From Ubombo to Mkhuzi: disease, colonial science, and the control of Nagana (livestock trypanosomosis) in Zululand, South Africa, C. 1894-1953

This article looks at the scientific studies and debates that surrounded the control of nagana (trypanosomosis in livestock) in Zululand, South Africa, from the late nineteenth century until the 1950s. By 1953 the disease appeared to be contained following the use of DDT to exterminate the tsetse fly that spread the infection from immune wildlife to susceptible livestock. It argues that South Africa made an important contribution to western knowledge about trypanosomosis in terms of its etiology and possibilities for its control-a fact that has often been overlooked in the historical literature that has tended to focus on events in colonial central and east Africa. It explores Zulu conceptualizations of nagana, which influenced early researchers, the evolution of veterinary, entomological, and ecological sciences as "tools" for understanding and suppressing disease, as well as the difficulties involved in reconciling game conservation with colonial settlement. The article also shows how an animal disease contributed to the development of colonial science and encouraged the expansion of scientific networks with African colonies and beyond.     

Barracks Islam and Command Christianity: Religion in Britain’s West African Colonial Army (c.1900–1960)

Religion was an important and dynamic aspect of Britain’s West African colonial army. The religious composition of the force changed from primarily Muslim in the late nineteenth century to primarily traditionalist and Muslim during the early twentieth century to overwhelmingly Christian during and immediately after the Second World War. These changes reflected not only military requirements but also broader social trends. While Muslim religious life in the military reflected a ‘barracks Islam’ accommodated by British officers, a top-down form of command Christianity emerged from the 1940s. Appointed during the Second World War, military chaplains and imams encouraged recruiting and strengthened morale but the presence of black religious officials challenged the existing racial hierarchy.     

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.     

Government Publishing in the German Pacific 1885–1914

Germany’s colonial experience in the Pacific was both relatively short (1884–1914) and also quite dispersed. In addition to administrative staff and office, a well-functioning colonial administration also required the means to propagate and document its administrative regulations and decisions. This article examines how the administrative offices in German Samoa and German New Guinea went about their official printing needs. In the Samoa case, the Germans ‘inherited’ a well-established printing environment, facilitated by newspapers. Here the official publications of the colonial government were merely additional print-jobs. In German New Guinea, however, no such infrastructure pre-existed and the German administration had to start its own press. Over time, the government gazette added no official sections and, had World War I not intervened, was on track to became a local newspaper.     

Pre-colonial Ethnic Wars and the Colonization of Northern Tanzania from 1800 to 1950 CE: The Case of Chagga of Kilimanjaro

In the late 19th century, the various chiefdoms of the Chagga people of Mount Kilimanjaro, in north-eastern Tanzania, engaged in continuous warfare among themselves. While the Mangi (chiefs) sought to expand their areas of domination and strengthen their chiefdoms with the wealth acquired through warfare, they also provided an opening for foreigners to become involved in these local conflicts. This paper examines the role and impacts of the Chagga wars in the German colonization of Chagga land. In the initial stages of the colonization process, the Germans could not know where to start or who to partner with in order to facilitate this process in Kilimanjaro. With the entire Chagga community at war, one chiefdom against another, and the axis of power moving from chiefdom to chiefdom, it was not very easy for colonialists to determine which one was dominant. Although Rindi, the Mangi of Moshi, convinced the Europeans that he was the most powerful chief in Kilimanjaro, the ceaseless wars made the Germans aware that there were other more active and even stronger chiefdoms than Moshi. For the Germans to get into Kilimanjaro, and secure a future for themselves there, the solution was to wage war against the Chagga. Hence they engaged in war with the Kibosho Chiefdom which, under Mangi Sina, was by then the most powerful and prosperous chiefdom. Although Karl Peters had signed a treaty with Mangi Rindi of Moshi in 1885, the country was brought under complete colonial rule by Germans in the early 1890s, after subduing the long-running local wars in the area. This paper draws on the author’s research into oral history in Chagga land, and his archaeological survey of the area, to explore the unintended consequences of involving Europeans in the Chagga chiefdom’s local wars.     

A landscape of powers in Highland Papua,C. 1899-1918

The article proposes that anthropologists and historians attend to a 'landscape of powers' to understand the ways colonial and mission projects become actualised in on-going social relations. An expanding body of scholarship for the Melanesian region has focused on the way missionaries and colonial agents, as much as the diverse Melanesian peoples, attain power through rendering persons and places in specific forms. This is documented here for Fuyuge-speakers relations with colonial and mission projects during their early phase. Although the forms and consequences of power among each--Fuyuge, colonial, mission--is different, attention is devoted to the resultant and emerging patterns of these long-standing interactions and interventions. In particular, the article maintains that when such projects become locally actualised a landscape of powers is established. A landscape of powers is the multiply constituted arrangement of persons and places in an historical and ethnographically delineated context.     

