Towards a modern colonial state: reorganizing leprosy care, 1890–1900

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Snelders
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Medical Doctors ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Colonial Government

Fears of leprosy as an ‘imperial danger’ spread globally after 1890. These coincided with a reorganization of leprosy care in Suriname. However, this reorganization had a dynamic of its own tied to the heritage of Surinamese confinement policies and the necessity for an accommodation between the dominant Christian religious groups in the colony (Protestants and Catholics) and with the colonial state. The reorganization of leprosy care in the colony was intended to establish better-organized leprosy asylums that should be more accommodating to the citizens of a ‘modern’ colonial state. Moreover, the colonial government acquiesced to pleas from medical doctors for more humane treatment, and managed the interests of religious groups and missionaries who wanted to maintain or gain a foot in leprosy care. However, the new care continued the traditions of contagionism, compulsory segregation, and racist prejudices that had characterized Surinamese leprosy politics since the eighteenth century, long before the international concerns of the 1890s.

Oliver Hart and the Rise of Baptist America

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric C. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Development ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Baptist Church ◽  
Southern Culture ◽  
Single Person ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Lower South

Oliver Hart was arguably the most important evangelical leader of the pre-Revolutionary South. For thirty years the pastor of the Charleston Baptist Church, Hart’s energetic ministry breathed new life into that congregation and the struggling Baptist cause in the region. As the founder of the Charleston Baptist Association, Hart did more than any single person to lay the foundations for the institutional life of the Baptist South, while also working extensively with evangelicals of all denominations to spread the revivalism of the Great Awakening across the lower South. One reason for Hart’s extensive influence is the uneasy compromise he made with white Southern culture, most apparent in his willingness to sanctify rather than challenge the institution of slavery, as his more radical evangelical predecessors had done. While this capitulation gained Hart and his fellow Baptists access to Southern culture, it would also sow the seeds of disunion in the larger American denomination Hart worked so hard to construct. Oliver Hart and the Rise of Baptist America is the first modern biography of Oliver Hart, at the same time interweaving the story of the remarkable transformation of America’s Baptists across the long eighteenth century. It provides perhaps the most complete narrative of the early development of one of America’s largest, most influential, and most understudied religious groups.

scholarly journals Colonial State as ‘New Manu’? Explorations in Education Policies in Relation to Dalit and Low-Caste Education in the Nineteenth-Century India

2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-107
Author(s):  
Parimala V. Rao
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Education Policy ◽  
Caste System ◽  
Colonial Administration ◽  
Education Policies ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Lower Castes ◽  
Priestly Class ◽  
Colonial Government ◽  
Implementation Stage

The colonial state always asserted itself as a harbinger of ‘modernity’ and emphasised its role in India as a ‘civilising mission’. The 1811 Educational Minute of Governor General Minto, declared Hindus and Muslims of India as inherently corrupt and insisted on the British role as ‘civilising’. Conventionally the terms ‘modern’ and ‘civilising mission’ have been considered as offensive, and scholars have critiqued them as Eurocentric and racist. However, these terms have not been analysed at the implementation stage in India. The colonial government used these terms to actually strengthen the structures of the traditional hierarchy. When Minto declared that the education policy was to civilise Hindus and Muslims of India, it was through the ‘the dread of their religion in this world and the next’ and through strengthening and empowering the priestly class of Hindus and Muslims (Sharp, 1920, pp. 19–21). The colonial administration regarded this kind of education as the corner stone of its education policy. This article looks at the education policies of the colonial state towards lower castes in the nineteenth-century India and how these policies upheld and reinforced the caste system.

scholarly journals Local Wisdom and National Integration in Indonesia: A Case Study of Inter-Religious Harmony amid Social and Political Upheaval in Bunga Bondar, South Tapanuli

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 30
Author(s):  
Rosmaida Sinaga ◽  
Flores Tanjung ◽  
Yuri Nasution
Keyword(s):  
Local Level ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
National Integration ◽  
Local Leadership ◽  
Political Upheaval ◽  
Colonial Government ◽  
Dutch Colonial

