Colonial emulation: sinophobia,ethnic stereotypes and imperial anxieties in late eighteenth-century economic thought

In 1799 Dirk van Hogendorp published a Report on the Current Conditions of Dutch Possessions in the East Indies, a document that has garned comparisons to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) for its condemnation of the Dutch East India Company and for its insistence on the importance of property rights to economic growth. The text is also an anti-Chinese diatribe, castigating the supposedly inveterate avarice of Java’s Chinese minority. Hogendorp’s advocacy of colonial reform and sinophobia intertwine in his use of the term ijver, then the standard Dutch translation of ‘emulation’, a keyword of eighteenth-century political economy. Read against the status of emulation in European thinking, Hogendorp’s employment of the ijver offers an opportunity to re-examine emulation’s fraught, ambivalent quality, which has been noted by scholars like Istvan Hont and Sophus Reinert concerned primarily with a division between benevolent domestic emulation and dangerous international emulation. The colonial sphere, neither wholly domestic nor wholly foreign, was a discursive site wherein the tensions of emulation were worked out in new ways.     

Liberia an(d) Empire?: Sovereignty, ‘Civilisation’ and Commerce in Nineteenth-Century West Africa

ABSTRACT

In the 1840s, Liberia was a black settler state on the West African coast which avowedly supported the connected ideologies of Christianity, commerce, and ‘civilisation’. However, from the 1870s, as the rest of West Africa began to be divided up into colonies, adherence to these ‘Western’ values did not spare Liberia’s leaders from some of the disruptive consequences of European expansionism. This article frames these consequences in the context of commercial clashes between the Liberian state and European traders (and their companies). These clashes predated Liberia’s declaration of independence in 1847, worsened thereafter, and later became increasingly politicised with the stricter enforcement of colonial law in the region in the 1870s, partly as a result of economic crisis. On the coast, Liberian officials struggled legally and militarily to stave off the activities of European smugglers with diplomatic backing. In the interior, commercial alliances were forged with local authorities in an attempt to keep out the French and the British, in particular. Conflicts over the collection of customs duties, the setting of borders, and, ultimately, the nature and extent of Liberian sovereignty, reached a climax during the Berlin Conference (1884–1885). The Conference led Liberia, by 1904, to implement its own version of colonial ‘indirect rule’: first and foremost to safeguard its independence, secondarily as a tool of expansion. In spite of major losses Liberian leaders were ultimately able to strengthen the country’s standing as a member of the international community of nations.     

The work of Norbert Elias

This paper argues that the moral legitimating reasoning of terra nullius assumed an under-recognised, different guise in the later years of colonial justification in the form of trusteeship. The idea of terra nullius has a central place in the political thought of thinkers such as Grotius and Locke. Although terra nullius, consolidated in European colonial thought in the early modern period, differed conceptually from the doctrine of trusteeship as the colonial legitimation for Africa, both instituted a moral justification for the appropriation of native land, and of empire itself.

The contention is that the trajectory from the one doctrine to the other was aligned with the change in the underlying moral framework of the rights and duties of Europeans and non-Europeans. In the early days of colonisation, there was a certain permissiveness on the part of the colonisers to appropriate the land of American Indians. By the late nineteenth century this seemed to change into a moral requirement for civilising the native Africans. Edmund Burke's conceptualisation of trusteeship illustrates the way in which traditionally conceived natural rights were transformed into fundamental social rights, and central to this idea was the expansion of European ‘civilised’ moral communities on which rights now depended.     

Making Territory Visible: The Revenue Surveys of Colonial South Asia

Once the British became a colonial power in south Asia in the eighteenth century, they had to struggle to determine the internal divisions and boundaries of the territories under their control. In north India, these units had been organized around various pre‐colonial administrative divisions, such as parganas, which had never been mapped. With the introduction of detailed revenue (cadastral) surveys in the early nineteenth century, the British were able to map the parganas and other administrative units, thereby creating a durable record of property holdings. In the nineteenth century, they also allowed the colonial administrators to reorganize the old divisions into a well‐defined and more coherent pattern that endured to form the geographical template of the modern state.     

