British Colonialism

This article examines the historical and political course followed by a colonial discipline, namely the British-initiated archaeological project, as it was extended to the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir in the early twentieth century. It examines how and in what circumstances colonial archaeology was adopted both by the Dogra-Hindu rulers and their preponderantly Muslim subjects in this indirectly governed part of the British Indian Empire. This article argues that the adoption of this project emanated not so much from interest in the discipline of archaeology qua discipline, but in its ancillary political effects. It demonstrates that whereas the Hindu princely rulers modified colonial archaeology in ways that could enable them to use it buttress their sovereignty, their Kashmiri Muslim subjects appropriated it to strip the legitimacy off that very sovereignty. In the process, this article also highlights the capacity of various indigenous actors to recast aspects of colonial ...

This essay considers the general force of anachronism in the British imperial project in peninsular Southeast Asia, an anachronism that was enacted in the translational efforts of educational officials as well as the curricular programs and educational policies of the colonial administration. The essay refers to this anachronism as a kind of "imperial pastoralism," which aesthetic conflated rurality and husbandry while eschewing the possibility of revolution. The effect, the essay suggests, was not only a politics of linguistic separatism but also a hierarchizing of ethnolinguistic difference and a gradual and increasingly exclusive identification of Malays with Malaysia.

This article examines the historical and political course followed by a colonial discipline, namely the British-initiated archaeological project, as it was extended to the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir in the early twentieth century. It examines how and in what circumstances colonial archaeology was adopted both by the Dogra-Hindu rulers and their preponderantly Muslim subjects in this indirectly governed part of the British Indian Empire. This article argues that the adoption of this project emanated not so much from interest in the discipline of archaeology qua discipline, but in its ancillary political effects. It demonstrates that whereas the Hindu princely rulers modified colonial archaeology in ways that could enable them to use it buttress their sovereignty, their Kashmiri Muslim subjects appropriated it to strip the legitimacy off that very sovereignty. In the process, this article also highlights the capacity of various indigenous actors to recast aspects of colonial ...

Torino, 2-3 settembre 2021 - Polo del '900, via Del Carmine 14
XV CONVEGNO INTERNAZIONALE DI STUDI STORICI DI
"SPAGNA CONTEMPORANEA"
1820-1830: RIVOLUZIONE, REAZIONE, LIBERALISMO
Convegno in omaggio a Alberto Gil Novales e Jean-René AymesLa vicinanza del Bicentenario delle rivoluzioni liberali in Grecia, Polonia, Portogallo, Spagna e Italia tra il 1820 e il 1830 e dell’estensione della crisi all’Atlantico e al Mediterraneo è utile per un primo bilancio sulle ricerche in corso e sulle prospettive storiografiche.
Si trattò di una crisi globale, che svolse un ruolo di primo piano nelle origini del mondo contemporaneo, intrecciando guerra e rivoluzione, progetti costituzionali e rinnovamenti delle monarchie, o viceversa rilancio del loro assetto materiale e ideologico tradizionale. Essa mobilitò eserciti e comunità politiche, favorendo la circolazione di uomini e generando una imponente messe di testimonianze e memorie.
La proposta di convegno prende le mosse dal corpo di studi internazionali che negli anni recenti, focalizzandosi sull’epoca post-napoleonica, si è misurato sui contenuti e i modi della politicizzazione e del conflitto civile; così come sull’istituto monarchico e sulle ideologie, le correnti e le pratiche controrivoluzionarie in Europa e in America; come, infine, sui caratteri transnazionali della Restaurazione, la nascita dei diversi patriottismi nazionali e le differenti e tipiche declinazioni del liberalismo.All’interno di questo mondo, il conflitto tra la Rivoluzione e la Restaurazione ha prodotto soluzioni politiche, statali, nazionali e costituzionali differenti: e in tal senso lo studio della crisi del decennio 1820-1830 offre ancora oggi la possibilità di formulare innovative prospettive interpretative sui modi della transizione che portò dalla guerra globale del 1792-1815 alla creazione delle comunità politiche ed istituzionali caratteristiche del mondo contemporaneo.
Le nuove domande della storiografia politica, istituzionale e culturale aprono uno spazio proficuo ai fini dell’innovazione della ricerca su questo periodo. Discuterle è l’obiettivo principale di questo convegno.
All’iniziativa hanno aderito oltre quaranta studiosi, provenienti da dieci Paesi (Francia, Germania, Grecia, Messico, Polonia, Portogallo, Regno Unito, Spagna, Stati Uniti, Italia), che da diversi punti di vista e con diversi approcci metodologici affronteranno i vari temi enunciati nel titolo.

