Abstract: This article examines the relationship between Indian indentured workers and plantation ecologies in Mauritius and British Guiana. Bound to the land by harsh colonial labour regulations, the indentured workers were brutally exposed to the ecological volatility of plantation production. At the same time, indentured labourers cultivated plants besides sugarcane in an effort to sustain a life independent of the canefields. The article explores indentured planting practices on the plantation margins, tracing a history of political and ecological struggle as estate labourers forged alternatives to the plantation economy, while navigating colonial strategies to pull them back into the orbit of the estates.
Abstract: Throughout its thirty-four years as a colonial power, Germany’s positive colonial self-image was repeatedly shaken by colonial scandals. In the scientific debate about these scandals and their reception, the influential role of caricature has not yet been considered from an art-historical perspective. Seeking to explore this gap, this article examines the satirical reception of the colonial scandals around Heinrich Leist by analyzing two examples from caricature and carnival. It demonstrates how satire functioned not only as a tool for societal criticism but also, through the use of racist imagery, as a means to defuse the scandal’s explosive nature and reinforce the legitimacy of German colonialism even in times of crisis.
Abstract: This paper uses the concept of feminicide, developed by Latin American feminists, to illuminate patterns of gendered governance in colonial India and postcolonial Pakistan. We argue that the British Empire in India was built on the structural subordination of women, the normalization of gendered violence, and the devaluation of women’s lives. We trace the long trajectory of state complicity in gendered violence back to British colonial legislation that extended male control over women’s bodies, sexual agency, and autonomy. The Indian Penal Code of 1860 created an exception to murder due to “grave and sudden provocation,” which was (and is) commonly used by men who killed women in colonial and postcolonial South Asia to evade punishment. Unmasking the violence of law that diminished the criminal culpability of men who murdered women in colonial India, the article argues that the legally sanctioned killing of women in Pakistan persists, in part, because the postcolonial judiciary applies a hybrid mix of colonial and Islamic laws. The colonial license to kill women has been strengthened by Islamic laws that have intermixed with rather than displaced colonial law, absolving the state of its duty to protect women and contributing to the enduring pandemic of feminicide in Pakistan today.
Abstract: Starting in 1844, French colonial authorities in Algeria imposed collective fines on Muslim populations, initially as a wartime measure and later as a tool for controlling dissent against the colonial regime. Although colonial authorities justified these fines as a means to enhance order, they unfairly impacted Muslim communities, deepening social divides and fostering anti-colonial sentiments. This study reviews the penal system’s failures from legal and moral perspectives, highlighting its contradictions with French legal principles and its role in exacerbating colonial injustice. It also explores the legacy of these policies, emphasizing the importance of studying historical injustices to achieve a more just future.
Abstract: This article will consider how Britons travelling to South Asia experienced stop-offs at Madeira, Rio de Janeiro, the Cape and Johanna Island. Time in these spaces forced them to interact with communities of majority racial “Others,” consider how foreign empires controlled subject populations, and confront how their minds and bodies would fare in foreign environments, triggering new reflections on how they would survive and rule in India. It will reorient our understanding of imperial identity formation, revealing that these individuals experienced a series of revelations and enactments during stop-offs which precipitated their transformation from prospective to active imperial agent before their arrival in India.
Abstract: This article is a micro-history of an episode of torture carried out by a screening team of Home Guard volunteers commanded by a nineteen-year-old British Kenya Police Reserve Officer, Brian Hayward, during the British counterinsurgency campaign against the Mau Mau in Kenya. The content focuses on how and why Brian Hayward and his screening team were made able and became willing to commit torture. Adopting the theoretical framework of Stathis Kalyvas’ Logic of Violence (2006), I will argue that some of these powerful and pragmatic volunteers took advantage of the prevailing situation in Kenya by using violence to fulfil their own interests. I will also consider how the volunteers were transformed into ‘violence workers’ for the British colonial government, whereby their violent actions were also the result of the state-induced violent culture of British Kenya. This article offers a rare window into the dynamics of violence on the ground-level in one of the most violent British counterinsurgency campaigns of the twentieth century.
Abstract: Historians have not examined the Hudson’s Bay Company’s (HBC) “Native Welfare” program undertaken by its Development Department from 1926 to 1931, and the work of George Binney, who consolidated the company’s humanitarian and health initiatives in these years into a London-directed social engineering program. His book, The Eskimo Book of Knowledge , published by the HBC in 1931 in both English and Inuktitut, and Native Welfare itself, was largely developed to address problems perceived in the company’s newly acquired Moravian mission trade, but discursively, the health, welfare and social programming it advanced targeted all Inuit in Canada’s north. Similar to other corporate welfare programs developed by firms in North America and Europe, Native Welfare attempted to raise the health, morale and productivity of Inuit. But Binney’s book encouraged Inuit to self-identify as citizens of the British Empire. The HBC’s Native Welfare likely supported if not provided the ideological foundations of the Canadian state’s interventionist development programs in the Arctic after World War II.
