Introduction: Torture, Empire, and the Exception

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-42
Author(s):  
Deana Heath
Keyword(s):  
Historical Memory ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
High Court ◽  
Virtual Absence ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Colonial Violence ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Exposed Facets

Colonial Terror begins with an examination of a historic case before the High Court of England and Wales in 2011 regarding torture in colonial Kenya that exposed facets of the brutal violence that sustained Britain’s empire, and argues that the case and its aftermath offer a number of insights into the role of extraordinary violence in the operation of colonial states, and with it to the maintenance of imperial and colonial sovereignties, in addition to the discourses and practices of denial regarding British culpability for torture and other forms of colonial violence. After elucidating the book’s key arguments regarding the centrality of the torture of Indian bodies to the law-preserving violence of British colonial rule in India the introduction then considers both the virtual absence of colonial violence from British historical memory and recent scholarship on such violence in former British colonial contexts that seeks to redress such an absence. Proposing that scholars of colonial violence need to broaden their understanding of, and approaches to, violence, as well as the impact of violence on both bodies and minds, the introduction goes on to examine the scholarly literatures on, and lacunae in, colonial policing, colonial law, the colonial state, colonial sovereignties, and the use of torture and terror to construct and maintain such sovereignties, and suggests ways in which Colonial Terror will address such omissions.

scholarly journals “Human Telephone Lines”: Flag Post Mail Relay Runners in British Southern Cameroon (1916–1955) and the Establishment of a Modern Communications Network

2014 ◽  
Vol 59 (S22) ◽  
pp. 211-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter Gam Nkwi ◽  
Mirjam de Bruijn
Keyword(s):  
Colonial Period ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Colonial Administration ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Communications Network ◽  
Southern Cameroon ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Communications System

AbstractThe flag post mail relay runners, a communications system established in Cameroon during British colonial rule, laid the foundations for the communications structure of this colonial state. They were a remnant of a pre-colonial communications system and, with the advancement of “modern” communications structures such as roads, telephone lines, and post houses, the flag post runner gradually disappeared. This article explores the role of the runners for the colonial administration in Cameroon and is based mostly on archival research. It describes the runners’ system and how it influenced the colonial communications landscape. In addition, the questions of how these runners were involved in the colonial state and what forms of resistance emerged among runners are analysed. Finally, the article discusses the degree to which the subsequent construction of roads, telegraphic communications, and postal networks reflected the role played by mail runners in the British colonial period up to the 1950s.

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.

The Facilitators I: Policing

2021 ◽  
pp. 69-105
Author(s):  
Deana Heath
Keyword(s):  
Structural Violence ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
British Government ◽  
Police Reform ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Legal Violence ◽  
Set Up

Focusing on the role of atrocity facilitators, particularly colonial officials and the British government, in the governmentalization of torture by the police and other officials in colonial India, this chapter examines the ways in which, following the transfer of India’s governance from the East India Company to the Crown in 1858, the extra-legal violence of torture became systematized as a technology of colonial rule. Beginning with an analysis of what led to the perpetration of torture by state officials, the existence of which had long been known in both India and Britain, to erupt into scandal in 1854, the chapter interrogates how the commission set up to investigate torture led to the emergence of a new facilitatory discourse that served both to deny the existence of torture and the structural violence that underpinned it, as well as to displace blame for it from the colonial regime to its Indian subordinates. The chapter further explores how police reform in the commission’s aftermath was designed not to eradicate torture or ensure the welfare of the Indian populace but to safeguard the coercive and terrorizing powers of the colonial state

From Little King to Landlord: Property, Law, and the Gift under the Madras Permanent Settlement

1986 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 307-333 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas B. Dirks
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Property Law ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Social Forms ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
The Gift ◽  
Permanent Settlement ◽  
The Impact

In the last few years, modern historians of India have pushed the historical frontier of their field backwards in time. Colonialism is no longer considered the great watershed it once was thought to be. Historians who concern themselves with economic processes such as protoindustrialization tend in particular to minimize the impact of the consolidation of colonial rule in the late eighteenth century. Changes viewed as significant by these historians usually begin with the introduction of capitalism and the early encroachment of a world system, both of which predate the full political realization of colonialism. Historians who concern themselves with political changes tend in the other direction, although increasingly they have proposed major continuities between the ancien régime and the early colonial state. Historians concerned with social change view colonialism as significant but invoke various new forms of dualism to account for the limited effects of colonialism on local social forms. Whatever their differences, all of these historians agree that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are crucial for viewing later changes in economy, polity, and society, and, from their varying theoretical and ideological perspectives, delight in excoriating traditional views of India as static and “traditional” before the arrival of the British.

