Wednesday, September 29, 2010 | 3:00pm
Stanford Humanities Center
This Mellon-Sawyer seminar will focus especially on how indigenous communities interacted with, resisted, and adapted to the the spread of settler colonialism, and on the connections among environmental and cultural changes prompted by the simultaneous expansion of these Anglophone settler colonies. One premise of the seminar is that we can better understand how nation states have incorporated lands that they claimed but did not fully control by looking at the construction of space — how movements of people, things, other animals, and ideas are expedited and constrained over historical time – in comparative and transnational context. Another starting point for discussion will be to ask how the 19th-century mix of settler colonialism and industrial capitalism produced political and scientific narratives of race, labor, property, polity, and environment, and how these discourses were both written and contested in law and on land.
We hope the seminar will be useful for scholars across several disciplines interested in these different Wests, in borderlands, environmental and indigenous issues, and in comparative colonialisms. The seminar will meet at least three times per quarter in 2010-2011, and will hold additional events in conjunction with the visits to Stanford of scholars and artists from Australia in the spring and summer of 2011. Discussion will be largely based on precirculated readings.
Hat-tip to Aaron B for sending word of this event.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, Seminar | Closed
Rhonda V. Magee, ‘Slavery as Immigration?’, University of San Francisco Law Review 44, 2 (2009)
Abstract:
In this essay, the author argues that transatlantic slavery was, in significant part, an immigration system of a particularly pernicious sort – a system of forced migration immigration aimed at fulfilling the nascent country’s needs for a controllable labor population, and desire for a racialized one. As such, the law and policy of chattel slavery should be viewed as perhaps the most important historical antecedent to contemporary immigration law regarding low- and unskilled labor in the United States. Following an analysis of the treatment of chattel slavery in general immigration history scholarship, and in scholarship on the history of immigration law, the author concludes that immigration law texts must include a discussion of chattel slavery that properly locates that system as a forerunner of modern immigration law and policy, and immigration scholars should devote more attention to chattel slavery. She concludes with a discussion of the broader implications of such a reframing for the American national community as a whole.
Filed under: law, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
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
