Colonial policy studies in Japan: racial visions of Nan'yo, or the early creation of a global South

This article examines Japanese colonial policy studies (shokumin seisaku gaku) with a particular focus on its relationship with the distinct region of ‘Nan'yo’ (the South Seas). Specifically analysing the works of Takekoshi Yosaburo (1865–1950), Nitobe Inazo (1862–1933) and Yanaihara Tadao (1893–1961), it seeks to uncover the ways in which the exponents of this study area accounted for Nan'yo based on their conceptions of race. It also shows how they inflicted envisaged racial hierarchies on the southern Pacific and how such attempts were related to colonial policy debates behind the practice of Japanese imperialism. Part of the findings point out that Takekoshi's and Nitobe's comparable projections of strict racial hierarchies on the Malays served to justify the southward colonization of the Japanese. Yanaihara's depiction of Nan'yo islanders as radically underdeveloped was tailored to championing Japan's sustained espousal of the League Mandate. The article argues that their accounts of Nan'yo formed part of a transnational knowledge chain about colonial and racial victimization. Like their western counterparts including Gustav Le Bon, Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, Paul S. Reinsch and J. A. Hobson, they built purported racial pyramids with the tropical areas at their bottom, the bulk of which correspond to today's global South. They have been accomplices in this colonial present.

مسيرة انتشار الإسلام في غرب أفريقيا

مسيرة انتشار الإسلام في غرب أفريقيا The research studies the long journey of the spread of Islam in western Africa and the problems that faced its peaceful penetration in it .These problems were relating mainly to the ways and means adopted in spreading Islam. They were the strong links that tied Africans to their environment and the deeply rooted traditions. The research detects the movement of spreading Islam since its commencement in the Vth century until the advent of the European colonization in the century describing the routes and the people who took part in that peaceful movement . The research tackles the allegations raised by some European writers accusing Muslims of enforcing their religion by sword, the hateful slave trade and not contributing in developing the content .However, the research proved that those allegations were non-objective and false .They can only be read within the context of the colonial policy to convert African to Christianity .Indeed, they were an echo of the Medieval Crusades against Islam which has provided a better choice of culture for the Africans

The (Un)governable City: Productive Failure in the Making of Colonial Delhi, 1858-1911 by Raghav Kishore

Delhi has always been a crucible of political disquiet, and the seat of manifold state and aesthetic desires to order, control and design the city. Even at this moment, we find ourselves before a ubiquitous impulse to change the appearance of the city through the Central Vista Project which proposes to cater to needs of increase in government office space. There are layers to the city and obvious enough, it is not monolithic. The vestiges and architectural remnants of subsequent ages narrate the relentless saga of power, domination and settlement. A historical analysis of the spatial structures reflects the reasons behind its physical organization. To talk about colonial designs within this very broad spectrum is but, only a brief moment in a longue duree of human settlement in this region. Yet, it is necessary to understand the spatial synchrony, for much of it is what we have inherited today and this is what shapes our experiences of this city even at present. Raghav Kishore’s The (Un)governable City (2020), makes an intervention in this corpus of historical analysis with his impeccable research and endless forays into the archives. This is a welcome addition to studies in the field of urban development of Delhi, with Pilar Maria Guerrieri’s Maps of Delhi (2017) being one precursor, which painstakingly curates maps of Delhi from the precolonial times, to the modern municipal Master Plans to contemporary digital mappings. Kishore unearths curious details from local sources and twines those with debates among colonial policy makers and personnel to highlight issues of political ideology, statecraft and governmentality. This volume juxtaposes notions of policing, control and accessibility with debates and discussions on sanitation, traffic, communication, railways and the building of military cantonments, which are significant if we think of the British rule in India as a garrison state, heavily dependent on the easy mobility of its military forces. The success of the control was conditional on the ability to gather up huge military forces to curb parallel sporadic outbursts at their very onset. The broadening of roads, regulation of quarters and delimiting encroachments and concerns over connectivity, were carefully thought out strategisations towards the goal of containment and territorialisation.

К спорным вопросам истории Бурят-Монголии: позиция В. Ф. Аханянова

The aim of the present study is to examine the report “On controversial issues in the history of Buryat-Mongolia” made by V. F. Akhanianov at the Institute of History of the Communist Academy. Its focusis on thequestions raised during the discussions in Verkhneudinsk in July 1934 that Akhanianov’s report deals with. The source for the study is the transcript of the report, dated September 7, 1934,that is kept in the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Results. The scholarpresented his criticisms of some participants’ opinions but, also, his own views of the issues on the agenda, such as feudalism in the historical context of Buryat-Mongolia, the Russian Empire’s colonial policy, Prussian or American ways of development, forms of exploitation that existed before 1917, October Revolution and Civil War in Buryat-Mongolia, and land reform. Also, the report includes a significant number of ideological statements, which was typical of public speeches in the mid-1930s. The report shows Akhanianov’s expertise in the history of Buryat-Mongolia and his genuine interest in restoring historical justice in the assessment of individual stages in the Republic’s development. In terms of the studies of the historical past of Buryatia, of relevance is also the discussion of the report that followed and the speaker’s concluding remarks. Conclusion.The material presented in the paper contributes to the database in the field of research and is of interest for further studies.