The Renovation of Custom in Colonial Kenya: the 1932 Generation Succession Ceremonies in Embu

1989 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 139-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles H. Ambler
Keyword(s):  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Local Autonomy ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Genital Mutilation ◽  
New Tribe ◽  
Opposition Movements ◽  
Substantial Degree ◽  
Central Kenya

The role of custom and tradition in the development of colonial rule in Africa has received little attention from scholars. Historians of colonial Kenya, particularly, have focused on the powerful transforming impact of the colonial state and economy and on the growth of opposition movements; they have had little to say about the processes through which previously autonomous societies negotiated their incorporation into the Kenya state. Yet by the 1920s and 1930s that state had acquired a substantial degree of popular legitimacy. ‘Customary’ institutions and rituals played an important part in the development of that legitimacy. This essay examines the institution of the genealogically defined ‘generation’ in the Embu-Mbeere area in colonial central Kenya and the ceremonies held in 1932 to mark the transition from one generation to the next. These ceremonies attracted considerable attention because they provided the occasion for the proclamation of rules, supported by the British administration, relating to the bitter issue of genital mutilation in female initiation. But this was not a crude case of the manipulation of custom. The attempt to reform female initiation was part of a larger process, of which the rituals of generation succession were elements, of building the ideological basis of a new ‘tribe’ in a society previously characterized by local autonomy and collective authority. As investigation of the succession ceremonies makes clear, the notion of a tribe dominated by appointed chiefs and identified with an exclusive territory lay at the centre of this ideology.

Administrator-scholars and the Writing of History in Early British India: A review article

2013 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 826-843
Author(s):  
JAMES LEES
Keyword(s):  
Early Years ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
British India ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
British East India Company ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
The Times

AbstractThe histories of Asian peoples penned by British East India Company officials during the early years of colonial rule—rightly—have long been considered to be doubtful source material within the historiography of South Asia. Their credibility was suspect well before the middle of the twentieth century, when Bernard Cohn's work began to present the British colonial state as one that relentlessly sought to categorize Indian society, and to use the distorted information thus gained to impose its government.However, the histories of these administrator-scholars still retain value—not as accurate studies of their subjects, perhaps, but as barometers of the times in which they were written and also in the unexpected ways in which some continue to resonate in the present. To illustrate that point, this paper will review three recent monographs which deal with the writings and historical legacies of some of the Company's most prominent early nineteenth-century administrator-scholars. These are: Jason Freitag's Serving Empire, Serving Nation: James Tod and the Rajputs of Rajasthan; Jack Harrington's Sir John Malcolm and the Creation of British India; and Rama Mantena's work centred around the antiquarian pursuits of Colin Mackenzie, The Origins of Modern Historiography in India: Antiquarianism and Philology, 1780–1880.1

scholarly journals Legacies of British Colonial Violence: Viewing Kenyan Detention Camps through the Hanslope Disclosure

2015 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 489-542 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aoife Duffy
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Violent Incident ◽  
The Public ◽  
British Colony ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Detention Camps ◽  
Colonial Violence ◽  
Colonial Histories

