Fueling the Colonial Future

2021 ◽  
Vol 90 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-210
Author(s):  
Ruth A. Morgan

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.

2021 ◽  
Vol 90 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-232
Author(s):  
Gregory A. Barton ◽  
Brett M. Bennett

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.


2021 ◽  
Vol 90 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-182
Author(s):  
Timothy P. Barnard

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.


2021 ◽  
Vol 90 (2) ◽  
pp. 140-156
Author(s):  
Brett M. Bennett ◽  
Gregory A. Barton

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.


2013 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 3-9
Author(s):  
Armin Geertz

This introduction to the special issue on narrative discusses various ways of approaching religious narrative. It looks at various evolutionary hypotheses and distinguishes between three fundamental aspects of narrative: 1. the neurobiological, psychological, social and cultural mechanisms and processes, 2. the many media and methods used in human communication, and 3. the variety of expressive genres. The introduction ends with a definition of narrative.


Transfers ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 87-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catharine Coleborne

This article examines the interpretive framework of “mobility” and how it might usefully be extended to the study of the Australasian colonial world of the nineteenth century, suggesting that social institutions reveal glimpses of (im)mobility. As the colonies became destinations for the many thousands of immigrants on the move, different forms of mobility were desired, including migration itself, or loathed, such as the itinerant lifestyles of vagrants. Specifically, the article examines mobility through brief accounts of the curtailed lives of the poor white immigrants of the period. The meanings of mobility were produced by immigrants' insanity, vagrancy, wandering, and their casual movement between, and reliance on, welfare and medical institutions. The regulation of these forms of mobility tells us more about the contemporary paradox of the co-constitution of mobility and stasis, as well as providing a more fluid understanding of mobility as a set of transfers between places and people.


This book addresses the sounds of the Crimean War, along with the many ways nineteenth-century wartime is aurally constructed. It examines wide-ranging experiences of listeners in Britain, France, Turkey, Russia, Italy, Poland, Latvia, Daghestan, Chechnya, and Crimea, illustrating the close interplay between nineteenth-century geographies of empire and the modes by which wartime sound was archived and heard. This book covers topics including music in and around war zones, the mediation of wartime sound, the relationship between sound and violence, and the historiography of listening. Individual chapters concern sound in Leo Tolstoy’s wartime writings, and his place within cosmopolitan sensibilities; the role of the telegraph in constructing sonic imaginations in London and the Black Sea region; the absence of archives for the sounds of particular ethnic groups, and how songs preserve memories for both Crimean Tatars and Polish nationalists; the ways in which perceptions of voice rearranged the mental geographies of Baltic Russia, and undermined aspirations to national unity in Italy; Italian opera as a means of conditioning elite perceptions of Crimean battlefields; and historical frames through which to understand the diffusion of violent sounds amid everyday life. The volume engages the academic fields of musicology, ethnomusicology, history, literary studies, sound studies, and the history of the senses.


Experiment ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-144
Author(s):  
Wendy Salmond

Abstract This essay examines Russian artist Viktor Vasnetsov’s search for a new kind of prayer icon in the closing decades of the nineteenth century: a hybrid of icon and painting that would reconcile Russia’s historic contradictions and launch a renaissance of national culture and faith. Beginning with his icons for the Spas nerukotvornyi [Savior Not Made by Human Hands] Church at Abramtsevo in 1880-81, for two decades Vasnetsov was hailed as an innovator, the four icons he sent to the Paris “Exposition Universelle” of 1900 marking the culmination of his vision. After 1900, his religious painting polarized elite Russian society and was bitterly attacked in advanced art circles. Yet Vasnetsov’s new icons were increasingly linked with popular culture and the many copies made of them in the late Imperial period suggest that his hybrid image spoke to a generation seeking a resolution to the dilemma of how modern Orthodox worshippers should pray.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (7) ◽  
pp. 3262
Author(s):  
Neill J. Turner

The present Special Issue comprises a collection of articles addressing the many ways in which extracellular matrix (ECM), or its components parts, can be used in regenerative medicine applications. ECM is a dynamic structure, composed of a three-dimensional architecture of fibrous proteins, proteoglycans, and glycosaminoglycans, synthesized by the resident cells. Consequently, ECM can be considered as nature’s ideal biologic scaffold material. The articles in this Special Issue cover a range of topics from the use of ECM components to manufacture scaffold materials, understanding how changes in ECM composition can lead to the development of disease, and how decellularization techniques can be used to develop tissue-derived ECM scaffolds for whole organ regeneration and wound repair. This editorial briefly summarizes the most interesting aspects of these articles.


Author(s):  
Germaine Halegoua ◽  
Erika Polson

This brief essay introduces the special issue on the topic of ‘digital placemaking’ – a concept describing the use of digital media to create a sense of place for oneself and/or others. As a broad framework that encompasses a variety of practices used to create emotional attachments to place through digital media use, digital placemaking can be examined across a variety of domains. The concept acknowledges that, at its core, a drive to create and control a sense of place is understood as primary to how social actors identify with each other and express their identities and how communities organize to build more meaningful and connected spaces. This idea runs through the articles in the issue, exploring the many ways people use digital media, under varied conditions, to negotiate differential mobilities and become placemakers – practices that may expose or amplify preexisting inequities, exclusions, or erasures in the ways that certain populations experience digital media in place and placemaking.


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