This article explores the effects of the neoliberal development paradigm on the restructuring of social formations through the external funding and promotion of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Palestine, and more precisely in the West Bank towns of Ramallah and al-Bireh; they are the ‘missionaries of the new era’. It argues that neoliberal rationality aims at transforming societies and subjectivities around the notion of enterprise and weakens the collective national resistance movement.
Filed under: Israel/Palestine, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Primary amongst the legal instruments that would implement British law across Britain’s Empire were colonial mounted police forces, and one of their shared purposes was to ensure Aboriginal people’s compliance to colonial rule. Although the land wars that accompanied the imposition of British rule are an integral part of national historical memory in some parts of the “British west”, Australia and Canada have always been framed by national foundational narratives of peaceful settlement through the rule of law. This article will compare the history and historical memory of colonial mounted police forces in Australia and Canada in relation to their role in subduing Aboriginal resistance to colonial sovereignty. While by the late nineteenth century the operations of Australia’s colonial mounted police forces had achieved little purchase in a foundational story of developing Australian nationhood, over the first decades of the twentieth century, the omnipresent image of the Mountie as the foundational figure of Canadian nationhood not only helped to shape a parallel Australian story of a “fine body of men” who brought law and order to Australia’s frontiers, but also served both to obscure and to justify the violence in Australia’s policing history against Aboriginal people.
Filed under: Australia, Canada, Scholarship and insights | Closed
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
The week that I received copies of these three engaged and thoughtful responses to Empire in Question I was two-thirds of the way through the syllabus for my 400 level course, Victorian Britain, which I teach in the department of History at the University of Illinois. In fact, we were poised between General Gordon’s vainglorious death in the Sudan—with its ramifications for both Gladstone’s second ministry and the “scramble for Africa”—and the partisan political work of Irish nationalists at Westminster—that eventuated in the ill-fated Home Rule debate of 1885-86 and the rout of the Liberals from office for the better part of two decades. Inhabiting the world of that syllabus as one often does at the upper-division level of the curriculum, where you can dig deeply into primary sources and build narratives and counter-narratives and engage students in lively debate about the fate of, in this case, nation and empire in “Britain’s imperial century,” I was struck at once by the sheer generosity of my colleagues’ comments, and by the limitations of my own syllabus as well. Had I ever mentioned, let alone thoroughly explored, the Anglo-Saxonism at the heart of much racial thinking in the nineteenth century that Elaine Freedgood references? One way to do so in the context of our syllabus readings would be to examine those Victorian suffragists who invoked Magna Carta and the relationship of “British cultures” to “Indo-Germanic races.” Though the staging of Magna Carta pageantry was a prominent feature of Edwardian suffrage work, references to the superiority of Anglo-Saxon civilizations to Norman counterparts were all over early Victorian feminist periodicals as well, and were especially evident in the work of Helen Blackburn. Identifying what’s at stake in conceiving Victorian Britain as a story about “islands of whiteness” and its counter-narratives is a pedagogical preoccupation for me, and it’s salutary to be reminded of the many ways that the colonial rule of racial difference—to echo both Partha Chatterjee and Catherine Hall—can be approached.
Do I sufficiently address the inter-imperial rivalries and cross-imperial pressures that shape so many of the major imperial events—and with them, the rise and fall of governments—of the later nineteenth century, from the Crimean War to the South African War? I typically end my course with the 1905 Alien Act and the founding of Sinn Fein that same year. But following Joanna de Groot’s observations it would be interesting, and provocative, to situate those confessional acts alongside the Russo-Japanese War, as a way of truly globalizing the end of Victoria’s reign and anticipating the conflagrations of 1914-1918. The specter of an aggressively imperializing Japan laying claim not simply to a place at the table at Versailles but to a kind of racial equivalence with white Europeans on the basis of its imperial success over Russia fifteen years before would make for an instructive complement to similar Victorian-era claims and presumptions. If this seems a temporal stretch for a Victorian history course, it is in part because determining the beginning and ending dates of “Victorian Britain” is an ongoing challenge of the syllabus, which I used to take to the threshold of World War I but which I now end, effectively, with the afterlives of what was formerly known as the Boer War on a variety of imperial and domestic fronts.
