reblog: africa at its best
via zunguzungu
Filed under: Africa, Scholarship and insights, Website | Closed
john mackenzie on the museums
John M. MacKenzie, Museums and Empire: Natural history, human cultures and colonial identities (Manchester UP: 2009)
Museums and Empire is the first book to examine the origins and development of museums in six major regions if the British Empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It analyses museum histories in thirteen major centres in Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, India and South-East Asia, setting them into the economic and social contexts of the cities and colonies in which they were located. Written in a lively and informative style, it also touches upon the history of many other museums in Britain and other territories of the Empire. A number of key themes emerge from its pages; the development of elites within colonial towns and cities; the emergence of the full range of cultural institutions associated with this; and the reception and modification of the key scientific ideas of the age. A major theme is the shift from natural history to ethnographic collecting, which generates key ideas upon the emergence of new colonial identities by the beginning of the twentieth century. There is also some discussion of international and imperial networks, of the development of a professionalized museum staff, as well as of display techniques to attract the public and create educational programmes. The book is illustrated in order to illustrate points about museum architecture. It will be essential reading for all those concerned with museum studies and imperial history, at undergraduate and postgraduate level, as well as among scholars in these fields. It will also be of interest to a wider public devoted to the cause of museums and heritage
Filed under: Empire, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Robert Bickers, Settlers and Expatriates: Britons over the Seas (OUP 2010)
The British Empire gave rise to various new forms of British identity in the colonial world outside the Dominions. In cities and colonies, and in sovereign states subject to more informal pressures such as Argentina or China, communities of Britons developed identities inflected by local ambitions and pressures. As a result they often found themselves at loggerheads with their diplomatic or colonial office minders, especially in the era of decolonisation. The impact of empire on metropolitan British identity is increasingly well documented; the evolution of dominions’ nationalisms is likewise well known; but the new species of Britishness which attained their fullest form in the mid-twentieth century have received significantly less attention. Settlers and Expatriates revisits the communities formed by these hundreds of thousands of Britons, as well as the passages home taken by some, and assesses their development, character, and legacy today. Scholars with established expertise in the history of each region explore the communalities that can be found across British communities in South, East and Southeast Asia, Egypt, and East and Southern Africa, and highlight the particularities that were also distinctive features of each British experience. These overseas Britons were sojourners and settlers; some survived in post-independent states, others were swept out quickly and moved on or back to an often uninterested metropolitan Britain. They have often been caricatured and demonized, but understanding them is important for an understanding of the states in which they lived, whose politics were at times a crucial part of British history and the history of migration and settlement.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction: Britains and Britons over the seas , Robert Bickers
2. The British of Argentina , David Rock
3. Expatriates in cosmopolitan Egypt: 1864-1956 , James Whidden
4. Kenya: Home county and African frontier , John Lonsdale
5. Rhodesia 1890-1980: ‘The Lost Dominion’ , Donal Lowry
6. ‘The Last Outpost’ The Natalians, South Africa and the British Empire , John Lambert
7. Avatars of Identity: The British community in India , David Washbrook
8. ‘Permanent Boarders’: The British in Ceylon, 1815-1960 , Margaret Jones
9. The British ‘Malayans’ , Tim Harper
10. Shanghailanders and others: British communities in China, 1843-1957 , Robert Bickers
11. ‘We don’t grow coffee and bananas in Clapham Junction you know!’: Imperial Britons Back Home , Elizabeth Buettner
12. Orphans of Empire , John Darwin
Filed under: Empire, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Kevin Murray’s take on the Institute of Postcolonial Studies-hosted ‘Here from elsewhere’ symposium, here.
The evening was fantastic; and the scholars, as well as the chairman, facilitated brilliant discussion. Well done to the IPCS.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, Seminar | Closed
Civilization is aggressive, as well as progressive – a positive state of society, attacking every obstacle, overwhelming every lesser agency, and searching out and filling up every crevice, both in the moral and physical world; while Indian life is an unarmed condition, a negative state, without inherent vitality, and without powers of resistance. The institutions of the red man fix him to the soil with a fragile and precarious tenure; while those civilized man, in his hightest estate, enable him to seize it with a grasp which defies displacement.
