Colonial Rule and Economic Subordination [The North-Indian Economy in the Nineteenth Century]

1983 ◽  
Vol 89 (1) ◽  
pp. 169-198
Author(s):  
Simon Commander
PMLA ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 111 (2) ◽  
pp. 222-239 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Butler Cullingford

Frank McGuinness's Carthaginians (1988) uses the historical relation between Rome and Carthage as a metaphor for the contemporary struggles between Britain and the nationalist community in the North of Ireland. The play, an elegy for thirteen Irish civilians murdered by British paratroopers on Bloody Sunday (30 Jan. 1972) in Derry, draws subversive power from a trope that since the eighteenth century has focused imaginative Irish resistance to British colonial rule. I first explore the history and the gendering of the trope, from early English myths of Trojan descent and medieval Irish genealogies through eighteenth-century antiquarians and philologists, nineteenth-century novelists, Matthew Arnold, and James Joyce. I then examine poems from Seamus Heaney's North, Brian Friel's play Translations, and McGuinness's Carthaginians to show how the pressure of history has revitalized the Rome-Carthage trope, which functions as origin myth, colonial parable, and site of intersection between nationalism and sexuality.


1976 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Lamphear

After a considerable period of conflict with nineteenth-century traders, hunters and ‘explorers’, the Turkana of northwestern Kenya actively resisted the occupation of their country by the Imperial forces of British East Africa and Uganda during the second and third decades of the twentieth century. At first, this primary resistance was largely in the hands of war-leaders, notably Ebei, the most important military leader of the southern sections. Bitterness engendered by Hut Taxes and other unpopular British policies led to the brief ascendancy of Koletiang, an influential southern diviner, until he was imprisoned in 1911. Again the resistance leadership fell to the military until especially brutal ‘punitive actions’ in 1915 had the effect of consolidating resistance in the north. At this point, Lowalel, another powerful diviner, became the spiritual patron of the war-leaders and their followers, reaffirming the close co-operation which traditionally had existed between religious and military leaders in Turkana society. So charismatic and innovative was Lowalel's leadership that he amassed armies several thousand strong and was joined by other peoples including the Merille and Dongiro, as well as by the forces of the Ethiopian Empire, in resisting the extension of British colonial rule.


1988 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 266-291 ◽  
Author(s):  
James L. Cobban

By the beginning of the twentieth century, Semarang was a major port city and administrative centre on Java. Attainment of this position was due partly to the expansion of its hinterland during the nineteenth century. This expansion was closely related to developments in the means of transportation and the consequent ability of plantation owners to bring the products of their plantations to the port for shipment to foreign markets. By the end of the century virtually the whole economic life of central Java focused upon Semarang. The city also exercised administrative functions in the Dutch colonial administration and generally had been responsible for Dutch interests in the middle and eastern parts of the island. The importance of Semarang as an administrative centre increased after 1906. In that year the government incorporated the city as an urban municipality (stadsgemeente). In 1914 it had consular representation from the United States, Belgium, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Italy, Norway, Germany, and Thailand. Subsequently, in 1926 it became the capital of the Province of Central Java under the terms of an administrative reform fostered by the colonial government at Batavia. Status as an urban municipality meant that local officials sitting on a city council would govern the domestic affairs of the city. The members of the city council at first were appointed from Batavia, subsequently some of them were elected by residents of the city. By the beginning of the twentieth century Semarang had enhanced its position as a major port on the north coast of the island of Java. It was one of the foremost cities of the Dutch East Indies, along with Batavia and Surabaya, a leading port and a centre of administration and trade. This article outlines the growth of the port of Semarang during the nineteenth century and discusses some of the conflict related to this growth over living conditions in parts of the city during the twentieth century, a conflict which smouldered for several decades among the government, members of the city council, and the non-European residents of the city, one which remained unresolved at the end of the colonial era.


1985 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Toyin Falola

The view that Ibadan society in the nineteenth century did not discriminate against strangers, irrespective of their origins in Yorubaland, is now firmly entrenched in the literature. To be sure, Ibadan, a new nineteenth-century Yoruba city-state, founded as a consequence of the political crises of the early decades of the century, did maintain an ‘open door’ policy to strangers, many of whom went there as adventurers, craftsmen and traders, hoping to acquire wealth and fame. This article, however, controverts the view that Ibadan society gave the strangers and the indigenes equal opportunities to wealth and power. It argues that all the key political offices went only to the Oyo-Ibadan group which dominated the city-state. Strangers were also not allowed to participate fully in the leading heights of the economy, with the result that most of the wealthy citizens were also of Oyo-Yoruba origin.In the 1890s discrimination against strangers was such that a number of moves were made to expel them. However, the British, who imposed colonial rule on Ibadan in 1893, were against the expulsion of strangers.


Itinerario ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 59-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
O.N. Njoku

At the close of the nineteenth century, that is on the eve of colonial rule in Igboland, Igbo metal industry was flourishing. Production had attained a high level in the range and the quality of output. The output included agricultural equipment, traps and guns as well as title insignia and ornaments, mosdy made of copper and brass. The demand for die smiths' products were widespread and seemingly insatiable. To serve the need of dieir widely dispersed customers and patrons, Igbo smiths from Abiriba, Agulu Amokwe, Agulu Umana, Awka, and Nkwere undertook regular tours of parts of soudi-eastern Nigeria and even beyond – up to die Niger-Benue confluence area; past die Edo country to Ondo Yorubaland; and to the Bamenda district of die Cameroons. The superiority of Igbo metalworking led, in some of these places, to the demise of the local industry.


2016 ◽  
Vol 96 ◽  
pp. 363-389 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paolo Biagi ◽  
Elisabetta Starnini ◽  
Carlo Beltrame

The discovery of the wreck of the brig Mercurio, which sank in 1812 in the waters of the north Adriatic, is of major significance for the study of Italic Kingdom vessels from the Napoleonic era. The underwater excavations carried out in 2004–11 led to the recovery of many small finds, among which are several gunflints of different size and shape. The Mercurio gunflints were produced mainly from blades using a technique in use in Britain and France, but also in the workshops of the Lessini Hills around Ceredo (Verona province, northern Italy). We suggest that the flint employed for their manufacture probably came from Monte Baldo, in the Trentino, or perhaps from the River Tagliamento, in Friuli. We can exclude the possibility that the specimens recovered from the shipwreck were made from French flint because of the typically north Italian manufacturing technique and the character of the grey Treveti-derived flint. Given the complexity of the period during which the Grado (or Pirano) battle took place, the study of even such small items can contribute to a better interpretation of the dramatic events that characterised the beginning of the nineteenth century in that part of the Mediterranean.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian Schwecke

Starting in the late nineteenth century, colonial rule in India took an active interest in regulating financial markets beyond the bridgeheads of European capital in intercontinental trade. Regulatory efforts were part of a modernizing project seeking to produce alignments between British and Indian business procedures, and to create the financial basis for incipient industrialization in India. For vast sections of Indian society, however, they pushed credit/debt relations into the realm of extra-legality, while the new, regulated agents of finance remained incapable (and unwilling) of serving their needs. Combining historical and ethnographic approaches, the book questions underlying assumptions of modernization in finance that continue to prevail in postcolonial India, and delineates the socioeconomic responses they produced, and studies the reputational economies of debt that have emerged instead – extra-legal markets embedded into communication flows on trust and reputation that have turned out to be significantly more exploitative than their colonial predecessors.


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