scholarly journals Colonial taxation in Africa. A fiscal history of the Congo through the lens of customs (1886-1914)

Afrika Focus ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bas De Roo
Keyword(s):  
Key Words ◽  
Free State ◽  
Bond Markets ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Limited Access ◽  
History Of ◽  
Congo Free State ◽  
Belgian Congo

Every colonial state in Africa faced the fiscal challenge of ruling vast, inaccessible and thinly populated territories that produced relatively little taxable wealth, without metropolitan grants-in-aid and with limited access to international bond markets. How colonial states dealt with this challenge determined how much resources could be invested in the administration of African colonies and how the colonizer interacted with the colonized. As such, taxation fundamentally shaped colonial rule. Thus far, most scholars have either studied the practice of “native” taxation or the general spending and revenue-raising patterns of colonial administrations. This thesis shines a new light on the fiscal history of colonial Africa – as well as the colonial history of the Congo – by focusing on customs, the second fiscal pillar on which African colonial states were founded. Key words : colonial history, fiscal history, Congo Free State, Belgian Congo 

The War of Legs

Transfers ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 102-120
Author(s):  
Michael Pesek
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Medical Care ◽  
East Africa ◽  
Transport Infrastructure ◽  
World War ◽  
East African ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
History Of ◽  
Main Factors ◽  
Belgian Congo

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.”

De zaak van Rechter Grootaert en de strijd om het Nederlands in Belgisch-Congo. Een symbooldossier uit de jaren vijftig

2008 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-46
Author(s):  
Bert Govaerts
Keyword(s):  
Private Property ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Free State ◽  
Court Cases ◽  
In De Praktijk ◽  
French Speaking ◽  
Congo Free State ◽  
The Right ◽  
Belgian Congo

In 1908 verwierf België de souvereiniteit over de voormalige Congo Vrijstaat, die particulier bezit van koning Leopold II was geweest. De nieuwe kolonie kreeg een soort grondwet, het Koloniale Charter. Artikel 3 daarvan bepaalde dat er in Belgisch-Congo taalvrijheid heerste, maar ook dat de Belgen er dezelfde taalrechten en -bescherming zouden genieten als in het moederland. Uiterlijk tegen 1913 moesten speciale decreten de taalregeling in rechtszaken en in de administratie vastleggen. Die afspraak werd niet gehonoreerd. De decreten kwamen er niet en de kolonie werd in de praktijk exclusief Franstalig. Een klein aantal Vlaamse koloniale ambtenaren verzette zich daar tegen en boekte ook beperkte successen, op plaatselijk niveau. Een doorbraak kwam er pas in de nadagen van de kolonie, toen een Vlaams magistraat, Jozef Grootaert, het recht opeiste om in het Nederlands te vonnissen. Pas na een lang en bitter gevecht, uitgevochten tot op regeringsniveau en mee gekleurd door allerlei persoonlijke motieven, werd uiteindelijk in 1956, meer dan veertig jaar later dan afgesproken, een decreet over het gebruik van de talen bij het koloniale gerecht goedgekeurd. Over een decreet i.v.m. bestuurzaken raakte men het niet meer eens voor de onafhankelijkheid van de kolonie in 1960. In het onafhankelijke Congo was er voor het Nederlands geen (officiële) plaats.________The Case of Judge Grootaert and the struggle for Dutch in the Belgian CongoIn 1908 Belgium acquired the sovereignty over the former Congo Free State, which had been the private property of king Leopold II. The new colony was granted a kind of constitution, the Colonial Charter. Article 3 of this charter provided not only that there would be freedom of language in the Belgian Congo, but also that the Belgians in that country would enjoy the same rights and protection of their language as they had in their motherland. The language regulation for court cases and the administration was to be laid down in special decrees by 1913 at the latest. That agreement was not honoured. The decrees failed to be drawn up and in practice the colony became exclusively French speaking. A small number of Flemish colonial officials resisted against this situation and in fact obtained some limited successes on a local level. A breakthrough finally occurred in the latter years of the colony, when a Flemish magistrate, Jozef Grootaert claimed the right to pronounce judgement in Dutch. Only after a long and bitter struggle that was fought out until the bitter end on a governmental level and that was also characterized by all kinds of personal motives, a decree about the use of languages at the colonial court was finally approved in 1956, more than forty years after it had been agreed. It proved to be no longer possible to reach agreement about a decree concerning administrative matters before the independence of the colony in 1960. In the independent Congo Republic no (official) role was reserved for Dutch.

scholarly journals Tuberculosis, Housing and the Colonial State: Hong Kong, 1900-1950

2003 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 653-682 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Jones
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
British Rule ◽  
Laissez Faire ◽  
Imperial State ◽  
Indirect Rule

As Tak-Wing Ngo has argued, the ‘dominant’ view of colonial rule in Hong Kong is one of a state which governed through ‘a deliberate policy of indirect rule—a combination of economic laissez-faire and political non-intervention’. It depicts a government which was disengaged from the population, preferring to see the colony as a trading opportunity, whilst leaving the condition of the peoples it held sway over to the philanthropy and humanitarianism of the colony's Chinese elites. This view of British rule was even supported by the primary representative of the imperial state when Sir David Trench admitted in 1970 that social policy, in the sense of responding to the needs of the populace, only began in the colony in 1953. But as Tak-Wing Ngo has argued, these ‘established narratives’ of Hong Kong's colonial history need to be reassessed and a more nuanced approach adopted to reveal the complexity of even Hong Kong's seemingly simple ‘colonial state-society’ relations.

