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By Subject: Colonialism

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• October 2003

  The Abolitions of Slavery

  From the L. F. Sonthonax to Victor Schoelcher, 1793, 1794, 1848

  Dorigny, M. (ed)

  These papers are intended to demonstrate the complexity of the historical processes leading up to the abolition of slavery in 1793-1794, and again in 1848, given that Bonaparte had restored the former colonial regime in 1802. Those processes include the slave insurrections and the many forms of resistance to slavery and servile work, the philosophical and political debates of the Enlightenment, the attitude of the Church, the action of anti-slavery associations and the role of revolutionary assemblies, not forgetting the importance of the economic interests that provided the backcloth to philosophical discussions in the matter.

  The close interweaving of the colonial spheres of the majority of European powers inexorably raised slavery to an international plane: from then on anti-slavery too became a cosmopolitan movement, and these present studies strive to take account of this important innovation at the end of the eighteenth century.

  This work, written in tribute to Léger Félicité Sonthonex, who was responsible for the first abolition in Santo Domingo in 1793, and to Victor Schoelcher, principal architect of the abolition of 1848, is intended to link two highly symbolic dates in the tragic history of the "first colonization": 1793 marks the beginning of the age of abolitions, yet it was not until half a century later that France, now republican once more, renewed links with the heritage of the Enlightenment and of Year II.

  Subjects: Colonialism 18th/19th Century History

• July 1996

  African Crossroads

  Intersections between History and Anthropology in Cameroon

  Fowler, I. & Zeitlyn, D. (eds)

  Cameroon is characterized by an extraordinary geographical, cultural, and linguistic diversity. This collection of essays by eminent historians and anthropologists summarizes three generations of research in Cameroon that began with the collaboration of Phyllis Kaberry and E. M. Chilver soon after the Second World War and continues to this day. The idea for this book arose from a concern to recognize the continuing influence of E. M. Chilver on a wide variety of social, historical, political and economic studies. The result is a volume with a broad historical scope yet one that also focuses on major contemporary theoretical issues such as the meaning and construction of ethnic identities and the anthropological study of historical processes.

  For more information on this title and related publications, go to
  http://lucy.ukc.ac.uk/Chilver/index.html

  Subjects: General Anthropology Colonialism

• October 2011

  Beyond Conversion and Syncretism

  Indigenous Encounters with Missionary Christianity, 1800-2000

  Lindenfeld, D. & Richardson†, M. (eds)

  The globalization of Christianity, its spread and appeal to peoples of non- European origin, is by now a well-known phenomenon. Scholars increasingly realize the importance of natives rather than foreign missionaries in the process of evangelization. This volume contributes to the understanding of this process through case studies of encounters with Christianity from the perspectives of the indigenous peoples who converted. More importantly, by exploring overarching, general terms such as conversion and syncretism and by showing the variety of strategies and processes that actually take place, these studies lead to a more nuanced understanding of cross-cultural religious interactions in general—from acceptance to resistance—thus enriching the vocabulary of religious interaction. The contributors tackle these issues from a variety of disciplinary perspectives—history, anthropology, religious studies—and present a broad geographical spread of cases from China, Vietnam, Australia, India, South and West Africa, North and Central America, and the Caribbean.

  Subjects: Religion General Anthropology Colonialism

• December 2001

  Cameroon's Tycoon

  Max Esser's Expedition and its Consequences

  Chilver†, E. M. & Röschenthaler, U. (eds)

  Max Esser was an adventurous young merchant banker, a Rhinelander, who became the first managing director of the largest German plantation company in Cameroon. This volume gives a vivid account of the antecedents and early stages as experienced and described by Esser. In 1896 he ventured, with the explorer Zintgraff, into the hinterland to seek the agreement of Zintgraff's old ally, the ruler of Bali, for the provision of laborers for his projected enterprise. The consequences, many optimistically unforeseen, are illustrated with the help of contemporary materials. Esser's account is preceded by a look at his and his family's connections, added to by an account of newspaper campaigns against him, and completed by an examination of his Cameroon collection, which he gave to the Linden Museum in Stuttgart.

  Subjects: General Anthropology Colonialism

• April 2006

  Claims to Memory

  Beyond Slavery and Emancipation in the French Caribbean

  Reinhardt C.

  Why do the people of the French Caribbean still continue to be haunted by the memory of their slave past more than one hundred and fifty years after the abolition of slavery? What process led to the divorce of their collective memory of slavery and emancipation from France's portrayal of these historical phenomena? How are Martinicans and Guadeloupeans today transforming the silences of the past into historical and cultural manifestations rooted in the Caribbean? This book answers these questions by relating the 1998 controversy surrounding the 150th anniversary of France's abolition of slavery to the period of the slave regime spanning the late Enlightenment and the French Revolution. By comparing a diversity of documents—including letters by slaves, free people of color, and planters, as well as writings by the philosophes, royal decrees, and court cases—the author untangles the complex forces of the slave regime that have shaped collective memory. The current nationalization of the memory of slavery in France has turned these once peripheral claims into passionate political and cultural debates.

  Subjects: Colonialism General Cultural Studies

• February 2013

  The Colours of the Empire

  Racialized Representations during Portuguese Colonialism

  Matos, P. F. de

  The Portuguese Colonial Empire established its base in Africa in the fifteenth century and would not be dissolved until 1975. This book investigates how the different populations under Portuguese rule were represented within the context of the Colonial Empire by examining the relationship between these representations and the meanings attached to the notion of ‘race’. Colour, for example, an apparently objective criterion of classification, became a synonym or near-synonym for ‘race’, a more abstract notion for which attempts were made to establish scientific credibility. Through her analysis of government documents, colonial propaganda materials and interviews, the author employs an anthropological perspective to examine how the existence of racist theories, originating in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, went on to inform the policy of the Estado Novo (Second Republic, 1933–1974) and the production of academic literature on ‘race’ in Portugal. This study provides insight into the relationship between the racist formulations disseminated in Portugal and the racist theories produced from the eighteenth century onward in Europe and beyond.

