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This book explores the ways in which Islam and European colonialism shaped modernity in the Indo-Malay world. Focusing on Indonesia and Malaysia, it looks at how European colonial and Islamic modernising powers operated in the common and parallel domains of organization, government and politics, law and education in the first half of the twentieth century. Through its critical approach to the interplay of Islamic religious rfrom and dynamics of both British and Dutch colonialisms, this work of comparative history illuminates perspective on the rather different shapes that Islam and Muslim societies have taken in the neighboring nation-states of modern Malaysia and Indonesia. It shows that colonialisation was able to co-exist with Islamisation, arguing that Islamic movements were not necessarily antithetical to modernisation, nor that Western modernity was always anathema to Islamic and local custom. Rather, in distinguishing religious from worldly affairs, they were able to adopt and adapt modern ideas and practices that were useful or relevant while maintaining the Islamic faith and ritual that they believed to be essential. Moving beyond binaries such as Orientalist versus Islamic and modernity versus Islam, it offers historical evidence and theoretical engagement with Islamic religious reform and European colonial modernisation in particular, and with religion, modernity, and tradition in general. In developing an understanding of the common ways in which Islam was defined and treated in Indonesia and Malaysia, we can gain a new insight to Muslim politics and culture in Southeast Asia.

As India emerges as an important global player, a serious question arises: how to relate to the existing descriptions of India that are centuries old? This question presents itself as a task for the current and future generations of intelligentsia in the twenty-first century, whether Indian or Western. This task will consist of reconceptualizing India Studies because most studies on India have been carried out using theories and concepts drawn primarily from the western culture. It also consists of reacquiring the insight that neither knowledge nor truth is a matter of majority decision or based on the strength of common-sense prejudice. Questioning inherited beliefs requires an intellectual courage that is on par with the bold nature of the challenge. Responding to this challenge in any meaningful way requires that we identify the scientific weakness of the current theories about the Indian culture and society. In this book, a first step is taken towards this end. It not only looks at debates about the concept of culture in anthropology and into the merits of critiques of Orientalism but also scrutinizes Studies on Hinduism, the nature of Inter-cultural dialogues, and their implications to normative political philosophy. It also outlines the methodology for a comparative study of cultures. Cutting across disciplinary boundaries, this book brings home the basic truth that understanding cultures and societies straddles multiple intellectual domains. By initiating a process of comparative study of cultures, this work is bound to challenge many uncritical assumptions made by students and scholars of Indian society and culture.

This book presents a broad ranging survey of French colonial engagements in the Pacific and Asian worlds of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Multiple studies, each in a different territory, examine French ideas of imperialism as they become manifested through religion, nationalist and patriotic fervour, tropical fantasy, literary and artistic creation, or colonial match-making to shape a distinctly Gallic “Empire of Love” in the Pacific. Successive chapters examine contested colonial sites where the French were present in Tahiti, New Caledonia, and Wallis and Futuna, with analyses of encounter and conflict in France, Panama, Indochina, and Japan. Each chapter focuses on particular Islander, Asian, and French protagonists, from Kanak warriors and Tahitian monarchs, to French penal colony prisoners and Japanese courtesans as they negotiate power relations tied to emotions. All of the chapters are linked together by the politics and writings of the famed naval captain and novelist Pierre Loti.

In the context of English’s apparent worldwide spread, this book brings together the fields of postcolonial studies and world Englishes, arguing that this is a necessary and long overdue connection. Although postcolonial studies appears to have its origins in literary studies, and accordingly in the study of language, in fact there have been few connections with fields in linguistics that are clearly relevant to postcolonial approaches to English in particular. The book chiefly makes connections with the growing field of World Englishes studies, considering points of contact, differences in emphasis, and fundamental disagreements. It proposes that postcolonial studies can be renewed through engaging with World Englishes studies, but also that postcolonial studies as a discipline can offer powerful frameworks for World Englishes studies itself. The book examines the existing and potential connections between the fields through examples such as postcolonial dictionaries, postcolonial composition, the language of global citizenship, and the interface between World Literatures and World Englishes. It concludes that World Englishes, by contrast with a monolithic Global English, contribute to a vision of communication that resists globalization’s demand for accessibility and transparency.