This study emphasizes on inter-religious affairs happened in Bunga Bondar, South Tapanuli began to experience turmoil when thenational movement era started in 1908 and itstillhappens to present-day. The Dutch colonial government advocated for inter-religiousharmony at a local level. The policy was pursued by the the Dutch colonial government out offear that the Indonesian people would developa sense of unity and fraternityamong them, thereby intensifying thespirit of nationalism. The Dutch government’s concern eventuallycame true when the power of the Christian wingof the national movement cooperated with itsIslamic counterpart. Along with the political upheavalsand social changes experienced by the Indonesian people, the harmony between religious groups in various regions was affected. Despite migration, changes of central and local leadership, and the flow of modernization that took place, the dynamics of inter-religious harmony of the 1930s are still present today.The tradition, the spirit of harmony, leadership models, and the application of local wisdom are all the key to the survival of inter-religious harmony in Bunga Bondar, South Tapanuli, as findings in research that can be used as a guide or model to build national integrity.

Romantic Heroes and Colonial Bandits

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Máire ní Fhlathúin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Indian Context ◽  
British Colonial

This chapter argues that British literary representations of Indian practices (such as banditry) criminalized by the colonial state had the effect of transforming the eighteenth-century stereotype of the ‘mild Hindoo’ into a predatory Indian masculinity formed in opposition to a weak and victimized femininity. It presents an analysis of a series of representations of India developed through the appropriation of British metropolitan forms and texts, in which the potential for threat to the British colonial state implicit in depictions of Indian agency is disabled or negated by the distancing or alienation of Indian figures from British readers. The chapter examines British Indian adaptations of the most important of these nineteenth-century metropolitan models – the works of Byron and Scott – and the ways in which their depiction of the criminal bandit / hero is appropriated and transformed in the Indian context.

Monument Preservation and the Vexing Question of Religious Structures in Colonial India

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Indra Sengupta
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Practice ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Policy And Practice ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Complex Process ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Ancient Monuments ◽  
Vexing Question

The principles of conservation spelled out in the first law on preservation for the whole of India — the Ancient Monuments Preservation Act of 1904 — were indicators of the ways in which conservation policy was made in colonial India: determined by the state, and heavily influenced by principles of preservation derived from Europe, based on a specifically colonial understanding of India's history and heritage, and of the ‘guardianship’ role of the colonial state. Yet attempts to implement pre-colonial religious structures could have unforeseen results, as local, indigenous religious groups began to utilize the opportunities for funding opened up by the new Act and succeeded in using the provisions of the Act in ways that best suited their own interests. This chapter looks closely at the interface between preservation policy and practice in colonial India in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries, and calls into question colonial hegemony as an explanatory framework for understanding a complex process of cultural practice.

Caste and the Politics of the Early ‘Public’ in Schooling: Dalit Struggle for an Equitable Education

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 126-154
Author(s):  
Geetha B. Nambissan
Keyword(s):  
Public Education ◽  
Mass Education ◽  
Publicly Funded ◽  
Social Spaces ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
The Public ◽  
Education Today ◽  
Equality In Education ◽  
Colonial Government

In this article, I draw attention to the early 1850s in the Bombay Presidency when the colonial government first assumed responsibility for mass education. I show that in the subsequent decades, publicly funded schooling was narrow and extremely exclusive as a result of the strong opposition of dominant castes to the education of the Dalits (‘Untouchable’ castes) as well as ambivalences and compromises of the colonial state to equality in education. I argue that in the efforts towards shaping of a more inclusive and ‘equitable’ public education, the struggles of the most excluded and stigmatised castes, the Untouchables, were crucial and have hitherto received little attention. Initiatives from within the community as well as the role of radical social reformers (I refer to Phule), Dalit activists and leaders such as Ambedkar in political and social spaces in relation to education also deserve far more serious study and acknowledgement. The neglect of the Untouchable castes in histories of education has resulted in failure to recognise their extraordinary efforts to spread education within their communities and significant contestations from below as well as in shaping discourses and practices around the ‘public’ in schooling. It also reminds us that as we defend the public in education today, we must understand the politics around it.