  Subjects: General Anthropology Colonialism

• March 2014

  Connecting Histories of Education

  Transnational and Cross-Cultural Exchanges in (Post)Colonial Education

  Bagchi, B., Fuchs, E. & Rousmaniere, K. (eds)

  The history of education in the modern world is a history of transnational and cross-cultural influence. This collection explores those influences in (post) colonial and indigenous education across different geographical contexts. The authors emphasize how local actors constructed their own adaptation of colonialism, identity, and autonomy, creating a multi-centric and entangled history of modern education. In both formal as well as informal aspects, they demonstrate that transnational and cross-cultural exchanges in education have been characterized by appropriation, re-contextualization, and hybridization, thereby rejecting traditional notions of colonial education as an export of pre-existing metropolitan educational systems. 

  Subjects: Colonialism Educational Studies General Cultural Studies

• August 2017

  Cooperation and Empire

  Local Realities of Global Processes

  Bührer, T., Eichmann, F., Förster, S. & Stuchtey, B. (eds)

  While the study of “indigenous intermediaries” is today the focus of some of the most interesting research in the historiography of colonialism, its roots extend back to at least the 1970s. The contributions to this volume revisit Ronald E. Robinson’s theory of collaboration in a range of historical contexts by melding it with theoretical perspectives derived from postcolonial studies and transnational history. In case studies ranging globally over the course of four centuries, these essays offer nuanced explorations of the varied, complex interactions between imperial and local actors, with particular attention to those shifting and ambivalent roles that transcend simple binaries of colonizer and colonized.

  Subject: Colonialism

• eBook available April 2018

  A Creole Nation

  National Integration in Guinea-Bissau

  Kohl, C.

  Despite high degrees of cultural and ethnic diversity as well as prevailing political instability, Guinea-Bissau’s population has developed a strong sense of national belonging. By examining both contemporary and historical perspectives, A Creole Nation explores how creole identity, culture, and political leaders have influenced postcolonial nation-building processes in Guinea-Bissau, and the ways in which the phenomenon of cultural creolization results in the emergence of new identities.

  Subjects: General Anthropology Colonialism Political Economy

• March 2014

  Creole Identity in Postcolonial Indonesia

  Knörr, J.

  Contributing to identity formation in ethnically and religiously diverse postcolonial societies, this book examines the role played by creole identity in Indonesia, and in particular its capital, Jakarta. While, on the one hand, it facilitates transethnic integration and promotes a specifically postcolonial sense of common nationhood due to its heterogeneous origins, creole groups of people are often perceived ambivalently in the wake of colonialism and its demise, on the other. In this book, Jacqueline Knörr analyzes the social, historical, and political contexts of creoleness both at the grassroots and the State level, showing how different sections of society engage with creole identity in order to promote collective identification transcending ethnic and religious boundaries, as well as for reasons of self-interest and ideological projects.

  Subjects: General Anthropology Colonialism

• June 2019

  Crossing Histories and Ethnographies

  Following Colonial Historicities in Timor-Leste

  Roque, R. & Traube, E. G. (eds)

  The key question for many anthropologists and historians today is not whether to cross the boundary between their disciplines, but whether the idea of a disciplinary boundary should be sustained. Reinterpreting the dynamic interplay between archive and field, these essays propose a method for mutually productive crossings between historical and ethnographic research. It engages critically with the colonial pasts of indigenous societies and examines how fieldwork and archival studies together lead to fruitful insights into the making of different colonial historicities. Timor-Leste’s unusually long and in some ways unique colonial history is explored as a compelling case for these crossings.

  Subjects: General Anthropology Colonialism Sociology

• May 2006

  The Dutch-Munsee Encounter in America

  The Struggle for Sovereignty in the Hudson Valley

  Otto, P.

  Employing a frontier framework, this book traces intercultural relations in the lower Hudson River valley of early seventeenth-century New Netherland. It explores the interaction between the Dutch and the Munsee Indians and considers how they, and individuals within each group, interacted, focusing in particular on how the changing colonial landscape affected their cultural encounter and Munsee cultural development. At each stage of European colonization - first contact, trade, and settlement - the Munsees faced evolving and changing challenges.

  Understanding culture in terms of worldview and societal structures, this volume identifies ways in which Munsee society changed in an effort to adjust to the new intercultural relations and looks at the ways the Munsees maintained aspects of their own culture and resisted any imposition of Dutch societal structures and sovereignty over them. In addition, the book includes a suggestive afterword in which the author applies his frontier framework to Dutch-indigenous relations in the Cape colony.

  Subjects: Early Modern History Colonialism Refugee & Migration Studies

• January 2006

  The Dutch Slave Trade, 1500-1850

  Emmer, P.

  Dutch historiography has traditionally concentrated on colonial successes in Asia. However, the Dutch were also active in West Africa, Brazil, New Netherland (the present state of New York) and in the Caribbean. In Africa they took part in the gold and ivory trade and finally also in the slave trade, something not widely known outside academic circles. P.C. Emmer, one of the most prominent experts in this field, tells the story of Dutch involvement in the trade from the beginning of the 17th century–much later than the Spaniards and the Portuguese–and goes on to show how the trade shifted from Brazil to the Caribbean. He explains how the purchase of slaves was organized in Africa, records their dramatic transport across the Atlantic, and examines how the sales machinery worked. Drawing on his prolonged study of the Dutch Atlantic slave trade, he presents his subject clearly and soberly, although never forgetting the tragedy hidden behind the numbers – the dark side of the Dutch Golden Age -, which makes this study not only informative but also very readable.

  Subjects: Colonialism Early Modern History Refugee & Migration Studies

• March 2004

  An Earth-colored Sea

  'Race', Culture and the Politics of Identity in the Post-Colonial Portuguese-Speaking World

  Vale de Almeida, M.