The Burning of Sampati Kuer: Sati and the Politics of Imperialism,Nationalism and Revivalism in 1920s India

Sati, the immolation of a Hindu widow on her husband's funeral pyre, is a rare, but highly controversial practice. It has inspired a surfeit of scholarly studies in the last twenty years, most of which concentrate on one of two main historical sati ‘episodes’: that of early‐colonial Bengal, culminating with the British prohibition of 1829, and that of late twentieth‐century Rajasthan, epitomised by the immolation of Roop Kanwar in 1987. Comparatively little detailed historical analysis exists on sati cases between these two events, however, a lacuna this paper seeks to address by exploring British and Indian discourses on sati as they existed in late‐colonial India. The paper argues that sati remained a site of ideological and actual confrontation in the early twentieth century, with important implications for ongoing debates about Hindu religion, identity and nation. It focuses on the intersection between various colonial debates and contemporaneous Indian social and political concerns during the controversy surrounding the immolation of Sampati Kuer in Barh, Bihar, in 1927, emphasising resonances with postcolonial interpretations of sati and the dissonance of early nineteenth‐century tropes when reproduced in the Patna High Court in 1928. Thus, while Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid have suggested that ‘ad hoc’ attempts to piece together a ‘modern’ narrative of widow immolation began in the 1950s, this paper will suggest that various contemporary discursive formations on sati can be observed in late‐colonial India, when discussions of sati became entwined with Indian nationalism and Hindu identity politics and evoked the first organised female response to sati from an emergent women's movement that saw it as an ideological, as well as physical, violation of women.     

The Politics of the Pew: Faith,Liberty, and Authority in a Sydney Church in 1828

This article examines the political implications of the dispute between E. S. Hall and Archdeacon Scott over a pew in St James’ Church in the late 1820s. Beyond the legal questions it raised about the established status of the Church of England in New South Wales, Hall's public protest, conducted every Sunday during the largest regular social gathering in Sydney, was a self‐conscious performance of his wider critique of colonial authority. This episode reveals the symbolic importance of church spaces and the role of religious ideas about authority and freedom in colonial political debate.     

Proceeding through Colonial Past-Presents in Fieldwork: Methodological Lessons on Accountability,Refusal, and Autonomy

This article examines how the colonial past manifests within the present through an analysis of ethnographic and archival fieldwork. Drawing on feminist geographic scholarship for decolonising knowledge production, I argue that geographers have a responsibility to the people they work with and the places where they conduct research to know what came before. Through an analysis of how the colonial past surfaced in everyday and ongoing experiences of negotiating consent during fieldwork, I show how reflecting on the colonial past-present offers insights into the colonial power geometries of knowledge production. Proceeding through the colonial past-present offers useful lessons on being accountable to people and lands, recognising refusal, and making autonomy. While this article is focused on my experiences as a white settler scholar from the USA who did research in a Mixe community in Oaxaca, Mexico, proceeding through colonial past-presents offers lessons to any and all geographers who struggle to unsettle the persistent colonial power geometries of knowledge production.     

The Enduring Toltecs: History and Truth During the Aztec-to-Colonial Transition at Tula,Hidalgo

Tula, Hidalgo, was an important early Postclassic city that dominated much of central Mexico as well as adjacent regions to its north and west. For many decades, Tula was thought to be the city that early colonial documents referred to as “Tollan,” or “place of the reeds.” It is clear that the Aztec Empire, a later civilization that dominated a much larger area, revered Tollan and connected themselves to the city and its people, the Toltecs, in various ways. Recent research has questioned whether Tula was indeed the Tollan that the Aztecs revered; instead, Tollan may have been a concept that referred to all of the great civilizations that preceded the Aztecs. These two perspectives, which I frame as the “single Tollan/many Tollans” debate, have important consequences for our understanding of the early Postclassic period as well as colonial configurations of power. I argue that to understand the Aztecs’ relationships with their past, and the colonial consequences of those relationships, it is important to shift away from questions of truth. Instead, I concentrate on historical narratives and the social, material, and biological effects that they produced, including the early and late Aztec interventions at Tula. I argue that Jorge Acosta’s data provide evidence for an Early Aztec period termination ritual and a Late Aztec period New Fire ceremony that ushered in a new population boom at Tula. In turn, these connections allowed for the unprecedented rise of the Moctezuma family during the colonial period. This evidence forms part of a broader argument that the two sides of the Tula debate are not mutually exclusive. Rather, they both form part of attempts to control, claim, and revere the past in the inherently unstable fields of power that characterized the late Postclassic and early colonial periods in central Mexico.     

