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Tropical Africa was one of the last regions of the world to experience formal European colonialism, a process that coincided with the advent of a range of new scientific specialties and research methods. This book studies the relationship between imperialism and the role of scientific expertise—environmental, medical, racial, and anthropological—in the colonization of British Africa. A key source for the author's analysis is the African Research Survey, a project undertaken in the 1930s to explore how modern science was being applied to African problems. This project both embraced and recommended an interdisciplinary approach to research on Africa that underscored the heterogeneity of African environments and the interrelations among the problems being studied. While the aim of British colonialists was to transform and modernize Africa, their efforts were often unexpectedly subverted by scientific concerns with the local and vernacular. The book examines imperial history, colonial development, and the role science played in both.

The essays in this volume explore the lives and activities of people of African descent – both black and white - in Europe between the 1880s and the beginning of the twenty-first century. They go beyond the still-dominant Anglo-American or transatlantic emphasis of Black Studies, examining the experiences of Africans, Afro-Caribbeans and African Americans in Germany, France, Portugal, Italy and the Soviet Union, as well as in Britain. Their subjects include people moving between European states and state jurisdictions or from the former colony of one state to another place in Europe, African-born colonial settlers returning to the metropolis, migrants conversing across ethnic and cultural boundaries among ‘Africans’, and visitors for whom the face-to-face encounter with European society involves working across the ‘colour line’ and testing the limits of solidarity. The authors focus on the ways in which their subjects have used the skills and resources they brought with them and the ones they found in each place of arrival to construct themselves and their families as subjects of their own lives, and also what new visions of self and community (or politics) have been enabled by the crossing of borders. The volume is multidisciplinary, and the contributors include a novelist and a filmmaker who reflect on their own experiences of these complex histories and the challenges of narrating them.

Through an exploration of a Daniel Burnham-designed colonial hill station in the mountains of northern Luzon called Baguio, this book examines the literal and figurative architecture of U.S. imperialism in the Philippines. Tracking the Pacific crossings of famed Progressives like Burnham and tracing the transformation of Philippine pastureland into American pastoral retreat, the book shows how colonial rule and subjects of rule were generated in the face of Philippine resistance, the contradictions of imperial ideology, and in place. Chapters examine subject and capital formation through acts of dispossession that underwrote the making of the colonial retreat in the first decades of the twentieth century. Collectively, they challenge the abstraction and seeming invisibility of the United States’ emergent market empire by excavating the formal aspects of American power and the labor of building it.

Animal Labor and Colonial Warfare examines the use of camels, mules, and donkeys in British colonial campaigns of conquest and pacification, starting with the Second Afghan War and ending in the early 1900s. Hevia explains how during past centuries a new set of human-animal relations were created as European powers and the United States expanded their colonial possessions and attempted to put local economies and ecologies in the service of resource extraction. The results had major impacts on animal and human communities alike, disrupting centuries-old ecological and economic relationships. And those effects were lasting: Hevia shows how a number of the key issues faced by the postcolonial nation-state of Pakistan—such as shortages of clean water for agriculture, humans, and animals, and limited resources for dealing with infectious diseases—can be directly traced to decisions made in the colonial past.

This pioneering study of migrant journeys to Britain begins with Huguenot refugees in the 1680s and continues to asylum seekers and east European workers today. Analysing the history and memory of migrant journeys, covering not only the response of politicians and the public but also literary and artistic representations, then and now, this volume sheds new light on the nature and construction of Britishness from the early modern era onwards. It helps to explain why people come to Britain (or are denied entry) and how migrants have been viewed by state and society alike. The journeys covered vary from the famous (including the Empire Windrush in 1948) to the obscure, such as the Volga German transmigrants passing through Britain in the 1870s. While employing a broadly historical approach, the book incorporates insights from many other disciplines and employs a comparative methodology to highlight the importance of the symbolic as well as the physical nature of such journeys.