Reaching as far back as ancient times, Ronojoy Sen pairs a novel history of India’s engagement with sport and a probing analysis of its cultural and political development under monarchy and colonialism, and as an independent nation. Some sports that originated in India have fallen out of favor, while others, such as cricket, have been adopted and made wholly India’s own. Sen’s innovative project casts sport less as a natural expression of human competition than as an instructive practice reflecting a unique play with power, morality, aesthetics, identity, and money. Sen follows the transformation of sport from an elite, kingly pastime to a national obsession tied to colonialism, nationalism, and free market liberalization. He pays special attention to two modern phenomena: the dominance of cricket in the Indian consciousness and the chronic failure of a billion-strong nation to compete successfully in international sporting competitions, such as the Olympics. Innovatively incorporating examples from popular media and other unconventional sources, Sen not only captures the political nature of sport in India but also reveals the patterns of patronage, clientage, and institutionalization that have bound this diverse nation together for centuries.

The sensational discovery in 1922 of Tutankhamun's tomb, close on the heels of Britain's declaration of Egyptian independence, accelerated the growth in Egypt of both Egyptology as a formal discipline and of 'pharaonism'—popular interest in ancient Egypt—as an inspiration in the national struggle for full independence. Emphasizing the three decades from 1922 until Nasser's revolution in 1952, this follow-up to Whose Pharaohs? looks at the ways in which Egypt developed its own archaeologies—ancient Egyptian, Greco-Roman, Coptic, and Islamic. Each of these four archaeologies had given birth to, and grown up around, a major antiquities museum in Egypt. Later, Cairo, Alexandria, and Ain Shams universities also joined in shaping these disciplines. The closely-related history of tourism—including Thomas Cook & Son, Nile steamers, and the famous Shepheard's Hotel—also receives careful attention. For Egyptians, developing their own expertise in fields dominated by the French, Germans, and British was often also an expression of nationalism. Egyptians who valued archaeology also had to defend it against the minority of their compatriots for whom pharaonic antiquity represented only alien and idolatrous darkness before the dawning of Islam. In 1952, Nasser's revolution put an end to ninety-four years of French direction of the Egyptian Antiquities Service, and four years later the Suez War rang down the curtain on British colonialism in Egypt.

This book recounts the French conquest of Algeria by exploring the world of Oran’s influential Jewish merchants. Jacob Lasry, along with Mordecai Amar, Judah Sebbah and others, established themselves in this Mediterranean port after the Regency of Algiers dislodged the Spanish in 1792. They were part of a settlement hailing originally from Algerian and Moroccan cities and towns, Saharan Oases, and British Gibraltar. In newly Muslim Oran, they found opportunities to ply their trades, deal in goods brought in on caravans from the African interior, or export grain, cattle, or hides. On the eve of France’s long, chaotic, and brutal invasion of Algeria, Oran’s Jewish mercantile elite was well established, having made deals and formed partnerships with European consuls, Muslim traders, and local governors. Colonial officials and reformers boasted of bringing “emancipation” to those they called the “indigenous Jews,” but they actually depended on its mercantile elite to fund civic improvements and military campaigns, fill civic posts, and even disseminate “civilization.” As the French colonial order solidified, the merchants of Oran maintained their commercial, political, and social clout, demonstrating that the French conquest of Algeria did not instantly undo Oran’s pre-colonial order. Yet, by the 1840s, French policies began collapsing Oran’s diverse Jewish inhabitants into a single social category, legally separating Jews from their Muslim neighbors, and ranking them above Muslims in a new colonial hierarchy. France’s exclusionary process of “emancipation,” rather than older antipathies, planted the seeds of the twentieth century’s ruptures and violence.

2010 marked the 50^th anniversary of the ‘Year of Africa’. All France’s colonies in sub-Saharan Africa gained their independence in that year. This book brings together leading scholars from across the globe to review ‘Francophone Africa at Fifty’. It examines continuities from the colonial to the post-colonial period and analyses the diverse and multi-faceted legacy of French colonial rule in sub-Saharan Africa. It also reviews the decolonization of French West Africa in comparative perspective and observes how independence is remembered and commemorated fifty years on.