The Colonial Economy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Flavio Versiani
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Labor Market ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Political Influence ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Slave Labor ◽  
Private Initiative ◽  
Colonial Economy ◽  
Colonial Government ◽  
Productivity Gains

The chapter deals with characteristics of the Brazilian colonial period (from 1500 to independence from Portugal in 1822) that have exercised a significant influence on later developments. Three aspects of the institutional framework of Portuguese colonization are emphasized: the relations between the colonial government and the private sector; the pattern of access to land by colonists; and the widespread use of slave labor. It is argued that colonial policies were detrimental to private initiative, hampering access to productivity gains from industrialization in the eighteenth century. Distribution of land, in large tracts, to privileged individuals was instrumental in establishing a pattern of inequality in wealth, power, and political influence; the landless majority helped to bring about an elastic supply of labor in later periods. Slavery, which dominated the labor market from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth, was an element of the inequality in income distribution that persists to the present.

From Little King to Landlord: Property, Law, and the Gift under the Madras Permanent Settlement

1986 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 307-333 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas B. Dirks
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Property Law ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Social Forms ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
The Gift ◽  
Permanent Settlement ◽  
The Impact

In the last few years, modern historians of India have pushed the historical frontier of their field backwards in time. Colonialism is no longer considered the great watershed it once was thought to be. Historians who concern themselves with economic processes such as protoindustrialization tend in particular to minimize the impact of the consolidation of colonial rule in the late eighteenth century. Changes viewed as significant by these historians usually begin with the introduction of capitalism and the early encroachment of a world system, both of which predate the full political realization of colonialism. Historians who concern themselves with political changes tend in the other direction, although increasingly they have proposed major continuities between the ancien régime and the early colonial state. Historians concerned with social change view colonialism as significant but invoke various new forms of dualism to account for the limited effects of colonialism on local social forms. Whatever their differences, all of these historians agree that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are crucial for viewing later changes in economy, polity, and society, and, from their varying theoretical and ideological perspectives, delight in excoriating traditional views of India as static and “traditional” before the arrival of the British.

scholarly journals Introduction

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrice Ladwig ◽  
Ricardo Roque
Keyword(s):  
State Power ◽  
The State ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Strategic Policy ◽  
European Colonialism ◽  
Colonial Government

Engaging critically with literature on mimesis, colonialism, and the state in anthropology and history, this introduction argues for an approach to mimesis and imitation as constitutive of the state and its forms of rule and governmentality in the context of late European colonialism. It explores how the colonial state attempted to administer, control, and integrate its indigenous subjects through mimetic policies of governance, while examining how indigenous polities adopted imitative practices in order to establish reciprocal ties with, or to resist the presence of, the colonial state. In introducing this special issue, three main themes will be addressed: mimesis as a strategic policy of colonial government, as an object of colonial regulation, and, finally, as a creative indigenous appropriation of external forms of state power.

scholarly journals Revolt, Testimony, Petition: Artisanal Protests in Colonial Andhra

2001 ◽  
Vol 46 (S9) ◽  
pp. 107-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
Potukuchi Swarnalatha
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Organizational Structure ◽  
Textile Industry ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
The Social ◽  
Conditions Of Work ◽  
Socioeconomic Structures

This paper examines the form, content, and role of petitions in the context of protests occasioned by the handloom weavers of colonial Andhra, particularly the northern districts of the northern Coromandel region, between 1770 and 1820. Minor and major protests and revolts by weavers erupted with increasing frequency from around the middle of the eighteenth century, whenever their socioeconomic structures and conditions of work and trade were under threat from the old and new elites, as well as from the commercial interests of the colonial state. On these occasions, weavers expressed their grievances through petitions and representations, either in combination with other strategies or independently. These petitions therefore offer opportunities to study and identify the economic and social conditions that prompted weavers to resort to collective action. Careful analyses of the petitions yield considerable insights with respect to the causes of the protests; their spatial and social diffusion; the social profile of contending parties, and their mentalities; the changing organizational structure of the textile industry; the petitions' consequences; and, finally, the attitude of the colonial state towards these petitions.

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