This study examines several themes such as public health, caste formation, famines, bacteriology, and the nature of the colonial state. These subjects have been studied while focusing on the central question of cattle within the predominantly agrarian landscape of India. The question of cattle was intimately linked to several areas of inquiry that have received great scholarly attention in the recent past. This includes studies on the nature of the colonial agrarian economy, or on the nature of the medical/public health intervention in colonies like India. Curiously though, despite the great spurt in writings around these themes, the subject of cattle and livestock has been completely ignored-there is not a single full-length work that examines it in all its complexities and detail. This book will both redress the balance as well as open up a new theme that will potentially attract great scholarly attention in the future.

The Haitian Revolution has generated responses from commentators in fields ranging from philosophy to historiography to twentieth-century literary and artistic studies. But what about the written work produced at the time, by Haitians? This book presents an account of a specifically Haitian literary tradition in the Revolutionary era. It shows the emergence of two strands of textual innovation, both evolving from the new revolutionary consciousness: the political texts produced by Haitian revolutionary leaders Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines; and popular Creole poetry from anonymous courtesans in Saint-Domingue's libertine culture. These textual forms, though they differ from each other, demonstrate both the increasing cultural autonomy and the literary voice of non-white populations in the colony at the time of revolution. Unschooled generals and courtesans, long presented as voiceless, are revealed to be legitimate speakers and authors. These Haitian French and Creole texts have been neglected as a foundation of Afro-diasporic literature by former slaves in the Atlantic world for two reasons: they do not fit the generic criteria of the slave narrative (which is rooted in the autobiographical experience of enslavement); and they are mediated texts, relayed to the print-cultural Atlantic domain not by the speakers themselves, but by secretaries or refugee colonists. These texts challenge how we think about authorial voice, writing, print culture, and cultural autonomy in the context of the formerly enslaved, and demand that we reassess our historical understanding of the Haitian Independence and its relationship to an international world of contemporary readers.

A collection of essays about the Colonial Medical Service of Africa in which a group of distinguished colonial historians illustrate the diversity and active collaborations to be found in the untidy reality of government medical provision. The authors present important case studies in a series of essays covering former British colonial dependencies in Africa, including Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zanzibar. These studies reveal many new insights into the enactments of colonial policy and the ways in which colonial doctors negotiated the day-to-day reality during the height of Imperial rule in Africa. The book provides essential reading for scholars and students of colonial history, medical history and colonial administration.

This book examines the events surrounding the establishment of a settlement in West Africa in 1787 that was later to become Freetown, the present-day capital of Sierra Leone. It outlines the range of ideas and attitudes to Africa that underlay the foundation of the settlement, and the part played by the black settlers themselves, London's ‘Black Poor’. Was the settlement based on a racist deportation designed to keep Britain white (as some accounts claim), or a voluntary emigration in which blacks themselves played a part? Once in West Africa, the settlers faced a struggle to survive against often harsh conditions, a struggle that included conflict with slave traders and neighbouring Africans. The settlement's ‘failure’ is perhaps less surprising than its subsequent re-establishment. The last part of the book looks at the nature of the Sierra Leone Company through the debate over its formation.

This book is about the end of the British Empire in the Middle East. It offers new insights into how the relationship between Britain and the Gulf rulers that was nurtured at the height of the British Empire affected the structure of international society as it remains in place today. Over the last four decades, the Persian Gulf region has gone through oil shocks, wars and political changes; however, the basic entities of the southern Gulf states have remained largely in place. How did this resilient system come about for such seemingly contested societies? The eventual emergence of the smaller but prosperous members such as Qatar, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates was not at all evident until 1971. Until then, nine separate states had stood in parallel to each other under British influence. At various points, plans were discussed to amalgamate the nine into one, two, three or even four separate entities. What, then, drove the formation of the three new states we see today? Drawing on extensive multi-archival research in the British, American and Gulf archives, this book illuminates a series of negotiations between British diplomats and the Gulf rulers that inadvertently led the three states to take their current shape. The story addresses the crucial issue of self-determination versus ‘better together’, a dilemma pertinent not only to students and scholars of the British Empire or the Middle East but also to those interested in the transformation of the modern world more broadly.

