Lunacy and the Colonial State

2020 ◽  
pp. 18-65
Author(s):  
Shilpi Rajpal
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
History Of

This chapter examines the variegated processes of professionalization, modernization, and Indianization along with the obstacles that colonialism created in their paths. These processes which began at the turn of the twentieth century were far from complete even on the eve of Independence. It argues that psychiatry remained at the margins of medicine as the colonial state maintained an indifference towards the development of the mental sciences. Highlighting contributions of individual psychiatrists and juxtaposing them with those of the colonial state, the chapter locates psychiatrists as historical actors at the centre of the history of colonial psychiatry during the period.

scholarly journals “Imperium in Imperio”: The Corporation, Mining, and Governance in British Southeast Asia, 1900–1930

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-32
Author(s):  
DAVID BAILLARGEON
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
State Model ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
State Regulations ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
History Of ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Corporate Ventures

This article examines the history of mining in British Southeast Asia during the early twentieth century. In particular, it focuses on the histories of the Burma Corporation and the Duff Development Company, which were located in British-occupied Burma and Malaya, respectively. It argues that despite being represented as “rogue” corporate ventures in areas under “indirect” colonial rule, the contrasting fates of each company—one successful, one not—reveal how foreign-owned businesses operating in the empire became increasingly beholden to British colonial state regulations during this period, marking a shift in policy from the “company-state” model that operated in prior centuries. The histories of these two firms ultimately demonstrate the continued significance of business in the making of empire during the late colonial period, bridging the divide between the age of company rule and the turn toward state-sponsored “development” that would occur in the mid-twentieth century.

Psychiatrists and psychiatry in late colonial India

2018 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
pp. 515-548
Author(s):  
Shilpi Rajpal
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Professional Identity ◽  
The State ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
History Of

The history of professionalisation of psychiatry in India is an array of parallel histories. The article describes the variegated processes of professionalisation, modernisation and Indianisation and the impediments that colonialism created in their path. It charts the reification of the professional identity of a psychiatrist which was uniquely different from the Western counterpart. The process that began at the turn of the twentieth century was far from complete even on the eve of independence. It argues that psychiatry remained at the margins of medicine and the colonial state maintained an indifferent attitude towards development of the mental sciences. Highlighting contributions of individual psychiatrists and juxtaposing them with those of the state, this article situates psychiatrists as historical actors and how the emergence of psychiatry was enmeshed with political histories of the period.

‘A Conglomeration of […] often Conflicting Ideas’: Resolving the ‘Native Question’ in Java and the Outer Islands in the Dutch East Indies, 1900-1925

Itinerario ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 27 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 160-188 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joost Coté
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Colonial Discourse ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
East Indies ◽  
Colonial Policy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Dutch East Indies ◽  
Dutch Colonial

This paper examines Dutch colonial discourse as it was developing at the beginning of the twentieth century. I argue that colonial circumstances were changing at the beginning of the twentieth century in many aspects - economic, political, social - and that these changes required new policy and administrative responses. I take as examples of these changing colonial conditions and responses, two episodes in the history of ‘the late colonial state’, which I argue are both representative of and formative in shaping, colonial policy in the last decades of Dutch colonial rule in Indonesia.

CHANGING CHILDHOOD: ‘LIBERATED MINORS’, GUARDIANSHIP, AND THE COLONIAL STATE IN SENEGAL, 1895–1911

2019 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-228
Author(s):  
KELLY M. DUKE BRYANT
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
Children And Youth ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
History Of ◽  
Official Recognition

AbstractThis article focuses on formerly enslaved children at the turn of the twentieth century, exploring their contributions to discourses about childhood, labor, and stigma in Senegal's colonial towns. Drawing on records for over 1,600 so-called ‘liberated minors’, children who entered state guardianship after official recognition of their liberation from slavery, and on a variety of other sources, the article investigates both broad trends and individual experiences of work, mistreatment, conflict, and — sometimes — defiance. I argue that while many liberated minors seemed to accept their circumstances, others complained, disobeyed, or ran away, thereby challenging lingering stigmas and highlighting ways the state fell short of the anti-slavery and humane ideals touted by some officials. Attentive, insofar as records allow, to the actions and perspectives of liberated minors, the article contributes to the growing literature on the history of children and youth in Africa and to scholarship on post-emancipation societies.

