Occupation, War, and the Transformation of the Sanusiyya

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eileen Ryan
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Power Sharing ◽  
Catholic Identity ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
World War ◽  
Central Objective ◽  
Political Interests ◽  
Sufi Order

Fierce opposition to the Italian invasion of Libya in October 1911 demonstrated the fallacies of Insabato’s predictions that a positive Italo-Sanusi relationship would lead to an easy victory. Nevertheless, Italian colonial officials continued to pursue an alliance with the Sanusiyya as a central objective. During World War I Italian and British officials toyed with the idea of exacerbating divisions within the Sanusi family, descendants of the man credited with founding the Sufi order. Rather than negotiating with the recognized head of the Sanusiyya, Ahmed al-Sharif, officials promoted the leadership of his younger cousin, Idris al-Sanusi. In the context of prolonged war, Idris’s negotiations with European officials met with widespread approval among Sanusi elites. For Italian colonial officials, the development of a power-sharing relationship with Idris meant minimizing the Catholic identity of Italian colonial rule, much to the dismay of missionaries and Catholic political interests in Rome.

The Anarchist Press in Egypt before World War I

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Gorman
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Public Education ◽  
World War I ◽  
State Power ◽  
Local Context ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
World War

This chapter traces the development of the radical secular press in Egypt from its first brief emergence in the 1870s until the outbreak of World War I. First active in the 1860s, the anarchist movement gradually expanded its membership and influence over subsequent decades to articulate a general social emancipation and syndicalism for all workers in the country. In the decade and a half before 1914, its press collectively propagated a critique of state power and capitalism, called for social justice and the organisation of labour, and promoted the values of science and public education in both a local context and as part of an international movement. In seeking to promote a programme at odds with both nationalism and colonial rule, it incurred the hostility of the authorities in addition to facing the practical problems of managing and financing an oppositional newspaper.

scholarly journals The United States of America and the End of Dutch Colonial Rule in Indonesia

Ad Americam ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 67-82
Author(s):  
Anna Wyrwisz
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War I ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
The United States ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Situation ◽  
East Indies ◽  
Trade Relations ◽  
The U.S

The United States had developed trade relations with the Dutch East Indies before World War I. In the 1920s, American diplomatic services prepared reports on the economic and political situation in the Dutch colony. The U.S. wanted to defend their interests in the region. In 1949, after several years of attempts to regain power in Indonesia, the Dutch withdrew in the absence of American support. A decade later, suchlike events occurred in connection with Dutch New Guinea.

Religion as Resistance

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eileen Ryan
Keyword(s):  
Religious Identity ◽  
Power Sharing ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Nationalist Movement ◽  
Religious Conservatism ◽  
Fascist Regime ◽  
Italian Nationalism ◽  
Sufi Order ◽  
The Continuum

During the Italian occupation of Libya, debates over where Italy should be on the continuum between coercion and collaboration in colonial rule often reflected contentious battles over religious identity in Italian nationalism. These tensions came into sharpest relief in the Italian attempts to develop a power-sharing relationship with elite members of the Muslim Sufi order, the Sanusiyya in eastern Libya. Perceptions of the Sanusiyya as religious fundamentalists suggested to some the utility of emphasizing a shared sense of religious conservatism to “sell” Italian colonial rule. Others, however, argued that only a secular identity in colonial rule would prevent Muslim opposition to Italian occupation. Descriptions of the Sanusiyya in Italian sources therefore reflected their authors’ conflicting interests in projecting a Catholic or secular identity in Italian expansion. Adherents of the Sanusiyya were likewise divided in their responses to Italian colonial rule. In the early stages of the Italian occupation, Sanusi elites recognized the utility of negotiating a position of political authority in relationship to the Italian colonial state. As the fascist regime pushed colonial rule further toward coercion than collaboration (and embraced a Catholic identity in the process) in the 1920s, some Sanusi factions redefined the Sufi order as a force of anticolonial opposition and a nascent nationalist movement. This book explores the shifting relationship between religious and national identity through the process of negotiating colonial rule among both Italian imperialists and Sanusi elites.

Japanese Empire and Pan-Asianism

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sven Saaler
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
World War ◽  
The North ◽  
Japanese Colonial ◽  
The Japanese Archipelago ◽  
The Government ◽  
Historical Memories

The Japanese colonial empire was composed of territories adjacent to the Japanese archipelago, ranging from Southern Sakhalin in the north to Taiwan in the south. Unlike most European powers, Japan did not acquire colonial territories that were far away from the metropolis; rather, it did so within the region in which it was located—East Asia. The geographical proximity between the metropolis and its colonial territories influenced not only the structure of the colonial administration, racial hierarchies in the empire, and colonial and metropolitan identities but also the rhetorical strategies that were used to legitimize colonial rule. Although the government generally envisioned a European-style empire, the creation of which would earn Japan the respect of the Great Powers and eventually lead to the recognition of Japanese equality, a significant number of politicians, writers, and activists argued that it was Japan’s mission to unite the Asian people and protect or liberate them from Western colonial rule. These discourses have been summarized under the term “Pan-Asianism,” a movement and an ideology that emerged in the late 19th century and became mainstream by the time World War I began. However, although some advocates of Pan-Asianism were motivated by sincere feelings of solidarity, the expansion of Japanese colonial rule and the escalation of war in China and throughout Asia in the 1930s brought to the fore an increasing number of contradictions and ambiguities. By the time World War II started, Pan-Asianism had become a cloak of Japanese expansionism and an instrument to legitimize the empire, a process that culminated in the Greater East Asia Conference of 1943. The contradictions between Japan’s brutal wars in Asia and the ideology of Asian solidarity continue to haunt that country’s relations with its neighbors, by way of ambiguous historical memories of the empire and war in contemporary Japanese politics and society.