Water Mamas among the Makushi in Guyana

Abstract

This article examines folklore concerning water spirits among the Makushi Amerindians in Guyana. Makushi accounts of spirits called ‘water mamas’—twingram or Tuenkaron in Makushi—associate these beings with white people in both past and present. The case is presented here that this folklore reflects Makushi histories and experiences of European contact, colonialism in Dutch and British Guiana, and ongoing relations with Europeans and other outsiders. The themes of abduction, enticement, capricious wealth, and exotic ‘palaces’ found in stories of water mamas relate to these histories and experiences and inscribe them into the present landscape in Guyana. In addition to describing beliefs in water mamas and examining Makushi histories of interaction with Europeans, the article begins to explore the comparative context of this folklore in relation to other beliefs in water spirits across Amazonia and beyond.     

Coming of Age: Law,Sex and Childhood in Late Colonial India

This article revisits child‐marriage legislation in colonial India between 1891 and 1929 to re‐envision the ‘child’ as a subject constituted by laws governing sex, rather than as an a priori object requiring protection from patriarchal sexual norms. Focusing on the digital construction of the child in the twentieth century, this essay introduces a new angle from which to examine recent conclusions regarding child‐marriage reform in India. By drawing attention to an understudied figure, this article demonstrates the ways in which the problem of the child might transform understandings of the nation and its women; the universe of rights and the location of culture and the place of age as number in the formulation of legal subjectivities, colonial governmentality and humanitarian accounting in late colonial India.     

Maintaining the Bar: Regulating European Barmaids in Colonial Calcutta and Rangoon

In 1902 the government of India banned the employment of European women as barmaids in Calcutta and Rangoon. This article examines this intervention, proceeding from the premise that a close look at this ban, and the women whose lives were affected by it, illuminates the entangled and at times contradictory ideas about gender, sexuality, mobility, labour and racial boundaries that characterised British imperial policy in India and Burma at the beginning of the twentieth century. This article argues that European barmaids, while seemingly marginal, in fact occupied a unique and important position within the British Empire, being at the heart of the recreational worlds of Calcutta and Rangoon. It further argues that the ban on the employment of barmaids reflects a wider official ambivalence about the new social forms emerging from the interactions of mobile subjects in these colonial port cities. Finally, it argues that Curzon’s and his colleagues’ intervention to ban the barmaids demonstrates the way that the relations of empire were negotiated through the control of mobile subjects.

The employment of barmaids was controversial in multiple sites across the British Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, including in London. Yet the campaign against barmaids in London was unsuccessful, whereas the campaigns in Calcutta and Rangoon succeeded. The particular dynamics of the specific colonial context help to explain this difference: European barmaids in South and Southeast Asian colonial cities were marginal in multiple dimensions. Some of the women employed as barmaids were members of the domiciled European community, who occupied a place on the margins of both Englishness and ‘whiteness’. The barmaids’ employability in drinking establishments catering to a predominantly but not exclusively European clientele was in part a function of their European identity, yet that identity meant that their presence in the morally ambiguous space of the bar posed a threat to British prestige. To colonial officials, including Curzon, European women’s employment behind the bar was additionally problematic because these women could be employed in serving alcohol to non-European men in an inversion of the desired colonial hierarchy.     

The road from serfdom: economic storytelling and narratives of India in the rise of neoliberalism

Abstract

Studies of neoliberalism’s rise in the second half of the twentieth century have focused on influential US and European thinkers and global economic institutions. They rarely mention India. This article argues that, in the 1950s and early 1960s, Nehru’s India served as both a central laboratory and a discursive field for international economists debating the proper role of the state in economic development. US economists like John Kenneth Galbraith held up India planning as a proxy for the ‘American way’ of capitalism in Asia; neoliberal economists like Milton Friedman and B.R. Shenoy excoriated Nehru’s ‘road to socialism.’ As India’s economy stumbled in the late 1960s, neoliberal economists used Indian foundations to build an empirical and rhetorical case against scientific planning. Their cautionary tales about India’s ‘Permit-License-Raj’ helped to construct and sustain the project of delegitimizing state action and celebrating markets.     