Governing the Bottle: Alcohol,Race and Class in Nineteenth-Century India

Following a series of aggressive military campaigns across India, by the early nineteenth century, the East India Company had secured a more definitive political space for itself in India. However, in taking over the administration of the diwani, or administration and revenue collection duties in Bengal, the Company gained responsibility for the taxes that governed the production and sale of alcohol and drugs—the abkari system. The abkari duties represented an opportunity and challenge for the colonial state. What followed changed the social landscape of India as the Company developed a series of regulations to govern alcohol in both military and civil space. These laws quickly moved beyond earlier Mughal dictates on alcohol, revealing the state’s intent to mould society through taxation.

This article frames these colonial taxes on alcohol as a tool of governmentality. It argues that the state utilised the abkari department not simply as a means of generating revenue, but as a means of managing social relations and economic life in nineteenth-century India. It explores the path that the colonial state sought to forge between arguing for the ‘moral uplift’ of drinking populations and securing reliable revenue for Company (and later Crown) coffers. The laws themselves were often race- (and class-) specific, suggesting, for example, the pre-disposition of certain peoples to particular drinks. Moreover, the drinks themselves, whether toddy or ‘European’-style distilled spirits, were assigned a racial identity. While European observers viewed toddy as ‘natural’ and even beneficial when drunk by poor Indian labourers, in the throats of European soldiers it was labelled ‘dangerous’ or even lethal. Conversely, later Indian campaigners warned that ‘alien’ distilled spirits, such as whisky or rum, were completely foreign to India and that their introduction suggested a darker, less benevolent, side to India’s colonial rule. As such, these colonial controls on alcohol, and the debates that swirled around them, illuminate the ways in which the colonial state both understood and attempted to shape its subjects and servants.     

Spaces of Intemperance & the British Raj 1860–1920

ABSTRACT

The history of the British Empire in India is one awash with alcohol. Drinking was a common practice throughout colonial society, acting as social necessity and source of a public anxiety. However, rather than only acknowledging what and why individuals in colonial India drank, it is of equal importance to consider where they did so. Despite its ubiquity, alcohol consumption in India was responsive to the dynamics of space and place, and both the habits of drinkers and the social, military or governmental response to their actions altered greatly depending on locations individuals were able to access, and in which they consumed alcohol. This article draws focus on the spatiality of colonial drinking through an examination of key environs that characterise the British experience of India, and in which colonial Britons drank regularly. Examining published sources alongside archival material, the article argues that drinking in colonial India is rendered simultaneously private and public, personal and socially performative, as a result of the hybrid spaces in which individuals access alcohol. The culture of drinking in colonial context, and the manner through which the drinker is constantly under scrutiny makes the act of drinking as much to do with social performance as it is to do with personal taste, with space in each instance a governing influence on choice of beverage, intent, behaviour, and the perceived identity of the drinker themselves.     

Infective Economies: Empire,Panic and the Business of Disease

The Third Plague Pandemic in Asia during the 1890s, and the institutional stresses it produced, exposed inherent vulnerabilities within the global networks that sustained the British Empire. While commercial and informational routes meshed disparate imperial dominions, they also functioned as pathways for disease and conduits of panic, undermining imperial commerce and threatening social order. Focusing in particular on the 1894 outbreak of bubonic plague in Hong Kong, the paper suggests that an analysis of a ‘local’ epidemic episode and its wider reverberations provides a new perspective on the often heated debates during the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries about the meaning and scope of empire in relation to new communication networks. The paper shows how expanding global networks were construed alternatively as sustaining and jeopardising imperial power. The bubonic plague in Hong Kong—a hub of ‘free trade’ in East Asia—and the panicked reactions elicited by the disease's diffusion westwards revealed the economic priorities that informed colonial public health concerns as well as the challenges posed to laissez-faire economic policy and ‘free trade’ by the expanding influence of capital in the ‘New Imperialism’. In so doing, the paper suggests that contemporary preoccupations with ‘globalisation’, ‘biosecurity’ and ‘emerging diseases’ have antecedents that lie beyond the Second World War and the interwar period in a late-nineteenth-century imperial biopolitics.     

The construction of a "population problem" in colonial India, 1919-1947

This article examines the construction of a "population problem" among public health officials in India during the inter-war period. British colonial officials came to focus on India's population through their concern with high Indian infant and maternal mortality rates. They raised the problem of population as one way in which to highlight the importance of dealing with public health at an all-India basis, in a context of constitutional devolution of power to Indians where they feared such matters would be relegated to relative local unimportance. While they failed to significantly shape government policy, their arguments in support of India's 'population problem' nevertheless found a receptive audience in the colonial public sphere among Indian intellectuals, economists, eugenicists, women social reformers and birth controllers. The article contributes to the history of population control by situating its pre-history in British colonial public health and development policy and outside the logic of USA's Cold War strategic planning for Asia.     