4 febbraio 2022 - 15.30-15.50 SESSIONE : LA DIPLOMAZIA: SPERANZE, ILLUSIONI E AMBIZIONI : ROSA MARIA DELLI QUADRI: "ALLE ORIGINI DELLA MOBILITAZIONE INGLESE PER LA GRECIA: LA CESSIONE DI PARGA"

... do the same. It was generally believed that his contemporary Ramtanu Lahiri had succeeded in gaining admis-sion to Hare's school by running after him for two months.Ramtanu was thirteen years old at the time. The public ...

In the last 165 years, which followed the nation-wide rebellion of 1857 against the rule of the East India Company in India, many of the misconceptions have been put at rest and a number of myths demolished regarding the nature and course of this great upheaval. For instance much has been written by the historians, both Indian as well as foreign, supplemented with contemporary documents, upholding the fact that it was not a ‘Mutiny’, on the contrary, a rebellion which drew wide support from different sections of the Indian people in most of the affected areas.

Even the then British rulers who initially declared it as a mere ‘Mutiny’ of the ‘Poorbeah’ (people from eastern India, the British used this term in derogatory sense) sepoys, ‘Budmashes’ (Urdu term for rascals which the British often used to describe the rebels) and ‘Pandies’ (followers of the rebel Mangal Pandey), soon realized the hollowness of this claim. Major W. S. R. Hodson (Commander of the British cavalry battalion which was created in his name itself, the ‘Hodson Horse’ and chief of the army’s intelligence wing) who played a major role in capturing Delhi, and was responsible for mass killings of Delhites including Mughal Princes in the most savage manner, in September 1857, in a letter to his wife from Delhi British army camp [July 26, 1857], did admit the fact that it was “an entire army and a whole nation” which was in revolt.

Another official, Thomas Lowe, commander of the medical corps, who accompanied the British army in its campaign to crush rebellion in the Central India in 1857-58, and was present at the battle of Kotah-ki-Sarai (Gwalior, June 18, 1858) in which Rani Laxmi Bai was martyred, in his narrative, underscored the reality that it was not a ‘Mutiny’ but a national revolt organized by the ‘cunning, educated fiends’ with the result that “the infanticide Rajput, the bigoted Brahmin, the fanatic Musselman [sic], and the luxury-loving, fat-paunched [sic] ambitious Mahrattah [sic]…they all joined together in the cause; the cow-killer and the cow-worshipper, the pig-hater and the pig-eater, the crier of ‘Allah is God and Mahomet [sic] his prophet’ and the mumbler of the mysteries of Bram [Brahma].”

However, a terrible myth continues to flourish about the complicity of Sikhs as a community in helping the Firangees in suppressing the 1857 revolt. There is no dearth of otherwise well-meaning historians and commentators who even today argue that the 1857 War of Independence was lost mainly due to the betrayal by Sikhs who either on the orders of Sikh native rulers of Punjab or on their own, recruited in the British army in large numbers, thus playing crucial role in subjugating India, which was then striving hard to liberate itself from the clutches of the British imperialism. Sikh community is thus presented as the main culprit responsible for helping out the British in securing India in the aftermath of 1857 rebellion.
This paper presented in a conference at Punjab University, Patiala IN 2007 was  an attempt to put facts as those happened at that time of the great liberation war.

