CHAPTER 2. Disciplinary Power and the Colonial State

2020 ◽  
pp. 56-84
Author(s):  
Stephen Snelders

This chapter explores the modern leprosy asylums in Suriname. In the modern Catholic and Protestant asylums of Majella and Bethesda Christian missionaries gave leprosy care a central place in their activities and in the presentation of these activities to their co-religionists and financiers in Europe. Together with the Groot-Chatillon state asylum, Christian asylums were interconnected parts of a system of leprosy care that was created after accommodation between the colonial state and the Christian churches in the 1890s. What resulted was a system including care and medical treatment by colonial medicine that ideally would return cured and grateful citizens back to society. Looking from ‘below’, the asylums were characterised by their own infrapolitics of friction and resentment. The permeability of asylum boundaries characterised by movement of patients between asylums and the outside world, and even between asylums was apparent. In everyday life there were limits to the disciplinary power of the regimes in the asylums.


Itinerario ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 121-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
Upik Djalins

“Above all, we will put on record, that the Rechtsschool has not missed its target: the creation of independent (native) lawyers, who are aware of their position as independent judicial officers in the indigenous social relations.”C.C. van Helsdingen,Gedenkboek Rechtsschool 1929When the Dutch introduced peace and order as the governing doctrine in the East Indies at the turn of the twentieth century, the network of colonial state institutions needed to project themselves as a unified, legitimate state with an authority to enforce justice. This state required a corps of jurists who embodied specific forms of subjectivity in order to maintain the projected authority. Educating natives as jurists offered the most economical means to staff the judiciary. This essay looks at legal education for Native elites as a colonial project of subject formation that was inseparable from colonial state formation. It does so by surveying three institutions in the Indies and the Netherlands between 1909 and 1939: the Batavia Rechtsschool, the Leiden United Faculty of Law and Letters, and the Batavia Rechtshoogeschool. Drawing on Foucauldian notions of disciplinary power and biopower in education and concepts from state theory, I argue that the pedagogical strategies and the legal education curricula in the Indies were deliberately designed to produce independent and critical Native jurists who were at the same time loyal to the Netherlands. The argument, thus, stands in contrast to literature that relies on early Foucault to construct education as a strictly normalising institution. I further suggest that although various state institutions did not unanimously agree on this ideal vision of Native jurists, they nevertheless tolerated it due to the urgent need to project the presence of a just state.Using a variety of sources I focus my attention on two arenas of investigation: the vision of the ideal subjectivity to be embodied by Native jurists, and the technologies employed to achieve it. With this focus, I do not attempt to represent a comprehensive native point of view. Instead, I limit myself to examining the debates among Dutch educators and policy makers regarding proper legal education for the Native elites, the resulting policies as decreed in various ordinances, and the policies' implementation in the schools' curricula and pedagogy.


Author(s):  
إبراهيم محمد زين

الملخّص يهدف هذا البحث لبيان أن السبيل الناجح لمواجهة الإرهاب الدولي المعاصر الملتبس بدعاوي الجهاد الإسلامي وإحياء دولة الخلافة الإسلامية هو التركز على معاني الأمن الفكري والروحي في الإسلام وهذا الاتجاه في المباحثة يُعيد النظر في طرائق قضايا الجهاد ويميز بين ما هو عقائدي ومرتبط بنظام الإسلام الكلي وبين ما هو من مجال حروب الفتنة والصعلكة.  الكلمات المفتاحيّة: الجهاد، حروب الصعلكة، حروب الفتنة، الأمن الروحي والفكري.              Abstract This study focuses on the most effective way of combating global terrorism that utilizes the banner of Jihad and restoration of the Khilafa system of governance. It should be emphasized that there is a dire need for a new line of investigation concerning the issue of Jihad that pays more attention to both spiritual and intellectual security systems in Islam. This requires a distinction to be made between what is universalistic in the Islamic system and what is particular. In this regard one has to differentiate between acts of just war and those of economic or sedition wars. Keywords: Jihad, economic war, sedition war, spiritual-intellectual security system.


Transfers ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 102-120
Author(s):  
Michael Pesek

This article describes the little-known history of military labor and transport during the East African campaign of World War I. Based on sources from German, Belgian, and British archives and publications, it considers the issue of military transport and supply in the thick of war. Traditional histories of World War I tend to be those of battles, but what follows is a history of roads and footpaths. More than a million Africans served as porters for the troops. Many paid with their lives. The organization of military labor was a huge task for the colonial and military bureaucracies for which they were hardly prepared. However, the need to organize military transport eventually initiated a process of modernization of the colonial state in the Belgian Congo and British East Africa. This process was not without backlash or failure. The Germans lost their well-developed military transport infrastructure during the Allied offensive of 1916. The British and Belgians went to war with the question of transport unresolved. They were unable to recruit enough Africans for military labor, a situation made worse by failures in the supplies by porters of food and medical care. One of the main factors that contributed to the success of German forces was the Allies' failure in the “war of legs.”


1990 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Tyson

The national armory at Springfield was the largest prototype of the modern factory establishment and its accounting controls were described by Alfred Chandler [1977] as the most sophisticated in use before the early 1840s. In spite of that, armory management did not integrate piece-rate accounting and a clock-regulated workday to produce prespecified norms of output. Hoskin & Macve [1988] have recently suggested that the armory's accounting controls were unable to attain disciplinary power over labor and increase labor productivity until a West Point trained managerial component had been established at the armory after 1840. They called for a reexamination of the historical record from a disciplinary rather than economic perspective to validate this doctrine. The paper presents the findings of this reexamination and indicates that West Point management training was a relatively minor determinant in the evolving nature of accounting. Several economic and social factors are found to better explain why integration did not occur any sooner than it did at the Springfield armory.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-37
Author(s):  
SANGHAMITRA MISRA

Abstract This article studies two seismic decades in the history of the Garo community, marked out in colonial records as among the most violent and isolated people that British rule encountered in eastern and northeastern India. Through a densely knit historical narrative that hinges on an enquiry into the colonial reordering of the core elements of the regional political economy of eastern and northeastern India, it will train its focus on the figure of the rebellious Garo peasant and on the arresting display of Garo recalcitrance between 1807 and 1820. Reading a rich colonial archive closely and against the grain, the article will depart from extant historiography in its characterization of the colonial state in the early nineteenth century as well as of its relationship with ‘tribes’/‘peasants’ in eastern and northeastern India. A critique of the idea of primitive violence and the production of the ‘tribe’ under conditions of colonial modernity will occupy the latter half of the article. Here it will argue that the numerous and apparently disparate acts of headhunting, raids, plunder, and burning by the Garos on the lowlands of Bengal and Assam were in fact an assembling of the first of a series of sustained peasant rebellions in this part of colonial India—a powerful manifestation of a community's historical consciousness of the loss of its sovereign self under British rule.


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