Temporality, Space, and Networks in Indo-Pacific Environmental Histories

2021 ◽  
Vol 90 (2) ◽  
pp. 140-156
Author(s):  
Brett M. Bennett ◽  
Gregory A. Barton
Keyword(s):  
Pacific Ocean ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Natural Resources ◽  
Historical Review ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
The Past ◽  
Environmental Histories ◽  
Indian Ocean World ◽  
Theoretical Overview

This special issue of Pacific Historical Review, “Crossroads of Indo-Pacific Environmental Histories,” is guest edited by Gregory A. Barton and Brett M. Bennett. The special issue explores how environmental historians can use the concept of the Indo-Pacific to understand both the deep and contemporary histories of regions that are frequently viewed through Indian Ocean world or Pacific Ocean world perspectives. A preface and this introduction provide a theoretical overview, establishing some of the key temporal, spatial, and causal parameters of the Indo-Pacific. The following articles by Timothy P. Barnard, by Ruth Morgan, and by Gregory Barton and Brett Bennett highlight how local and foreign powers have sought to control the Indo-Pacific’s natural resources to shape new economies, ecologies, and polities within the region during the past two centuries. Broadly, the special issue encourages other historians to engage with the Indo-Pacific concept due to its theoretical depth as well as its relevance to contemporary geopolitical affairs.

Fueling the Colonial Future

2021 ◽  
Vol 90 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-210
Author(s):  
Ruth A. Morgan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eucalyptus Globulus ◽  
Historical Review ◽  
Tree Cover ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Fuel Wood ◽  
Southeastern Australia ◽  
Environmental Histories ◽  
The Many ◽  
Blue Gum

As its record in California, southern India, and elsewhere suggests, of the many biotic exchanges of the long nineteenth century, the case of the Australian blue gum tree (Eucalyptus globulus) is one that especially transcends bilateral, spatial, or imperial framing. The blue gum instead invites more material and temporal perspectives to its spread: since its reputation accrued over time in diverse colonial settings, its adoption was contingent on the extent to which local tree cover was feared to have been depleted, and its growth was hoped to secure the futures of colonial states. Focusing on nineteenth-century understandings of the biological characteristics of the blue gum in southeastern Australia, South Asia and California, and the circulation of this knowledge between these sites, this article draws on the insights of neo-materialism to argue that this tree’s value and importance lay in its perceived ability to rapidly provide fuel wood for the empowerment of colonial states. This article is part of the “Crossroads of Indo-Pacific Environmental Histories” special issue of Pacific Historical Review.

Decolonizing Informal Empire

2021 ◽  
Vol 90 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-232
Author(s):  
Gregory A. Barton ◽  
Brett M. Bennett
Keyword(s):  
Historical Review ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
World War ◽  
Informal Empire ◽  
Foreign Office ◽  
Thai Government ◽  
Environmental Histories ◽  
Second World

This article traces the decolonization of Britain’s informal empire over the teak trade in Thailand in the mid-twentieth century. It argues that British influence over the teak industry, which dated to the second half of the nineteenth century, began to wane in the 1920s due to the gradual nationalization of teak leases. Still, British firms and the Foreign Office remained dominant in the export industry in the 1920s and 1930s because of Britain’s lobbying and geopolitical authority. The Japanese invasion of Thailand in 1941 during the Second World War caused British firms to lose access to their leases and equipment. Bilateral negotiations between the Thai government and British firms after the war ended led to logs and leases being returned to British firms, but the Thai government did not renew long term leases in the 1950s despite protests from British business and government. The Thai elite looked to Americans for defense support, and they supported nationalization to expand Thai and Thai-Chinese economic authority. Britain’s military and economic authority in Thailand had eroded rapidly and, within a decade, British firms had lost control over Southeast Asia’s teak trade. This article is part of the “Crossroads of Indo–Pacific Environmental Histories” special issue of Pacific Historical Review.

Imagined Dragons

2021 ◽  
Vol 90 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-182
Author(s):  
Timothy P. Barnard
Keyword(s):  
Historical Review ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
World War ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World ◽  
Environmental Histories ◽  
Second World ◽  
Unique Species

The presence of a large lizard, the Komodo dragon, in eastern Indonesia first came to the attention of Dutch authorities in 1912. Over the next thirty years these reptiles became one of the most desired celebrity species in the world for explorers to seek, zoos to display, and the public to imagine. From these experiences with captive Komodo lizards, a greater understanding of the behavior and morphology of the animal developed. This literature was shared in polycentric networks of science prior to the Second World War among zookeepers, explorers, and government officials, reflecting early efforts in the development of transnational knowledge of the biology of a unique species. This article is part of the “Crossroads of Indo–Pacific Environmental Histories” special issue of Pacific Historical Review.

