Evolutions

Author(s):  
Gerard Sasges

The remains of the Indochina’s alcohol regime dot the landscape of today’s Indochina today. From the Revolutionary Museum in Hanoi, housed in the former headquarters of the reviled Department of Customs and Monopolies, to the French embassy that occupies the SFDIC’s former headquarters, to the Khmer Distilleries Company producing “Super Whisky” at US$1.00 per bottle, legacies of the long-ago monopoly endure. Yet while colonial rule has long since ended and the SFDIC is a footnote to French economic history, the same convergence of science, state, and industry that drove the creation of the monopoly a century ago continues to operate in the present day.

2020 ◽  
pp. 225-251
Author(s):  
Ernest Ming-Tak Leung

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.


Author(s):  
Sabyasachi Bhattacharya

The archives are generally sites where historians conduct research into our past. Seldom are they objects of research. Sabyasachi Bhattacharya traces the path that led to the creation of a central archive in India, from the setting up of the Imperial Record Department, the precursor of the National Archives of India, and the Indian Historical Records Commission, to the framing of archival policies and the change in those policies over the years. In the last two decades of colonial rule in India, there were anticipations of freedom in many areas of the public sphere. These were felt in the domain of archiving as well, chiefly in the form of reversal of earlier policies. From this perspective, Bhattacharya explores the relation between knowledge and power and discusses how the World Wars and the decline of Britain, among other factors, effected a transition from a Eurocentric and disparaging approach to India towards a more liberal and less ethnocentric one.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-44
Author(s):  
CHRISTOF DEJUNG

Abstract This article examines the history of the Swiss merchant house Volkart Bros., which was one of the most important exporters of Indian raw cotton and one of the biggest trading firms in South Asia during the colonial period. The study allows for a fresh look at Indian economic history by putting forth two main arguments. First, it charts the history of a continental European firm that was active in South Asia to offer a better understanding of the economic entanglements of the subcontinent with the wider world, which often had a reach beyond the empire. This ties in with recent research initiatives that aim to examine the history of imperialism from a transnational perspective. Second, the history of a private company helps in developing a micro-perspective on the often ambiguous relation between the business goals of individual enterprises and colonial rule. The article argues that this may be evidence of the fact that capitalism and imperialism were two different, although sometimes converging, spatial structures, each with a distinct logic of its own. What is more, the positive interactions between European and Indian businessmen, fostered by a cosmopolitan attitude among business elites, point to the fact that even in the age of empire, the class background of actors could be more important for the establishing of cooperative ventures than the colour of their skin or their geographical origin. It is argued that this offers the possibility of examining the history of world trade in terms of global social history.


2008 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 383-401 ◽  
Author(s):  
MEGAN VAUGHAN

ABSTRACTThe elaborate mortuary rites of the Chitimukulu (the paramount chief of the Bemba people) attracted the attention of both colonial administrators and anthropologists in inter-war Northern Rhodesia. This paper examines the political and symbolic significance of these rites before turning to an analysis of accounts, by the anthropologist Audrey Richards, of the deaths of two ‘commoners’ in the 1930s. The paper argues that chiefly power resided less in the threat of death which was enacted spectacularly in the Chitimukulu's mortuary rituals than in the promise to create and protect life, located in the practices of quotidian life. This promise of the creation and protection of life was being progressively undermined by the conditions of colonial rule.


2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (9) ◽  
pp. 2138-2150
Author(s):  
L.V. Gudakova ◽  
E.D. Grebennikova

Subject. We study the main directions and special aspects of the monetary system development during the reign of Catherine II. We discuss the monetary reform associated with the introduction of bank notes and the emergence of the banking system, as well as the creation of new financial systems. Objectives. We focus on identifying the economic reasons that propelled Catherine the Great to use a new instrument of State regulation of the financial system, on showing how the creation of the banking system, still within the conditions of serfdom, acquired its own specifics. Methods. We apply the logical, historical and diachronous approaches, economic research methods. We also use the principles of historical method, dialectics, the method of scientific abstraction and analysis, which determine the foundations of the financial reforms of Catherine the Great. Results. We revealed the role of creating the banking system and non-banking institutions during the second half of the eighteenth century, classified their types and goals, determined the main characteristics of paper money. The monetary reform of Catherine the Great, which created favorable conditions for external borrowings, ensured the recovery of public finance in general. Conclusions. The study concludes on important role of State regulation in the development of financial infrastructure, on the need to use the experience in the modern practice of private enterprise development and capital accumulation. The findings can be used in lectures and seminars for basic courses, like History of Finance and Economic History.


2018 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 573-593 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerrit Verhoeven ◽  
Nina Payrhuber

Belgium has often been labelled as a reluctant colonizer in the past. Yet, a meticulous analysis of tourist magazines, guidebooks, brochures, posters, and documentaries on colonial tourism in the Belgian Congo tells a different story. Travel literature was often teeming with pro-empire propaganda that emphasized the primitiveness of the Congo and underscored the civilizing mission. Tourism was, in this respect, not very different from the overtly positive framing of the Belgian colonial rule that was propagated by museums, monuments of colonial heroes, exhibitions, movies and schoolbooks. The aim of this article is to take the argument even further. Most research on colonial tourism is focused on the creation of pro-empire propaganda in tourist magazines and guidebooks, while the actual appropriation of this image by travellers of flesh and blood is often tacitly assumed or – even worse – taken for granted. Interviews with ex-colonials show that the reality was much more subtle, as the overly positive propaganda was not always swallowed hook, line and sinker.


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