The British Jingo and the German Viking: the Emergence and Reception of the Colonial Hero Image of Cecil Rhodes and Carl Peters

Литература, наряду с официальными источниками, может дать представление о формировании культа двух одиозных деятелей колониальной эпохи – Сесила Родса и Карла Петерса. Их деятельность на африканском континенте, получившая неоднозначную оценку при жизни, впоследствии была переосмыслена официальной пропагандой, привела к изменению общественного мнения о колониализме и имперских ценностях. Африканское прошлое Империи в Великобритании вылилось в одну из форм протеста 2020 г., в то время как в Германии его пересмотр был связан с оценками национал-социализма, реанимировавшего идеи колониализма. The paper considers the colonial policy of Kaiser Germany and the British Empire in Africa via periodicals and fiction. Alongside with official sources, fiction can provide an insight into the way the cult of the two most notorious colonialists – Cecil John Rhodes and Carl Peters – emerged. Their activities in the African continent, cautiously assessed even in their lifetime, was reconsidered in official propaganda and by writers of the 19th-20th centuries, which led to the change in public opinion regarding colonialism and imperial values. The process of reconsidering went in different ways, however. The imperial past of the British Empire was shown in the protests of 2020 in the UK, whereas in Germany this reconsideration is closely connected with the reassessment of the Nazi period that attempted to revive colonial ideas of the first quarter of the 20th century.

The Colonial History of Burkina Faso

Burkina Faso has a remarkable history owing to repeated dissolution and reunification of its territory. Following the French colonial conquest in 1896, a military territory was established over a large part of what would become Upper Volta. In 1905, the military territory was integrated in the civilian colony of Upper Senegal and Niger with headquarters in Bamako. Following a major anticolonial war in 1915–16, the colony of Upper Volta with Ouagadougou as its capital was created in 1919, for security reasons and as a labor reservoir for neighboring colonies. Dismantled in 1932, Upper Volta was partitioned among neighboring colonies. It was recreated after World War II as an Overseas Territory (Territoire d’Outre-mer) within the newly created French Union (Union française). In 1960, Upper Volta gained its independence, but the nation experienced a new beginning in 1983 when it was renamed Burkina Faso by the revolutionary government of Thomas Sankara. The policies and debates that shaped the colonial history of Burkina Faso, while important in themselves, are a reflection of the larger West African history and French colonial policy.

Famine of 1943 in Bakarganj and British Colonial Policy

In the vast literature of Bengal famine of 1943, it is hard to offer new insights about that vicious source of mass misery. Local history may mark a significant departure here, as it provides scope for an in-depth study of both the origin and course of the famine. Bakarganj was called the granary of Bengal, which used to supply rice to other regions even in the driest years due to its large production. But the famine of 1943 gravely affected this district. The present study shows how it was the colonial measures that played a vital role in intensifying the famine in Bakarganj. The government’s led to: hoarding of rice and serious shortage of food supply. The article concentrates on four aspects of the government failure: inappropriate warning system, callous purchase policy, lack of effective government inspection and a policy of disaster denial.

New Zealand’s ‘Critics of Empire’: Domestic Opposition to New Zealand’s Pacific Empire, 1883-1948

<p>The recent resurgence of interest in the ‘other side’ of New Zealand’s colonial history has reaffirmed the need to view the nation’s history in its Pacific context. This historiographical turn has involved taking seriously the fact that as well as being a colony of Britain, New Zealand was an empire-state and metropole in its own right, possessing a tropical, Oceanic empire. What has yet to have been attempted however is a history of the ‘other side’ of the imperial debate. Thus far the historiography has been weighted towards New Zealand’s imperial and colonial agents. By mapping metropolitan critiques of New Zealand’s imperialism and colonialism in the Pacific (1883-1948), this thesis seeks to rebalance the historiographical ledger. This research adds to our understanding of New Zealand’s involvement in the colonial Pacific by demonstrating that anticolonial struggles were not only confined to the colonies, they were also fought on the metropolitan front by colonial critics at once sympathetic to the claims of the colonised populations, and scathing of their own Government’s colonial policy. These critics were, by virtue of their status as white, metropolitan citizens, afforded greater rights and freedoms than indigenous colonial subjects, and so were able to challenge colonial policy in the public domain. At the same time this thesis demonstrates how colonial criticism reflected national anxieties. The grounds for criticism generally depended on the wider social context. In the nineteenth-century in particular, critiques often contained concerns that New Zealand’s Pacific imperialism would disrupt the sanctity of ‘White New Zealand’, however as the twentieth-century wore on criticism bore the imprint of anti-racism and increasingly supported indigenous claims for self-government. By examining a seventy year period of change, this thesis shows that at every stage of the ‘imperial process’, New Zealand’s imperialism in the Pacific was a subject open to persistent public debate.</p>