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.

Neighbors Recognizing and Redefining Identities in the Belgian Congo, 1916–1935

2020 ◽  
pp. 104-126
Author(s):  
Kimberly D. Hill
Keyword(s):  
Historical Context ◽  
State Policies ◽  
Free State ◽  
Traditional Religion ◽  
Church Members ◽  
African Theology ◽  
African People ◽  
African Traditional Religion ◽  
Congo Free State ◽  
Belgian Congo

Chapter 4 explains how the ministerial priorities of Althea Brown and Alonzo Edmiston developed through coordination with African villagers, students, and church members in the Belgian Congo. The missionaries’ descriptions of local life are analyzed through comparison with historical context and anthropological studies of the region. African theology produced in the three decades following decolonization is introduced as an interpretive lens for analyzing the perspectives of African people experiencing the first decades of transition from Congo Free State policies to the Belgian Congo government. The chapter closes by identifying the Edmistons’ sense of kinship with the Kuba kingdom as their link to specific rituals in African traditional religion.

‘A Conglomeration of […] often Conflicting Ideas’: Resolving the ‘Native Question’ in Java and the Outer Islands in the Dutch East Indies, 1900-1925

Itinerario ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 27 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 160-188 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joost Coté
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Colonial Discourse ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
East Indies ◽  
Colonial Policy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Dutch East Indies ◽  
Dutch Colonial

This paper examines Dutch colonial discourse as it was developing at the beginning of the twentieth century. I argue that colonial circumstances were changing at the beginning of the twentieth century in many aspects - economic, political, social - and that these changes required new policy and administrative responses. I take as examples of these changing colonial conditions and responses, two episodes in the history of ‘the late colonial state’, which I argue are both representative of and formative in shaping, colonial policy in the last decades of Dutch colonial rule in Indonesia.

WIELDING THE EPOKOLO: CORPORAL PUNISHMENT AND TRADITIONAL AUTHORITY IN COLONIAL OVAMBOLAND

2015 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 301-320 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID CRAWFORD JONES
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Corporal Punishment ◽  
Salient Feature ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Traditional Authority ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
History Of ◽  
Traditional Authorities ◽  
Communal Norms ◽  
Society Today

AbstractBased on both archival research and oral interviews conducted in northern Namibia, this article traces the history of public flogging in Ovamboland throughout the twentieth century. In contrast to recent scholarship that views corporal punishment in modern Africa mainly through the lens of colonial governance, the article argues that because the South African colonial state never withdrew the power to punish from the region's traditional authorities, these indigenous leaders were able to maintain a degree of legitimacy among their subjects, who looked to the kings and headmen to punish wrongdoers and maintain communal norms. Finally, the article explores why nostalgia for corporal punishment remains a salient feature in Namibian society today, 25 years after the end of colonial rule.

Memoir of Tanzania: Learning about early childhood projects in developing countries

2017 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 80-90
Author(s):  
Helen Penn
Keyword(s):  
Early Childhood ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Initial Visit ◽  
Low Income Country ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Childhood Interventions ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Looking Back

This article considers the contribution of memoir as a method for understanding complex early childhood issues. It recounts the author’s first visit to Tanzania, a low-income country with a chequered history of independence from colonial rule. The article uses memories from that initial visit to reflect on the changing interpretations of colonial history and early childhood interventions. Looking back, it also considers the impact of that visit on the author’s own work trajectory, as an epiphany which led to new areas of work and conceptualization.

Church, State, and “Native Liberty” in the Belgian Congo

2020 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 156-185
Author(s):  
Gale Kenny ◽  
Tisa Wenger
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Religious Freedom ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
National Unity ◽  
Foreign Missions ◽  
Civilizing Mission ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
History Of ◽  
Belgian Congo

AbstractThis essay describes a religious freedom controversy that developed between the world wars in the Belgian colony of the Congo, where Protestant missionaries complained that Catholic priests were abusing Congolese Protestants and that the Belgian government favored the Catholics. The history of this campaign demonstrates how humanitarian discourses of religious freedom—and with them competing configurations of church and state—took shape in colonial contexts. From the beginnings of the European scramble for Africa, Protestant and Catholic missionaries had helped formulate the “civilizing” mission and the humanitarian policies—against slavery, for free trade, and for religious freedom—that served to justify the European and U.S. empires of the time. Protestant missionaries in the Congo challenged the privileges granted to Catholic institutions by appealing to religious freedom guarantees in colonial and international law. In response, Belgian authorities and Catholic missionaries elaborated a church-state arrangement that limited “foreign” missions in the name of Belgian national unity. Both groups, however, rejected Native Congolese religious movements—which refused the authority of the colonial church(es) along with the colonial state—as “political” and so beyond the bounds of legitimate “religion.” Our analysis shows how competing configurations of church and state emerged dialogically in this colonial context and how alternative Congolese movements ultimately challenged Belgian colonial rule.

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