  Although the post-colonial situation has attracted considerable interest over recent years, one important colonial power – Portugal – has not been given any attention. This book is the first to explore notions of ethnicity, "race", culture, and nation in the context of the debate on colonialism and postcolonialism. The structure of the book reflects a trajectory of research, starting with a case study in Trinidad, followed by another one in Brazil, and ending with yet another one in Portugal. The three case studies, written in the ethnographic genre, are intertwined with essays of a more theoretical nature. The non-monographic, composite – or hybrid – nature of this work may be in itself an indication of the need for transnational and historically grounded research when dealing with issues of representations of identity that were constructed during colonial times and that are today reconfigured in the ideological struggles over cultural meanings.

  Subjects: Colonialism General Anthropology

• eBook available October 2007

  Empire and After

  Englishness in Postcolonial Perspective

  MacPhee, G. & Poddar, P. (eds)

  The growing debate over British national identity, and the place of "Englishness" within it, raises crucial questions about multiculturalism, postimperial culture and identity, and the past and future histories of globalization. However, discussions of Englishness have too often been limited by insular conceptions of national literature, culture, and history, which serve to erase or marginalize the colonial and postcolonial locations in which British national identity has been articulated. This volume breaks new ground by drawing together a range of disciplinary approaches in order to resituate the relationship between British national identity and Englishness within a global framework. Ranging from the literature and history of empire to analyses of contemporary culture, postcolonial writing, political rhetoric, and postimperial memory after 9/11, this collection demonstrates that far from being parochial or self-involved, the question of Englishness offers an important avenue for thinking about the politics of national identity in our postcolonial and globalized world.

  Subjects: Colonialism General Cultural Studies

• June 2008

  Empire, Colony, Genocide

  Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History

  Moses, A. D. (ed)

  In 1944, Raphael Lemkin coined the term “genocide” to describe a foreign occupation that destroyed or permanently crippled a subject population. In this tradition, Empire, Colony, Genocide embeds genocide in the epochal geopolitical transformations of the past 500 years: the European colonization of the globe, the rise and fall of the continental land empires, violent decolonization, and the formation of nation states. It thereby challenges the customary focus on twentieth-century mass crimes and shows that genocide and “ethnic cleansing” have been intrinsic to imperial expansion. The complexity of the colonial encounter is reflected in the contrast between the insurgent identities and genocidal strategies that subaltern peoples sometimes developed to expel the occupiers, and those local elites and creole groups that the occupiers sought to co-opt. Presenting case studies on the Americas, Australia, Africa, Asia, the Ottoman Empire, Imperial Russia, and the Nazi “Third Reich,” leading authorities examine the colonial dimension of the genocide concept as well as the imperial systems and discourses that enabled conquest. Empire, Colony, Genocide is a world history of genocide that highlights what Lemkin called “the role of the human group and its tribulations.”

  Subjects: Genocide Studies Colonialism

• June 2013

  Empire, Global Coloniality and African Subjectivity

  Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S. J.

  Global imperial designs, which have been in place since conquest by western powers, did not suddenly evaporate after decolonization. Global coloniality as a leitmotif of the empire became the order of the day, with its invisible technologies of subjugation continuing to reproduce Africa’s subaltern position, a position characterized by perceived deficits ranging from a lack of civilization, a lack of writing and a lack of history to a lack of development, a lack of human rights and a lack of democracy. The author’s sharply critical perspective reveals how this epistemology of alterity has kept Africa ensnared within colonial matrices of power, serving to justify external interventions in African affairs, including the interference with liberation struggles and disregard for African positions. Evaluating the quality of African responses and available options, the author opens up a new horizon that includes cognitive justice and new humanism.

  Subject: Colonialism

• July 2009

  Encounter, Transformation, and Identity

  Peoples of the Western Cameroon Borderlands, 1891-2000

  Fowler, I. & Fanso, V. (eds)

  Bringing together key historical and innovative ethnographic materials on the peoples of the South-West Province of Cameroon and the Nigerian borderlands, this volume presents critical and analytical approaches to the production of ethnic, political, religious, and gendered identities in the region. The contributors examine a range of issues relating to identity, including first encounters and conflict as well as global networking, trans-national families, enculturation, gender, resistance, and death. In addition to a number of very striking illustrations of ethnographic and material culture, this volume contains key maps from early German sources and other original cartographical materials.

  Subjects: General Anthropology Colonialism

• eBook available August 2017

  European Anthropologies

  Barrera-González, A., Heintz, M. & Horolets, A. (eds)

  In what ways did Europeans interact with the diversity of people they encountered on other continents in the context of colonial expansion, and with the peasant or ethnic ‘Other’ at home? How did anthropologists and ethnologists make sense of the mosaic of people and societies during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when their disciplines were progressively being established in academia? By assessing the diversity of European intellectual histories within sociocultural anthropology, this volume aims to sketch its intellectual and institutional portrait. It will be a useful reading for the students of anthropology, ethnology, history and philosophy of science, research and science policy makers.

  Subjects: General Anthropology Theory & Methodology in Anthropology Colonialism

• eBook available November 2018

  Explorations and Entanglements

  Germans in Pacific Worlds from the Early Modern Period to World War I

  Berghoff, H., Biess, F., & Strasser, U. (eds)

  Traditionally, Germany has been considered a minor player in Pacific history: its presence there was more limited than that of other European nations, and whereas its European rivals established themselves as imperial forces beginning in the early modern era, Germany did not seriously pursue colonialism until the nineteenth century. Yet thanks to recent advances in the field emphasizing transoceanic networks and cultural encounters, it is now possible to develop a more nuanced understanding of the history of Germans in the Pacific. The studies gathered here offer fascinating research into German missionary, commercial, scientific, and imperial activity against the backdrop of the Pacific’s overlapping cultural circuits and complex oceanic transits.

  Subjects: 18th/19th Century History 20th Century History Colonialism

• August 2001

  From Chains to Bonds

  The Slave Trade Revisited

  Diène, D. (ed)

  Most important issues of today's world - such as development, human rights, and cultural pluralism - bear the unmistakable stamp of the transatlantic slave trade. In particular Africa's state of development can only be properly understood in the light of the widespread dismantling of African societies and the methodical and lasting human bloodletting to which the continent was subjected by way of the trans-Saharan and transatlantic slave trade over the centuries. But this greatest displacement of population in history also transformed the vast geo-cultural area of the Americas and the Caribbean.

