Turning Tropical

2018 ◽  
pp. 130-166
Author(s):  
Michitake Aso
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Human Disease ◽  
Human Biology ◽  
Industrial Agriculture ◽  
Pasteur Institute ◽  
World War ◽  
Racial Categories ◽  
Rubber Plantations ◽  
Colonial Society ◽  
Ecological View

Rubber plantations necessitated extensive medical studies of human biology and diseases. Researchers at the Pasteur Institute carried out numerous studies of mosquitoes and plasmodia, and to a lesser extent other pathogens, among plantation workers. Race served as an important analytic category for these researchers even as anthropologists were beginning to question the coherence of racial categories. Chapter 4 investigates the racialized society that the architects of industrial agriculture imagined they were creating. It also discusses the interactions in Indochina between the burgeoning tropical sciences and government and transnational capital, focusing on human disease environments to examine how “rubber science” was applied to the surrounding countryside. If plantations were microcosms of the global colonial society, they were also laboratories where solutions to colonial problems were worked out. Tropical agronomy, geography, and medicine, linked by an ecological view of climates and soils, helped naturalize racial distinctions for the colonizers. Yet the colonial subjects who were the targets of these projects did not act in ways that race makers expected. While these subjects could not control the discourse of race, they could appropriate it for their own ends, and they attempted to do so before the outbreak of World War II.

Maintaining Modernity

2018 ◽  
pp. 169-205
Author(s):  
Michitake Aso
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Industrial Agriculture ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
World War ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Building Projects ◽  
Imperial Power ◽  
Indochina War

Rubber trees helped structure the violent transition from empire to nation-state during nearly thirty years of conflict on the Indochinese peninsula. Chapter 5 focuses on the struggle over plantations that took place in Vietnam and Cambodia between 1945 and 1954. During the First Indochina War, plantation environments served as a key military battleground. In the fighting that took place immediately after the end of World War II, many plantation workers, encouraged by the anticolonial Việt Minh, attacked the rubber trees as symbols of hated colonial-era abuse. Slogans placing the culpability of worker suffering on trees show how plantation workers often treated the trees themselves as enemies. Despite their colonial origins, plantation environments were important material and symbolic landscapes for those seeking to build postcolonial Vietnamese nations. French planters claimed to struggle heroically against nature, Vietnamese workers saw themselves as struggling against both nature and human exploitation, and anticolonial activists articulated struggles against imperial power structures. Industrial agriculture such as rubber was vital to nation-building projects, and by the early 1950s, Vietnamese planners began to envision a time when plantations would form a part of a national economy.

Scarcely Making Ends Meet

2018 ◽  
pp. 10-26
Author(s):  
Aaron T. Hale-Dorrell
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Rural Society ◽  
Industrial Agriculture ◽  
World War ◽  
Agricultural Enterprises ◽  
Urban Workers ◽  
The Government ◽  
Agrarian Crisis ◽  
Harsh Conditions

The Soviet Union’s path through crises of collectivization, World War II, and postwar famine established important preconditions for Khrushchev’s reforms to agriculture and associated changes in rural society. Early visionaries imagined highly productive industrial farms. Under Stalin, the government and Communist Party violently nationalized peasant farms, subordinating combined agricultural enterprises to a bureaucracy that forcibly requisitioned grain but lacked the means and wherewithal to facilitate increases in productivity. Farms and farmers struggled to make ends meet before, during, and after the war, when they faced harsh conditions that culminated in famine. Even privileged urban workers and officials remained reliant on farms for food and therefore faced lean times. When Stalin died in March 1953, his successors moved quickly to address this agrarian crisis. These conditions opened the way for Khrushchev to pursue his distinct version of industrial agriculture and launch his initiative to rapidly expand corn cultivation.

