The politics of self-help: The Rockefeller Foundation,philanthropy and the ‘long’ Green Revolution

While scholars of contemporary philanthropy have observed a concerted interest in the promotion of ‘self-help,’ little has been said about the political history of this investment and its significance in determining both domestic and international development priorities. We locate this modern conceptualisation of self-help in early twentieth-century philanthropic practice that sought to ‘gift’ to individuals and communities the precious habit of self-reliance and social autonomy. The Rockefeller Foundation promoted rural development projects that deliberately sought to ‘emancipate’ the tradition-bound peasant, transforming him or her into a productive, enterprising subject. We begin by documenting their early agricultural extension work, which attempted to spark agrarian change in the US South through the inculcation of modern habits and aspirations among farmers and their families. These agrarian schemes illustrate the newfound faith that ‘rural up-lift’ could only be sustained if farming communities were trained to ‘help themselves’ by investing physically and psychologically in the process of modernisation. We then locate subsequent attempts to incentivise and accelerate international agricultural development within the broader geopolitical imperatives of the Green Revolution and the Cold War. While US technical assistance undoubtedly sought to prevent political upheaval in the Third World, we argue that Rockefeller-led modernisation projects, based on insights gleaned from behavioural economics, championed a model of human capital – and the idea of ‘revolution within’ – in order to contain the threat of ‘revolution without’. Approaching agricultural development through this problematisation of the farmer reveals the ‘long history’ of the Green Revolution – unfolding from the domestic to the international and from the late nineteenth century to the present – as well as the continuing role of philanthropy in forging a new global order.     

‘A Fanatical Reverence for Gandhi’: Nationalism and Police Militancy in Bengal during the Non-cooperation Movement

Police militancy and strike actions featured prominently throughout the British Empire in the years after the First World War. While the demands of police for greater pay and better conditions of service were rooted in economic circumstances, police in diverse locales also forged tentative alliances with labour and trade union movements, sparking government fears of police ‘Bolshevism’. In the Indian province of Bengal, Indian police officers took a more radical stance and expressed widespread sympathy with the non-cooperation campaign of Mohandas Gandhi and its goal of swaraj or independence. Police discussed Gandhian teachings, threatened strike actions and formed the first association of non-European policemen in India, the Bengal Police Association. While ultimately the police remained loyal to the British Raj, the events in Bengal demonstrate the continuing links of colonial policemen to social, economic and political currents within the societies in which they operated, the force of nationalism in Bengal during the noncooperation movement and the strategies used by the colonial state to maintain police loyalty. An interrogation of Bengal police support for Gandhi not only complicates our portrait of the policemen who upheld the raj, but also sheds light on a significant moment in the ‘modernisation’ and professionalisation of colonial police forces and the tensions between their role in upholding colonial authority and their relationship to emerging labour and nationalist movements.     

Cartographic conflicts within a union: Finding land for Nagaland in India

Colonial-era borders continue to be sites of intra- and inter-national territorial conflicts across the Indian Sub-continent. The State of Nagaland in North East India has been witness to one of the oldest armed struggles in the region to redraw colonial borders. The Nagaland government finds itself sandwiched between an irredentist insurgency and the union government. This paper examines the cartographic-statistical fallout of the Nagaland government's balancing act that is reflected in, among other things, the diversity of conflicting maps published by different tiers and wings of the government. The paper suggests that the cartographic/territorial conflicts between Nagaland and its neighbouring states are driven by the use of political-geographic arguments to advance political-economic interests along contested borders. These conflicts are not amenable to a technical resolution as they are rooted in the as yet inconclusive search for a stable basis for Naga identity and the ongoing dispute over Nagaland's place within the Union of India. Nagaland's borders are, in fact, sites of collision of different conceptions of nationhood (Indian and Naga) and understandings of constitutional federalism. The union government tolerates Nagaland's parchment transgressions and occasional physical “encroachments.” Its cartographic laxity is motivated by the need to avoid a strictly legalistic approach that would necessitate the use of force to implement a singular, exclusive solution to protracted territorial disputes involving several states.     

For a ‘normal government’ of the colony: Antonio Gandolfi and the first administration of Eritrea (1890–1892)

The colony of Eritrea was officially born in 1890, after a period marked by scandals in which the government of the Italian territories of the Horn of Africa revealed themselves to be weak and contradictory. After the brief rule of Baldassarre Orero, Antonio Gandolfi became the first colonial governor of Eritrea. Gandolfi was highly dissatisfied with the men who administered the colony, especially as they ignored the native societies and sought to reform the government apparatus. In particular, he wanted to promote the participation of indigenous notables in the colonial government, as he felt it was necessary to share responsibility with the local population, ‘to make them responsible for the good conduct of public affairs’. The period of his administration was marked by ongoing controversies with other personalities operating in Eritrea, in particular with the deputy Leopoldo Franchetti, responsible for the colonization, and with General Oreste Baratieri, commander of the Keren zone, whom Gandolfi criticized for his hard military methods. Gandolfi was soon forced to resign and his successor Baratieri set up a real military dictatorship.     