  In this volume, one result of UNESCO's project Memory of Peoples: The Slave Route, scholars and thinkers from Africa, the Americas, Europe, and the Caribbean have come together to raise some crucial questions and offer new perspectives on debates that have lost none of their urgency.

  Subject: Colonialism

• October 2004

  Genocide and Settler Society

  Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History

  Moses, A. D. (ed)

  Colonial Genocide has been seen increasingly as a stepping-stone to the European genocides of the twentieth century, yet it remains an under-researched phenomenon. This volume reconstructs instances of Australian genocide and for the first time places them in a global context. Beginning with the arrival of the British in 1788 and extending to the 1960s, the authors identify the moments of radicalization and the escalation of British violence and ethnic engineering aimed at the Indigenous populations, while carefully distinguishing between local massacres, cultural genocide, and genocide itself. These essays reflect a growing concern with the nature of settler society in Australia and in particular with the fate of the tens of thousands of children who were forcibly taken away from their Aboriginal families by state agencies. Long considered a relatively peaceful settlement, Australian society contained many of the pathologies that led to the exterminatory and eugenic policies of twentieth century Europe.

  Subjects: Genocide Studies Colonialism

• June 2015

  Genocide on Settler Frontiers

  When Hunter-Gatherers and Commercial Stock Farmers Clash

  Adhikari, M. (ed)

  European colonial conquest included many instances of indigenous peoples being exterminated. Cases where invading commercial stock farmers clashed with hunter-gatherers were particularly destructive, often resulting in a degree of dispossession and slaughter that destroyed the ability of these societies to reproduce themselves. The experience of aboriginal peoples in the settler colonies of southern Africa, Australia, North America, and Latin America bears this out. The frequency with which encounters of this kind resulted in the annihilation of forager societies raises the question of whether these conflicts were inherently genocidal, an issue not yet addressed by scholars in a systematic way.

  Subjects: Genocide Studies Colonialism

• eBook available December 2007

  Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History

  Imperialism, Nation, Race, and Genocide

  King, R. H. & Stone, D. (eds)

  Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) first argued that there were continuities between the age of European imperialism and the age of fascism in Europe in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). She claimed that theories of race, notions of racial and cultural superiority, and the right of ‘superior races’ to expand territorially were themes that connected the white settler colonies, the other imperial possessions, and the fascist ideologies of post-Great War Europe. These claims have rarely been taken up by historians. Only in recent years has the work of scholars such as Jürgen Zimmerer and A. Dirk Moses begun to show in some detail that Arendt was correct.

  This collection does not seek merely to expound Arendt’s opinions on these subjects; rather, it seeks to use her insights as the jumping-off point for further investigations – including ones critical of Arendt – into the ways in which race, imperialism, slavery and genocide are linked, and the ways in which these terms have affected the United States, Europe, and the colonised world.

  Subjects: Genocide Studies Colonialism

• September 2016

  Health and Difference

  Rendering Human Variation in Colonial Engagements

  Widmer, A. & Lipphardt, V. (eds)

  Human variation represented a central research topic for life scientists and posed challenging administrative issues for colonial bureaucrats in the first half of the 20th century. By following scientists’ and administrators’ interests in innovating styles and tools for making and circulating documents, in reshaping landscapes and environments, and in fixing distances between humans, the book advances new understandings of the materiality of colonial institutional life and governance.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Colonialism

• January 2001

  Hunting the Gatherers

  Ethnographic Collectors, Agents, and Agency in Melanesia 1870s-1930s

  O'Hanlon, M. & Welsch, R. (eds)

  Between the 1870s and the 1930s competing European powers carved out and consolidated colonies in Melanesia, the most culturally diverse region of the world. As part of this process, great assemblages of ethnographic artefacts were made by a range of collectors whose diversity is captured in this volume. The contributors to this tightly-integrated volume take these collectors, and the collecting institutions, as the departure point for accounts that look back at the artefact-producing societies and their interaction with the collectors, but also forward to the fate of the collections in metropolitan museums, as the artefacts have been variously exhibited, neglected, re-conceived as indigenous heritage, or repatriated. In doing this, the contributors raise issues of current interest in anthropology, Pacific history, art history, museology, and material culture.

  Subjects: Museum Studies Theory & Methodology in Anthropology Colonialism

• May 2015

  Imperial Projections

  Screening the German Colonies

  Fuhrmann, W.

  The beginning of filmmaking in the German colonies coincided with colonialism itself coming to a standstill. Scandals and economic stagnation in the colonies demanded a new and positive image of their value for Germany. By promoting business and establishing a new genre within the fast growing film industry, films of the colonies were welcomed by organizations such as the Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft (German Colonial Society). The films triggered patriotic feelings but also addressed the audience as travelers, explorers, wildlife protectionists, and participants in unique cultural events. This book is the first in-depth analysis of colonial filmmaking in the Wilhelmine Era.

  Subjects: Film Studies Colonialism

• August 2006

  In Search of Salt

  Changes in Beti (Cameroon) Society, 1880-1960

  Quinn, F.

  Relatively recent Bantu-speaking migrants to central Cameroon, the Beti have had an eventful history. Based on extensive interviews and traditional Beti (Fang) poetry, in addition to German and French archival sources, the author of this readable study recreates the social structure of the Beti and their self-perceptions in pre-colonial times, their disruptive encounters with first German (1880-1918) and then French (1918-1960) colonialism, until Cameroon’s independence.

  Subjects: General Anthropology Colonialism

• March 2001

  The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450-1800

  Bernardini, P. & Fiering, N. (eds)

  Jews and Judaism played a significant role in the history of the expansion of Europe to the west as well as in the history of the economic, social, and religious development of the New World. They played an important role in the discovery, colonization, and eventually exploitation of the resources of the New World. Alone among the European peoples who came to the Americas in the colonial period, Jews were dispersed throughout the hemisphere; indeed, they were the only cohesive European ethnic or religious group that lived under both Catholic and Protestant regimes, which makes their study particularly fruitful from a comparative perspective. As distinguished from other religious or ethnic minorities, the Jewish struggle was not only against an overpowering and fierce nature but also against the political regimes that ruled over the various colonies of the Americas and often looked unfavorably upon the establishment and tleration of Jewish communities in their own territory. Jews managed to survive and occasionally to flourish against all odds, and their history in the Americas is one of the more fascinating chapters in the early modern history of European expansion.

