Americans have been showing their independent streak for thousand of years. Samples of fossilized faeces from caves in Oregon show that two distinct tool-making cultures lived side by side more than 13,000 years ago. And a genetic analysis of living Native Americans from dozens of cultures indicates that, in prehistory, North and South America were settled by at least three waves of migrants from Asia.
Together, the studies — published this week in Science and Nature — support the idea that humans settled the continents along the Pacific coastline first, fast and furiously, and moved inland later.
Ewan Callaway, Nature online, citing ‘Reconstructing Native American Population History’.
Filed under: Ancient History, Canada, Scholarship and insights, Science, United States | Closed
This article explores the making of segregated space in Bundaberg as revealed by an 1891 trial for the killing of Charlie Eureka, an Aboriginal man of the area. The article reveals the ways settler anxieties regarding race, possession and settlement manifested in the built environment of colonial space. While historians haved looked at the policing of Queensland’s settler towns with racial curfews and surveillance, less have considered the lived experiences of the marginalised communities themselves. I argue that these communities exerted their own spatial presence and that available records provide glimpses of their economic and cultural agency.
Filed under: Australia, Scholarship and insights | Closed
When compared with other reconciliation processes, Australian reconciliation and its acts of official remembrance have received relatively little academic attention, and yet the case raises many important questions for settler societies struggling to come to terms with past misdeeds and the burden of the past in the present. This article places Australian reconciliation in the political context of the campaign for a treaty between Indigenous peoples and the settler state that emerged in the 1980s, the institutionalization of common law Indigenous land rights during the 1990s, and the current ‘intervention’ in the Northern Territory. The nature and trajectory of these political events are at odds with two highly lauded official acts of remembrance made under the rubric of reconciliation, Paul Keating’s Redfern Park speech in 1992, and Kevin Rudd’s formal state apology in 2008. The article argues that such settler state acts of official remembrance and acknowledgement of past injustices, while far from devoid of value, are considerably diminished by the positively colonial, and inherently unjust, contemporary political context in which they were made.
Filed under: Australia, Scholarship and insights | Closed
This article examines how the dichotomy of the colonizer/colonized was elastic, but sustained by people’s everyday existence in the Japanese colony by examining experiences of Okinawan migrants in colonial Taiwan. While Taiwanese struggled to become ‘Japanese’ by mastering Japanese language and practicing Japanese customs in their daily lives, Japanese migrants in Taiwan also tried to become ‘Japanese’ in distinguishing themselves from the colonized subjects. Although Okinawan people were legally categorized into ‘Japanese’ and enjoyed some privileges such as a colonial bonus for public officials, ‘Okinawans’ were seen as the ‘other Japanese’, and were likely to be marginalized in the Japanese community. Thus, the micro-politics of ‘becoming Japanese’ and ‘distinguishing from Taiwanese’ was critical to their everyday lives. On the basis of my own oral interview records of the former migrants from the Yaeyama Islands, which sent a number of migrants to Taiwan in the 1920s and the 1930s, this article examines why they migrated to colonial Taiwan, and in what way they struggled to become the ‘colonizer’ in their daily lives. This article demonstrates colonial modernity matters not only to those who were ‘colonized’ in the Japanese empire, but also to the Japanese colonizer. Indeed, colonial modernity matters on the point that the boundary between the ‘colonizer/colonized’ was produced and re-produced at different political fields in the empire.
Filed under: Asia, Scholarship and insights | Closed
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
