Elphinstone and the Afghan-Pathan Elision

2019 ◽  
pp. 299-318
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Leake
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Political Order ◽  
First Century ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Northern Pakistan ◽  
Regional Politics ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Similarities And Differences ◽  
Great Game

Mountstuart Elphinstone's writings on Afghanistan have had lingering effects throughout the twentieth (and into the twenty-first) century. Even with the end of British colonial rule in 1947, western interest in Afghanistan, and particularly the Pathan borderlands spread across southern Afghanistan and northern Pakistan, has remained. Both British and American observers have continued to value this region for its strategic locale, even as both have wrestled with the "tribal" nature of the local Pathan population and its longstanding autonomy from neighboring states. While Cold War competition replaced the rivalry of the Great Game, colonial-era understandings of Afghanistan and local and regional politics continued to color western policies towards this region. This chapter reflects on the legacies of Elphinstone's work for western policymakers, particularly in the aftermath of partition and in the emergent Cold War. Using the works of Olaf Caroe and James W. Spain, it considers how Elphinstone's ideas and rhetoric concerning Afghan politics and tribal society and organization have resounded in western conceptualizations of Afghanistan, and neighboring Pakistan. It compares British and American understandings of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and their relative reliance on Elphinstone's ideas. Ultimately it considers the similarities and differences in the ways that British and American officials have perceived and valued Afghanistan's place in a broader world political order.

Between Idealism and Pragmatism

2019 ◽  
pp. 46-72
Author(s):  
Jing Jing Chang
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Film Culture ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Integral Component ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The Cold War

Chapter 2 traces the development of Hong Kong’s official film culture during the 1950s and 1960s within the contexts of the documentary film movement, the imperial legacy of the British Colonial Film Unit, and the colonial rhetoric of film literacy. In particular, it uses such Hong Kong Film Unit-produced short features as Report to the Gods (Dir. Brian Salt, 1967), starring local opera talent Leung Sing-por, as archival sources to argue that the colonial regime’s relationship with Hong Kong’s population was not a static vertical imposition of the “culture of depoliticization,” but one that was shifting and characterized by manipulation, misunderstanding, and negotiation amid bipolarized Cold War tension. I argue here that British Hong Kong’s involvement in filmmaking activities expose the top-down imposition of a colonial regime as well as the transformative nature of colonial rule during the Cold War period of the 1950s through 1960s. Official film culture should not be seen merely as tools of colonial governance or a means of indoctrinating subject audiences, but rather was part of an overall “strategy for survival” as well as an integral component in the process of screening the local Hong Kong “colonial” citizenry during the Cold War.

British Rule and Tribal Revolts in India: The curious case of Bastar

2015 ◽  
Vol 50 (5) ◽  
pp. 1619-1644 ◽  
Author(s):  
AJAY VERGHESE
Keyword(s):  
Colonial Period ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Indian Government ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
British Rule ◽  
Indigenous Groups ◽  
Princely State ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Colonial Policies

AbstractBritish colonial rule in India precipitated a period of intense rebellion among the country's indigenous groups. Most tribal conflicts occurred in the British provinces, and many historians have documented how a host of colonial policies gave rise to widespread rural unrest and violence. In the post-independence period, many of the colonial-era policies that had caused revolt were not reformed, and tribal conflict continued in the form of the Naxalite insurgency. This article considers why the princely state of Bastar has continuously been a major centre of tribal conflict in India. Why has this small and remote kingdom, which never came under direct British rule, suffered so much bloodshed? Using extensive archival material, this article highlights two key findings: first, that Bastar experienced high levels of British intervention during the colonial period, which constituted the primary cause of tribal violence in the state; and second, that the post-independence Indian government has not reformed colonial policies in this region, ensuring a continuation and escalation of tribal conflict through the modern Naxalite movement.

Mugabe’s Urban Legacy: A Postcolonial Perspective on Urban Development in Harare, Zimbabwe

2020 ◽  
pp. 002190962094362
Author(s):  
Abraham R Matamanda
Keyword(s):  
Urban Development ◽  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
Spatial Configuration ◽  
Spatial Segregation ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Dominant Feature ◽  
State Capture ◽  
British Colonial

Robert Gabriel Mugabe resigned as the President of Zimbabwe in 2017 after being in office since 1980 when Zimbabwe gained independence from British colonial rule. Mugabe implemented various policies that impacted on the urbanscape of Zimbabwe. Using a desktop approach that is based on bibliography research, the study examines Mugabe’s urban legacy through the lenses of postcolonial theory and the concept of Mugabeism. The results show that power was a dominant feature in Mugabe’s legacy, as he used it to influence the socio-spatial configuration of the urban scape whenever he saw it befitting. His power was rooted in corruption, clientism, patronage, state capture and sanctioning of opponents. Essentially, Mugabe perpetuated the colonial city, in that the postcolonial city was a replication of the socio-spatial segregation which existed during the colonial era, yet this time round it was based on class and not race.

scholarly journals Psychiatry and mental health in Malaysia

2005 ◽  
Vol 2 (8) ◽  
pp. 14-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Parameshvara Deva
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
East Asia ◽  
First Century ◽  
South East Asia ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Tropical Country ◽  
Trade Routes ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
East West

Malaysia is a tropical country in the heart of South East Asia, at the crossroads of the ancient east–west sea trade routes. Although independent from British colonial rule only in 1957, it has a recorded history dating back to at least the first century CE, when the region was already the source of valuable mineral and forest produce that found markets in China, India and further west.