  Subjects: Jewish Studies Early Modern History Colonialism Refugee & Migration Studies

• July 1996

  Kingdom on Mount Cameroon

  Studies in the History of the Cameroon Coast 1500-1970

  Ardener†, E.

  The Bakweri people of Mount Cameroon, an active volcano on the coast of West Africa a few degrees north of the equator, have had a varied and at times exciting history which has brought them into contact, not only with other West African peoples, but with merchants, missionaries, soldiers and administrators from Portugal, Holland, England, Jamaica, Sweden, Germany and more recently France.

  Subjects: General Anthropology Colonialism

• April 2000

  The Language Encounter in the Americas, 1492-1800

  Gray, E. & Fiering, N. (eds)

  When Columbus arrived in the Americas there were, it is believed, as many as 2,000 distinct, mutually unintelligible tongues spoken in the western hemisphere, encompassing the entire area from the Arctic Circle to Tierra del Fuego. This astonishing fact has generally escaped the attention of historians, in part because many of these indigenous languages have since become extinct. And yet the burden of overcoming America's language barriers was perhaps the one problem faced by all peoples of the New World in the early modern era: African slaves and Native Americans in the Lower Mississippi Valley; Jesuit missionaries and Huron-speaking peoples in New France; Spanish conquistadors and the Aztec rulers. All of these groups confronted America's complex linguistic environment, and all of them had to devise ways of transcending that environment - a problem that arose often with life or death implications.

  For the first time, historians, anthropologists, literature specialists, and linguists have come together to reflect, in the fifteen original essays presented in this volume, on the various modes of contact and communication that took place between the Europeans and the "Natives." A particularly important aspect of this fascinating collection is the way it demonstrates the interactive nature of the encounter and how Native peoples found ways to shape and adapt imported systems of spoken and written communication to their own spiritual and material needs.

  Subjects: Early Modern History Colonialism General Cultural Studies Refugee & Migration Studies

• December 2016

  Legacies of Violence

  Rendering the Unspeakable Past in Modern Australia

  Mason, R. (ed)

  Whether in the form of warfare, dispossession, forced migration, or social prejudice, Australia’s sense of nationhood was born from—and continues to be defined by—experiences of violence. Legacies of Violence probes this brutal legacy through case studies that range from the colonial frontier to modern domestic spaces, exploring themes of empathy, isolation, and Australians’ imagined place in the world. Moving beyond the primacy that is typically accorded white accounts of violence, contributors place particular emphasis on the experiences of those perceived to be on the social periphery, repositioning them at the center of Australia’s relationship to global events and debates.

  Subjects: 20th Century History 18th/19th Century History Colonialism

• eBook available April 2019

  Luso-Tropicalism and Its Discontents

  The Making and Unmaking of Racial Exceptionalism

  Anderson, W., Roque, R., & Ventura Santos, R. (eds)

  Modern perceptions of race across much of the Global South are indebted to the Brazilian social scientist Gilberto Freyre, who in works such as The Masters and the Slaves claimed that Portuguese colonialism produced exceptionally benign and tolerant race relations. This volume radically reinterprets Freyre’s Luso-tropicalist arguments and critically engages with the historical complexity of racial concepts and practices in the Portuguese-speaking world. Encompassing Brazil as well as Portuguese-speaking societies in Africa, Asia, and even Portugal itself, it places an interdisciplinary group of scholars in conversation to challenge the conventional understanding of twentieth-century racialization, proffering new insights into such controversial topics as human plasticity, racial amalgamation, and the tropes and proxies of whiteness.

  Subjects: Colonialism 20th Century History Sociology

• eBook available September 2018

  Medicinal Rule

  A Historical Anthropology of Kingship in East and Central Africa

  Stroeken, K.

  As soon as Europeans set foot on African soil, they looked for the equivalents of their kings – and found them. The resulting misunderstandings have lasted until this day. Based on ethnography-driven regional comparison and a critical re-examination of classic monographs on some forty cultural groups, this volume makes the arresting claim that across equatorial Africa the model of rule has been medicine – and not the colonizer’s despotic administrator, the missionary’s divine king, or Vansina’s big man. In a wide area populated by speakers of Bantu and other languages of the Niger-Congo cluster, both cult and dynastic clan draw on the fertility shrine, rainmaking charm and drum they inherit.

  Subjects: General Anthropology Colonialism

• December 2002

  Memoirs of a Mbororo

  The Life of Ndudi Umaru: Fulani Nomad of Cameroon

  Bocquene, H.

  This remarkable book recounts the life of Ndudi Umaru, a pastoral nomadic Fulani, who was born in the Nigeria-Cameroon border zone, but spent most of his life in Cameroon where he was treated for leprosy. Left to his own devices at an early age—his illness having separated him from his kith and kin—Ndudi is befriended by Père Boquené, a French missionary who takes him on as a field assistant. Working closely with the young man, Père Boquené realizes Ndudi is a keen observer of his own pastoral society, with its links to a wider social setting, and suggests he record his observations on tape. The result is a rare and sensitive collaboration, which sheds new insight into the world of the Mbororo and the complex and ever-changing social mosaic of West African savanna societies. Ndudi's leprosy and his efforts to find a cure grant him the necessary perspective to analyze this complex world, while still remaining a part of it.

  For the western public, the Mbororo have often been the photogenic subjects of "Disappearing World" documentaries or glossy coffee table books. However, this account renders "the exotic" comprehensible, preserving the cultural authenticity of Ndudi's story while making this unique world more accessible to outsiders.

  Subjects: General Anthropology Colonialism

• January 2014

  Metallic Modern

  Everyday Machines in Colonial Sri Lanka

  Wickramasinghe, N.

