john pickard on fences
After reviewing the development of wire fencing in Great Britain and the United States of America in the early nineteenth century, I examine the introduction of wire into Australia using published sources only. Wire was available in the colonies from the early 1850s. The earliest published record of a wire fence was on Phillip Island near Melbourne (Victoria) in 1842. Almost a decade passed before wire was used elsewhere in Victoria and the other eastern colonies. Pastoralists either sought information on wire fences locally or from agents in Britain. Local agents of British companies advertised in colonial newspapers from the early 1850s, with one exceptional record in 1839. Once wire was adopted, pastoralists rejected iron posts used in Britain, preferring cheaper wood posts cut from the property. The most significant innovation was to increase post spacings with significant cost savings. Government and the iron industry played no part in these innovations, which were achieved through trial-and-error by pastoralists. The large tonnages of wire imported into Australia and the increasing demand did not stimulate local production of wire, and there were no local wire mills until 1911.
Filed under: Australia, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Abstract:
This dissertation begins with several questions regarding colonial modernity, gender and nationalism in colonial Korea. Why do some New Women, especially female writers, get memorialized as ideal models, and others do not? If gendered nationalism produced the model of an ideal women and suppressed and regulated women to fit that frame, where can we locate the subjectivity of New Women? Even though male nationalists seem so powerful when they construct and enforce a model for ideal women, is their power undermined by their own status as the colonized? In order to answer these sequential questions, this dissertation follows writers‘ lives and their works in colonial Korea. The literary world, with its writers‘ groups, was the place to practice modernity because, in the colonial context, the participation of Koreans in the economic and political realms was restricted. As a consequence, the literary realm became especially important, and it offers us a valuable opportunity for observing the discourse and behavior of these colonial subjects. Using the comparative method to find the real reason for the success and failure of New Women, I argue that gaining access to economic resources and maintaining favorable public opinion contribute to the success of female writers. Although both successful and unsuccessful female writers had several marriages, divorces, and love affairs, the more successful second generation of female writers used several strategies such as making politically expedient marriages, and publishing ideologically uncontroversial stories to maintain their popularity. In short, they learned the lessons of their first-generation predecessors. While male writers tried to control the behaviors of Korean New Women, they also attempted to overcome their own insecure position as the colonized by imagining Japanese women as their inferior.
The literary world of colonial Korea, in the form of novels, newspaper and magazine articles, and barriers to publication, clearly reflects these struggles and conflicts. At the same time, the colonial writers contributed to the construction and practice of social norms. Examining these multi-layered conflicts and the construction of norms in the colonial context, this dissertation suggests that no single category or duality, whether male/female or colonizer/colonized, fully explains the colonial structure or the struggles that took place within it.
TOC:
I. Introduction
II. Constructing Moral Boundaries across Gender and Nationalism
II. Setting Colonial Boundaries across Gender: Role of Interethnic Marriages
IV. Reproducing Boundaries in Gender and Coloniality: Survival Strategies in Literary Field
V. Conclusion: Being Women, Being the Colonized
Filed under: Asia, gender, Scholarship and insights | Closed
The essence of a free colony, on the contrary, consists in this — that the bulk of the soil is still public property, and every settler on it therefore can turn part of it into his private property and individual means of production, without hindering the later settlers in the same operation. This is the secret both of the prosperity of the colonies and of their inveterate vice — opposition to the establishment of capital.
How, then, to heal the anti-capitalistic cancer of the colonies? … Let the Government put upon the virgin soil an artificial price, independent of the law of supply and demand, a price that compels the immigrant to work a long time for wages before he can earn enough money to buy land, and turn himself into an independent peasant. The fund resulting from the sale of land at a price relatively prohibitory for the wage-workers, this fund of money extorted from the wages of labor by violation of the sacred law of supply and demand, the Government is to employ, on the other hand, in proportion as it grows; to import have-nothings from Europe into the colonies, and thus keep the wage-labor market full for the capitalists…The price of the soil imposed by the State must, of course, be a “sufficient price” — i.e., so high “as to prevent the laborers from becoming independent landowners until others had followed to take their place.” This “sufficient price for the land” is nothing but a euphemistic circumlocution for the ransom which the laborer pays to the capitalist for leave to retire from the wage-labor market to the land. First, he must create for the capitalist “capital,” with which the latter may be able to exploit more laborers; then he must place, at his own expense, a locum tenens [placeholder] on the labor-market, whom the Government forwards across the sea for the benefit of his old master, the capitalist.