In this article the author raised the question of the 'relevance' of anthropology to its wider political context, particularly in relation to colonialism and imperialism in Great Britain and USA. Historically, anthropology was always relevant for the colonial government and the anthropologists knowingly or unknowingly served the system in which they had to work at the universities and institutes.The greatest contradiction of anthropologists is their simultaneous involvement with the aspirations of the underprivileged as well as with the rulers who fund their research. Jack Stauder, the author of this landmark paper, concluded by saying:"Are we to try to serve ourselves by serving imperialism?....we can also choose another road, which I believe holds the future: we can ally with the people we are meant to study- tribesmen, peasants, working class people abroad and at home
- in their struggles to create a new world where science can truly serve the people and not be a tool for their oppression".

This article examines the  deportation from interwar Egypt of socialists, communists and syndicalists, who were either resident foreigners  or  “local subjects of foreign extraction.” The article surveys these ideological-ethnic deportations as an example of the colonial rule of difference. It analyzes the changing tactics employed by the British authorities to legitimize and institute the practice in Egypt as a means to facilitate the policing of the colonized population, prior to and after the Unilateral Declaration of Egypt’s Independence of 1922. The article then inquires into the ramifications of these deportations on nationalist discourse, and the ways in which the practice of colonial exceptionalism became incorporated into the laws and practices of the postcolonial Egyptian state, during the gradual transition to independence.

There are many things that can be done to educate young people about controversial topics - including historical monuments - in schools. At the same time, however, we argue that there is little warrant for optimism concerning the educational potential of classroom instruction given the likely resistance from parents, the general absence of adequate training, the problematic nature of state-approved textbooks, as well as the institutional constraints under which most school teachers must labour. For these reasons, we think it best to expand the scope of educational possibilities one is willing to consider.

This was presentation on the historical roots of the current crisis in Burma (Myanmar) which I gave to KIKA (Kaukus Indonesia untuk Kebebasan Akademik) on Thursday 25 March 2021. One of the key themes which I chose to explore was the comparative one of looking at the experiences of Indonesia and Burma in the period from early 19th century colonialism - in Burma's case the First Anglo-Burman War of 1824-26) and the Java War (1825-30) for Indonesia - and following this through to the present time, in particular looking at the importance of developing an understanding, appreciation and commitment to the maintenance of a multi-racial, multi-ethnic and multi-religious society/nation, and the leadership skills required to guide such. Here I took the opportunity to compare Daw Aung San Suu Kyi with her near Indonesian contemporary the country's Fourth President, Gus Dur (Abdurrahman Wahid, in office, 1999-2001). The KIKA discussion also brought up many issues relating the future of the democratic and Civil Disobedience Movements in Burma and the need for a complete regreening of the current NLD leadership. Happy reading!

The late development of industrialism, socialism and national liberation movements in much of South-East Asia and Oceania saw anarchism emerge as a marginal force – with the exception of the Spanish- then US-occupied Philippines, British-occupied Malaya (Malaysia and Singapore), and Dutch- and Portuguese-occupied East Indies (Indonesia and East Timor) where it developed as a key component of the anti-colonial struggle. This text, provided especially for the Indonesian PPR, is a slightly modified extract from Michael Schmidt, In the Shadow of a Hurricane: Global Anarchist Ideological and Organisational Lineages, publication forthcoming.

يقدم هذا الكتاب بجزئيه نصوصًا أدبية متنوعة لأحد أهم رواد النهضة العربية الحديثة، وهو عبد الله بن مصباح بن إبراهيم الإدريسي، الذي عُرف فيما بعد باسم: عبد الله النديم. يضم الجزء الثاني، المخصَّص لآثار عبد الله النديم النثرية، مقالات النديم التي لم تُنشر من قبل ويطالعها القارئ العربي للمرة الأولى مجموعةً في كتاب منذ نَشَرَها النديم متفرقة في صحف عصره، كصحف: "مصر"، "التجارة"، و"المحروسة"، ويقدم أيضًا شذرة من مسرحية النديم الوحيدة الباقية: "الوطن وطالع التوفيق"، وكذلك عددًا مما بقي من رسائل النديم الأدبية وخمس رسائل أرسلها إلى عرابي في منفاه، إضافة إلى قائمة ببليوغرافية مُحدَّثة تحوي جميع ما أنتجه عبد الله النديم من كتب ودواوين شعرية ومقالات صحافية ورسائل أدبية ومسرحيات، وكذا جميع ما نُشر عن عبد الله النديم من دراسات متنوعة سواء باللغة العربية أو الإنجليزية وغيرها من اللغات.