And last but certainly not least, do I pay enough attention to the political economy of the imperial nation-state in this period, moving beyond the metaphor of “flow” that some critics of the cultural emphasis of the imperial turn have suggested, both implicitly and explicitly, is insufficient for getting at the relationship of consumption and trade and “material processes” to citizenship and imperial political culture in a global frame?
Filed under: Empire, Scholarship and insights | Closed
This exploratory paper looks at the potentially genocidal effects of community relocation and the imposition of capitalist time upon animist Aboriginal groups in Canada. Contemporary sociological and historical approaches to genocide define it as the violent interruption or destruction of relations that create and sustain a group, and maintain their collective lives and identities. Relocation has been used by the Canadian government and major corporations throughout history to destroy Aboriginal ties to the land, securing Aboriginal land and labour for capitalist expansion. Colonizers forced communities into a serial spatiality consistent with capitalist relations of production. Significant changes in temporal orientation, caused by the implementation of wage labour onto Aboriginal communities living on reserves, disrupt social and economic relational processes that are necessary for maintaining the group as a whole. This re-arranging of spatial and temporal perceptions violently disrupts the relational processes- involving both humans and the environment- that create and sustain animist communities’ group life and identity.
Filed under: Canada, Genocide, Scholarship and insights | Closed
durba ghosh on the imperial turn
Durba Ghosh, ‘Another Set of Imperial Turns?’, American Historical Review 117, 3 (2012).
The British imperial turn has been the product of many historiographical changes over the last century, and in the last several decades it has engaged other historiographical turns—the global, the postcolonial, and the archival. From the height of Britain’s empire in the late nineteenth century (then considered a “new imperialism”) to our current moment, imperial history in Britain has shifted from the study of the British Empire toward world and global history in which the structuring effects of European colonialism are accorded less centrality than they once were. In tracking tensions between liberal and Marxist historiographies on empire, disagreements between social and cultural historians, and differing views on the scale at which we should think about empires, we can see how one might write the histories of an imperial turn that goes global while being attentive to the states of exception to the norm that are produced from marginal, feminist, subaltern, and minority perspectives. While proponents of the imperial/postcolonial turn attempted to radically transform historical methodologies by engaging in close reading, questioning the symbolism of language, and exposing archival texts to deconstructive techniques, this move was strongly challenged by some imperial historians, who claimed that their methods were based wholly in archival research and empiricism rather than “theorizing.” One might look to feminist and queer studies approaches to reading archives as a kind of archival (re)turn that requires close reading of marginal perspectives as well as deep and thorough archival research.
Filed under: Empire, postcolonialism, Scholarship and insights | Closed
The most recent Canadian Historical Review 93, 2 (2012) contains the Garneau Roundtable on John C. Weaver’s influential book, The Great Land Rush and the Making of the Modern World, 1650-1900 (2003).
For those indebted to Weaver for his incredible comparative history of settler colonialism, it is certainly worth checking out the views of Bill Parenteau, David Hackett Fischer, E. J. Errington, Ann McGrath, and John C. Weaver himself, almost ten years after the book’s publication.