The Corporeal Empire: Physical Education and Politicising Children's Bodies in Late Colonial Bengal

This article deploys children's bodies as an analytical lens to examine the political significance of knowledge production and childhood in British colonial projects in late colonial India. Scholars have theorised the ‘body as method’ of history to argue that bodies are imbued with meanings, become stakes in power struggles and are sites of knowledge and power. I examine this theme by investigating a key locus of knowledge production for children – the colonial school and its curriculum, specifically physical education. To underline the multi‐stranded processes and loci of colonial knowledge production, I examine nationalist pedagogies of two Bengali children's magazines (Amaar Desh and Mouchak) as a form of informal schooling. I argue that the colonial state's engagement with physical education in schools stemmed from anxieties to both discipline native children's bodies, and to discourage students’ ‘seditious’ political activism. Second, I demonstrate that for Bengali educated elites, children embodied a political space for contestation and undertaking their projects of re‐masculinising the youth. These nation‐building projects placed a premium on masculinity, influenced boy cultures to imitate adult male cultures, and inscribed gender roles on the bodies of Bengali boys and girls. By doing so, these colonial encounters restructured and redefined childhood in crucial ways.     

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.     

Colonies and Colonisation in Bulwer Lytton’s The Caxtons,A Strange Story and The Coming Race

Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, an eminently popular novelist, published The Caxtons in 1849. Though sub-titled A Family Picture and mainly concerned with domestic life, it included a lengthy disquisition on colonisation and emigration, its value to British society and its role in extending civilisation by spreading ‘God’s law, improvement’. His colonial example was ‘Australia’. A Radical MP in the 1830s, but opposed to the encroachment of ‘democracy’ and supportive of the Corn Laws, in the early 1850s Lytton turned to the Conservative Party. In 1858–59 he served as secretary of state for the colonies. In the light of his experience, his view of Australia and of self-governing colonies was modified, as A Strange Story (1862) shows. But in 1871, in The Coming Race, an elaborate satire on democracy and egalitarianism, he made a distinct addition to the colonial theme of The Caxtons. He did not doubt that ‘improvement’ and colonisation produced evidence of ‘the triumph of civilization’, but a metaphor embedded in the later novel indicated the inevitability of displacement of aboriginal inhabitants by Anglo-Saxon settlers.     

The Imperialism of Internment: Boer Prisoners of War in India and Civic Reconstruction in Southern Africa, 1899–1905

During the course of the Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902, over 9,000 captured Boers were sent abroad to India as prisoners of war. Using hitherto unexamined sources, this article explores how, during their internment and repatriation, British officials and administrators across the empire collaborated in a concerted attempt to transform the imperial enemy into colonial collaborator. This involved a necessarily intercolonial effort to conduct a successful programme of ‘re-education’ capable of cultivating ‘white’ British virtues in preparing Boer POWs for their future rights and duties in reconstructing Southern Africa upon their repatriation. In so doing, the government of India and other colonial officials across the empire thus recapitulated their ideal of Britain’s imperial project in the Boer POW camps. Highlighting the intercoloniality of this process, India’s viceroy, Lord George Curzon, played as prominent a role as did the War Office, or South Africa’s soon-to-be pro-consul, Lord Alfred Milner. The microcosmic imperialism of Boer internment thus reveals a great deal about the nature and structure of power within the British Empire, and emphasises the value of an intercolonial or transcolonial perspective in examining the complex, global consequences of the Anglo-Boer War.     