يملأ كتاب "نصوص عبد الله النديم: الديوان الشعري والآثار النثرية" فراغًا كبيرًا في المكتبة العربية حيث يقدم إضاءات حول الكتابة الأدبية في عصر النهضة العربية في الربع الأخير من القرن التاسع عشر، كما يكشف عن فترة زمنية مهمة في تاريخ مصر الحديث وهي الثورة العرابية، نتعرف فيها من خلاله بعمق على أهم أحداثها ومآلاتها بقلم خطيبها وثائرها وفيلسوفها عبد الله النديم.

يقدم هذا الكتاب بجزئيه نصوصًا أدبية متنوعة لأحد أهم رواد النهضة العربية الحديثة وهو عبد الله بن مصباح بن إبراهيم الإدريسي الذي عٌرف فيما بعد باسم عبد الله النديم. الجزء الأول هو ديوان النديم الشعري، والذي يطالعه القاريء العربي للمرة الأولى منذ وفاة النديم في العقد الأخير من القرن التاسع عشر. ويحتوى على كل ما وصلت إليه أيدينا من إنتاج عبد الله النديم الشعري، شعرًا وزجلاً، وهي حصيلة جهد سنوات طوال أمضاها مؤلف الكتاب بحثًا وتنقيبًا عن قصائد النديم وأبياته الشعرية وأزجاله في بطون الكتب والدوريات. ونزعم من خلال هذا الجهد أن الجزء الأول من كتاب "نصوص عبد الله النديم"، أي "الديوان الشعري"، هو أول ديوان شعر مطبوع وكامل له منذ عصر عبد الله النديم نفسه؛ وذلك أن دواوين شعر النديم وأزجاله قد آل أغلبها إلى التلف والفقد.

يسد كتاب "نصوص عبد الله النديم: الديوان الشعري والآثار النثرية" فراغًا كبيرًا في المكتبة العربية حيث يقدم إضاءات من الأهمية بمكانٍ فيما يتعلق بالكتابة الأدبية في عصر النهضة العربية في الربع الأخير من القرن التاسع عشر، كما يكشف عن فترة زمنية مهمة في تاريخ مصر الحديث وهي الثورة العرابية نتعرف فيها من خلاله بعمق على أهم أحداثها ومآلاتها بقلم خطيبها وثائرها وفيلسوفها عبد الله النديم.

The Indian Subcontinent, or South Asia in the greater perspective, has been under British colonial domination for centuries. The indigenous state systems inevitably collapsed and the new system was responsible for reconstruction and state building. New Western liberal concepts were introduced, hitherto unknown to these lands, for instance-Democracy, Equality, Fraternity etc. With these, there was a tide of nationalism and a desire for self determination to govern one's own land and own people and to be the masters of one's own destiny. After being under British jackboots for centuries, winds of freedom finally blew in the 1940s and the erstwhile colonies of the Empire became sovereign states. Since then, there were popular uprisings in Kashmir, Balochistan, Nepal, erstwhile East Pakistan (Bangladesh) etc. The nature of response from the state establishment was brutal, and it seems they had learned well from their colonizers. These states adopted the British Parliamentary System and Multi Party Democracy. In case of Pakistan, CMLA (Chief Martial Law Administrators) played dictator sometimes, but in the garb of liberalism and a storehouse of democracy and liberty. These new republics massacred people, jailed dissenters, passed draconian laws, created ethnic divide and genocides. This paper seeks to investigate into the hidden folds of the territorial disputes in these post colonial successor states and their responses to it. This paper will also try to examine the nature of state system of these successor states to ascertain their similarities with their colonial masters. Finally this paper would attempt to find out whether the colonial experience is responsible for the ongoing ethnic, socioeconomic and territorial tensions in these successor states.