  Everyday life in the Crown colony of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) was characterized by a direct encounter of people with modernity through the consumption and use of foreign machines – in particular, the Singer sewing machine, but also the gramophone, tramway, bicycle and varieties of industrial equipment. The ‘metallic modern’ of the 19th and early 20th century Ceylon encompassed multiple worlds of belonging and imagination; and enabled diverse conceptions of time to coexist through encounters with Siam, the United States and Japan as well as a new conception of urban space in Colombo. Metallic Modern describes the modern as it was lived and experienced by non-elite groups – tailors, seamstresses, shopkeepers, workers – and suggests that their idea of the modern was nurtured by a changing material world.

  Subjects: Colonialism General Cultural Studies Development Studies

• eBook available July 2016

  The Nature of German Imperialism

  Conservation and the Politics of Wildlife in Colonial East Africa

  Gissibl, B.

  Today, the East African state of Tanzania is renowned for wildlife preserves such as the Serengeti National Park, the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, and the Selous Game Reserve. Yet few know that most of these initiatives emerged from decades of German colonial rule. This book gives the first full account of Tanzanian wildlife conservation up until World War I, focusing upon elephant hunting and the ivory trade as vital factors in a shift from exploitation to preservation that increasingly excluded indigenous Africans. Analyzing the formative interactions between colonial governance and the natural world, The Nature of German Imperialism situates East African wildlife policies within the global emergence of conservationist sensibilities around 1900.

  Subjects: Colonialism Environmental Studies

• November 2014

  Navigating Colonial Orders

  Norwegian Entrepreneurship in Africa and Oceania

  Kjerland, K. A. & Bertelsen, B. E. (eds)

  Norwegians in colonial Africa and Oceania had varying aspirations and adapted in different ways to changing social, political and geographical circumstances in foreign, colonial settings. They included Norwegian shipowners, captains, and diplomats; traders and whalers along the African coast and in Antarctica; large-scale plantation owners in Mozambique and Hawai’i; big business men in South Africa; jacks of all trades in the Solomon Islands; timber merchants on Zanzibar’ coffee farmers in Kenya; and King Leopold’s footmen in Congo. This collection reveals narratives of the colonial era that are often ignored or obscured by the national histories of former colonial powers. It charts the entrepreneurial routes chosen by various Norwegians and the places they ventured, while demonstrating the importance of recognizing the complicity of such “non-colonial colonials” for understanding the complexity of colonial history.

  Subject: Colonialism

• November 2007

  Picturing Pity

  Pitfalls and Pleasures in Cross-Cultural Communication.
  Image and Word in a North Cameroon Mission

  Gullestad†, M.

  Picturing Pity is the first full length monograph on missionary photography. Empirically, it is based on an in-depth analysis of the published photographs taken by Norwegian evangelical missionaries in Northern Cameroon from the early nineteen twenties, at the beginning of their activities in this region, and until today. Being part of a large international movement, Norway sent out more missionaries per capita than any other country in Europe.

  Marianne Gullestad's main contention is that the need to continuously justify their activities to donors in Europe has led to the creation and maintenance of specific ways of portraying Africans. The missionary visual rhetoric is both based on earlier visualizations and has over time established its own conventions which can now also be traced within secular fields of activity such as international development agencies, foreign policy, human relief organizations and the mass media.

  Picturing Pity takes part in the present "pictorial turn" in academic teaching and research, constituting visual images as an exciting site of conversation across disciplinary lines.

  Subjects: Colonialism General Anthropology

• September 2007

  Pious Pursuits

  German Moravians in the Atlantic World

  Gillespie, M., & Beachy, R. (eds)

  Recent work on the history of migration and the Atlantic World has underscored the importance of the political economies of Europe, Africa, and the Americas in the eighteenth century, emphasizing the impact of these exchanges on political relations and state-building, and on economic structures, commerce, and wealth. Too little of this work explores culture and identity outside the Anglo-American context, especially as reflected through religious developments of radical Pietists and other Germans, the second largest group of migrants to the American colonies in the eighteenth century.

  This volume offers a fresh vantage point from which to examine the Atlantic World. Quick to traverse the conventional political boundaries that divided European states and American colonies, Moravians departed their homeland to form new congregations in the most cosmopolitan European cities as well as on the North American frontier. Pious Pursuits explores the lives and beliefs of Atlantic World Moravians, as well as their communities and culture, and it provides a new framework for analysis of the Atlantic World that is comparative and transnational.

  Subjects: 18th/19th Century History Colonialism Refugee & Migration Studies

• July 2007

  Possessing the World

  Taking the Measurements of Colonisation from the 18th to the 20th Century

  Etemad, B.

  Based on an impressive body of information and data, this volume recounts the history of five continents over a long stretch of time and in a comparative approach. From the beginning of European expansion the question was posed: what were the "empire tools" that gave Europe its military superiority, even before the industrial revolution? What was it that enabled Europeans to withstand life-threatening tropical diseases and to control indigenous populations? This book gives a fresh and wide-ranging view of the construction and collapse of the modern colonial empires of Europe, the United States of America and Japan.

  Subjects: Colonialism Early Modern History Refugee & Migration Studies

• July 2007

  Postcoloniality

  The French Dimension

  Majumdar, M. A.

  “Postcolonial theory” has become one of the key issues of scholarly debates worldwide; debates, so the author argues, which have become rather sterile and are characterized by a repetitive reworking of old hackneyed issues, focussing on cultural questions of language and identity in particular. Gradually, a gulf has emerged between Anglophone and Francophone thinking in this area. The author investigates the causes for the apparent stagnation that has overtaken much of the current debate and explores the particular characteristics of French global strategy and cultural policy, as well as the divergent responses to current debates on globalization. Outlining in particular the contribution of thinkers such as Césaire, Senghor, Memmi, Sartre and Fanon to the worldwide development of anti-imperialist ideas, she offers a critical perspective on the ongoing difficulties of France’s relationship with its colonial and postcolonial Others and suggests new lines of thought that are currently emerging in the Francophone world, which may have the capacity to take these debates.

  Subject: Colonialism

• September 2000

  Recalling the Belgian Congo

  Conversations and Introspection

  Dembour, M.-B.

