"Not at Home in Empire"

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Binayak Roy
Keyword(s):  
Political Identity ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Amitav Ghosh ◽  
Military Discourse ◽  
Existential Crisis ◽  
British Military ◽  
War Machine ◽  
Native Identity ◽  
The Military

Amitav Ghosh opposes the “agonistic” or “reconciliatory” strand in postcolonial studies espoused amongst others by Bhabha. By fusing postcolonialism with postmodernism, this school of postcolonial thought rejects resistance and reconfigures the historical project of invasion, expropriation and exploitation as a symbiotic encounter. As a staunch anti-colonialist, what Ghosh presents in his writing is the ubiquity of the Eurocentrism of the colonized. The Glass Palace represents how colonial discourses (primarily the military discourse) have molded native identity and resulted in severe vulnerability and existential crisis. Self-alienation is apparent in the characters of the Collector, a Britain-trained colonial administrator and the soldier, Arjun, who has been transformed into a war-machine in the hands of British military discourse. The narrative attempts to revisit and reframe the colonial past by questioning the ideological, epistemological and ontological assumptions of the imperial powers, the masks of conquest. The community of the disillusioned soldiers of the British Indian army presented in The Glass Palace is one that challenges, provokes, threatens, but also enlivens, is a community of disagreement, dissonance, and resistance. Popular or insurgent nationalism thus reclaims or imagines forms of community and challenges colonial rule giving shape to a collective political identity. This article also intends to trace the failures of Burmese nationalism after a series of insurrections on ethnic grounds belied the aspirations of the postcolonial nation state.

Cartography and Conflict: The Board of Ordnance and the Construction of the Military Landscape of Scotland, 1689–1815

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolyn J. Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Tower Of London ◽  
British Military ◽  
Drawing Room ◽  
Transportation Development ◽  
The Military

Scotland generated four Jacobite risings from 1689 to 1745, plus Franco-Jacobite invasion threats in 1708 and 1744. British military mapping was the responsibility of the London-based Board of Ordnance. After the 1707 Act of Union the Scottish Ordnance Office came under London control and received additional staff. Road making was initiated, associated with Generals George Wade and William Roy. Originally fortress-oriented, the Drawing Room in the Tower of London shifted to producing topographical surveys, oriented after 1746 towards transportation, development and integration.

Decolonizing Palestine

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Somdeep Sen
Keyword(s):  
West Bank ◽  
Gaza Strip ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
The West ◽  
Governing Body ◽  
Legislative Council ◽  
Armed Resistance ◽  
Liberation Movements ◽  
The Gaza Strip

This book rejects the notion that liberation from colonialization exists as a singular moment in history when the colonizer is ousted by the colonized. Instead, it considers the case of the Palestinian struggle for liberation from its settler colonial condition as a complex psychological and empirical mix of the colonial and the postcolonial. Specifically, the book examines the two seemingly contradictory, yet coexistent, anticolonial and postcolonial modes of politics adopted by Hamas following the organization's unexpected victory in the 2006 Palestinian Legislative Council election. Despite the expectations of experts, Hamas has persisted as both an armed resistance to Israeli settler colonial rule and as a governing body. Based on ethnographic material collected in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Israel, and Egypt, the book argues that the puzzle Hamas presents is not rooted in predicting the timing or process of its abandonment of either role. The challenge instead lies in explaining how and why it maintains both, and what this implies for the study of liberation movements and postcolonial studies more generally.

From Small Wars to Guerrilla Warfare: Imperial School of British Military Thought During the Interbellum

2021 ◽  
pp. 22
Author(s):  
Stanislav Malkin
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Mutual Influence ◽  
Guerrilla Warfare ◽  
Internal Security ◽  
Guerilla Warfare ◽  
Small Wars ◽  
British Military ◽  
The Face ◽  
Colonial Order ◽  
The Military