On the one hand, the enormous and ceaseless stream of men, year after year driven upon America, leaves behind a stationary sediment in the east of the United States, the wave of immigration from Europe throwing men on the labor-market there more rapidly than the wave of emigration westwards can wash them away. On the other hand, the American Civil War brought in its train a colossal national debt, and, with it, pressure of taxes, the rise of the vilest financial aristocracy, the squandering of a huge part of the public land on speculative companies for the exploitation of railways, mines, &c., in brief, the most rapid centralization of capital. The great republic has, therefore, ceased to be the promised land for emigrant laborers. Capitalistic production advances there with giant strides, even though the lowering of wages and the dependence of the wage-worker are yet far from being brought down to the normal European level. The shameless lavishing of uncultivated colonial land on aristocrats and capitalists by the Government, so loudly denounced even by Wakefield, has produced, especially in Australia, in conjunction with the stream of men that the gold-diggings attract, and with the competition that the importation of English-commodities causes even to the smallest artisan, an ample “relative surplus laboring population,” so that almost every mail brings the Job’s news of a “glut of the Australia labor-market,” and the prostitution in some places flourishes as wantonly as in the London Heymarket.
The secret discovered in the new world by the Political Economy of the old world, and proclaimed on the housetops is: that the capitalist mode of production and accumulation, and therefore capitalist private property, have for their fundamental condition the annihilation of self-earned private property; in other words, the expropriation of the laborer.
Karl Marx, Capital, Chapter 33: The Modern Theory of Colonisation.
Filed under: Quote | Closed
Jean M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England (University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
Across nineteenth-century New England, antiquarians and community leaders wrote hundreds of local histories about the founding and growth of their cities and towns. Ranging from pamphlets to multivolume treatments, these narratives shared a preoccupation with establishing the region as the cradle of an Anglo-Saxon nation and the center of a modern American culture. They also insisted, often in mournful tones, that New England’s original inhabitants, the Indians, had become extinct, even though many Indians still lived in the very towns being chronicled.
In Firsting and Lasting, Jean M. O’Brien argues that local histories became a primary means by which European Americans asserted their own modernity while denying it to Indian peoples. Erasing and then memorializing Indian peoples also served a more pragmatic colonial goal: refuting Indian claims to land and rights. Drawing on more than six hundred local histories from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island written between 1820 and 1880, as well as censuses, monuments, and accounts of historical pageants and commemorations, O’Brien explores how these narratives inculcated the myth of Indian extinction, a myth that has stubbornly remained in the American consciousness.
In order to convince themselves that the Indians had vanished despite their continued presence, O’Brien finds that local historians and their readers embraced notions of racial purity rooted in the century’s scientific racism and saw living Indians as “mixed” and therefore no longer truly Indian. Adaptation to modern life on the part of Indian peoples was used as further evidence of their demise. Indians did not—and have not—accepted this effacement, and O’Brien details how Indians have resisted their erasure through narratives of their own. These debates and the rich and surprising history uncovered in O’Brien’s work continue to have a profound influence on discourses about race and indigenous rights.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
This from the ABC:
The Department of Primary Industries (DPI) is prosecuting the Framlingham Aboriginal Trust for failing to control the rabbit population in the Deen Maar Indigenous protected area.
The DPI alleges the trust has not complied with a land management notice.
The matter has been adjourned to be heard in the Warrnambool Magistrates Court at a later date.