scholarly journals Accounting for the Nation, Marginalizing the Empire: Taxable Capacity and Colonial Rule in the Early Twentieth Century

2020 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 455-472
Author(s):  
Eleanor Newbigin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
National Economy ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
World War ◽  
National Accounting ◽  
A Site

Modern forms of national accounting are widely understood to have emerged within the context of rivalry between the western powers and attempts to manage the economic fallout of World War I. There has been little consideration of the way in which imperialism shaped debates and approaches to national accounting. Providing a close reading of Indian scholar K. T. Shah’s intervention in debates about how to measure the national economy of the 1920s, this article seeks to shed new light on innovative debates within Indian economics in this period. In so doing, it also seeks to draw attention to the ways in which debates about national economy were themselves a site of contestation, and reaffirmation, of colonial power structures in the interwar years.

Colonial Rule and the Sikhs

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
J.S. Grewal
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Political Party ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
World War ◽  
Constitutional Politics ◽  
National Congress ◽  
The Government ◽  
Indian National Congress

Nearly all classes of the Sikh social order suffered due to the loss of power in 1849, especially the Sikh jagīrdārs, the Sikh peasantry, and the Sikh soldiery. However, much of the lost ground was recovered before World War I. A new religious awakening among the Sikhs had started before 1849 in the form of the Nirankari and the Nāmdhārī movements. Both of these were overshadowed by the Singh Sabha movement which was far more influential. The Chief Khalsa Diwan, led by Sunder Singh Majithia, generally pursued constitutional politics. But there were other more radical Singh reformers who were willing to take up causes in opposition to the government. The Central Sikh League, the first political party of the Sikhs, was founded at Amritsar in 1919 to remain closely aligned with the Indian National Congress.

scholarly journals “The Shari‘a must go”: Seduction, Moral Injury, and Religious Freedom in Egypt's Liberal Age

2018 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 446-475
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Culang
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Religious Freedom ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Moral Injury ◽  
Moral Issue ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
World War ◽  
Islamic Tradition ◽  
The Right ◽  
British State

AbstractSince the 2011 uprising in Egypt, the Egyptian state has increasingly used the charge of contempt of religion (izdira’ al-din) to regulate speech. This charge, though sometimes assumed to be a medieval holdover, is part of a modern genealogy of the politics of religious freedom. This article examines how religious freedom accumulated meaning in Egypt after World War I, when it became an international legal standard. Protestant missionaries in Egypt advocated religious freedom as the right to proselytize and the right of Egyptians to convert. For many Egyptians, by contrast, it came to mean the right to protect one's religion from perceived missionary attacks (ta‘n). Using British state archival records, missionary sources, and Egyptian parliamentary transcripts and periodicals, this article traces the formation of this paradox in public discourse and law. Drawing on theorizations of seduction and moral injury, I show how Egyptians articulated notions of religious freedom centered around feelings of moral injury and through a local ethical vernacular that, though embedded within the Islamic tradition, was broadly shared. The Egyptian state gradually incorporated these sensibilities into its expanding modern legal system as part of maintaining a majority-defined public order, transforming offense to religion from a moral issue into a punishable crime. Forged through a contingent process involving missionaries, local communities, and the Egyptian state under the shadow of colonial rule, religious freedom has exacerbated rather than resolved religious divides in Egypt, and has helped to define and delimit the country's political, moral, and religious imaginaries.

The War of thangata: Nyasaland and the East African Campaign, 1914–1918

1978 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melvin E. Page
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Medical Care ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Eastern Africa ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
World War ◽  
East African ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
War Effort ◽  
Military Campaign

During World War I, Africans in Nyasaland were called upon to provide large numbers of soldiers and military labourers for the war effort in eastern Africa. Although a few willingly volunteered, many more objected, and some resisted. In this situation, colonial officals used force to secure the necessary manpower. Africans, therefore, called the conflict ‘the war of thangata’, referring to the growing colonial demands for taxes and for labour rent on European estates. The tasks which the soldiers and carriers were called upon to perform were equally likened to thangata, being ‘work which was done without real benefit’. So far from receiving rewards, Africans found that inadequate food, clothing, and medical care contributed greatly to the sufferings associated with a military campaign. Between 1914 and 1918 wartime manpower requirements, and war service, gave full meaning to colonial rule throughout the protectorate. The response to these demands and this suffering brought, in the form of both traditional and modern religious and social institutions, the first tentative stirrings of African nationalism in Nyasaland.

Nationalism and Missions

1957 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Pierce Beaver
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Cultural Imperialism ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
World War ◽  
Cultural Resistance ◽  
Christian Mission ◽  
Boxer Uprising

Nationalism in the Orient came into being as a reaction to Western and Japanese political, military, economic, and cultural imperialism. It still has this character in countries remaining under colonial rule. This nationalism is a phenomenon of the twentieth century, although arising somewhat earlier in certain countries. Anti-western movements before this time were manifestations of cultural resistance to European penetration rather than truly nationalistic expressions. The Boxer Uprising of 1900 in China is the last major example of such a cultural reaction. Thereafter love and pride of ancient culture became increasingly only one ingredient in patriotic loyalty and devotion. Intensified during World War I, this earlier type of nationalism reached its climax in Asia in the period of World War II, and came to fruition in the independence of eight nations in East and Southern Asia. Since then this earlier type of nationalism has been replaced by a religious statism, to which many Western nations had already succumbed and which had led Japan to disaster. The entire Orient is far too vast an area for treatment in a brief paper, and this survey is limited to a mere outline of the relation of nationalism to the Christian mission as illustrated by events in some countries of East Asia, where along with India the issues were most sharply raised.

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