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.

It is commonly claimed by Israeli authorities that Bedouins are trespassers who never acquired property or settlement rights in southern Israel/Palestine. This led to massive dispossession of Bedouins. This book sets to examine state claims by providing, for the first time, a thorough analysis of the legal geography of the Negev. It adopts critical scholarly perspectives, drawing on multidisciplinary sources from geography, law, history and the social sciences. The study defines the “Dead Negev Doctrine (DND)”—a set of legal arguments and practices founded on a manipulative use of Ottoman and British laws through which Israel constructed its own version of “'terra nullius”—the now repealed colonial doctrine denying indigenous land and political rights. The book systematically tests the doctrine, using systematic archival and geographic research, and focusing on key land cases, most notably the al-‘Uqbi claim in ‘Araqib. The analysis reveals that the DND is based on shaky, often distorted, historical and legal grounds, thereby wrongly denying land rights from the majority of the Negev Bedouins. The book then discusses the indigeneity of the Bedouins in the face of persistent state denial. It argues that international law and norms protecting indigenous peoples are highly applicable to the case of Negev Bedouins. The book then offers an overview of state and Bedouin proposals to resolve the dispute. It shows how alternative plans advanced by the Bedouins, based on the concepts of recognition and equality, provide the most promising path to resolve the protracted conflict.

This book reassesses the nature and meanings of King Philip’s War (1675-1678), a major Indigenous resistance movement and colonial conflict that pervasively reshaped the American Northeast and has reverberated among regional communities for centuries. It focuses on specific places that have been meaningful to Native American (Algonquian) peoples over long spans of time, as well as to colonial New England residents more recently, and how the waging and remembrance of violence at these locales has affected communities’ senses of past, place, and collective purpose. Its case studies reinterpret intercultural interactions and settler colonialism in early America, the importance of place and environment in the production of history, and the myriad ways in which memory has been mobilized to shape the present and future. It emphasizes that American history continues to be contested, in highly local and sometimes hard-to-perceive ways that require careful interdisciplinary methods to access, as well as in more prominent arenas.

Hong Kong's Chinese History Curriculum from 1945: Politics and Identity investigates the ways in which Chinese history has evolved as a subject in Hong Kong secondary schools since 1945, and the various social, political and economic factors that have shaped the curriculum, through an examination of a wide range of primary and secondary source materials and interviews. This book examines how the aims, content, teaching, learning and assessment of the Chinese history curriculum have evolved since 1945. It describes how Chinese history became an independent subject in secondary schools in Hong Kong despite the political sensitivity of the subject, how it consolidated its status during the colonial period, and how it has faced threats to its independence since the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997. An important element of the book is its in-depth analysis of the major socio-political and socio-economic forces that have been involved in the development of Chinese history. This book will be of interest to all who are interested in history education and curriculum development, and readers who are concerned with history education.

With rigorous original scholarship and creative narration, Our Beloved Kin recovers a complex picture of war, captivity, and resistance during the “First Indian War” (later named “King Philip’s War”) by relaying the stories of Weetamoo, a female Wampanoag leader, and James Printer, a Nipmuc scholar, whose stories converge in the captivity of Mary Rowlandson. King Philip’s War (1675-1678) is often viewed as the quintessential moment of colonial conquest and Native resistance, but these stories reveal a historical landscape much more complex than its original Puritan narrators conveyed. Our Beloved Kin also draws readers beyond the locus of most narratives of the war, southern New England, into the northern front, the vast interior of Wabanaki, where the war continued long beyond the death of “King Philip.” Beginning and ending at Caskoak, a place of diplomacy, the book explores the movement of survivors seeking refuge, captives taken in war, and Indigenous leaders pursuing diplomacy in vast Indigenous networks across the northeast. Supplemented by thirteen maps and an interactive website, Our Beloved Kin takes readers into Indigenous geographies, braiding together research in historical archives, including little-known revelatory documents, interpretive frameworks drawn from Indigenous languages, and place-based history which arises from reading “the archive of the land” to offer a compelling new interpretation of “King Philip’s War.”

