East of the Cape in 1832: The Old Indies World, Empire Families and “Colonial Women” in Nineteenth-century Java

Itinerario ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. Roger Knight
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
Colonial Discourse ◽  
Colonial Society ◽  
Netherlands Indies ◽  
Recent Debate ◽  
Dutch Colonial

This paper deals with several themes central to recent debate about Dutch colonial society in Java, the key island of the erstwhile Netherlands Indies. Primarily, these themes relate to the colonial-metropolitan nexus, and my discussion seeks to illuminate these themes with particular reference to the documented experiences of three women who were either on their way to the Indies—or making their way back from there—early in the 1830s. The paper's fundamental argument concerns the importance of the concept of “Empire Families” to an understanding of Dutch colonial communities in the Indies. It is an understanding that serves to correct some misconceptions about the dynamics of those societies in the early to mid-nineteenth-century period. Among other things, building on the work of others and drawing on unpublished documentation, it seeks to locate some aspects of colonial “discourse,” particularly those relating to “colonial women,” in the broader framework of social history.

Genealogy of Colonial Discourse: Hindu Traditions and the Limits of European Representation

2009 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 563-589 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raf Gelders
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Colonial Discourse ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
The Core ◽  
European Culture ◽  
Eastern Cultures ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Core Issues

In the aftermath of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), European representations of Eastern cultures have returned to preoccupy the Western academy. Much of this work reiterates the point that nineteenth-century Orientalist scholarship was a corpus of knowledge that was implicated in and reinforced colonial state formation in India. The pivotal role of native informants in the production of colonial discourse and its subsequent use in servicing the material adjuncts of the colonial state notwithstanding, there has been some recognition in South Asian scholarship of the moot point that the colonial constructs themselves built upon an existing, precolonial European discourse on India and its indigenous culture. However, there is as yet little scholarly consensus or indeed literature on the core issues of how and when these edifices came to be formed, or the intellectual and cultural axes they drew from. This genealogy of colonial discourse is the subject of this essay. Its principal concerns are the formalization of a conceptual unit in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, called “Hinduism” today, and the larger reality of European culture and religion that shaped the contours of representation.

‘The salvational currents of emigration’: Racial theories and social disputes in the Philippines at the end of the nineteenth century

2018 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 426-444
Author(s):  
Florentino Rodao
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Spanish Colonial ◽  
Biological Determinism ◽  
White Race ◽  
Colonial Society ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This article analyses the changing significance of racial theories in the writings of Spanish emigrants in the late nineteenth century Philippines. Works by Antonio Cañamaque, Pablo Feced (Quioquiap), and Antonio Barrantes show how racialised understandings of colonial society in the Philippines evolved, from an initial dismissal of hybridism and rejection of mestizos to assertions of the innate superiority of the ‘white race’ and advocation of a rigid separation between local communities. These developments are considered in the context of the rising popularity of biological determinism alongside an influx of Spanish emigrants into the Philippines. The Spanish settlers used biological determinism to proclaim their role as the sole purveyors of both ‘progress’ and of a kind of egalitarianism. This article describes these debates and arguments, analyses their inconsistencies, and addresses the Filipino elite's responses to the settlers’ racial theories. These responses are read not simply as part of the development of Filipino nationalism, but as reflective of rivalries within the Spanish colonial community in the Philippines, where the locally born found additional reasons to support anticolonialism.

Beyond Trouillot

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 132-154
Author(s):  
Marlene L. Daut
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
North Atlantic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Scholarship ◽  
The World ◽  
Historical Writings

This essay explores the genealogy of historian and anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s writings as related to broader trends in historical scholarship. The author suggests that it was through Silencing the Past’s acceptance and ascendance within the very North Atlantic “guild” that Trouillot deconstructs in his historical writings that the ideas of nineteenth-century Haitian historians such as Baron de Vastey, Hérard Dumesle, Beaubrun Ardouin, and Thomas Madiou produced an immeasurable influence on the direction of historical scholarship across the world. The author argues that the influence of these nineteenth-century Haitian authors can be seen everywhere in social history, especially in the concept of history from below, even though most historians in Europe and the United States have never even heard the names of these other Haitian authors.

Indigenous and Black Confraternities in Colonial Latin America

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Javiera Jaque Hidalgo ◽  
Miguel Valerio
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Colonial Latin America ◽  
Colonial Discourse ◽  
Colonial Society ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
Racial Hierarchies

Employing a transregional and interdisciplinary approach, this volume explores indigenous and black confraternities –or lay Catholic brotherhoods– founded in colonial Spanish America and Brazil between the sixteenth and eighteenth century. It presents a varied group of cases of religious confraternities founded by subaltern subjects, both in rural and urban spaces of colonial Latin America, to understand the dynamics and relations between the peripheral and central areas of colonial society, underlying the ways in which colonialized subjects navigated the colonial domain with forms of social organization and cultural and religious practices. The book analyzes indigenous and black confraternal cultural practices as forms of negotiation and resistance shaped by local devotional identities that also transgressed imperial religious and racial hierarchies. The analysis of these practices explores the intersections between ethnic identity and ritual devotion, as well as how the establishment of black and indigenous religious confraternities carried the potential to subvert colonial discourse.

Little Shell II’s World

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith Richotte
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Environment ◽  
The Future ◽  
To Come ◽  
Changing World

Chapter two describes the early treaty and social history that defined the political stakes for the Plains Ojibwe and Métis into the future. This discussion includes a number of various treaties and their contexts that eventually came to define the boundaries of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. Focusing primarily on the middle third of the nineteenth century, this chapter also demonstrates the growing colonial impositions that Plains Ojibwe and Métis were beginning to face in a rapidly changing world. The political environment that set the stage for the rest of what was to come was built in this time.

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