This article studies representations of Indian magic and wizards in five popular nineteenth century Anglo-Indian novels. Such study allows us to understand how ordinary nineteenth century Britons envisioned Indian occult practices. Arguing that literary representations of Indian magic and wizards were essentially structured by the way Indian magic was conceptualized at both the metropolitan centre and the colonial periphery, this article considers the history of actual British encounter with Indian magicians in both Britain and India. It is found that in Anglo-Indian novels Indian wizards were generally stereotyped as malevolent beings, though favourable representations of wizards were not entirely absent. This article seeks to provide an explanation for this. It goes on to argue that, ultimately, representations of Indian magic and magicians in colonial literature reveal more about colonial ideology and public expectations in Britain, than about occult practices and their practitioners in India.

Questo lavoro analizza le critiche portate da Edmund Burke e Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron all’utilizzo della categoria di “dispotismo orientale” (con le immagini ad essa collegate) come strumento di legittimazione del dominio coloniale. Le loro riflessioni partirono dall’osservazione di ciò che si stava attuando nell’amministrazione coloniale britannica e nella gestione delle popolazioni indiane soggette all’autorità dell’East India Company: la loro analisi li portò a considerare il ruolo teorico che in tutto questo contesto aveva avuto questa categoria filosofico-politica. Infatti a partire dalla seconda metà del XVIII secolo l’influenza inglese in India stava crescendo sempre di più e nel giro di qualche decennio la Compagnia commerciale britannica si era ritrovata ad essere la potenza egemone del Subcontinente. Il dispotismo in tal contesto risultò di fondamentale importanza perché venne utilizzato in diversi modi, come un’arma ed uno spauracchio, dai fautori del colonialismo, siano stati essi solamente dei teorici, oppure dei veri e propri funzionari coloniali operanti in quelle lontane regioni.

In the early twentieth-century, picture postcards were an important medium through which convictions about identity could be portrayed. In colonial India, postcards became one of the contested sites of British casting of Indians as a people lacking in civilisation and the Indian response to these convictions. The imperial discourse on Indian infantilism and dependency on the civilisational values of the British was challenged in the visual narratives of postcards, particularly in the British fascination with fakirs or ascetics and in their pictures of household servants. This article compares postcards created by Indian publishers with those created by non-Indians, while paying attention to general colonial discourses concerning these two groups. Colonial postcard producers generally stuck to the depiction of Indians as stereotypes in a nondescript environment. In contrast, Indian postcard publishers highlighted individuality while creating a clearly defined background supporting their position. In doing so, they gave fakirs and servants an identity which did not depend on the British. Indian postcard publishers visually contested the dominance of imperial discourses, emphasising that Indians were capable and independent.

The Chota Nagpur plateau, which is today the state of Jharkhand in eastern India, is one of the oldest regions of the world with the richest concentration of mineral resources and natural vegetation in the country. The region, mainly inhabited by aboriginal tribes, has however remained one of the most backward and marginalized areas of the country. Since the beginning of the 19th century these simple tribal people have been caught in the vortex of contesting claims over them which have had lasting repercussions on their socio-economic development and on their sense of identity and belongingness. Christian missionaries of various denominations had a huge stake in these people, and their active evangelization resulted in a sizeable tribal population adopting Christianity. This chapter examines the attempts of the British administrators and German missionaries to ‘civilize’ this region by introducing Western education among the tribal people in the mid-19th century. The introduction of formal schools by the missionaries and their attempt to retrieve the tribal peoples from a ‘primitive’ stage of development and integrate them into mainstream civilization has resulted in a series of complicated entanglements between the adivasis (original inhabitants) and the dikus (outsiders). An overview of the contributions of the German missionaries, the Gossner Lutherans in particular, and the British colonialists, and their rapid incursion into the lives of the adivasis will bring to light the appropriation of contesting claims over these people, and the extent to which missionaries and colonialists were agents for the re-formation of indigenous society.