Hygienic Nature: Afforestation and the greening of colonial Hong Kong

2014 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 1177-1209 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROBERT PECKHAM
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Urban Development ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
Green Space ◽  
Tree Planting ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
Barren Rock ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Colonial Order

AbstractThis article examines the ‘greening’ of Hong Kong in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with an emphasis on the afforestation of the colony's ‘barren’ mountainsides from the 1880s. To date, histories of Hong Kong have tended to focus on the colonial state's urban interventions, particularly on the draconian measures it took to ‘sanitize’ Chinese districts. In contrast, this article connects Hong Kong's urban development with the history of green space and the cultivation of ‘nature’. While the state sought to transform the ‘barren rock’ into a visible correlate of the colony's aspiring status as an imperial hub in Asia, the promotion of hygiene and health provided a further rationale for tree-planting. The article argues that colonial Hong Kong provides insights into the ‘tropicalization of modernity’ and the constitutive processes by which colonial power was naturalized and legitimated through planning practices that extended from the urban to the natural. A study of Hong Kong's afforestation underscores the importance of the natural environment as a ‘contact zone’ between colonial and ‘native’ cultures; it also reveals the extent to which the equation of a ‘green’ landscape with economic (re)production and colonial order, functioned as a critical trope for framing race and labour.

The Local History of an Imperial Category: Language and Religion in Russia's Eastern Borderlands, 1860s-1930s

Slavic Review ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn E. Graber ◽  
Jesse D. Murray
Keyword(s):  
Lake Baikal ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Baikal Region ◽  
Linguistic Anthropology ◽  
Local History ◽  
Russian Orthodox ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed the construction and naturalization of many unitary ethnolinguistic categories that would serve diverse ends within the Russian and Soviet states. This article combines disciplinary perspectives from linguistic anthropology and history to excavate the local history of one such category–the Buriat language. We trace the category's origin in the grammars, translations, and correspondence of its first Russian proponents, Russian Orthodox missionary linguists working in the area around Lake Baikal, and its subsequent uptake by Buriat nationalists and Soviet linguists. We show that the missionaries and their religious motivations played a significant role in the construction of ethnolinguistic categories and that these ethnolinguistic categories were not, as is often thought, predominantly imposed by the center onto distant peripheries. Attending to Orthodox missionaries’ linguistic work in the Baikal region reveals the more complex local workings of colonial power.

“How Other Peoples Dwell and Build”

2019 ◽  
Vol 78 (4) ◽  
pp. 409-421
Author(s):  
Marcel Vellinga
Keyword(s):  
Urban Development ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
Architectural Design ◽  
Vernacular Architecture ◽  
International Perspective ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Settlements ◽  
History Of

In 1953, architect, planner, and historian Erwin Anton Gutkind published a series of articles collectively titled “How Other Peoples Dwell and Build” in Architectural Design. At a glance, the series seems an anomaly in Gutkind's extensive oeuvre, and it remains little known in the field of vernacular architecture. In “How Other Peoples Dwell and Build”: Erwin Anton Gutkind and the Architecture of the Other, Marcel Vellinga aims to place the series within the broader context of Gutkind's writings. Running through Gutkind's work—and underlined in Vellinga's article—is the thesis that the historical development of human settlements mirrors the degenerating relationships between individuals and their communities, and between human beings and the natural environment. Thus, the Architectural Design series is an integral part of Gutkind's writings on the history of urban development. The series is one of the first architectural publications to focus on vernacular traditions from an international perspective and to emphasize the importance of studying vernacular architecture in its larger cultural and environmental contexts.

Paris, Real Estate, and Histories of Capitalism

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-158
Author(s):  
DESMOND FITZ-GIBBON
Keyword(s):  
Real Estate ◽  
Urban Development ◽  
Commercial Real Estate ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Capitalist Development ◽  
History Of Capitalism ◽  
Real Estate Markets ◽  
Market Formation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Selling Paris offers a superb inquiry into the particular institutions and agencies of late nineteenth-century French commercial real estate. This review assesses the contribution of the book in light of recent debates on the “history of capitalism” and argues that it addresses three important questions about the process of market formation, the qualities that make real estate so revealing of tensions within capitalist development, and the chronology of real estate markets and French urban development.

Bringing Order to Chaos: The Appropriation of Maithili by Colonial State, c 1870s–1940s

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-246
Author(s):  
Sneha Jha
Keyword(s):  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Colonial Policies ◽  
The Government

This article, through the use of several surveys, grammar books and articles on language written by colonial officials, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, has explored how language became an instrument in the exercise of colonial power in Bihar in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Taking the case of a particular language Maithili, spoken in the Mithila region of Bihar, the paper has engaged with the suggestion by Bernard S. Cohn that the history of language can help us understand the mechanism of power in a colonial context. The aspirations of the rulers, as well as the intended and unintended implications caused by such experiments, are worth examining. They would help us answer many general questions about colonial policies and power – not just on the theme of language – such as the following: How does one situate the understanding of the rulers while writing a history of colonialism? How do different debates among the colonial administrators shape the policies of the government, and what does that tell us about the nature of colonial rule? How does one see the role of the ‘native’, both as an informant as well as the subject of study? How does one read the native agency?

The Modernities of H. Lawrence Freeman

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 719-779
Author(s):  
David Gutkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
White Press ◽  
Grand Opera

H. Lawrence Freeman's “Negro Jazz Grand Opera,” Voodoo, was premiered in 1928 in Manhattan's Broadway district. Its reception bespoke competing, racially charged values that underpinned the idea of the “modern” in the 1920s. The white press critiqued the opera for its allegedly anxiety-ridden indebtedness to nineteenth-century European conventions, while the black press hailed it as the pathbreaking work of a “pioneer composer.” Taking the reception history of Voodoo as a starting point, this article shows how Freeman's lifelong project, the creation of what he would call “Negro Grand Opera,” mediated between disparate and sometimes apparently irreconcilable figurations of the modern that spanned the late nineteenth century through the interwar years: Wagnerism, uplift ideology, primitivism, and popular music (including, but not limited to, jazz). I focus on Freeman's inheritance of a worldview that could be called progressivist, evolutionist, or, to borrow a term from Wilson Moses, civilizationist. I then trace the complex relationship between this mode of imagining modernity and subsequent versions of modernism that Freeman engaged with during the first decades of the twentieth century. Through readings of Freeman's aesthetic manifestos and his stylistically syncretic musical corpus I show how ideas about race inflected the process by which the qualitatively modern slips out of joint with temporal modernity. The most substantial musical analysis examines leitmotivic transformations that play out across Freeman's jazz opera American Romance (1924–29): lions become subways; Mississippi becomes New York; and jazz, like modernity itself, keeps metamorphosing. A concluding section considers a broader set of questions concerning the historiography of modernism and modernity.

A Medical History of Hong Kong

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Moira M. W. Chan-Yeung
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Medical History ◽  
History Of

A Medical History of Hong Kong

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Moira M. W. Chan-Yeung
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Medical History ◽  
History Of
Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document