Rethinking “Peasant Consciousness” in Colonial Egypt: An Exploration of the Performance of Folksongs by Upper Egyptian Agricultural Workers on the Archaeological Excavation Sites of Karnak and Dendera at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (1885–1914)

This paper aims to rethink “peasant consciousness” in colonial Egypt, through a study of the performance of folksongs by Upper Egyptian agricultural workers on the archaeological excavation sites of Karnak and Dendera at the turn of the twentieth century (1885–1914). Mainly based on a historical‐anthropological analysis of songs collected between 1900 and 1914 by the French archaeologists Maspéro and Legrain, this essay proposes a new understanding of subaltern consciousnesses as fragmented objects constructed through a dialectical relationship of power and resistance as performed by the various actors present on the scene. Drawing its inspiration from the work of contemporary ethnomusicologists (Finnegan 1977 Finnegan, R. 1977. Oral Poetry: Its Nature, Significance, and Social Context, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  [Google Scholar], 1992 Finnegan, R. 1992. Oral Traditions and the Verbal Arts: A Guide to Research Practices, London; New York: Routledge. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]; Slyomovics 1987 Slyomovics, S. 1987. The Merchant of Art: An Egyptian Hilali Oral Epic Poet in Performance, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.  [Google Scholar]) and relying on the framework shaped by their use of oral‐formulaic and speech‐act theories, this study conceives of the performance, reception and collection of the songs as a crucial locus of encounter, interaction and negotiation between the local landless peasants employed as daily workers on the excavation sites, and the colonial administrators of the Antiquities Service during the key period of transition from corvée to contract labour.     

Colonial ethnology and political rationality in french west Africa

This article explores the circular and mutually reinforcing relationship between professional anthropology and new technologies of administration that emerged after the First World War in French West Africa. Local administrators wrote fieldwork monographs that were formative for metropolitan science, while new native policies concerned with protecting yet improving indigenous social institutions incorporated the methods and insights of professional ethnologists. Together they created a shared field of colonial ethnology, a scientific‐administrative complex through which practical science and scientific administration constituted one another, whether deliberately or despite actors' self‐understanding. The goal is neither to dismiss anthropology as tainted by colonial history nor to accuse individual anthropologists of supporting colonial violence. Instead, this article analyzes how ethnologists' (contradictory) characterizations of African social relations and (contradictory) native policies were intrinsically related to, and did not simply influence, one another. These administrative and scientific imperatives constituted colonial humanism, a doubled and contradictory political rationality, even as they were its products. The French administration thus produced terms and data taken up by French ethnology that then shaped policies, which fueled administrative ethnographies that generated metropolitan scholarship and vice versa.     

?Doing Archaeology?: cultural heritage management and its role in identifying the link between archaeological practice and theory

Using a case study of the recent history of archaeology in Australia, the paper details how Cultural Heritage Management, in addition to protecting the archaeological data base, actually protects archaeological access to it. In offering this protection, archaeologists involved in Cultural Heritage Management become the regulators of archaeological practice and theory. Here archaeology comes into direct contact and conflict with governments and a range of interest groups, notably the Aboriginal community, with a stake in material culture. In effect 'doing' Cultural Heritage Management is 'doing' archaeology.     

The Continuity of Victorian Traces: A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book

Both King Solomon's Mines (1885) and Allan Quatermain (1887) pursue a quest to regenerate the authority of the English gentleman as ‘the highest rank that a man can reach upon this earth’. The present essay focuses upon Haggard's construction of this ideal of masculinity through the combination of the qualities of the gentleman with those of the barbarian. The discussion follows both Laura Chrisman and Bradley Deane in attending to the relationship between the ideological structures of metropole and colony. This article, however, situates Haggard's masculinist ideology in relation to the wider cultural poetics of late-Victorian material culture, particularly as manifested in the imperial souvenir – a complicated category of thing that comprises artefacts, hunting trophies and human relics. Attention to their thingness entails reflection upon the complexity of textual representations of objects and practical encounters with them as constituent elements of late-Victorian material culture. In addition to examining the significance of hunting and battle trophies in Haggard's fiction, close attention is also paid to the keynote spectacle of the Colonial and Indian Exhibition at the South Kensington Museum in 1886, Rowland Ward's habitat diorama, ‘The Jungle’, and to Ward's subsequent forays into ‘animal furniture’. Through reflection on such formations of objects, the thingness of the imperial souvenir illuminates the ideological formations within which hegemonic masculinity and imperialism were articulated at this key moment in the mid-1880s.     

French military officers and the mapping of West Africa: the case of Captain Brosselard-Faidherbe

Through the study of projects conceived to shape colonial space, this article aims to reconsider the motives and means of French colonial expansion in West Africa in the 1880s and 1890s. The Plan Faidherbe, designed by the Governor of Senegal in the 1860s, outlined a plan for eastward development, including a road and rail link between the Senegal and the Niger Rivers (and beyond, between Algeria and Sudan). The implementation of these routes of penetration called for a number of military-led topographic missions. The study of these missions and of the maps that were produced at the time reveal how such projects and their implementation were mediated by both cartographic and field practices. The case of Captain Henry Brosselard (1855-93), General Faidherbe’s son-in-law, is an interesting example because of the diversity of the missions he led and the extent of territory which he traversed and mapped. This case also shows how, in the course of a career, an officer could assume several different functions and come to conceive the process of building colonial territory from different perspectives. This paper questions a common view of the military as having a purely strategic vision of space as a field of conquest, a view which reserves a more development-oriented outlook for civil administrators and the business community. Indeed, Brosselard’s varied career somewhat blurs the conventional divide between civilians and soldiers, requiring us to reconsider accepted ways of categorising colonial actors.     

Governing population, public health, and malaria in the early Turkish republic

In the early Turkish republic of the 1920s, population was a central question of concern for the leadership of the Kemalist state. This article focuses on how a demographic discourse concerning population – in terms both numerical and medical – provided a basis for emerging programs in public health, confronting the very real threats posed by disease. Employing the example of the nascent republic’s anti-malarial campaigns, this study thus examines the discursive, cartographic, and legislative measures employed in combating this widespread disease in the wider contexts of nation-building. In doing so, it traces one vital trajectory of the development of modern governmentality (i.e., that of public health) in the case of Turkey during the 1920s and 1930s, prior to the wartime slowing of state investments (due to national defense priorities), the post-World War II infusions of foreign aid and the incorporation of DDT in confronting malaria.