The Interbellum era was marked by the competition of various interpretations of guerrilla warfare and small wars, which were a practical expression of rebel activity in the colonies and on the outskirts of the British Empire. Discussions in that regard reflected both theoretical and doctrinal contradictions and the bureaucratic rivalry between the departments responsible for its internal security and the confrontation between the military and civilian authorities over the boundaries of their responsibility to preserve colonial order. The evolution of the meaning of the concept of “guerilla warfare” within the British military thought in the first half of the 20th century is demonstrated by highlighting the stages of the process, historical reconstruction of the levels of discussion of this topic in a professional environment, and identifying the degree of mutual influence of its basic provisions in the face of budgetary constraints and new challenges to colonial rule after the First World War. This approach allowed to specify ideas about the place and role of the army in the functioning of the internal security system of the British Empire at the final stage of its existence. The analysis of the semantics and content of the “guerilla warfare” concept between two world wars makes it possible to apply a new approach to the issue of disagreements between the military and civilian authorities over the choice of the military and political course in the conflicts of this kind. Thus, the identified differences may be viewed as a result not of the bureaucratic differences only, but as the absence of the unified understanding of the “modern rebellion” problem among the military as itself.

Imperial Culture and Hunting in Colonial India

2018 ◽  
pp. 38-78
Author(s):  
Vijaya Ramadas Mandala
Keyword(s):  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Colonial Administration ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
East Indian ◽  
Imperial Culture ◽  
Indian Company ◽  
British Military ◽  
The World ◽  
Game Hunting ◽  
Big Game Hunting

This chapter offers a brief account of the institution of the hunt, or shikar, and its significance as an allegory of rule in pre-colonial and colonial India, by illustrating the transition of hunting from the Mughals to the East Indian Company period. Further, this study moves away from the purely recreational focus on hunting, and places it within the world of everyday colonial administration and rule. It firmly establishes the link between shikar and governance, particularly how the British positioned and employed big-game hunting and conservation at various levels, and in different situations, aimed at the establishment and stabilization of colonial rule, and in ordering and redrawing Indian marginal territories. Another key aspect is how shikar served as an essential platform, where power and rule operated in a recreational situation. Here, the chapter illustrates the way the hunting field aided and enabled the British to formulate their political and imperial agendas in an expedient way. The sporting lives of the Company administrators like John Malcolm and James Outram are studied in detail to demonstrate the nature of high imperial decades and British military credence in the Indian hunting field.

Women in Somalia

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Safia Aidid
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
State Violence ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
Somali Women ◽  
Education And Employment ◽  
The Military ◽  
Life Roles

Although Somali women have played a dynamic and important role in the making of Somalia’s history, their histories have been obscured by archival limitations and androcentric scholarship. Women in traditional Somali society—pastoralists, agriculturalists, and urbanites alike—were central to their communities for their reproductive and productive labor. They embodied social capital, as the practice of exogamous marriage that brought them to other communities also created important reciprocal relations between different kinship groups. Although a deeply patriarchal culture defined their life roles primarily as wives and mothers, Somali women used that very culture and the indigenous resources available to them to exercise agency, negotiate their positions, and carve out their own spaces. The advent of colonial rule, which partitioned the Somali peninsula between Britain, France, Italy, and the Ethiopian empire, drastically altered women’s lives. It fused traditional patriarchal relations with European ones, codified tradition and flexible communal identities, treated women as dependents of their male relatives, and created opportunities for men in education and employment that were not available to women. Though Somali women were at the forefront of the anticolonial struggle, the male elite who inherited the state after independence excluded women from the political sphere. Women’s rights took on a prominent role in the military dictatorship of General Mohamed Siad Barre, yet the repression and state violence that characterized his rule affected women acutely. The civil war that followed the disintegration of the Somali state has similarly affected women intimately. In addition to the gendered experience of violence, the increasingly conservative nature of Somali society has resulted in the loss of many gains made for women’s rights after independence. From precolonial society to colonial rule, dictatorship, and civil war, Somali women have exhibited the resilience, agency, and fortitude to make the most of their circumstances.

Sally Haslanger and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on the Possibility of Metaphysics of Resistance and its Implications for Postcolonial Feminist Theologizing

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 130-146
Author(s):  
Jeane C. Peracullo
Keyword(s):  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Asian Women ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
Social Constructs ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Social Theorist ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Postcolonial Feminist ◽  
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

In Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique, contemporary feminist philosopher Sally Haslanger claims that the reality of race and gender (both social constructs) is built on unjust social structures and must be resisted. Meanwhile, contemporary social theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak extends the term ‘subaltern’ to Third World Asian women who were rendered inarticulate by centuries of oppressive masculinist, imperialist, and colonial rule. This article examines how a metaphysics of resistance, culled from philosophy and postcolonial studies, can contribute to expanding postcolonial feminist theologizing.