This book traces the life of Albert Raymond Forbes Webber (1880–1932), a distinguished Caribbean scholar, statesman, legislator, and novelist. Using Webber as a lens, it outlines the Guyanese struggle for justice and equality in an age of colonialism, imperialism, and indentureship. The author examines Webber’s emergence from the interior of Guyana to become a major presence in Caribbean politics. The book examines Webber’s insightful novel, Those That Be in Bondage; his travel writings; and his poetry. It chronicles Webber’s formation of the West Indian Press Association, his work on British Guiana’s constitution, and his championing of its people’s causes. The author studies Webber’s work with the British Guiana Labor Union to improve the conditions of the Guyanese working people and his authorship of the Centenary History and Handbook of British Guiana.

This book presents a comparative account of the slave trade within the nations and colonial systems of the Americas. While most scholarly attention to slavery in the Americas has concentrated on international transatlantic trade, the chapters in this volume focus on the slave trades within Brazil, the West Indies, and the Southern states of the United States after the closing of the Atlantic slave trade. The chapters cast new light upon questions that have framed the study of slavery in the Americas for decades and investigates such topics as the illegal slave trade in Cuba, the Creole slave revolt in the U.S., and the debate between pro- and antislavery factions over the interstate slave trade in the South.

Citizenship, Nation, Empire investigates the extent to which popular imperialism influenced the teaching of history between 1870 and 1930. It is the first book-length study to trace the substantial impact of educational psychology on the teaching of history, probing its impact on textbooks, literacy primers and teacher-training manuals. Educationists identified ‘enlightened patriotism’ to be the core objective of historical education. This was neither tub-thumping jingoism, nor state-prescribed national-identity teaching. Rather, enlightened patriotism was a concept used in the development of a carefully crafted curriculum for all children which fused civic intentions alongside imperial ambitions. The book will be of interest to those studying or researching aspects of English domestic imperial culture, especially those concerned with questions of childhood and schooling, citizenship, educational publishing and anglo-British relations. Given that vitriolic debates about the politics of history teaching have endured into the twenty-first century, Citizenship, Nation, Empire is a timely study of the formative influences that shaped the history curriculum in English schools.

In the past quarter century, France has grappled with the legacies of colonialism, the Algerian War (1954-1962), and the migration and settlement of Algerians and other Muslims from the former colonial empire. The Civilizing Mission in the Metropole explores the roots of these intertwined histories through an examination of the history of social welfare programs for Algerian migrants from the end of World War II until Algeria gained independence in 1962. First colonized in 1830, Algeria fought a bloody war of decolonization against France (1954-1962), as France fought to maintain control over its most prized imperial possession. In the midst of this violence, some 350,000 Algerians settled in France. This study examines the complex and often-contradictory goals of a welfare network that sought to provide services and monitor Algerian migrants’ activities. Historian Amelia Lyons particularly highlights family settlement and the central place Algerian women held in French efforts to transform the settled community. Lyons explores the nature of colonial racism, analyzes and breaks down colonial categories, and exposes numerous paradoxes surrounding the fraught relationship between France and Algeria—many of which continue to echo in French debates about Muslims today.

This critical edition offers the first English translation of Baron de Vastey’s Le système colonial dévoilé, a trailblazing critique of colonialism and the transatlantic slave system that was originally published in Haiti in 1814. Jean-Louis Vastey was the best known Haitian writer to emerge in the years after that country’s world-historical revolution (1791-1804). Born in 1781, Vastey was the son of a white plantation owner and a free woman of color; by the time of his murder in 1820, he had authored over ten books and pamphlets, and had become one of the most influential members of the government of King Henry Christophe. His first and most incendiary work, Colonial System Unveiled, provides a moving invocation of the horrors of slavery in pre-revolutionary Saint-Domingue, as well as an unrelenting denunciation of racial hierarchies and colonial rule that anticipates by over a hundred years the anticolonial politics (and poetics) of Césaire, Fanon, and Sartre. Featuring an extensive Introduction and critical apparatus that provides historical and ideological contextualization for Vastey’s book, this edition also includes four supplementary essays on Colonial System written by scholars on the cutting edge of Haitian Revolutionary Studies.

