大米换橡胶：20世纪50年代的中锡贸易

1952年9月和12月,中国与锡兰从各自的需要出发,签订了以大米换橡胶为主要内容的政府贸易协定,不仅开创了新中国同尚未建交、又是不同社会制度国家签订政府贸易协定的先河,而且建立了新中国与锡兰间的贸易关系,促进了两国贸易额的迅速增长。1957年8月,中锡在签订第二个五年贸易协定时,面对超价难题,周恩来提出了将贸易和援助分开来谈,即橡胶贸易按照公平的市场价格,但中国同时给予锡兰经济援助的设想,使谈判进入了比较顺利的阶段。中锡贸易协定的执行和续订,从南亚和东南亚方向打开了美国对华封锁、禁运的缺口,促进了中锡友好关系的发展。     

‘Why Disgrace the Commonwealth?’ Ceylonese Communalism,the Search for Global Influence and the Politics of a Transnational Organisation, 1948–65

This article examines the progress of the commonwealth as a forum for political action by Ceylonese in the first two decades after the nation’s independence by focusing on the debate over Tamil political rights. Significantly, this domestic conflict intensified during a crucial phase in the commonwealth’s transition, from being essentially a members’ club consisting of Britain and the settler dominions to a multilateral organisation led by newly independent African and Asian states. In this ambivalent geopolitical landscape, an emerging small state such as Ceylon sought to use the commonwealth in such a way as to project itself on the world stage, while at the same time some of its citizens adopted the organisation as a focus for liberal causes against the state. In this way, it is argued, the ‘new commonwealth’ was being shaped by postcolonial British legacies of global influence and liberal politics.     

After the ‘king of beasts’: Samuel Baker and the embodied historical geographies of elephant hunting in mid-nineteenth-century Ceylon

This paper draws on and develops a range of concepts and methodologies from ‘more-than-human’ and animal geographies to map some embodied historical geographies of elephant hunting in mid-nineteenth-century Ceylon. It focuses in particular on the exploits of Samuel Baker and some of his contemporaries. The paper attends to the attachments, crossings and ethics that passed between hunted and hunting bodies to flesh out the colonial visions of these ‘seeing men’ of empire. It critically engages with existing work on hunting and colonial natural history by examining interwoven human and nonhuman experiences, exploring elephant hunting as a collection of embodied and co-evolutionary processes with complex material histories. Drawing out the importance of embodiment, affect and intercorporeal exchange the paper then reflects on the performance, epistemology and ethics of hunting practice and traces the role played by a code of sportsmanship in orientating and legitimating the ethical sensibility of hunting. In conclusion the paper details what is gained from this style of embodied historical analysis which unsettles any simple spatio-temporal territorialisation of (post-) colonial historical geographies.     

The Clanking of Medieval Chains: Extra-Judicial Banishment in the British Empire

Banishment in English law was circumscribed by the Magna Carta and habeas corpus and prohibited except by legal procedure. The Transportation Act of 1718 legalised exile and enshrined convictism in law. The case of Bancoult (No.2), 2008, which considered the banishment of the Ilois of Chagos Island in the 1960s, brought consideration of banishment into the twentieth century and opened the royal prerogative to modern scrutiny. What becomes clear from this case is that banishment relied on royal prerogative without resort to legal process and was surprisingly routine throughout the British Empire. This article considers the implications of this case and some of the wider history of banishment in the empire.     

From Batticaloa via Basel to Berlin. Transimperial Science in Ceylon and Beyond around 1900

ABSTRACT

Recent historiographies of ‘Science and Empire’ have successfully critiqued older euro-centric narratives. They highlighted how science was ‘co-produced’ through interactions between knowledgeable European and non-European actors in colonial ‘contact zones’, and how this ‘pidginised knowledge’ circulated through networks across various sites within the British Empire. This article shares and expands this approach. By focussing on continental European scholars in Ceylon around 1900, it argues that scientific networks were never confined to a particular empire. Science among Europeans was, rather, multi-lingual, mostly cross-disciplinary and always transimperial. Applying such an approach to the history of science in late colonial Ceylon allows us to uncover entanglements between historical processes that have for too long remained subject matters of disconnected historiographies: the emergence of Buddhist revivalism, evolutionary theories about human origins, the transformation from ‘liberal race science’ to Nazi eugenics in Germany, and the surfacing of British cultural anthropology.