Producing Ottomans: Internal Colonization and Social Engineering in Ottoman Immigrant Settlement

In the past decade, historians of the Armenian Genocide have productively explored broader trends in Ottoman population politics to situate the genocide within the totality of Ottoman social engineering techniques and to highlight continuities between the Second Constitutional Period (1908–1918) and the Kemalist era (1919–1950). This article contributes to the effort to understand state building, internal colonization, and state-enacted violence across regimes by examining Ottoman archival documents related to immigrant settlement. Rather than focusing exclusively on the Young Turk period, this article traces Ottoman conceptions of its territory and population from the 1850s forward. In 1857, concerns about population density and population productivity inspired the Tanzimat High Council to issue a new set of migration regulations, which encouraged immigration by promising free land, tax exemption, and religious freedom for colonists from Europe and the United States. The issuing of the 1857 regulations occurred almost simultaneously with the initiation of a decades-long mass Muslim migration from the Crimean Peninsula, Caucasus, and Balkans into the shrinking territory of the Ottoman state. In 1860, the Empire established a centralized Immigrant Commission (Muhacirin Komisyonu) for receiving, categorizing, and settling the Muslim immigrants. Most immigrants did not meet the selection criteria established in the 1857 regulations. Nevertheless, immigrant settlement became a key component in nineteenth-century Ottoman internal colonization and social engineering. Ultimately, settlement policies and data generated about the population and territory allowed officials to enact assimilative and expulsive policies based not only on ethnic or religious characteristics but also on tropes of productivity and civilization. Examining immigrant settlement as internal colonization situates the Ottoman Empire within global patterns of state building and imperialism and reveals continuity in how officials conceived of population productivity and population removal, allowing historians to understand better political, infrastructural, and ideological precursors to the Armenian genocide.     

Tourists as colonizers in Quintana Roo,Mexico

Spatial appropriation is an age‐old strategy for domination by one group over another. In the context of national states, territorial expansion is a common manifestation of this. Spain's colonization process began in the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico in the sixteenth century but remained incomplete in this area. Independent Mexico's struggle for control over the Mayan landscape of the Yucatan continued through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is my contention that the assault has continued in recent times. Today, it is not the conventional notion of nation state colonialism but a much more subtle invasion brought about by the ability of tourists from richer nations to travel south. Using the paradigm of settler colonization, this article proposes that relationships of power underlying this new infiltration parallel those of conventional colonialism, and that the tourist is, in fact, an unwitting colonizer. The case of Quintana Roo, Mexico illustrates how the tourist can be seen as a pawn in a larger political project. Exposure of this predatory nature of tourism reveals processes that have implications for other Native regions of the Americas and beyond that are suffering similar “invasions.”     

The technology of Stone Age colonization: an empirical,regional-scale examination of Clovis unifacial stone tool reduction,allometry, and edge angle from the North American Lower Great Lakes region

There is now broad consensus that the appearance of Clovis in Northeastern North America (Great Lakes, New England) represents a colonization pulse into recently deglaciated landscapes. Due to the increased resource uncertainty that comes with colonizing unfamiliar landscapes, it was hypothesized that the majority tool component of Clovis assemblages, unifacial stone tools, should have been knapped on tool blanks possessing the design properties of longevity and functional flexibility to facilitate exploration mobility and guard against the absence of toolstone sources in the new landscape. These properties are optimized by large, flat flakes, possessing large surface area relative to flake thickness. Since discarded and, at times, exhausted unifacial stone tools do not preserve the original dimensions of the blank upon which they were created – necessary items for a true test of blank morphology selection – this study presents a set of predictions for inferring whether Clovis unifacial stone tool blanks were selected for the properties of longevity and functional flexibility based on evidence that Clovis people actually capitalized on those properties. Due to the nature of Clovis unifacial stone tools, tool size was of necessity used as a proxy for tool reduction, on the grounds that smaller tools are more likely to have been resharpened than larger tools, at least in the case of unifacial flake tools. The results showed that less resharpened tools possessed flatter, less spherical shapes than the more resharpened tools, which possessed more globular, spherical shapes, suggesting Clovis foragers exploited the retouch potential afforded by the larger, flatter blanks. Edge angles showed no relationship with tool reduction, suggesting that Clovis foragers exploited the functional flexibility afforded by flatter blanks by adjusting the edge angle to be either higher or lower as needed. These results are consistent with the notion that human colonizers, who did not know the abundance or location of stone outcrops prior to settling an unfamiliar territory, not only “geared up” before leaving a stone source, but geared up as efficiently as possible by carefully selecting the blanks they chose to carry. Broader implications for such careful unifacial stone tool blank selection are discussed.     