Editor's Preface, JIOWS Special Issue: Festschrift to Michael Pearson

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Gwyn Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Special Collections ◽  
Indian Ocean World ◽  
Do So

This edition of the JIOWS is the first of two special collections of Festschrift essays in honour of Michael Pearson. Michael has established himself as one of the formative figures in Indian Ocean world (IOW) studies. It is our hope that these two special editions will encourage readers who have yet to explore Michael’s works, to do so.

scholarly journals Slave, Convict, and Indentured Labor and the Tyranny of the Particular

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard B. Allen
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Forced Labor ◽  
Migrant Labor ◽  
Memorial Lecture ◽  
Indentured Labor ◽  
The Past ◽  
Holistic Approaches ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Indian Ocean World ◽  
Slavery Studies

In Slave, Convict and Indentured Labor and the Tyranny of the Particular, distinguished historian Richard B. Allen draws on forty-five years of research on slavery and indentured labor in the Indian Ocean world and Asia to challenge scholars to look beyond the chronological, conceptual, and geographical confines of the specialized case studies that characterize research on slavery and related forms of migrant labor and situate their studies in more fully developed local, regional, pan-regional, and comparative contexts. As this inaugural Joseph C. Miller Memorial Lecture at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies demonstrates, the globality of European slave trading and abolitionism and the connections between the slave, convict, and indentured labor trades in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonial world highlight the need to adopt more holistic approaches to studying the nature, dynamics, and impact of the human experience with slavery and cognate forms of forced labor in both the past and the present.

scholarly journals 'Being Chinese' in Mauritius and Madagascar: Comparing Chinese diasporic communities in the western Indian Ocean

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 91-117
Author(s):  
Federica Guccini ◽  
Mingyuan Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Southern China ◽  
Western Indian Ocean ◽  
Chinese Immigrants ◽  
Chinese Diaspora ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
The Past ◽  
Diasporic Identity ◽  
Chinese Migration ◽  
Identity Formations

Chinese migration to the Western Indian Ocean since the 1800s was part of an earlier historical trend that saw European colonial powers setting up plantation economies that required foreign laborers. Migrants from Southern China arrived in Mauritius and Madagascar first as indentured laborers, and later as free merchants. Despite many similarities between the two diasporas, they differed in terms of their cultural and linguistic propensities. Furthermore, since the 1990s, both Mauritius and Madagascar have been experiencing rising influences of Mandarin-speaking Chinese immigrants working in infrastructure construction, commercial and educational sectors. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in these two Western Indian Ocean countries between 2015 and 2020, this paper applies the theoretical lens of ‘diaspora-for-others,’ featured in this special issue, to explore the similarities and differences between Chinese migration trajectories to Mauritius and Madagascar, and their respective diasporic identity formations. Local socio-historical contexts in Mauritius, Madagascar, and China influence the transnational experiences of Mauritian and Malagasy Chinese communities, which further contributes to their heterogeneous, fluid and changing cultural identities. In addition, the People’s Republic of China’s increasing engagement in Western Indian Ocean countries as a gateway to Africa in the past two decades has also created more nuances in the distinguishable boundaries within the Chinese diaspora communities in the region.

EDITORIAL: Migration and competitiveness: Japan and the United States

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-124
Author(s):  
Philip L. Martin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Variable Cost ◽  
Fixed Cost ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Science And Engineering ◽  
The Past ◽  
Past Half Century ◽  
Key Sectors ◽  
Past Half

Japan and the United States, the world’s largest economies for most of the past half century, have very different immigration policies. Japan is the G7 economy most closed to immigrants, while the United States is the large economy most open to immigrants. Both Japan and the United States are debating how immigrants are and can con-tribute to the competitiveness of their economies in the 21st centuries. The papers in this special issue review the employment of and impacts of immigrants in some of the key sectors of the Japanese and US economies, including agriculture, health care, science and engineering, and construction and manufacturing. For example, in Japanese agriculture migrant trainees are a fixed cost to farmers during the three years they are in Japan, while US farmers who hire mostly unauthorized migrants hire and lay off workers as needed, making labour a variable cost.

Five Years and Count(er)ing: Memoir after Memoir

CounterText ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-32
Author(s):  
Norbert Bugeja
Keyword(s):  
Guest Editor ◽  
Arab Countries ◽  
National Museum ◽  
Terror Attack ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
The Past ◽  
Personal Perspectives ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Ongoing Project

In this retrospective piece, the Guest Editor of the first number of CounterText (a special issue titled Postcolonial Springs) looks back at the past five years from various scholarly and personal perspectives. He places particular focus on an event that took place mid-way between the 2011 uprisings across a number of Arab countries and the moment of writing: the March 2015 terror attack on the Bardo National Museum in Tunis, which killed twenty-two people and had a profound effect on Tunisian popular consciousness and that of the post-2011 Arab nations. In this context, the author argues for a renewed perspective on memoir as at once a memorial practice and a political gesture in writing, one that exceeds concerns of genre and form to encompass an ongoing project of political re-cognition following events that continue to remap the agenda for the region. The piece makes a brief final pitch for Europe's need to re-cognise, within those modes of ‘articulacy-in-difficulty’ active on its southern borders, specific answers to its own present quandaries.

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