Not My Taxes! Explaining Tax Resistance and its Implications for Australia's Welfare State

In discussing Australia's need to increase taxes to pay for future social security, Michael Keating worries that voters see taxes as a ‘burden’ and that ‘the link between taxation and citizenship has been broken’. This paper deals with the problem of tax resistance (preferring lower taxes even when tax cuts risk public services) for Australia's welfare state. First, I describe how two Australian fiscal institutions—a residual welfare system and visible income taxes—promote tax resistance among voters. Second, I draw on these insights to develop several explanations for tax resistance: voter self-interest, voter hostility to minorities, voter disengagement (low trust and lack of interest in politics), and individualistic attitudes. The main conclusion is that tax resistance in Australia is institutionalised, making it easier to mobilise interests around low taxes, and harder to advocate for alternatives. Results of multivariate analysis using AES 2004 data indicate that an ‘anti-tax coalition’ can build on three diverse publics; one of higher and middle-income earners attuned to self-interest, another hostile to welfare beneficiaries, and another ‘tuned out’ of politics and willing to support any call for tax cuts. Inevitably, the debate about the welfare state is shadowed by a debate about voter willingness to pay taxes that finance it.     

‘Martial Races’ and ‘Imperial Subjects’: Violence and Governance in Colonial India, 1857–1914

This essay explores the specificity of colonial violence in India. Although imperial and military historians are familiar with several instances of such violence—notably the rebellion in 1857 and the 1919 massacre at the Jallianwalla Bagh in Amritsar—there is a broader, and arguably more significant, history that has largely escaped attention. In contrast to metropolitan European states, where sovereignty derived, at least in principle, from a covenant between subjects and government, the sovereign power of the colonial state was always predicated on the violent subjugation of ‘the natives’. However, while violence was integral to colonialism, such violence was never a purely metropolitan agency: most of those recruited to serve in the colonial military were, themselves, Indian. Exploring the history of the imperial military in South Asia after 1857, the paper outlines the complex and rather ambiguous relationship between the colonial state and its ‘native armies’.

résumé ?Cet article se penche sur la spécificité de la violence coloniale. Malgré des exemples familiers—comme la grande révolte de 1857 en Inde ou le massacre de Jallianwalla Bagh à Amritsar en 1919—il y a une histoire plus large et plus importante qui a échappée à l'attention des historiens. Contrairement aux états européens ou la souveraineté dérivait en principe du moins d'un contrat social entre les acteurs sociaux, le pouvoir souverain de l'état colonial restait fondé sur la subjugation violente des indigènes.     

From Batticaloa via Basel to Berlin. Transimperial Science in Ceylon and Beyond around 1900

ABSTRACT

Recent historiographies of ‘Science and Empire’ have successfully critiqued older euro-centric narratives. They highlighted how science was ‘co-produced’ through interactions between knowledgeable European and non-European actors in colonial ‘contact zones’, and how this ‘pidginised knowledge’ circulated through networks across various sites within the British Empire. This article shares and expands this approach. By focussing on continental European scholars in Ceylon around 1900, it argues that scientific networks were never confined to a particular empire. Science among Europeans was, rather, multi-lingual, mostly cross-disciplinary and always transimperial. Applying such an approach to the history of science in late colonial Ceylon allows us to uncover entanglements between historical processes that have for too long remained subject matters of disconnected historiographies: the emergence of Buddhist revivalism, evolutionary theories about human origins, the transformation from ‘liberal race science’ to Nazi eugenics in Germany, and the surfacing of British cultural anthropology.     

A jurisprudence of power: Martial law and the Ceylon controversy of 1848–51

The English East India Company has long been regarded as a ‘mere merchant’ that turned into a sovereign only with its eighteenth-century territorial acquisitions in India. Focusing on the first decades of Company rule at St Helena, this article argues instead that the late seventeenth-century Company aspired to become a polity in itself: a self-sustaining global system built upon sound civic institutions and informed by a coherent if composite political ideology. In the end, the Company's early history at St Helena demands a flexible understanding both of the boundaries of the British ‘Atlantic world’ and of the various kinds of political communities beyond the national state instrumental in fashioning early modern empires. Moreover, such a political and intellectual approach to the early Company confounds the trade-to-empire narrative that has long defined its history, insisting on deeper and more complex roots for the ‘Company-State’ and thus for British Empire in India.     