GOVERNMENT FISCAL BEHAVIOR AND ECONOMIC GROWTH OF SINGAPORE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

2011 ◽  
Vol 56 (01) ◽  
pp. 19-40
Author(s):  
ICHIRO SUGIMOTO ◽  
EU CHYE TAN
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Significant Shift ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Fiscal Balance ◽  
Fiscal Behavior ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Similarities And Differences ◽  
Fiscal Expenditure ◽  
The Government ◽  
Colonial Government

This paper reviews the trends in the government fiscal structure and explores the possible relationships between government fiscal expenditure and economic growth in Singapore over the 20th century. It is a reasonable conjecture that the government fiscal behavior and in particular vis-à-vis economic growth had undergone a significant shift as Singapore switched from British colonial rule to self-government. The paper first traces out the characteristics of the colonial government fiscal behavior and compares them with those during the period of self-government in terms of sources and uses of revenue and fiscal balance. This is then followed by econometric exercises to ascertain whether the government fiscal expenditure responds to income movements broadly in the spirit of Wagner's law in 1900–1939 and 1966–2000. Generally, attention is focused upon inter-temporal similarities and differences.

The Best Hope

2019 ◽  
pp. 114-148
Author(s):  
Wen-Qing Ngoei
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Military Bases ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
War Aims ◽  
The Way

This chapter examines how the creation of Malaysia in 1963—the merger of Malaya, Singapore and Britain’s Borneo territories—completed a geostrategic arc of anticommunist states in Southeast Asia, undermined Sukarno’s left-leaning regime in Indonesia, and provided a powerful fillip to U.S. Cold War aims. As Singapore prepared to enter the Malaysian federation, its anticommunist leader, Lee Kuan Yew, incarcerated his main left-wing rivals with repressive policies inherited from British colonial rule. This move ensured Britain’s military bases in Singapore would continue to serve Anglo-American interests. In addition, Britain and Malaysia launched effective diplomatic offensives against Sukarno during the Malaysia-Indonesia Confrontation (Konfrontasi) of the early 1960s, destabilizing the Sukarno regime and paving the way for his ouster and Indonesia’s subsequent alignment America against China and the USSR.

Tagore’s Perspective on Decolonizing Education

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mousumi Mukherjee
Keyword(s):  
Education Reform ◽  
Adult Life ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
British Imperialism ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Rabindranath Tagore ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The Social ◽  
British Colonial

Decolonization is a historic process that picked up momentum in the second half of the 20th century, whereby several countries of the Global South in Asia, Africa, and Latin America successively gained independence from European colonial rule and became sovereign modern nation-states. However, territorial independence from an external ruling power alone could not bring an end to all the social, political, and economic problems ushered in by hundreds of years of imperialism. This fact was realized long before independence from colonial rule by Rabindranath Tagore within the context of British colonial India. Hence, even before territorial and political decolonization, Tagore sought to decolonize the minds of people through education reform by first setting up his own school in 1901 and then establishing Visva-Bharati University in 1921. In fact, Tagore, who is the author of the national anthems of two independent modern South Asian nation-states, never saw independent India. He died in 1941 as a British colonial subject, six years before the independence of India from colonial rule in 1947. While many indigenous intellectuals of his era adopted violent and nonviolent methods to fight against British imperialism, Tagore devoted much of his adult life to the pursuit of freedom through pedagogic reforms. Tagore’s philosophy and practice of pedagogic reform sought to “decolonize education” in British colonial India. Tagore’s own writings on education beginning in 1892 reveal that his philosophy and practice to “decolonize education” was based on the memory and critical reflections on his own experiences as a student in mainstream schools during the British colonial era in India. Tagore’s philosophy of education, institutionalized through his decolonizing pedagogic reform work in his school and university at Bolepur, Shantiniketan, were concrete responses of a highly creative and critical-thinking indigenous intellectual to the problems of the mainstream education system during his time. Hence, studying Tagore’s perspective on “decolonizing education” can provide us with a deeper understanding of the educational problems posed by British imperialism in India, as well as the evolution of these problems in the colonial metropole, which became global in nature through the process of colonialism, as has been argued by a number of academics, including modern British historian Michael Collins and postcolonial Indian academic Sanjukta Dasgupta.

The Japanese Factor in the Making of North Korean Socialism

2020 ◽  
pp. 225-251
Author(s):  
Ernest Ming-Tak Leung
Keyword(s):  
Communist Party ◽  
North Korea ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Direct Experience ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Stepping Stone ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Juche Ideology

This article explores a commonly ignored aspect of Japan–North Korean relations: the Japanese factor in the making of Korean socialism. Korea was indirectly influenced by the Japanese Jiyuminken Movement, in the 1910s–1920s serving as a stepping-stone for the creation of a Japanese Communist Party. Wartime mobilization policies under Japanese rule were continued and expanded beyond the colonial era. The Juche ideology built on tendencies first exhibited in the 1942 Overcoming Modernity Conference in Japan, and in the 1970s some Japanese leftists viewed Juche as a humanist Marxism. Trade between Japan and North Korea expanded from 1961 onwards, culminating in North Korea’s default in 1976, from which point on relations soured between the two countries. Yet leaders with direct experience of colonial rule governed North Korea through to the late 1990s.

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