  When the author embarked on her study, her aim was to approach former colonial officers with a view to analyzing processes of domination in the ex-Belgian Congo. However, after establishing a rapport with some of these officers, the author was soon forced to revise her initial assumptions, widely held in present-day Belgium: these officers were not the "baddies" she had expected to meet.

  Exploring the colonial experience through the respondents' memories resulted in a far more complex picture of the colonial situation than she had anticipated, again forcing her to question her original assumptions. This resulted not only in a more differentiated perspective on Belgian colonialist rule, but is also sensitized her as regards the question of anthropological understanding and of what constitutes historical fact.

  These two aspects of her work are reflected in this study that offers specific material on the way Belgian colonialism is remembered and reflects on its conditions of production, thus combining ethnographic analysis with a theoretical essay.

  Subjects: Colonialism General Anthropology

• eBook available January 2003

  The Road to War

  France and Vietnam 1944-1947

  Shipway, M.

  How did France become embroiled in Vietnam, in the first of long wars of decolonization? And why did the French colonial administration, in late 1946, having negotiated with Ho Chi Minh for a year, adopt a warlike stance towards Ho's régime which ran counter to the liberal colonial doctrine of liberated France? Based on French archival sources, almost all of them previously unavailable to the English-speaking reader, the author assesses the policy that emerged from the 1944 Brazzaville conference; and the doomed attempt to apply that policy in Indo-China.

  Subject: Colonialism

• April 2005

  Rock of Contention

  Free French and Americans at War in New Caledonia, 1940-1945

  Munholland, K.

  What went wrong in Free French relations with Americans during World War Two? Two peoples, presumably sharing a common cause in a war to defeat the axis powers, often found themselves locked in bitter disputes that exposed fundamental differences in outlook and intentions, creating a profound misunderstanding or mésentente that was a major source of Franco-American conflict during the war and has persisted since then. The site for this dispute was the South Pacific colony of New Caledonia. By documenting carefully French policy toward the American presence in New Caledonia during the war, the author demonstrates the existence of a deep-seated suspicion, fear, even paranoia about the Americans that colored almost every phase of Free French policy. Revising traditional views, the author lays bare the roots of the antagonism, which stem from perceptions and biases.

  Subjects: WWII History Colonialism

• September 2019

  A Sad Fiasco

  Colonial Concentration Camps in Southern Africa, 1900–1908

  Kreienbaum, J.

  Only in recent years has the history of European colonial concentration camps in Africa—in which thousands of prisoners died in appalling conditions—become widely known beyond a handful of specialists. Although they preceded the Third Reich by many decades, the camps’ newfound notoriety has led many to ask to what extent they anticipated the horrors of the Holocaust. Were they designed for mass killing, a misbegotten attempt at modernization, or something else entirely? A Sad Fiasco confronts this difficult question head-on, reconstructing the actions of colonial officials in both British South Africa and German South-West Africa as well as the experiences of internees to explore both the similarities and the divergences between the African camps and their Nazi-era successors.

  Subjects: Genocide Studies Colonialism 20th Century History

• March 2015

  Sex and Control

  Venereal Disease, Colonial Physicians, and Indigenous Agency in German Colonialism, 1884-1914

  Walther, D. J.

  In responding to the perceived threat posed by venereal diseases in Germany’s colonies, doctors took a biopolitical approach that employed medical and bourgeois discourses of modernization, health, productivity, and morality. Their goal was to change the behavior of targeted groups, or at least to isolate infected individuals from the healthy population. However, the Africans, Pacific Islanders, and Asians they administered to were not passive recipients of these strategies. Rather, their behavior strongly influenced the efficacy and nature of these public health measures. While an apparent degree of compliance was achieved, over time physicians increasingly relied on disciplinary measures beyond what was possible in Germany in order to enforce their policies. Ultimately, through their discourses and actions they contributed to the justification for and the maintenance of German colonialism.

  Subject: Colonialism

• eBook available June 2013

  Slavery and Antislavery in Spain's Atlantic Empire

  Fradera, J. M. & Schmidt-Nowara†, C. (eds)

  African slavery was pervasive in Spain’s Atlantic empire yet remained in the margins of the imperial economy until the end of the eighteenth century when the plantation revolution in the Caribbean colonies put the slave traffic and the plantation at the center of colonial exploitation and conflict. The international group of scholars brought together in this volume explain Spain’s role as a colonial pioneer in the Atlantic world and its latecomer status as a slave-trading, plantation-based empire. These contributors map the broad contours and transformations of slave-trafficking, the plantation, and antislavery in the Hispanic Atlantic while also delving into specific topics that include: the institutional and economic foundations of colonial slavery; the law and religion; the influences of the Haitian Revolution and British abolitionism; antislavery and proslavery movements in Spain; race and citizenship; and the business of the illegal slave trade.

  Subjects: Colonialism General History

• January 2006

  The Sounds of Silence

  Nineteenth-Century Portugal and the Abolition of the Slave Trade

  Marques, J

  Portugal was the pioneer of the transatlantic slave trade, the ruler of both Brazil and Angola — the all time champions of that trade —, and one of the last western countries to decree the abolition of slaving institutions. Paradoxically, and in spite of the overwhelming number of works devoted to the problems of slavery produced in recent decades, little was known about the way Portugal dealt with the twilight of the age of slavery and, most of all, with abolitionism. This book offers the first study of the abolition of the Portuguese slave trade, covering the period from the end of the eighteenth century to the mid-1860s, and bringing to life a dark and silenced corner in the history of the odious commerce. Based on a thorough examination of Portuguese and British historical sources — most of them never used before —, and on his awareness of the international scholarship in the field in which he writes, it investigates not only the Portuguese pro and anti-abolitionist attitudes but also the underlying ideologies, and whether and how those attitudes and ideologies changed over time and in the light of events in the political, economic and social spheres.

  Subjects: Colonialism Refugee & Migration Studies

• November 2017

  Subjects, Citizens, and Others

  Administering Ethnic Heterogeneity in the British and Habsburg Empires, 1867-1918

  Gammerl, B.

