The Shipping Conference System,Empire and Local Protest in Singapore, 1910–1911

This article analyses local opposition in Singapore in 1910–11 to the shipping conference system and the responses of a powerful group of British shipowners and the Colonial Office. The conference, a cartel agreed among shipowners, divided monopoly profits among its members and a small group of London-based merchant houses. We suggest that the concerns of Singapore anti-conference protestors, backed by the governor of the Straits Settlements, counted for little in official London circles when weighed against the vital role of shipping in the British Empire. Even in 1967 the strength of the empire and British shipping was still apparent when the Singapore government refused to support local mercantile opposition to the Far Eastern Freight Conference.     

‘Poor heathens’, ‘Cone-headed natives’ and ‘Good water’: the production of knowledge of the interior of Australia through German texts from around the 1860s

This essay critically reviews the textual archive related to the two German mission stations in the South Australian Lake Eyre basin: the Lutheran Hermannsburg mission at Killalpaninna and the Moravian mission at Kopperamanna. The multiple entanglements of these stations far beyond their missionary activity become evident through examining distinctly religious material, such as mission journals, and secular texts, in German-language newspapers and scientific journals. These include entanglement in German domestic affairs as well as German diasporic politics; and in debates over scientific advancement and British colonial expansion.     

Colonial exhibitions,hybrid architecture,and the interpretation of modernity in the Dutch East Indies

To gain more economic profit and strengthen its colonial power, the Dutch brought Western technologies and products to their colonies and organized colonial exhibitions, modeled on the successful international exhibitions in Europe. This article analyzes colonial exhibitions in the Dutch East Indies and the ways that Dutch architects used various local architectural forms for those ephemeral events to attract visitors and to modernize the colony. The empirical case study discusses hybrid architecture in the Dutch East Indies at three events: Pasar Gambir of Batavia, Jaarmarkt of Surabaya, and the 1914 Semarang Colonial Exhibition. Through analysis of archival and historical documents, I argue that the use of local architectural forms in colonial exhibitions helped the colonies to adapt to modernity and created places where local people could practice a Dutch lifestyle and create their own idea of modernity.     

From appropriation to conservation: Mughal monuments,colonial tourism and the Dak Bungalow

ABSTRACT

The rise in colonial tourism in the post-uprising decades propelled the need for tourist infrastructure in the Indian Subcontinent. This need was met by appropriating historic monuments and reusing them as tourist rest houses, called Dak Bungalows – a common occurrence in Agra and Delhi, former Mughal capitals and popular tourist destinations. Even as the state established the Archaeological Survey of India to safeguard the Subcontinent’s monuments, the transformation carried out by colonial engineers undermined their historic worth in the absence of guidelines. Critical of the engineers’ undertaking, Viceroy Curzon, took up the challenge of ridding monuments, particularly Mughal monuments, of modern interventions. While being instrumental in providing monuments with statutory protection, Curzon appropriated these monuments to legitimize the colonial state’s authority. This paper examines the seventeenth century Mughal city, Fatehpur Sikri, a popular tourist destination in the nineteenth century, where three historic buildings were appropriated and transformed into Dak Bungalows prior to the building of a new Dak Buangalow at Curzon’s behest. Examining these developments against the backdrop of the colonial state’s post-uprising political dispensation, through the prism of monument conservation and colonial tourism, it argues that all forms of engagement with monuments operated within the colonial framework.     

Compromised Landscapes: The Proto-Panoptic Politics of Colonial Araucanian and Spanish Parlamentos

Indigenous resistance to the Spanish Crown in the Araucania region of south-central Chile is infrequently included in wider discussions of early American colonialism. Until recently, what has been inadequately addressed in these discussions is the parlamentos (peace treaties) associated with Spanish efforts to seize territorial control of the region. In this paper, we highlight the potential of landscape analysis to enhance our archival and archaeological understanding of the long historical confrontation between the Araucanians and the Spanish from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. The Spanish were unable to defeat the indigenous populations living south of the Bio Bio River, the formal frontier established between the Crown and the Araucanians. However, they enacted numerous parlamentos in hope of establishing military footholds. Because the Spaniards failed to conquer the region, parlamentos eventually developed into compromised acts of observing and monitoring military movements and of recruiting allied indigenous groups. On the basis of this interdisciplinary examination, we argue that Spanish parlamentos were a ‘panopticon’-like network of political surveillance, designed to provide a visible signal of the wider political activities taking place beyond the formal frontier. The panopticon model provides a metaphorical and conceptual framework for conceiving this aspect of Spanish and Araucanian relations and for defining one cause of successful indigenous resiliency to external influence.     