Re/placing Native Science: Indigenous Voices in Contemporary Constructions of Nature

Since the earliest days of the European Enlightenment, Western people have sought to remove themselves from nature and the ‘savage’ non‐European masses. This distancing has relied upon various intellectual techniques and theories. The social construction of nature precipitated by Enlightenment thinking separated culture from nature, culture being defined as civilised European society. This separation has served to displace the Native voice within the colonial construction of Nature. This separation has also served as one thread in the long modern ‘disenchantment’ of Westerners and nature, a ‘disenchantment’ described so adeptly by Adorno and Horkheimer (1973 ). Unfortunately though, this displacement is not only a historical event. The absence of modern Native voices within discussions of nature perpetuates the colonial displacement which blossomed following the Enlightenment. In his book entitled, Native Science, Gregory Cajete describes Native science as ‘a lived and creative relationship with the natural world ... [an] intimate and creative participation [which] heightens awareness of the subtle qualities of a place’ (2000, 20). Perhaps place offers a ‘common ground’ between Western and Indigenous thought; a ‘common ground’ upon which to re/write the meta‐narrative of Enlightenment thought. This paper will seek to aid in the re/placement of modern Native voices within constructions of nature and seek to begin healing the disenchantment caused through the rupture between culture and nature in Western science.     

‘I Felt Connected to a Past World’: A Survey of Visitors to Colonial Archaeological Sites Conserved In Situ in Australia and New Zealand

Abstract

While there is extensive international literature on the technology and techniques of archaeological conservation and preservation in situ, there has been only limited discussion of the meanings of the places created and the responses they evoke in visitors. Experience in Australia and New Zealand over the past decade suggests that the conservation of colonial archaeological remains is today seen as a far more desirable option, whereas previously many would have suggested that this kind of conservation was only appropriate in ‘old world’ places like Greece and Italy; and that the archaeology of the colonial period was not old enough to be of value. This paper discusses a recent survey of visitors to colonial archaeological sites which reveals some of the ways in which these archaeological remains are experienced, valued, and understood, and gives some clues as to why conservation in situ is an expanding genre of heritage in this region. The visitors surveyed value colonial archaeological sites conserved in situ for the link they provide to place, locality, and memory; for the feeling of connection with the past they evoke; and for the experience they provide of intimacy with material relics from the past. This emphasis on the affective qualities of archaeological remains raises some issues in the post-colonial context, as it tends to reinforce received narratives of identity and history, and relies on the ‘European’ antiquarian appreciation of ruins — making the urban environment more like Europe by creating evidence of similar historical layering.     

On the Margins of Colonialism: Contact Zones in the Aru Islands

ABSTRACT

The Aru Islands are situated at the eastern end of the Indian Ocean, in the southern Moluccas. They are also one of the easternmost places in the world where Islam and Christianity gained a (limited) foothold in the early-modern period, and marked the outer reach of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). The present article discusses Western-Arunese relations in the seventeenth century in terms of economic exchange and political networks. Although Aru society was stateless and relatively egalitarian and eluded strong colonial control up to the late colonial period, it was still a source of natural products, such as pearls, birds-of-paradise, turtle-shells, destined for luxury consumption in Asia and Europe. Aru society was thus positioned in a global economic network while leaving it largely ungoverned. Colonial archival data yield important information about the indigenous responses to European attempts to control the flow of goods. They both support Roy Ellen’s claim that the economic flows in eastern Indonesia extended beyond the control of VOC, and provide parallels to James Scott’s thesis of state-avoidance among the ethnic minorities in mainland Southeast Asia.