The Danish St Croix Project: Revisiting the Lincoln Colonization Program with Foreign-language Sources

Working from previously unknown sources in Danish archives, this article establishes for the first time the important role that the island of St Croix played in the Lincoln administration's considerations on colonizing African Americans abroad. This article argues that U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward, commonly viewed as an anti-colonizationist, was at least a mild proponent of colonization in its earliest stages. The article demonstrates further that in the summer of 1862, the St Croix colonization project was an important stepping stone in the Lincoln administration's legal justification for emancipation, and that it was recognized as such by high-ranking Confederates. The negotiations failed for reasons that had little to do with Lincoln or his opinion on the matter. Rather, the plan fell through because the Danes slowly turned against it for economic and political reasons. The substantial conclusion of this article is that, contrary to earlier perceptions in the historiography, African American colonization during the Civil War was not led and directed entirely from Washington. Rather, in this case, the Danish minister proposed a colonization plan and then worked with the U.S. Government to attempt to see it through.     

Living with the fence: militarization and military spaces on Guahan/Guam

The landscape of Guahan/Guam, an organized unincorporated territory of the USA and the largest and southernmost island of the Mariana Islands archipelago, is visibly marked by chain link fences that enclose land taken for use by the US military. This US military presence on Guam is evidence of a long military colonial history that has stressed, particularly under US rule, the importance of the island's strategic location. The ‘fence,’ a frequently used but rarely defined expression, refers to a multiplicity of lines, most of which recreate a dichotomous view of military/local relations, and help to make invisible the complex web of identities that go through, over, and beyond its real and imagined spaces. Working from an understanding that theory must be grounded in experience, this article draws on interviews to explore the multiple meanings of the fence. It focuses on the ways the colonized, militarized, and gendered spaces of the fence promote US values, interests, and security concerns but also mark points of resistance to militarization and colonization. Exploring the ways colonization and militarization are played out on the bodies of those who live and work on the island, the article concludes that tearing down the ‘fence’ must include both demilitarization and decolonization, but in ways that transcend, rather than reproduce its present gendered and dichotomous spaces.     

Island Archaeology,Model Systems,the Anthropocene,and How the Past Informs the Future

The use of islands as ‘model systems’ has become particularly relevant for examining a host of important issues in archaeology and other disciplines. As papers in this special issue of the Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology demonstrate, islands can serve as critical and ideal analytical platforms for observing human populations in the past and their evolutionary histories within complex and insular human ecodynamics. In this paper we address the issue of how islands are also important models for future sustainability and as corollaries for the survival of humans generally. In a sense, island cultures and ecosystems can be seen as microcosms of the issues we have faced as humans, and provide important insights for understanding the fate of our species, particularly as it pertains to the exploration and colonization of new worlds.     

Long-term developments in complex hunter-gatherer societies: Recent perspectives from the pacific coast of North America

The Pacific coast of North America is ideally suited to the study of long-term developments in complex hunter-gatherer societies. This paper synthesizes current research in California and the Northwest Coast on three related research problems. The first concerns the timing, spatial distribution, and economies of the earliest coastal peoples in the region. The second problem involves the growth and florescence of complex Pacific hunter-gatherer societies. What constitutes archaeological evidence of hunter-gatherer complexity, when and where it occurs, and the interpretations proposed to account for it are reviewed. The final problem addresses how complex hunter-gatherer peoples responded to European exploration and colonization, and how these early encounters affected the Pacific coast societies recorded in early ethnohistoric accounts and later studied by ethnographers.     

Clovis Lithic Technology: The Devil Is in the Details

Clovis is the best known early development in North America buts its lithic technology is poorly documented and often from animal kill sites. This evidence has been used to picture Clovis peoples as mobile, colonizing, big-game hunters and explanations of lithic technological practices have been framed largely in materialist terms. Increasing documentation suggests views about how the complex Clovis biface and blade production strategies relate to subsistence, land use, and specific kinds of mobility patterns are questionable and often difficult to test with archaeological data. We need to seriously consider the role of Clovis people's worldview in structuring their thought and technical actions.     

The Peopling of the New World: Present Evidence, New Theories, and Future Directions

The prevailing archaeological consensus on Paleoindian origins and colonization of the Americas has been shaken by recent wide acknowledgment of pre-Clovis occupation at Monte Verde, Chile, and by claims that ostensibly non-Mongoloid skeletal remains might represent a precursor population. Recent mitochondrial DNA studies have been interpreted by some as indicating an earlier and more complex peopling of the continent. This paper reviews the current archaeological and biological evidence, in America and northern Asia, for the origins of Native Americans, assesses models of the colonization process in the light of new data and a revised chronology, and suggests avenues for future research.