‘Garden City’ in the tropics? French Dakar in comparative perspective

The aim of this article is to examine the transmission of garden city notions into the colonial context by focussing on French Dakar, a key site of colonisation in West Africa. Although there is an abundance of literature on the diffusion of urban ideas in general and garden city notions in particular, publications about extra-European planning history, especially in the formerly colonised territories and sub-Saharan Africa, are scant. The article analyses the conception and communication of garden city schemes from late nineteenth-century Britain to early twentieth-century France in terms of cité-jardin applications within the colonial urban sphere of French West Africa. It will also be shown that in interwar Dakar, the practical and terminological usages of the cité-jardin served mainly to create a prestigious image for the designated residential quarters of administrative employees. As a result, unofficial class segregation within the expatriate society was enforced as was unofficial racial segregation between the colonisers and the colonised.     

Cotton,climate and colonialism in Dharwar,western India, 1840–1880

Focussing on the cotton improvement projects in Dharwar, western India, that exemplified the modernising aims of colonial agriculture in nineteenth-century India, this article interrogates the architecture of cotton imperialism in the colonised world through the conceptual lens of political ecology. In particular, it brings to the fore the crucial dimension of climate both as an element in colonial thinking and planning, and as a dynamic force impacting on the cultivation of transplanted American cotton. The climate of Dharwar was not quite what the cotton authorities had constructed it to be, and it was, moreover, undergoing change due to the impact of regional deforestation. Furthermore, the article shows how this failure to come to terms with local climate conditions and changes was symptomatic of a broader failure to consider the overall agricultural livelihoods of peasant cultivators. Apart from a brief period when prices were artificially high, peasants much preferred growing the accustomed indigenous cotton rather than the new exotic variety. In turn, cotton was less of a priority than the production of millet food crops. By exploring the ways in which climatic conditions interacted with the economic, social and technological processes of cotton production in Dharwar, this article highlights why American cotton cultivation failed to meet colonial expectations during this period while also revealing the fragile architectural edifice of colonial power.     

Active citizenship and the governmentality of local lesbian and gay politics

This paper explores the relationship between new forms of speakability and continuing unthinkability in the context of British local government lesbian and gay work, particularly post-1997. The paper argues new municipal speech acts ushered in progressive modes of sexual citizenship; at the same time, local government's refusal to think hard, deeply or critically, limited the modes of active citizenship made possible. The paper addresses the easing out of active citizenship through an analysis of local government's self-care and its intensification of firewalls – firewalls which restricted the possibility of certain non-state forces guiding from ‘a distance’.     

The Allison Commission and the national map: towards a Republic of Knowledge in late nineteenth-century America

From 1884 to 1886, the U.S. Congressional Allison Commission convened to address the administrative organization and escalating costs of the major federal scientific agencies, and to establish new modes of accountability to ensure their proper conduct. Much of the commission's attention turned to the Geological Survey's plans for the production of a geodetically accurate, national topographic map (in 2600 sheets), and the national geologic map that would follow the topographic work. While critics saw the national mapping program as an immense and inefficient scientific boondoggle, its advocates, notably its author, Survey Director John Wesley Powell, saw instead a tangible reflection of science's republican virtue – a vision of the body politic founded on both the production and the democratic and geographical distribution of useful scientific information. This paper explores the scientific nature of territoriality in late nineteenth-century America by revisiting a moment when both the technical requirements and fiscal expenses of America's new national mapping program were called into question. Through a close reading of the conflicts between Powell and the Alabama Representative, commission member, and future US Secretary of the Navy Hilary Abner Herbert, the paper examines the hearings as a complex hybrid of public sphere and formal legislative arena. The outcomes of these debates would have profound implications for the politics of scientific expertise amidst the rising American Leviathan, and for the changing dimensions of modern state territoriality and sovereignty.     

Conquest,pestilence and demographic collapse in the early Spanish Philippines

Documentary evidence for the demographic impact of Spanish conquest and colonial rule in the Philippines suggests that the pre-Spanish population was about 1.5 million. This is higher than previous estimates and implies that the decline in the early colonial period was greater than often supposed. However, the decline was lower than that associated with Spanish conquest in the Americas. The more moderate impact of Old World diseases in the Philippines cannot be attributed to immunity that Filipinos had acquired through contacts with Asia in pre-Spanish times, but to the low population density and difficult communications between and within the islands that impeded their spread. Despite new colonial policies aimed at the more peaceful acquisition of new territories, conquest in the Philippines was accompanied by considerable bloodshed. However, in the longer term the impact of colonial rule was moderated by the limited Spanish presence that resulted from the remoteness of the islands from Spain and the limited opportunities there for wealth creation, notably in the form of precious minerals.     

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.     

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.     

Observing,Collecting and Governing “Ourselves” and “Others”: Mass-Observation's Fieldwork Agencements

This paper explores the relationship between oligoptic visual economies and liberal technologies of government which emerge from a consideration of the field collecting practices of Mass-Observation (MO), a social research movement established in the years leading up to the outbreak of the Second World War which attempted to develop an anthropology of British “everyday” life. Focussing on MO's fieldwork agencements, the paper shows how the project brought together museological methods of collecting and curating with new mechanisms of collective self-watching, and the ways in which these mechanisms became implicated in technologies of government through its archival operations. In the connections it drew between the liberal subjectivities of collective self-watching and surrealist aesthetic practices, MO played a significant role in shaping new governmental rationalities, with implications for both metropolitan and colonial populations, through its interlinked conceptions of “mass” and “morale”. These formed part of a broader scientific–administrative–bureaucratic apparatus which facilitated the classification, ordering and governance of populations and “things” in this and later periods.