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.     

Breaking the CMEA hold: Romania in search of a ‘strategy’ towards the European Economic Community, 1958–1974

ABSTRACT

This article analyses Cold War Romania’s conceptualization of its relations with the European Economic Community (EEC) and its struggle to influence the policy of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) towards the EEC in a way compatible with Bucharest’s interests. Addressing a significant historiographical gap, in a sense, this study investigates the origins of Romania–EU relations. Multi-archival in approach, it argues that the period between 1969 and 1974 represents the formative years of Romania–EEC relations. Exploring the political rationale behind Romania’s attitude towards the Common Market, the article finds that the country’s ‘strategy’ in this respect had three main characteristics: it was pragmatic, active and, to some point, adaptive; drawing heavily from Romania’s previous position, it took shape in the early 1970s; and, although it seemed to focus on the commercial aspects of relations, it reflected a far more complex interaction between the two political and social systems than previously acknowledged.     

How not to build a world wireless network: German–British rivalry and visions of global communications in the early twentieth century

Abstract

Edward Snowden’s revelations laid bare an unprecedented scale of state influence on communications technology. But government elites have frequently shaped technological development through their beliefs about potentially nefarious uses of communications. This article argues that beliefs about how other states or groups might use a technology can shape innovation. In particular, German visions about the British use of cables spurred German investment in developing wireless telegraphy. Germans imagined that the British were using cable technology to damage Germany’s reputation, spy on Germany and ‘poison’ neutral countries against the Central Powers. The German government and military at first created a colonial wireless network to bypass British cables. In World War I, however, they sought to establish a world wireless network. In the end, innovation was significantly shaped by how Germans imagined their enemies’ uses of communications technology.     

Our women must return home: institutionalized patriarchy in colonial central Nyanza district, 1945-1963

Colonial policies and practices were very instrumental in the creation of the Luo Diaspora. This Diaspora extended far beyond the physical and cultural boundaries of Central Nyanza as was constituted by the colonial administration. To colonial officials, this Diaspora represented "detribalized natives" responsible for social decay and immorality in the colonial townships. Similarly, to the male elders in the rural areas, this Diaspora was an affront towards destabilizing tribal authority and sanctions, which governed Luo moral order, Luo marriage, and Luo identity as it existed prior to colonialism. This article uses patriarchy as an analytical framework to understand how male elders and colonial officials collaborated to assert control over young women under suspicion of prostitution. The article argues that the Ramogi African Welfare Association (RAWA) was a post-war patriarchal institution which was used by male elders, with the encouragement of the colonial officials, to intimidate, harass and repatriate young women seeking wage employment within the emerging colonial townships. In this article, I use archival and field data gathered from Central Nyanza between 1999 and 2002 to illustrate how institutionalized patriarchy threatened many women and young girls seeking to migrate to colonial towns in order to exploit the limited economic and social opportunities that colonialism provided.     

Presentation is Everything: Foodways, Tablewares, and Colonial Identity at Presidio Los Adaes

Ceramics and zooarchaeological remains are commonly used as indicators of status and wealth at colonial-period sites, yet colonial expectations with regard to cuisine were often difficult to meet within the rigors of frontier life. In this paper, we juxtapose faunal and ceramic assemblages from Presidio Los Adaes and, informed by ethnohistorical and visual data, investigate how social expectations with regard to foodways were negotiated on the Spanish colonial frontier. While ceramic evidence suggests that tableware varied among households, the zooarchaeological assemblage indicates that Los Adaes residents shared the same basic diet.     

The Professors' Africa: Economists, the Elections of 1907, and the Legitimation of German Imperialism

German economists led by Gustav Schmoller created the KolonialpolitischesAktionskomité (colonial-political action committee) duringthe so-called ‘colonial crisis’ of 1906–1907to promote the German colonial empire at a time when it wassuffering much scandal and criticism. Widely esteemed and enjoyingthe appearance of non-partisanship, they worked closely withthe government of Bernhard von Bülow during the electionsof 1907, arguing that colonial empire was economically and politicallyindispensable and that its financial burdens were bearable.Straddling a position between the economic imperialism of manyGerman liberals and the settler colonialism prevalent in conservativeand radical nationalist circles, they helped secure a middleground that enabled the Bülow bloc and developed many ideasfor colonial reform that came into currency during the Dernburgera (1906–1910). Through lecturing, the mass disseminationof relatively high-quality literature, and the demarcation ofthe new academic sub-discipline known as Kolonialwissenschaft(colonial science), a potent complex of liberal-nationalistambitions was fused with a new ‘scientific’ colonialismthat helped redefine and legitimate a German civilizing missionin Africa and forge an imperialist ideology that gained a nationalaudience.