Filed under: Australia, Canada, Empire, Latin America, law, New Zealand, Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa, Sovereignty, United States | Closed
ben gurion airport
This is not merely racial profiling but the construction of particular racial, sexual and gendered hierarchies that enable Israel to be seen as ‘normal’ and ‘exceptional’ within Western governance practices. Airports in general are spaces where the state performs its sovereign power. In the case of Israel, a settler colonial state with historically shifting borders (even reaching into European capitals, as its actions over the ‘Flytilla’ activists illustrate), the airport is central to the performance of the Zionist identity and logic that underpins Israel as a settler colonial state. Through Israeli security practices, Palestinians are not constructed as a vulnerable minority or a people under decades of illegal occupation but as an essentially threatening group, who must be contained through humiliating, invasive security techniques (that is, gendered feminine). By feminizing Palestinians, Zionism constructs its strategic superiority. Meanwhile, the single Western woman traveler, potentially a victim of Arab manipulation, is physically juxtaposed to the Israeli (most often) woman security officer, simultaneously embodying Israel’s vulnerability and its supposed support for gender equality (and, thereby supposedly reaffirming Zionism’s moral superiority).
That’s Nicola Pratt in her recent piece in Jadaliyya. For more, including some photographs of the incredible posters that greet new arrivals to Israel, check it out here.
Filed under: Israel/Palestine, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Reviewed by Eliga Gould; Published on H-Soz-u-Kult (June, 2012).
For the most part, when Benton talks about empire and sovereignty, what she means is the fiduciary sovereignty of European rulers over non-European subjects; however, Europe also expanded through the outmigration of European settlers, who generally preferred not to govern indigenous peoples but to displace them — often with the assistance of non-European slaves, who also tended to be migrants — and who cared deeply about the territorial sovereignty that Benton cautions against. On this last point, it is worth noting James Belich’s recent argument that “it was settlement, not empire, that had . . . staying power in the history of European expansion.” James Belich, Replenishing the Earth. The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783-1939, Oxford 2009, p. 23. This of course is a contentious point, with which Benton might well disagree. Still, by passing over the settler nations and empires that also proliferated during the period covered by her book, Benton leaves the reader wondering how that part of Europe’s expansion affected the part that is her main concern.
Filed under: Empire, law, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Mohamed Adhikari’s book The Anatomy of a South African Genocide is a synthesis of the research on the extermination of the San peoples of South Africa and aims to establish that such extermination must be considered genocide. Unfortunately, the book is based exclusively on published sources, and especially with regard to the nineteenth century, fails to consider archival and other sources that throw much light on the fate of the San, most notably the corpus of documents on the mission that the resident magistrate and civil commissioner of Namaqualand, Louis Anthing, undertook in 1862 to investigate reports of massacres of San bands in Bushmanland. Adhikari’s book also suffers from the fact that he refers to “the San”, while it is methodologically more correct to distinguish clearly between the different San populations and to address the history of specific groups in specific areas of southern Africa. Another major weakness is his placement of almost exclusive blame for the extermination of the San on “Dutch-speaking pastoralists”, downplaying sources that point to the heavy involvement of Baster, Griqua and Khoi groups in the destruction of the hunter-gatherer bands. The case study of Louis Anthing’s mission to Bushmanland, which proves that there was indeed genocide in Bushmanland in the second half of the nineteenth century, is presented in detail to show that an engagement with archival sources is essential to grasp the tragedy of the San in all its complexity.
Filed under: Genocide, Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa | Closed
In recent decades, Indigenous histories have been increasingly significant and growing areas of historical research in white settler societies such as Australia and New Zealand. These rich veins of historical enquiry have, for the most part, been explored within the framework of national boundaries, and the state has been central to many analyses of Indigenous experiences of the past. Calls to write comparative Indigenous histories are not new, and since the 1990s, such projects have appeared in growing numbers. Yet they remain relatively scarce, particularly outside the history of the British empire, or across empires. At the same time, more and more scholars have adopted the methods and approaches of transnational history. Trends in the writing of Indigenous histories and trends in transnational historical scholarship, however, may be leading in opposite directions. In this paper I reflect on these trends, and on the longer history of comparative Indigenous history writing, taking comparisons of Australia and New Zealand as a particular example. Exploring some of the problems and possibilities that have faced those embarking on such research, I reflect on the implications for the transnational history project of the call to local and regional views emerging from Indigenous histories.
Filed under: Australia, Empire, New Zealand, Scholarship and insights | Closed