MEDICINE AND COLONIAL PATENT LAW IN INDIA: A Study of Patent Medicines and the Indian Patents and Designs Act, 1911 in Early- Twentieth-Century India

2020 ◽  
Vol 75 (4) ◽  
pp. 408-428
Author(s):  
Subhadeep Chowdhury
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Patent Law ◽  
Public Health Issue ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Patent Medicines ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Relationship ◽  
Indigenous Entrepreneurs ◽  
Sufficient Space

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the history of drugs sold as “patent medicines” in India in the early twentieth century. The paper investigates their legitimacy as patenting of medicines was forbidden by the Indian Patents and Designs Act, 1911 (IPDA). The paper argues that the instrument of letters patents functioning as the prerogative of the Crown that gave monopolistic rights to grantees to sell any compound without having to disclose its constituents was the reason behind this seemingly conflicting historical relationship between the law and the market. Colonial law-making left sufficient space within the ambit of the IPDA for letters patents to have their ill effects. The colonial state made attempts to address this as a public health issue by incorporating concerns related to this class of medicines within regulations addressed to the drugs market in the 1930s. The currency of patent medicines in the market was further added to by Indian indigenous entrepreneurs fueled by cultural nationalism of Swadeshi ideology in Bengal in the early twentieth century. However, even such indigenous responses or attempts at hybridization of manufacturing and selling practices related to patent medicines were mostly informed by upper-caste/ upper-class interests and not so much by those of consumers of these medicines.

Drugs, Consumption, and Supply in Asia: The Case of Cocaine in Colonial India, c. 1900–c. 1930

2007 ◽  
Vol 66 (2) ◽  
pp. 345-362 ◽  
Author(s):  
James H. Mills
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
New Products ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
World War ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
New Drug ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
History Of

This article examines the market for cocaine in India during the early twentieth century and the efforts of the colonial state to control it. The British authorities issued regulations to prohibit the drug's use as early as 1900, and yet by the start of World War I, cocaine's appeal had become socially diverse and geographically wide. This account of a significant market for a powerful new drug suggests that Indian society was able to rapidly develop a demand for such products even when the colonial state had no part in their introduction. Indians used these new products in complex ways—as medicines, as tonics, and as intoxicants, albeit through the localized medium of the everydaypaanleaf. The study points to a reconsideration of a number of debates about the history of drugs and modern medicines in Asia.

Hard Objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 496-517
Author(s):  
Ned Hercock
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Discrete Series ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
Gerard Manley Hopkins ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
The World ◽  
Production History ◽  
History Of

This essay examines the objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series (1934). It considers their primary property to be their hardness – many of them have distinctively uniform and impenetrable surfaces. This hardness and uniformity is contrasted with 19th century organicism (Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Ruskin). Taking my cue from Kirsten Blythe Painter I show how in their work with hard objects these poems participate within a wider cultural and philosophical turn towards hardness in the early twentieth century (Marcel Duchamp, Adolf Loos, Ludwig Wittgenstein and others). I describe the thinking these poems do with regard to industrialization and to human experience of a resolutely object world – I argue that the presentation of these objects bears witness to the production history of the type of objects which in this era are becoming preponderant in parts of the world. Finally, I suggest that the objects’ impenetrability offers a kind of anti-aesthetic relief: perception without conception. If ‘philosophy recognizes the Concept in everything’ it is still possible, these poems show, to experience resistance to this imperious process of conceptualization. Within thinking objects (poems) these are objects which do not think.

Review: Urban Latino Cultures: La Vida Latina en LA by Gustavo Leclerc, Raúl Villa, and Michael J. Dear (eds.)

1999 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 126-128
Author(s):  
Catherine S. Ramirez
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
History Of ◽  
Crime Wave ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
The City ◽  
History Of Los Angeles

Throughout the twentieth century (and now the twenty-first), the specter of a Latina/o past, present, and future has haunted the myth of Los Angeles as a sunny, bucolic paradise. At the same time it has loomed behind narratives of the city as a dystopic, urban nightmare. In the 1940s Carey McWilliams pointed to the fabrication of a “Spanish fantasy heritage” that made Los Angeles the bygone home of fair señoritas, genteel caballeros and benevolent mission padres. Meanwhile, the dominant Angeleno press invented a “zoot” (read Mexican-American) crime wave. Unlike the aristocratic, European Californias/os of lore, the Mexican/American “gangsters” of the 1940s were described as racial mongrels. What's more, the newspapers explicitly identified them as the sons and daughters of immigrants-thus eliding any link they may have had to the Californias/os of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or to the history of Los Angeles in general.

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