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
The Canadian diamond industry has been lauded as a new approach to resource extraction, one whose institutions are characterized by a greater attention to Indigenous rights and the environment. However, an institutional analysis obfuscates the terrain of unequal relations that is the context for the Canadian diamond boom; an analysis of the effectiveness of social and environmental policies in relation to the extraction of diamonds in the Canadian North suggests that there is an intent on the part of those instigating this extraction (that is, the Canadian state, Canadian capitalist interests and international capitalist interests) to protect the Northern environment and to provide economic benefits to Northern Indigenous communities. This piece argues, instead, that this assumption is erroneous and that the Northern mining industry is part of Canada’s project of internal colonization of Indigenous communities, a project that has intensified and expanded in the neoliberal era.
Filed under: Canada, Scholarship and insights | Closed
How do the perpetrators of mass killing legitimise their behaviour? This article examines the legitimation of some of the worst cases of mass killing in the past two centuries. It finds that the colonial experience helped establish a moral framework that facilitated arguments designed to place whole groups beyond normal legal and moral protection on account of some assigned traits. This moral framework was evident in different colonial settings and rested on claims negating the right of the victim group to protection and claims valourising their violent extermination. It also underpinned the moral justifications offered by perpetrators of some of the twentieth century’s worst episodes of mass killing. This article examines the “family resemblances” between the arguments used by perpetrators in different settings, indentifies their common structure, and examines the factors that influenced their capacity to secure legitimacy for mass killing.
Filed under: Empire, Genocide, Scholarship and insights | Closed
