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.     

Open Annotation and Close Reading the Victorian Text: Using Hypothes.is with Students

Observers of the digital humanities often see them as shifting literary study away from close reading. However, the digital humanities also present opportunities to refine our capabilities for close reading. These digital reading tools, often useful to scholars, may be just as helpful in the classroom. Students working on long Victorian texts often resist close reading. Ideally, they will have multiple low-pressure opportunities to practice this skill. Open annotation provides a frequent, collegial assignment to help students gain the habit of turning to specific moments in the text for their examples. Hypothes.is is an open-source project facilitating group annotation of any online text; it requires users to anchor any comment in a specific text passage while enabling privacy, conversation threads, and easy grading. This essay offers a commentary on open annotation in the classroom, growing out of the particular challenges and rewards of the course where it was used. Students’ experiences of the text were indisputably enriched by their work with Hypothes.is, but the assignment works best with careful framing and support due to students’ unfamiliarity with the technology.     

The Uncertain Origins of Mesoamerican Turkey Domestication

The turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) is the only domesticated vertebrate to originate from North America. Accurate reconstructions of the timing, location, and process of its domestication are thus critical for understanding the domestication process in the ancient Americas. A substantial amount of recent research has been devoted to understanding turkey domestication in the American Southwest, but comparatively little research has been conducted on the subject in Mesoamerica, despite the fact that all modern domestic turkeys descend from birds originally domesticated in Mexico during pre-colonial times. To address this disparity, we have conducted a review of the available literature on early turkeys in the archaeological record of Mesoamerica. We evaluate the evidence in terms of its accuracy and use this evaluation as a stepping off point for suggesting potential avenues of future research. Although the lack of available data from Mesoamerica currently precludes detailed cross-cultural comparisons, we briefly compare the origins and intensification of turkey rearing in Mesoamerica with the American Southwest to generate more dialogue among researchers independently studying the topic in these two distinct but interconnected cultural regions.     

A Switzerland of the north? The Nationalistes and a bi‐national Canada*

Abstract. Nationalism is frequently associated with the break‐up of states. This article seeks to demonstrate that nationalism, through the guise of bi‐nationalism, can be compatible with the creation and maintenance of a multinational state. The political vision of the Nationalistes of Québec provides the focus. In the early twentieth century these individuals believed that Canada could emulate states such as Switzerland and Belgium, which were marked by a degree of power‐sharing. They sought the adoption of practices which have since become associated with the doctrine of ‘consociationalism’. The research suggests that these nationalists were conscious that federalism, on its own, is not sufficient to accommodate a significant national minority.