What’s this? So rabbits were brought over by non-Aborigines, and then land was taken from Aborigines. So then – Fibonacci eat your heart out – the rabbits went feral, and royally disrupted a fantastically fine-tuned eco-system. In 1999, a beautiful stretch of country known as Deen Maar became reserve land, managed by the Framlingham Aboriginal Trust. And today, in 2010, this Trust, on behalf of the Aborigines, is being sued by a Department of the state of Victoria, on behalf of non-Aboriginal farmers, for the rabbit problem. Presumably, the case will be paid for by tax-payers.
Victoria needs to wake up to itself. I hope the DPI loses miserably.
Filed under: Australia, law, Political developments | Closed
Thought I might give an update on the AWB, since some of my other posts on the topic have got a lot of hits. This from Mail and Guardian:
Former Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) general secretary Andre Visagie resigned to start a new organisation to fulfil a promise he made to the late party leader Eugene Terre’Blanche, he said on Thursday.
“I resigned on Saturday because of the slow pace of the new AWB, to prepare the Boer nation for the onslaught that our nation is facing,” he said in a telephone interview.
He said it had taken too long for the AWB to form a security company to protect Afrikaners, specially farmers being targeted by criminals.
“They are not performing, they are not preparing themselves. I couldn’t live with that.”
Filed under: Political developments, Southern Africa | Closed
Wherever colonisation is a fact, the indigenous culture begins to rot and among the ruins something beings to be born which is condemned to exist on the margin allowed it by the European culture.
Filed under: Quote | Closed
The fuel-sucking RV – a direct descendent of the Conestoga wagon and voortrekker kakebeenwa – celebrates a hundred years in 2010. The formula hasn’t changed much: hop in, traverse the ’empty’ wilderness, pull up at that piece of untouched beauty (or national park), inhale ‘unbreathed’ air.
Filed under: media, United States, wacky | Closed
Jared Diamond and James A. Robinson (ed), Natural Experiments of History (Harvard University Press, 2010):
Some central questions in the natural and social sciences can’t be answered by controlled laboratory experiments, often considered to be the hallmark of the scientific method. This impossibility holds for any science concerned with the past. In addition, many manipulative experiments, while possible, would be considered immoral or illegal. One has to devise other methods of observing, describing, and explaining the world.
In the historical disciplines, a fruitful approach has been to use natural experiments or the comparative method. This book consists of eight comparative studies drawn from history, archeology, economics, economic history, geography, and political science. The studies cover a spectrum of approaches, ranging from a non-quantitative narrative style in the early chapters to quantitative statistical analyses in the later chapters. The studies range from a simple two-way comparison of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, which share the island of Hispaniola, to comparisons of 81 Pacific islands and 233 areas of India. The societies discussed are contemporary ones, literate societies of recent centuries, and non-literate past societies. Geographically, they include the United States, Mexico, Brazil, western Europe, tropical Africa, India, Siberia, Australia, New Zealand, and other Pacific islands.
In an Afterword, the editors discuss how to cope with methodological problems common to these and other natural experiments of history.
TOC:
- Prologue: Natural Experiments of History
Jared Diamond and James A. Robinson
- Controlled Comparison and Polynesian Cultural Evolution
Patrick V. Kirch - Exploding Wests: Boom and Bust in Nineteenth-Century Settler Societies
James Belich - Politics, Banking, and Economic Development: Evidence from New World Economies
Stephen Haber - Intra-Island and Inter-Island Comparisons
Jared Diamond - Shackled to the Past: The Causes and Consequences of Africa’s Slave Trades
Nathan Nunn - Colonial Land Tenure, Electoral Competition, and Public Goods in India
Abhijit Banerjee and Lakshmi Iyer - From Ancien Régime to Capitalism: The Spread of the French Revolution as a Natural Experiment
Daron Acemoglu, Davide Cantoni, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson
- Afterword: Using Comparative Methods in Studies of Human History
Jared Diamond and James A. Robinson - Contributors
Filed under: Africa, Australia, Canada, Latin America, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