The Colonisation of Time is a highly original and long overdue examination of the ways that western-European and specifically British concepts and rituals of time were imposed on other cultures as a fundamental component of colonisation during the nineteenth century. Based on a wealth of primary sources, it explores the intimate relationship between the colonisation of time and space in two British settler-colonies (Victoria, Australia and the Cape Colony, South Africa) and its instrumental role in the exportation of Christianity, capitalism, and modernity, thus adding new depth to our understanding of imperial power and of the ways in which it was exercised and limited. All those intrigued by the concept of time will find this book of interest, for it illustrates how western-European time’s rise to a position of global dominance—from the clock to the seven-day week—is one of the most pervasive, enduring and taken-for-granted legacies of colonisation in today’s world.

Pennsylvania contained the largest concentration of early America's abolitionist leaders and organizations, making it a necessary and illustrative stage from which to understand how national conversations about the place of free blacks in early America originated and evolved, and, importantly, the role that colonization—supporting the emigration of free and emancipated blacks to Africa—played in national and international antislavery movements. This book demonstrates that, in Philadelphia at least, the American Colonization Society (ACS) often worked closely with other antislavery groups to further the goals of the abolitionist movement. It brings a much-needed examination of the complexity of the colonization movement by describing in depth the difference between those who supported colonization for political and social reasons and those who supported it for religious and humanitarian reasons. The book puts the black perspective on emigration into the broader picture instead of treating black nationalism as an isolated phenomenon and examines its role in influencing the black abolitionist agenda.

In 1493, Christopher Columbus led a fleet of 17 ships and more than 1200 men to found a royal trading colony in America. Columbus had high hopes for his settlement, which he named La Isabela after the queen of Spain, but just five years later it was in ruins. It remains important, however, as the first site of European settlement in America and the first place of sustained interaction between Europeans and the indigenous Tainos. This book tells the story of this historic enterprise. Drawing on a ten-year archaeological investigation of the site of La Isabela, along with research into Columbus-era documents, the book contrasts Spanish expectations of America with the actual events and living conditions at America's first European town. It argues that La Isabela failed not because Columbus was a poor planner but because his vision of America was grounded in European experience and could not be sustained in the face of the realities of American life. Explaining that the original Spanish economic and social frameworks for colonization had to be altered in America in response to the American landscape and the non-elite Spanish and Taino people who occupied it, the book sheds light on larger questions of American colonialism and the development of Euro-American cultural identity.

Colonialism created exclusive economic and segregatory social spaces for the exploitation and management of natural and human resources, in the form of plantations, ports, mining towns, hill stations, civil lines, and new urban centres for Europeans. This book studies the social history of medicine within two intersecting enclaves in colonial India: the hill-station of Darjeeling, which incorporated the sanitarian and racial norms of the British Raj; and in the adjacent tea plantations of North Bengal, which produced tea for the global market. It explores the demographic and environmental transformation of the region; the racialisation of urban spaces and its contestations; the establishment of hill sanatoria; the expansion of tea cultivation; labour emigration; and the paternalistic modes of healthcare in the plantation. The book also examines how the threat of epidemics and riots informed the conflictual relationship between the plantations and the adjacent agricultural villages and district towns. It reveals how tropical medicine was practised in its ‘field’; researches in malaria; how hookworm, dysentery, cholera, and leprosy were informed by investigations here; and how the exigencies of the colonial state, private entrepreneurship, and municipal governance subverted their implementation. The book establishes the vital link between medicine, the political economy, and the social history of colonialism, demonstrating that while enclaves were essential and distinctive sites of the articulation of colonial power and economy, they were not isolated sites. It shows that the critical aspect of the colonial enclaves was in their interconnectedness; with other enclaves, with the global economy, and with international medical research.

Crowns and Coloniesis a set of sixteen original essays by distinguished international scholars that explore the relationship between European monarchies and overseas empires. The essays argue that during much of the history of colonialism there existed a direct and important link between most colonial empires and the institutions of monarchy. The contributions, which encompass the British, French, Dutch, Italian and German empires, examine the constitutional role of the monarchs in overseas territories brought under their flag, royal prerogatives exercised in the empires, individual connections between monarchs and their colonial domains, such aspects of monarchical rule as royal tours and regalia, and the place of indigenous hereditary rulers in the colonial system. Several chapters also focus on the evolution of the Queen as Head of the Commonwealth and former British colonies.