A “Surreptitious Introduction”: Opium Smuggling and Colonial State Formation in Late Nineteenth-Century Bengal and Burma

2018 ◽  
pp. 233-252
Author(s):  
Diana Kim
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
State Formation ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Late Nineteenth

The Moghia Menace, or the Watch Over Watchmen In British India

2012 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 751-779 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANASTASIA PILIAVSKY
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Systemic Change ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
British India ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Indigenous Governance

AbstractThis paper contributes to the history of ‘criminal tribes’, policing and governance in British India. It focuses on one colonial experiment—the policing of Moghias, declared by British authorities to be ‘robbers by hereditary profession’—which was the immediate precursor of the first Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, but which so far altogether has passed under historians’ radar. I argue that at stake in the Moghia operations, as in most other colonial ‘criminal tribe’ initiatives, was neither the control of crime (as colonial officials claimed) nor the management of India's itinerant groups (as most historians argue), but the uprooting of the indigenous policing system. British presence on the subcontinent was punctuated with periodic panics over ‘extraordinary crime’, through which colonial authorities advanced their policing practices and propagated their way of governance. The leading crusader against this ‘crisis’ was the Thuggee and Dacoity Department, which was as instrumental in the ‘discovery’ of the ‘Moghia menace’ and ‘criminal tribes’ in the late nineteenth century as in the earlier suppression of the ‘cult of Thuggee’. As a policing initiative, the Moghia campaign failed consistently for more than two decades. Its failures, however, reveal that behind the façade-anxieties over ‘criminal castes’ and ‘crises of crime’ stood attempts at a systemic change of indigenous governance. The diplomatic slippages of the campaign also expose the fact that the indigenous rule by patronage persisted—and that the consolidation of the colonial state was far from complete—well into the late nineteenth century.

Combating ‘Filth’: The temple, the state, and urbanization in late nineteenth-century Puri

2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (06) ◽  
pp. 1849-1891
Author(s):  
UJAAN GHOSH
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Governance ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
The State ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Infrastructural Development ◽  
Public Body ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Temple

AbstractThis article interrogates the urbanization of Puri at the time of the cholera epidemic in the latter half of the nineteenth century. In the wake of the epidemic the colonial state took serious steps to reorder the urban landscape of the pilgrim town in general and Puri in particular. However, in Puri the narrative of infrastructural development is slightly complicated by the presence of the temple of Jagannath which acted as an alternative public body. Thus, on every occasion the colonial state had to negotiate with the temple in order to facilitate urban governance in Puri. As a result, I argue, Puri's urban landscape could only develop through interaction and negotiation between the temple and the state.

scholarly journals Colonial sugar production in the Spanish Philippines: Calamba and Negros compared

2017 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-261 ◽  
Author(s):  
Filomeno V. Aguilar
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
The State ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sugar Production ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Enclave Economy

This article presents two modes of export-oriented sugar hacienda production in the late-nineteenth-century Spanish Philippines. The Hacienda de Calamba epitomised a large-scale estate under a religious corporation; it was an enclave economy reliant on local capital and technology. In contrast, Negros showcased a range of haciendas of varying sizes in a frontier setting involving different ethnicities and supported by capital and technology mediated directly by foreign merchant houses. In both locations sugar planters opposed the colonial state, but whereas leaseholders in Calamba, led by Rizal's family, became intentionally political in their resistance, in Negros planters engaged in a persistent and calibrated evasion of the state.

A National Custom: Debating Female Servitude in Late Nineteenth-Century Hong Kong

2009 ◽  
Vol 43 (6) ◽  
pp. 1463-1493 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN M. CARROLL
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Hong Kong ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial Discourse ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Colonial Policies

AbstractThis article frames the debate about mui-tsai (meizai, female bondservants) in late nineteenth-century Hong Kong within changing conceptions of the colony's political, geographical and cultural position. Whereas some colonial officials saw the mui-tsai system as a national shame that challenged Britain's commitment to ending slavery, others argued that it was an archaic custom that would eventually dissolve as China modernized. The debate also showed the rise of a class of Chinese elites who had accumulated enough power to defend the mui-tsai system as a time-honoured Chinese custom, even while acknowledging that in Hong Kong they lived beyond the boundaries of Chinese sovereignty. Challenging notions of the reach of the colonial state and showing how colonial policies often had unintended consequences, this debate also reveals the analytical and explanatory weakness of concepts such as ‘colonial discourse’ or ‘the colonial mind’.

Colonial Misrepresentation of the “Tea Revolution” in the Province of Phú Thọ (Tonkin), 1920-1945

2013 ◽  
Vol 68 (01) ◽  
pp. 167-202
Author(s):  
Olivier Tessier
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Natural Resources ◽  
Agricultural Production ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Spontaneous Movement ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
New Methods ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
French Protectorate

The colonization of the land that is now Vietnam and the establishment of a French protectorate in Tonkin in the late nineteenth century led to new methods of agricultural production and new means of exploiting natural resources. This article examines this evolution by focusing on the endogenous and spontaneous movement of colonization that developed “illegally” during the first half of the twentieth century and which concerned several villages located in the hills of two districts in Phú Thọ province. A comparison of archival sources produced by the protectorate authorities with the testimonials recorded by former colonist-planters and their descendants reveals how the colonial state manipulated and falsified information in order to subsequently claim ownership of this colonial movement, which transformed the region’s environment, society, and economy.

Masonería, Cofradía, Katipunan

2021 ◽  
pp. 45-71
Author(s):  
John T. Sidel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South America ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Spanish Colonial ◽  
International Context ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter argues that the Philippine Revolution of the late nineteenth century can be most fully understood in light of the international context in which it unfolded and the cosmopolitan mobilizing structures that enabled and impelled the trajectory it followed. The chapter suggests that the timing of the Philippine Revolution — late relative to South America, early in Southeast Asia — owed less to the nationalizing impact of Spanish colonial state formation than to the cosmopolitanizing consequences of the deepening integration of the Philippine archipelago within the world capitalist economy over the course of the nineteenth century. The chapter reviews the church's fundamental role in the formation of a modern public sphere in the Philippines and in linking the Philippines to the very same cultural, intellectual, and linguistic world of Christianity, which liberal and republican cosmopolitan challenges to the universalist claims of Rome had emerged. Ultimately, the chapter discusses how plebeian and egalitarian forms of brotherhood provided the basis for a revolution within the Revolution, with the associational form of the cofradía providing a popular vehicle for subaltern mobilization in many provinces across the archipelago.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document