Being insulated by two immense oceans makes it hard for Americans to appreciate the concerns of more exposed countries. American democracy’s rapid rise also fools many into thinking the same liberal system can flourish anywhere, and having populated a vast continent with relative ease impedes Americans’ understanding of conflicts between different peoples over other lands. Paul R. Pillar ties the American public’s misconceptions about foreign threats and behaviors to the nation’s history and geography, arguing that American success in international relations is achieved often in spite of, rather than because of, the public’s worldview. Drawing a fascinating line from colonial events to America’s handling of modern international terrorism, Pillar shows how presumption and misperception turned Finlandization into a dirty word in American policy circles, bolstered the “for us or against us” attitude that characterized the policies of the George W. Bush administration, and continue to obscure the reasons behind Iraq’s close relationship with Iran. Fundamental misunderstandings have created a cycle in which threats are underestimated before an attack occurs and then are overestimated after they happen. By exposing this longstanding tradition of misperception, Pillar hopes the United States can develop policies that better address international realities rather than biased beliefs.

Meeting Place: Encounters across Cultures in Hong Kong, 1841-1984 presents detailed empirical studies of day-to-day interactions between people of different cultures in a variety of settings. The broad conclusion – that there was sustained and multilevel contacts between men and women of different cultures – challenges and complicates traditional historical understandings of Hong Kong as a city either of rigid segregation or of pervasive integration. The case studies explore relationships between and within the Japanese, Eurasian, German, Portuguese, British, Chinese and other communities in areas of activity that have often been overlooked – from the schoolroom and family home to the courtroom and international trading concern, from the gardens of Government House to the boarding houses for destitute sailors. In the studies in this volume we see not just East meets West, but also East Meeting East, and South meeting North – in fact, a range of complex and dynamic processes that seem to render obsolete any simplistic conception of ‘East meets West.’

Beginning in 1897 the French state monopolized the production and sale of rice liquor in Indochina. The result was one of the colonial era’s defining institutions, with French-owned factories churning out tasteless ethanol and the state’s largest civilian branch, the Department of Customs and Monopolies, using draconian means to encourage consumption and stamp out illegal competition. The monopoly not only failed to generate appreciable net revenue for the state, but also it placed millions of Indochinese in a stance of resistance to its rule as they continued to make and drink liquor as they had for generations. The monopoly was the product of advances in microbiology, the consolidation of the distilling industry, and the growth of the fiscal state worldwide. Yet it was also shaped by Indochina’s unique geographies, histories, and personalities. By exploring alcohol’s central role in the making of colonial Indochina, Imperial Intoxication illuminates the contradictory mix of modern and archaic, power and impotence, civil bureaucracy and military occupation that characterized colonial rule. It highlights the role Indochinese played in shaping the monopoly, whether as illegal distillers or the agents sent to arrest them. And it links long-ago stories of rebellion to global processes that continue to play out today.

By the early 1700s, the vast scale of Spanish empire led crown authorities to rely on local institutions to carry out their political agenda, including religious orders like the Franciscan mission of Santa Rosa de Ocopa in the Peruvian Amazon. This book follows the Ocopa missions throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a period marked by events such as the indigenous Juan Santos Atahualpa Rebellion and the 1746 Lima earthquake. Caught between the directives of the Spanish crown and the challenges of missionary work on the Amazon frontier, the missionaries of Ocopa found themselves at the center of a struggle over the nature of colonial governance. This book examines the changes that Spain’s far-flung empire experienced from borderland Franciscan missions in Peru to the court of the Bourbon monarchy in Madrid, arguing that the Bourbon clerical reforms that broadly sought to bring the empire under greater crown control were shaped in turn by groups throughout the Americas, including Ocopa friars, the Amerindians and Africans in their missions, and bureaucrats in Lima as well as Madrid. Far from isolated local incidents, the book argues, these conflicts were representative of the political struggles over clerical reform occurring throughout Spanish America on the eve of Independence.