Filed under: Quote, United States | Closed
lisa ford reviews james belich
James Belich’s book is useful not just for scholars comparing settler societies but for everyone working on nineteenth-century North America or Australasia. Belich tells a compelling story about economic colonialism in the nineteenth century. In the process, he provides a remarkably accessible synthesis of recent historiography describing economic development in a region stretching from the southern United States to New South Wales.
Belich’s book joins a growing body of literature about the history of anglophone settlers. Most people working on English-speaking settler polities do so on the basis that North America and Australasia (and sometimes southern Africa and islands in the Caribbean) form an analytical unit sharing institutions like common law, a particular mode of indigenous dispossession and oppression, or a rhetoric of racial nationhood. Belich, however, has larger pretensions. The rise of the Greater British world, he argues, provides a new explanation of global economic disparity between East and West by 1900 (p. 14). Nineteenth-century Anglo history, in this formulation, is global history.
A few other good reviews in this most recent AHR as well. Among ’em:
By Paul Moon
Filed under: Australia, Canada, Empire, Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa, United States | Closed
Modern western Oregon was a crucial site of imperial competition in North America during the formative decades of the United States. In this book, Gray Whaley examines relations among newcomers and between newcomers and Native peoples–focusing on political sovereignty, religion, trade, sexuality, and the land–from initial encounters to Oregon’s statehood. He emphasizes Native perspectives, using the Chinook word Illahee (homeland) to refer to the indigenous world he examines.
Whaley argues that the process of Oregon’s founding is best understood as a contest between the British Empire and a nascent American one, with Oregon’s Native people and their lands at the heart of the conflict. He identifies race, republicanism, liberal economics, and violence as the key ideological and practical components of American settler-colonialism. Native peoples faced capriciousness, demographic collapse, and attempted genocide, but they fought to preserve Illahee even as external forces caused the collapse of their world. Whaley’s analysis compellingly challenges standard accounts of the quintessential antebellum “Promised Land.”
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
Debunking the Myths of Colonization examines Salman Rushdie’s thesis on the paradoxical nature of colonialism and its horrific impact on the psyche of the colonized. It probes Frantz Fanon’s theories concerning the relationship between colonizers and colonized, and attempts to apply these theories to modern Arabic literature. Like Rushdi and Fanon, many Arab writers have embarked on a journey to the metropolis of their ex-colonial masters. Due to their encounter with English or French culture, they have written memoirs, poems, or fictions in which they have represented themselves and the ‘other.’ Their representations differ markedly according to their own make up as human beings, their class, education, experiences, and gender. Yet what brings them together is their love-hate relationship with the ex-colonizer. In the case of the Palestinian writers, however, there is only bitterness and bewilderment at Israel as a colonizing power in the 21st century and its Jewish citizens, who were once victims in Europe but now have turned into victimizers.
Filed under: Israel/Palestine, literature, Scholarship and insights | Closed
The Dutch involvement in North America started after Henry Hudson, sailing under a Dutch flag in 1609, traveled up the river that would later bear his name. The Dutch control of the region was short-lived, but had profound effects on the Hudson Valley region. In The Colony of New Netherland, Jaap Jacobs offers a comprehensive history of the Dutch colony on the Hudson from the first trading voyages in the 1610s to 1674, when the Dutch ceded the colony to the English.
As Jacobs shows, New Netherland offers a distinctive example of economic colonization and in its social and religious profile represents a noteworthy divergence from the English colonization in North America. Centered around New Amsterdam on the island of Manhattan, the colony extended north to present-day Schenectady, New York, east to central Connecticut, and south to the border shared by Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, leaving an indelible imprint on the culture, political geography, and language of the early modern mid-Atlantic region. Dutch colonists’ vivid accounts of the land and people of the area shaped European perceptions of this bountiful land; their own activities had a lasting effect on land use and the flora and fauna of New York State, in particular, as well as on relations with the Native people with whom they traded.
Sure to become readers’ first reference to this crucial phase of American early colonial history, The Colony of New Netherland is a multifaceted and detailed depiction of life in the colony, from exploration and settlement through governance, trade, and agriculture. Jacobs gives a keen sense of the built environment and social relations of the Dutch colonists and closely examines the influence of the church and the social system adapted from that of the Dutch Republic. Although Jacobs focuses his narrative on the realities of quotidian existence in the colony, he considers that way of life in the broader context of the Dutch Atlantic and in comparison to other European settlements in North America.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights | Closed