Pageantry, Pioneers, Panics and Punitive Expeditions

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graham Dominy
Keyword(s):  
African Population ◽  
Military Officers ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
British Military ◽  
The Military ◽  
The Prestige

This chapter examines the role of the garrison in the British Empire's establishment of a colonial state in Natal during the period 1840s–1860s. It first explains how the garrison transformed Pietermaritzburg from a Trekker settlement to a Victorian colonial capital before considering the ways in which the British Crown used pageantry and propaganda to reinforce the prestige of the colonial state while masking the military weakness of the garrison in relation to the colony's potential enemies. It then discusses the garrison's “punitive expeditions”—almost as an extension of the parading on the barrack square of Fort Napier—in response to panic and rumors of invasions. Ironically, those raids provoked “panics” among the African population; such panics fed the almost pathological fear that the settlers had of a “native” rising or “combination.” The chapter also looks at the appointment of British military officers in various civil posts in the colony and concludes with an assessment of the Zulu invasion scare of 1861 and the question that it raised regarding payment for the garrison.

Analyzing Collective Violence in Indonesia: An Overview

2008 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 341-359 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashutosh Varshney
Keyword(s):  
East Timor ◽  
New Order ◽  
Collective Violence ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Japanese Military ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Violence ◽  
Primary School Age ◽  
The Cost ◽  
The Military

In 2001, using violent junctures in the life of a seventy-year-old Indonesian as a metaphor for the whole nation, Benedict Anderson summarized the history of violence in Indonesia in a poignant manner:A seventy year old Indonesian woman or man today will have observed and/or directly experienced the following: as a primary school age child, the police-state authoritarianism of … Dutch colonial rule …; as a young teenager, the wartime Japanese military regime, which regularly practiced torture in private and executions in public …; on the eve of adulthood, four years (1945–49) of popular struggle for national liberation … at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives; as a young mother or father … the cataclysm of 1965–66, when at least 600,000 and perhaps as many as two million people … were slaughtered by the military; in the middle age, the New Order police-state, and its bloody attempt to annex East Timor, which cost over 200,000 East Timorese lives …; in old age, the spread of armed resistance in … Aceh and West Papua, the savage riots of May 1998 … and … the outbreak of ruthless internecine confessional warfare in the long peaceful Moluccas. (Anderson 2001, 9–10)

scholarly journals The Impact of the Military Profession on Highland Gentry Families, c. 1730 – 1830

2006 ◽  
Vol 85 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stana Nenadic
Keyword(s):  
Family Formation ◽  
Alternative Interpretation ◽  
Military Establishment ◽  
British Military ◽  
Family Discord ◽  
Two Generations ◽  
Beneficial Impact ◽  
Military Profession ◽  
The Military ◽  
The Impact

The expansion of the British military establishment from c. 1730 to 1830 is well known, as is the large numbers Scots and particularly highlanders who formed the British officer class. There is a common assumption—in some respects well founded—that the army had a beneficial impact on the political and economic experience of Scotland. This article offers an alternative interpretation through a focus on the social and cultural implications for highland gentry families of having so many male kin engaged in one particular career. The first two sections examine the scale and increasing attractions of military employment relative to other career destinations, notably farming, the legal profession and trade via urban business apprenticeship. Two generations with different motivations are compared, and the importance of the loss of practical farming and commercial expertise is noted. The next section explores the impact of military employment on relationships within families, particularly between officers and their father or elder brother, but also on relationships with female kin and on the broader processes of family formation through marriage. Of particular significance was the tendency towards teenage recruitment among the highland officer class, which removed boys from the influence of family and gave rise to reckless behaviour, extreme individualism and conspicuous consumption, posing major problems for gentry families and estates. The article concludes that although the military profession was a valuable short-term route for disposing of sons in a gentlemanly manner, the impact on their families and on the highlands could be highly disruptive. Yes, there was success and material benefits for a lucky few, but also tragedy, failure and family discord for many.

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