Reviewed by Daniel Gorman (University of Waterloo)
Published on H-Albion (January, 2011)
Commissioned by Thomas Hajkowski
excerpt:
Despite work by scholars such as David Armitage, Uday Singh Mehta, Jennifer Pitts, and Duncan Bell, to cite just four examples of a recent upsurge of interest in empire and political theory, we still have only a partial understanding of the historical discourses surrounding the intellectual roots of empire. To be sure, imperial historians have devoted much ink to “discourse” as a dynamic feature of the history of empire. Whether invoking Orientalism, Michel Foucault, or the Subaltern School, much of the history very loosely grouped under the aegis of “postcoloniality” has argued that the very essence of imperialism was ideational. Relationships of inequality and power were inscribed in the various iterations of imperial rule and culture created by European powers. Recovering the history of these relationships requires historians to be attentive to how ideas and language were constructed and contested. This work has without question widened our understanding of how and why empires functioned, and how they shaped the lives of those in both the metropole and the colonized world. Yet like the politico-economic imperial history which is sometimes presented as its foil, the “new imperial history,” whether postcolonial or more empirically based cultural history, largely ignores the ideational beginnings and subsequent intellectual rationales of empire. The “idea of empire” is assumed from its later nature.
Filed under: Empire, Scholarship and insights | Closed
scs update
Dear all,
I have been between countries and computers frantically over the last few weeks, but the blog should return back to normal soon.
Our first issue of the settler colonial studies (the journal) is coming along nicely and should be published and available online — in open access — in March. I will publish a table of contents teaser on the blog in the coming weeks.
Ed Cavanagh
for the settler colonial studies blog
Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed
Abstract
On the frontiers of Queensland and British Columbia in the mid-nineteenth century, a culture of violence prevailed. Frontier men accommodated violence in their lives as a routine and normal part of frontier living. The Victorian ethos of ‘manliness’ – the possession of essential virtues such as self-restraint, courage and strenuous effort – had within it the potential for violence. On the frontier the practice of manliness often entailed violence and the manly ethos could be distorted to justify and legitimise violent acts.
Filed under: Australia, Canada, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Why do so many individuals and organizations shy away from calling land grabbing what it is, and either put it in inverted commas or trot out such euphemisms as ‘responsible land-based investment’, ‘commercial pressures on land’ or ‘large-scale investment in land’?
Why are researchers who have worked on land grabbing so apparently timid and complacent in their conclusions, so desperately eager to seek magic, painless ‘win-win’ solutions, and so quick to retreat to ‘each case is different, the devil lies in the detail’ formulations. Could it be that they fear to antagonize their donors?
Why is such an enormous amount of effort, time and resources being invested by organizations such as the World Bank, FAO, IFAD, IFPRI etc, in the drawing up of international, but always voluntary, codes of conduct in an attempt to regulate land grabbing? These will increase the likelihood of poor people losing their land and it will be impossible to bring to account companies which violate them. I agree with Ian Scoones that such principles are ‘doomed to failure, given the lack of capacity, failures of institutional authority, corrupt practices and so on’ highlighted in the World Bank’s September 2010 report, Rising Global Interest in Farmland. Advocates of ‘win-win’ situations argue that many of these are ‘paper deals’ which may never come to fruition. I think that misses the point entirely. Are those whose land rights are threatened expected to sit patiently and wait to see what happens?
Finally, why, given that the long term impact of global land grabbing on many African rural communities could well be catastrophic, does there appear to exist an almost total conspiracy of silence on the subject? Although I sense that this may at last be beginning to change a little.
Parts of Africa are being targeted because ‘African farmland prices are the lowest in the world’ and ‘it is the last frontier’. Many African leaders, and foreign investors, peddle the myth that there is a vast amount of vacant, unused land, owned by no one – and hence available to outsiders. One suggested that pastoralists in Ethiopia ‘can just go somewhere else’, another that Zambia has well over 30 million hectares ‘begging to be utilised’, yet another that 36 million hectares of arable land in Mozambique could be used for biofuels without threatening food production!
Still, doesn’t sound like settler colonialism – but then what is it? I raised some of these issues here, but the matter is far from settled. More scholarship on this is required.
See full article here @ African Arguments.
Hat tip to Aaron B.
Filed under: Africa, postcolonialism, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Highlights from the H-Net discussion network.
Is this list an academic platform or a mediator for political propaganda and agitation?
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… it seems still in accordance with an academic platform, unless I assume one consider’s the list of internationally/academically acknowledged speakers and chairs [both Palestinian and Israeli in fact] non-academic because they dont reiterate a particular political dogma, or because the issues being raised dont echo a colonial logic. That is possible too of course. Thankfully not in London though.
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While there is ample room for discussion of the issue of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, with men and women of good will able to discuss the historical context, political significance, cultural and religious impact, economics and other factors relating to past practices and current results, this conference does not seem to provide the kind of arena in which that would be possible. The perpetrator-victim paradigm, which appears to be the conforming ideology of this conference based on the invitation, is hardly an objective starting point for an examination of a conflict of this magnitude and complexity.