WARTIME RECRUITING PRACTICES, MARTIAL IDENTITY AND POST-WORLD WAR II DEMOBILIZATION IN COLONIAL KENYA

2005 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
HAL BRANDS
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Military Service ◽  
World War ◽  
National Politics ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Post World War Ii ◽  
New Class ◽  
Colonial Society ◽  
The Social

After World War II, African ex-servicemen in Kenya sought to maintain the socioeconomic gains they had accrued through service in the King's African Rifles (KAR). Looking for middle-class employment and social privileges, they challenged existing relationships within the colonial state. For the most part, veterans did not participate in national politics, believing that their goals could be achieved within the confines of colonial society. The postwar actions of KAR veterans are best explained by an examination of their initial perceptions of colonial military service. Indeed, the social and economic connotations of KAR service, combined with the massive wartime expansion of Kenyan defense forces, created a new class of Africans with distinctive characteristics and interests. These socioeconomic perceptions proved powerful after the war, often informing ex-askari action.

Colonial Education in the Third Reich: The Witzenhausen Colonial School and the Rendsburg Colonial School for Women

2016 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Willeke Sandler
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Young Women ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
The Political ◽  
Colonial Education ◽  
World War ◽  
Colonial Society ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
New Phase

AbstractIn 1926, the Women's League of the German Colonial Society opened the Rendsburg Colonial School for Women to train young women to go abroad to the former German colonies. This school joined the Witzenhausen Colonial School (for men), founded in 1899, as institutions of colonial education in a Germany now without an overseas empire. After 1933, the schools entered a new phase of their histories. This article examines the Rendsburg and Witzenhausen Colonial Schools in tandem in order to explore the place of colonial education in the Third Reich. Through their curricula, the schools sought to negotiate the value of this education to the ideological and territorial goals of the Third Reich, a negotiation that was not always smooth, as demonstrated by debates about the political and pedagogical suitability of the directors of the schools. World War II heightened the gendered differences between the schools and led to different wartime experiences, in particular the Rendsburg school's participation in Germanization projects in eastern Europe. The trajectory of both schools in the Third Reich demonstrates that the cultural/national/racial importance of colonial work retained relevance and indeed obtained increased value in a Germany without overseas colonies.

Agricultural Education and Environmental Protection: A Vision of Ecological Agrarianism in America

2012 ◽  
Vol 524-527 ◽  
pp. 3326-3329
Author(s):  
Gui Gui Yao
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Environmental Protection ◽  
Agricultural Education ◽  
Industrial Agriculture ◽  
Land Grant ◽  
World War ◽  
Land Grant University

Ecological agrarianism came on stage in America in reaction to the development of industrial agriculture, which gained its momentum after World War II. In order to establish a link between agriculture and environmental protection, ecological agrarians emphasize the importance of education in the changing of fundamental assumptions of human’s place in nature and advocated reform of agricultural education, especially that in land-grant university (LGU), which has been quite effective and promising.

Transhumanists’ Informational View of Being and Knowledge

2021 ◽  
pp. 191-231
Author(s):  
Susan B. Levin
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Human Biology ◽  
Pure Reason ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Critique Of Pure Reason ◽  
World War ◽  
Human Reason ◽  
Self Transcendence ◽  
Concept Of Information

What transhumanists see as context-independent truths involving knowledge and reality are actually holdovers from World War II and its aftermath: prior to the 1940s and 1950s, the informational view of reality and knowledge that soon appeared self-evidently true did not exist. The concept of information emerged unscathed by the failure of the earliest attempts to apply information theory to biology, firmly attaching to DNA, and human biology was deemed highly manipulable. Transhumanism channels this perspective on human biology, one that science itself shows increasingly to be outdated. Beyond their problematic informational frame, transhumanists fail to appreciate what it means for us to think or experience anything at all as human beings. Though Immanuel Kant is cited as a backdrop for their focus on humanity’s self-transcendence via rationality, extrapolation from his Critique of Pure Reason shows their confidence that human reason will spur the creation of posthumanity to be irrational.

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