Rethinking the Historical Genealogy of Orientalism

The publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978 Said, E. 1978. Orientalism, New York: Random House.  [Google Scholar]) marked a paradigm shift in thinking about the relationship between the West and the non‐West. Said coupled his critique of European discourse on the Middle East to issues of representation generally, demonstrating that Western discourse on the Middle East was linked to power, trafficked in racist stereotypes and continually reproduced itself. Despite important achievements, the critique of colonial representations often appeared abstract and disengaged from its own history as well as the specific colonial histories it sought to explain. We contend that while colonial representations have been theorized, they have yet to be adequately historicized. To this end, we trace the genealogy of the critique of colonial forms of knowledge in Britain, France and the US from the mid‐1940s to 1978. We argue for the historicization of the critique of orientalism, and for a more philosophically adequate theorization of modernity in world history.     

From the Archives: Pacific Research Archives

The Pacific Research Archives (PRA) is one of three national collections held in the archives at the Australian National University (ANU). This paper describes the origins of and relationships among the three core archival collections: the Noel Butlin Archives Centre, the ANU University Archives and the Pacific Research Archives. The entire ANU Archives boasts over 20 kilometres of records, largely held in the ‘Acton Tunnel’, an underground car park redeveloped as a repository. Established in 2007, the Pacific Research Archives includes over 150 collections created by scholars, missionaries, colonial administrators, organisations and individuals who were working, or had interests, in the Pacific Islands in the politico-cultural regions of Melanesia, Polynesia and Micronesia. This paper traces the origins of the university’s role as a leader in Pacific studies, the context in which the Pacific Research Archives was created in 2007 and its current method of operation in a collaborative and digital world.     

Coastal Maya Obsidian Tool Use and Socio-Economy in the Late Postclassic-Early Spanish Colonial Period at San Pedro,Ambergris Caye,Belize

Microscopic use-wear analysis of the obsidian artifacts recovered from Late Postclassic-Early Spanish Colonial occupations at the site of San Pedro yields useful information for interpreting Maya socio-economic activities. Obsidian traded into the community was used for a variety of tasks with emphasis placed on subsistence and domestic manufacture associated with marine resources, including intermittent and contingent crafting. Trade in obsidian and marine resources likely provided San Pedro community members access to inland economic networks and enabled the acquisition of resources not found on the caye. Microwear on chert and obsidian tools indicates relative stability in the traditional lives of the San Pedro Maya in the 15th–17th centuries a.d. Although the San Pedranos likely suffered to some degree from coastal raiding and the introduction of epidemic diseases by the Spaniards, their off-shore location provided them some protection from the upheaval experienced by the Maya in mainland communities.     

Appeals for European solidarity as calls for colonial violence: British and German public debates around 1900

Abstract

While recent scholarship has emphasized the role of the colonial experience in the development of the idea of Europe and European integration, notions of European solidarity in the age of imperialism have largely been ignored. This paper investigates the specific context in which journalists and politicians voiced such pleas for solidarity, explores the motivations for them, and probes their limits in times of tension. A closer look at the actors involved illustrates the strictures placed on ideas of European solidarity and illuminates the limited potential of projects of integration prior to 1914. However, latter considerations notwithstanding, a discourse on European solidarity in a colonial context did emerge in the decades before the First World War, allowing early proponents of integration to view colonialism as a field for common European action.     

Geoarchaeological approaches to the environmental history of Cyprus: explication and critical evaluation

Geoarchaeology represents crossdisciplinary research focused on environmental issues and human activities, and directed primarily to social scientists. Site micro-studies are central to the enterprise, emphasizing cultural sediments and the taphonomic record of site formation, preservation, or destruction. But when expanded to include off-site investigation and watershed studies, geoarchaeology can go well beyond stratigraphy and context, to address human impacts on the environment or long-term sustainability. This paper articulates a research agenda to evaluate the largely anecdotal premise that the island of Cyprus has been degraded by millennia of improvident land use. First, it outlines Holocene settlement, land use and forest histories, as a differentiated model against which to apply specific types of investigation, and in conjunction with other archaeological sciences. Second, it applies Quaternary-style watershed study to confront commonplace misunderstandings about possible degradation, to show that most of the slope and stream deposits on Cyprus are of Pleistocene age. Third, it switches to examples of site micro-geoarchaeology to illustrate the possibilities of understanding detailed change. The purpose is heuristic, in the absence of many more site and off-site studies that incorporate bioarchaeology. Provisional inferences suggest that environmental damage may be limited, that even with heavy land-use stress, climatic triggers were critical to inaugurate change, and that the system may be more resilient than anticipated. Such caveats may encourage greater attention to environmental research design in ongoing and future excavation projects.