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The conference is organised neither by “semi-academics” nor by “anti-Israelis.” In fact a number of the academic presenters, all very well-known and well-regarded historians, are Israelis themselves. And to be clear and open, I am a chair of one of the sessions, and I have done legitimate research with and on Palestinians. The conference addresses the legacy and continuation of settler-colonial discourses and practices from the establishment of the Yishuv to the present. SOAS has invited a number of excellent people; and the suggestion that somehow the conference should be “balanced” is absolutely unheard-of (except in the context of Israel/Palestine, of course, when even a single conference that may critically view the history of Israel is required to be balanced by a partisan view that lauds the state and every one of its actions as the most moral on earth).
I love these H-Net discussion networks. Recall the discussion on violence in South Africa bogged down into a succession of personal snipes, in the wake of the Terre’Blanche murder, for instance.
Filed under: Israel/Palestine, Scholarship and insights, Website | Closed
is decolonisation dead?
“Is decolonization dead?” What does such a question mean? In what ways could decolonization be dead? That would be, it seemed to me, either the day when the colonized have thoroughly overcome colonization OR the day when the colonized themselves are all dead.
Unless, of course, “decolonization” here refers simply to an academic fad whose time has come and gone, and so its being “dead” only means that it is no longer worthy of study, no longer worthy of attention, no longer worthy of tenure—if it ever had been perceived as such by mainstream academics, for the colonized themselves have had a hard enough time getting tenure. Perhaps it is no longer hip, now that something hipper must have come along. So these must be the postdecolonial days during which we must all be doing our Postdecolonial Studies.
But if, on the other hand, “decolonization” still refers to decolonization—the rigorous, dangerous, and ongoing process of challenging the external and internalized roots, mechanisms, institutions, willful as well as unconscious blindnesses, and the unrelenting sanctioned violence of colonialism—then decolonization has hardly begun.
Filed under: Empire, Scholarship and insights, Website | Closed
symposium on ‘political authority, recognition, and the right of indigenous peoples’ published
Breanna M. Forni, ‘Political Authority, Recognition, and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: An Introduction’, pp. 44-46.
Burke Hendrix, ‘Political Authority and Indigenous Sovereignty’, pp. 47-52.
Andrew Volmert, ‘Indigenous Self-Determination and Freedom from Rule’, pp. 53-59.
Jorge M. Valadez, ‘Deliberation, Cultural Difference, and Indigenous Self-Governance’, pp. 60-65.
Filed under: law, Scholarship and insights | Closed
This forum discusses the comparative dimensions of settler colonialism in Israel and the U.S.-Mexico border region, including separation walls, issues of migration, and the control of movement, dispossession, and settlement. The contributions take a variety of perspectives, both activist and scholarly. They engage with the longer historical perspective and with contemporary realities that suggest the comparability of the experience of Chicana/os and other Latina/o minorities in the United States and Mexico and that of the Palestinian populations of the Occupied Territories and Israel itself. Methodologically, they cross the disciplinary boundaries that separate disparate instances of oppression and struggle and propose that both scholarly and activist work should make connections between locations while respecting the distinctiveness and specificity of places and histories. Solidarity, these essays suggest, is based not on absolute identification, but on differentiated experiences of oppression and struggle against systems of domination like settler colonialism and capitalism.
Filed under: Israel/Palestine, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
This essay revisits the language of conquest in metropolitan writings advocating Elizabethan Atlantic expansion. It argues that contrary to the belligerent connotations scholars usually attach to the word conquest, in Elizabethan England it was a term used in a benign and benevolent manner that fit within humanist goals for a noble, peaceful, and long-term relationship with both the people and land of America. By the early seventeenth century, however, this idea of benign conquest was overshadowed by factors such as the example of Spanish conquest in the New World, which tainted the English benign usage, and the transition from theory in the Elizabethan age to practice under the early Stuarts, which showed that the American natives were not willing to accept English presence on the benevolent terms anticipated by English humanists. Another factor that led to the decline in the language of benign conquest was the formulation of the “conquest doctrine” in the law of nations, which gave the term an exclusively belligerent connotation. Owing to these various factors, by the time the permanent English empire in America was established, the idea of benign conquest no longer had a place in domestic, colonial, or supranational discourse.
Keywords:Elizabethan Atlantic expansion, conquest doctrine, benign conquest, Ken MacMillan, Humphrey Gilbert, Walter Ralegh, Richard Hakluyt, Alberico Gentili, English colonialism
Filed under: Empire, law, Scholarship and insights, Sovereignty, United States | Closed
‘In many parts of Israel, imported plants have crowded out native species’, Haaretz reported yesterday.
“Many years ago, eucalyptus trees were planted in the Dan reserve and proliferated rapidly,” Dr. Didi Kaplan, the authority’s ecologist for the northern region, explained yesterday. “They are hindering the development of the reserve’s natural vegetation, among other things by preventing light from penetrating.”
After much effort, the INPA persuaded the Jewish National Fund and Kibbutz Dan, which had planted the trees, to cut them down.
“The results are simply amazing,” Kaplan said. “Immediately after the trees were cut down, indigenous plant species, like small-flowered willow-herb, appeared after decades of absence.”
Filed under: Israel/Palestine, media | Closed