A number of works have recently been published that seek to re-narrate colonial histories, with a particular emphasis on the role of law in at once creating and marginalizing colonial subjects.1Focusing on mid-twentieth century detention camps in the British colony of Kenya, this article illuminates a colonial history that was deeply buried in a Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) building for many years. As such, the analysis supports the revelatory work of David Anderson and Caroline Elkins, who highlighted the violence that underpinned British detention and interrogation practises in Kenya.2In particular, the article explores recently declassified colonial files, and pieces together a picture of administrative subterfuge, suppression of facts, and whitewashing atrocities, threaded through with official denial, which long outlived its colonial genesis. Against the hypothesis that detention laws created an architecture of destruction and concomitant custodial violence in Kenya, the article establishes that an accountability deficit is the legacy of detention without trial as it was practiced in colonial Kenya. By untangling a complex web of colonial records and government papers relating to Kenya, this article reveals the often insurmountable pressure that was exerted to conceal evidence of detainee violence, and the role of a highly sophisticated propaganda machine that controlled the public narrative of a violent incident when outright denial was impossible.

Politics, Intelligence and Elections in Late Colonial India: Congress and the Raj in 1937

2010 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 160-188 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Muldoon
Keyword(s):  
Political Reform ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Political Behaviour ◽  
Indian Politics ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Intelligence Collection ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
National Congress ◽  
Election Results ◽  
The Impact

This article addresses questions of political reform and colonial intelligence collection in 1930s India. It focuses on the expectations British colonial officials had of the impact of the 1935 Government of India Act reforms on Indian political behaviour, especially regarding the creation of largely autonomous provincial assemblies. The 1937 provincial elections put these colonial suppositions to the test, and found them wanting. The article outlines the flawed and blinkered nature of colonial information gathering, demonstrating how the election results, particularly the very strong showing by an organized Indian National Congress, came as a real surprise to colonial administrators. However, the article also shows that these results did not necessarily change colonial opinions about Indian politics overmuch, as administrators and governors sought to frame what had happened within their existing understanding of India. Overall, this piece argues for the persistence of certain ways of colonial thinking in India, driven by ideological or cultural biases, as well as by the real limitations on the capability of the colonial state.

scholarly journals Federally administered tribal areas: British colonial legacy in postcolonial age

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 196-199
Author(s):  
Oleg Sergeevich Tselera
Keyword(s):  
British India ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial Legacy ◽  
The Usa ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Administrative Experience ◽  
Tribal Areas ◽  
The Impact

The following paper analyzes the role of administrative experience of the British Empire on Northwest boundary of the British India in 19 - the first half of the 20th centuries in Pakistan political policy choice concerning the federally administered tribal areas in the second half of 20 - the beginning of the 21st centuries. At the same time special attention is paid to the British colonial practices which saved the value during a post-colonial era in the tribes zone. The author also pays attention to the role of colonial experience in asymmetrical conflict settlement with the USA involvement in Afghanistan territory as well as to features of interaction of Washington and Islamabad in the tribes zone. The author concludes about perspectives of colonial knowledge in federally administered tribal areas administration during a post-colonial era taking into account historical experience of the British colonial administration on Northwest boundary of British India during the age of empires. The paper also reveals the impact of postcolonial practices on the history of modern Pakistan and on the choice of its way to reform the FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas), as well as the role of other regional players in the reform of the FATA.

scholarly journals The instrumental function of "augmented reality" in the processes of representation, transmission and construction of knowledge

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosella Tomassoni ◽  
Nicola Santangelo
Keyword(s):  
Augmented Reality ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Teaching Methodologies ◽  
Construction Of Knowledge ◽  
The Subject ◽  
High Level ◽  
2D And 3D ◽  
The Impact

The paper examines the potential offered by augmented reality in the didactic field, with particular reference to the possibility of creating “augmented” experiences, which make it possible to obtain a high level of interaction with the sources and places that have acted and are acting for conservation and activation of historical memory. The subject of analysis is the psycho-pedagogical value of the information enrichment offered by AR, which allows to support the narrative potential of historical sources through the presentation of documents, interactive objects, 360° videos and 2D and 3D reconstructions. Particular attention is paid to: the possibility of using augmented reality to innovate textbooks and teaching methodologies; the possibility of creating “active” study paths with a high level of interaction and personalization; the recent applications of AR in the museum field; the psycho-pedagogical role of AR in the construction of stories and narratives and the impact that this type of technology can have on the methods of transmission and construction of stories.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document