source of information for the prevalence of odontomes from prehistoric to modern times.     

The Sultan's Domain: British Cyprus' Role in the Redefinition of Property Regimes in the Post-Ottoman Levant

This article argues that property law is the main means through which Britain built its imperial sovereignty on Cyprus and in the post-Ottoman Levant. It charts the development of an official British expertise in Ottoman land legislation following the so-called affair of the Sultan's claims to properties in Cyprus. To settle this matter in the island which they had obtained to ‘occupy’ and ‘administer’ through a treaty with the Sublime Porte, colonial authorities were compelled to become conversant with the 1858 Ottoman Land Code. Hence, the article argues that because of its ambiguous status – a province occupied and administered by Britain but under the nominal suzerainty of the Sultan from 1878 to 1914 – Cyprus, as the first Ottoman territory to pass under direct Western rule, played a decisive role in the elaboration of a colonial knowledge in Ottoman land laws. And this, despite long-standing economic and political ties between Britain and the Ottoman Empire and exposure to other settings where layered land tenure systems prevailed. Published in treatises authored by British administrators of Cyprus, the legal expertise in Ottoman land law thus acquired was then transposed to other territories which passed under British rule, such as Palestine.     

Recovering Classical Philosophy in the Modern Context: The Work of Francis Slade

Francis Slade's spoken words and his writings are concrete and realistic: in their arresting formulations, their close reading and juxtaposition of texts, their use of literature and art, their insights into classical political philosophy, and their understanding of Christian faith. This article illustrates these features by examining three contrasts he develops in his work. First, the distinction between ends and purposes helps recover the classical significance of telos, which was done away with in modernity and has been lost to contemporary thought and culture. Second, Slade contrasts the premodern city, where political life naturally emerges in several kinds of communities in accord with the ends of human nature, with the modern state, which has been constructed by thought from “deracinated individuals” organized into a “depoliticized society” and governed by “decontextualized rule.” Third, Slade shows how Augustine's reevaluation of human experience and Greek thought in the light of Christian revelation differs from Machiavelli's rejection of classical and Christian thought in favor of effective rationalism.     

The Declaration of Independence: A Global History

Twenty years after the publication of John MacKenzie's Empire of Nature, his characterisation of sport hunting tourism as a symbol of elite and imperial privilege remains strong. Using the example of two white hunters from New Zealand and their trip to Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) in 1926, this article elaborates upon MacKenzie's brief mention of hunters in Africa from cultures other than Britain. In particular, the article argues that ‘home’ hunting cultures—in this case of New Zealand—need to be considered thoroughly when examining meanings of hunting tourism, and, second, that hunting trips could serve a range of purposes beyond the notion of reinforcing colonial rule.     

Umberto Zanotti Bianco and the Mogadishu events of 1948

Soon after the Second World War and the signing of the 1947 Peace Treaty, Italy was faced with the traumatic loss of its African colonial Empire, an Empire whose establishment had been one of the main objectives of the Fascist regime's foreign policy. This article analyses Anglo-Italian relations in the Somalian context, highlighting the contributions made by Fascism and by the anti-Italian policies of British troops to the tensions that were to lead to the tragic events of January 1948. Attention is focused on the diplomatic mission carried out by Umberto Zanotti Bianco, President of the Italian Red Cross, an important figure in Italian Liberalism. Zanotti Bianco was conscious of the need for Italy to rejoin the ‘club’ of democratic powers and, in accordance with the diplomatic strategy of Foreign Minister Carlo Sforza, he sought to reopen dialogue between Britain and Italy. The dispute between Italy and Britain brought about by the Mogadishu events and, more generally, by the Italian presence in Africa was soon brought to a close, due both to Zanotti Bianco's shrewd strategy and to the clear need for the Western Allies to strengthen De Gasperi's government on the eve of the decisive April 1948 elections.     

Drug or medicine? China's experience of Marx's opium thesis on religion

This paper tracks the changes in the influence of Marx's celebrated opium thesis in China. Marx's view that religion is “the opium of the people” was first introduced into China through propaganda associated with the Russian revolution. It became very influential among Chinese intellectuals and dominated the religious policy of the CCP for a long period. However, as the revolutionary party became the party in power after 1949, it was obvious that the opium thesis alone would be insufficient to deal with the religious situation in a socialist country. Although the “five natures” of religion thesis was proposed to explain the persistence of religion in socialist China, the opium thesis proved more powerful politically and resulted in a general attack on religion during the Cultural Revolution. Not until the era of reform and “opening up” was the opium thesis questioned. After the release of a major document entitled “The Basic Viewpoint and Policy on the Religious Question during our Country's Socialist Period” in 1982, the opium thesis was viewed as too simplistic an instrument for understanding “the problem of religion.” Scholars have argued that religion contains important cultural elements and can make a positive contribution to a socialist society in certain respects. After lengthy discussion, a consensus was reached that Marxist views on religion should keep up with the times and that the opium thesis was no longer compatible with contemporary Chinese society. Although different voices can still be heard on the issue, religion is no longer viewed as just a “drug” but rather as a kind of “medicine.” Marx's opium thesis has been replaced in China by a new theory, one that emphasizes that religion should and can adapt to the needs of a socialist society.