  Bosnian Muslims, East African Masai, Czech-speaking Austrians, North American indigenous peoples, and Jewish immigrants from across Europe—the nineteenth-century British and Habsburg Empires were characterized by incredible cultural and racial-ethnic diversity. Notwithstanding their many differences, both empires faced similar administrative questions as a result: Who was excluded or admitted? What advantages were granted to which groups? And how could diversity be reconciled with demands for national autonomy and democratic participation? In this pioneering study, Benno Gammerl compares Habsburg and British approaches to governing their diverse populations, analyzing imperial formations to reveal the legal and political conditions that fostered heterogeneity.

  Subjects: 18th/19th Century History Colonialism 20th Century History

• eBook available October 2007

  Sugarlandia Revisited

  Sugar and Colonialism in Asia and the Americas, 1800-1940

  Bosma, U., Giusti-Cordero, J, & Knight, G.K. (eds)

  Sugar was the single most valuable bulk commodity traded internationally before oil became the world’s prime resource. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, cane sugar production was pre-eminent in the Atlantic Islands, the Caribbean, and Brazil. Subsequently, cane sugar industries in the Americas were transformed by a fusion of new and old forces of production, as the international sugar economy incorporated production areas in Asia, the Pacific, and Africa. Sugar’s global economic importance and its intimate relationship with colonialism offer an important context for probing the nature of colonial societies. This book questions some major assumptions about the nexus between sugar production and colonial societies in the Caribbean and Southeast Asia, especially in the second (post-1800) colonial era.

  Subject: Colonialism

• August 2002

  Swedish Ventures in Cameroon, 1883-1923

  Trade and Travel, People and Politics

  Ardener, S. (ed)

  The 1880s were a critical time in Cameroon. A German warship arrived in the Douala estuary and proclaimed Cameroon a protectorate. At that time, two Swedes, Knutson and Waldau, were living on the upper slopes of the Cameroon Mountain. Very little is known about their activities. One, Knutson, wrote a long memoir of his time in Cameroon (1883-1895) which is published here for the first time. It gives fascinating insights into everyday life in Cameroon and into the multifaceted relationships among the various Europeans, and between them and the Africans, at the end of the 19th century; we learn about the Swedes' quarrels first with the Germans and later with the British, over land purchases, thus revealing the origins of long on-going disputes over Bakweri lands. We are given vivid descriptions of Bakweri notables and their, and the Europeans', cultural practices, a rare eye-witness account of the sasswood witchcraft ordeal, and learn about Knutson's friendships with slaves. Together with appended contemporary correspondence, legal opinions, and early (translated) texts, this memoir must be considered as a unique and invaluable primary source for the pre-colonial history of Cameroon.

  Subjects: General Anthropology Colonialism Travel & Tourism

• eBook available October 2017

  Unearthing the Past to Forge the Future

  Colin Mackenzie, the Early Colonial State, and the Comprehensive Survey of India

  Wolffhardt, T.

  For much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the British East India Company consolidated its rule over India, evolving from a trading venture to a colonial administrative force. Yet its territorial gains far outpaced its understanding of the region and the people who lived there, and its desperate efforts to gain knowledge of the area led to the 1815 appointment of army officer Colin Mackenzie as the first Surveyor General of India. This volume carefully reconstructs the life and career of Mackenzie, showing how the massive survey of India that he undertook became one of the most spectacular and wide-ranging knowledge production initiatives in British colonial history.

  Subjects: Colonialism 18th/19th Century History

• August 2016

  Violent Becomings

  State Formation, Sociality, and Power in Mozambique

  Bertelsen, B. E.

  Violent Becomings conceptualizes the Mozambican state not as the bureaucratically ordered polity of the nation-state, but as a continuously emergent and violently challenged mode of ordering. In doing so, this book addresses the question of why colonial and postcolonial state formation has involved violent articulations with so-called ‘traditional’ forms of sociality. The scope and dynamic nature of such violent becomings is explored through an array of contexts that include colonial regimes of forced labor and pacification, liberation war struggles and civil war, the social engineering of the post-independence state, and the popular appropriation of sovereign violence in riots and lynchings.

  Subjects: General Anthropology Peace & Conflict Studies Colonialism

• February 2010

  Who Abolished Slavery?

  Slave Revolts and Abolitionism
  A Debate with João Pedro Marques

  Drescher, S. & Emmer, P. (eds)

  The past half-century has produced a mass of information regarding slave resistance, ranging from individual acts of disobedience to massive uprisings. Many of these acts of rebellion have been studied extensively, yet the ultimate goals of the insurgents remain open for discussion. Recently, several historians have suggested that slaves achieved their own freedom by resisting slavery, which counters the predominant argument that abolitionist pressure groups, parliamentarians, and the governmental and anti-governmental armies of the various slaveholding empires were the prime movers behind emancipation. Marques, one of the leading historians of slavery and abolition, argues that, in most cases, it is impossible to establish a direct relation between slaves’ uprisings and the emancipation laws that would be approved in the western countries. Following this presentation, his arguments are taken up by a dozen of the most outstanding historians in this field. In a concluding chapter, Marques responds briefly to their comments and evaluates the degree to which they challenge or enhance his view.

  Subject: 18th/19th Century History Colonialism

• December 2016

  Xenocracy

  State, Class, and Colonialism in the Ionian Islands, 1815-1864

  Gekas, S.

  Of the many European territorial reconfigurations that followed the wars of the early nineteenth century, the Ionian State remains among the least understood. Xenocracy offers a much-needed account of the region during its half-century as a Protectorate of Great Britain—a period that embodied all of the contradictions of British colonialism. A middle class of merchants, lawyers and state officials embraced and promoted a liberal modernization project. Yet despite the improvements experienced by many Ionians, the deterioration of state finances led to divisions along class lines and presented a significant threat to social stability. As author Sakis Gekas shows, the ordeal engendered dependency upon and ambivalence toward Western Europe, anticipating the “neocolonial” condition with which the Greek nation struggles even today.

  Subjects: 18th/19th Century History Colonialism