Burmese Women Portrait Under the British Imperialism in Orwell’s Burmese Days

This study aims to expose the Burmese women portrait under British Imperialism. The writer believes that Burmese Days is created as a response to the social phenomenon that was happening during the process of its creation. This study used a qualitative method using a sociological approach by Laurenson and Swingewood. The data of this study were collected from the description and utterances of the characters and narrator in the novel. The result of this study shows that the women were portrayed as the slave of the English men. The women are not valuable, they merely become entertainment for the English men to entertain them. Even, some of the Europeans have concubines to accompany them in killing their time or killing their boredom. It looks like the women are created for the English men as dolls which can be played as often as they can, and of course, like a doll, they can be thrown easily after the English men being bored. As this research limited to the analysis of women portrait as a concubine for the English men, it is suggested for other researchers to analyze and find the relevant problems that still exist around the society, such as social inequality, resistance, obedience, strategy, gender, racism, corruption and other social aspects in the novel Burmese Days.

London and Cloisterham as an Imperial ‘Heart of Darkness’ in Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood

The article examines Dickens’s last novel in the context of British imperialism, contraband opium trade in nineteenth-century China under the armed protection of the British government, and the Opium Wars (1839–1842 and 1856–1860). Although Dickens has often been discussed as one of the authors who approved of his country’s imperial domination, his last novel foregrounds a critique of colonial practices. The atavistic character of imperialism takes its moral and psychological toll not merely somewhere in the dominions, colonies, protectorates, and other territories but also ‘at home’ on the domestic ground. In The Mystery of Edwin Drood London has the face of a dingy and dark opium den or the ominous headquarters of the Heaven of Philanthropy with the professing philanthropists in suits of black. Moreover, the article seeks to discuss deep-rooted evil and darkness associated in the novel with an ecclesiastical town in connection with Protestant missionaries’ close collaboration with opium traders in the Celestial Empire. Portraying John Jasper’s moral degradation enhanced by the drug and the corruption of the ecclesiastical town, Dickens gothicises opium, and by implication, opium trade pointing to its double-edged sword effect: sullying and debasing both the addict and the trafficker. The symbolic darkness of the opium den and the churchly Cloisterham reflects the inherent evil latent in any unbridled colonial expansion and Dickens’s anti-colonial purpose.

Meat, Mercy, Morality

This book uses the lens of humanitarian debates to understand the nature of British colonialism in India. It demonstrates that with emergence of new notions of public health in late 19th-century Bengal, contests over appropriate measures for controlling animals became part of wider debates surrounding environmental ethics, diet, sanitation, and a politics of race/class that reconfigured boundaries between the colonizer and the colonized. Centered around three major stories – animals as diseased, eaten, and overworked – it explores how the colonial project of animal protection mirrored an irony in that it exposed the disjunction between the claims of a benevolent colonial state and a powerful, not-too-benign reality where the state constantly sought to discipline its subjects – both human and nonhuman. It refreshes our understanding of environment, colonial science and British imperialism by arguing that colonial humanitarianism was not only an idiom of rule, but was also translated into Bengali dietetics, anxieties, vegetarianism and vigilantism which can be seen in India even today.

Disarming the periphery: Inter-war arms control, British imperialism and the Persian Gulf

Drawing on research on the international disarmament efforts of the inter-war years as well as on arms control in the empires, this article argues that arms control in the imperial periphery was an integral and very tangible part of the inter-war years’ international disarmament policies. It demonstrates that arms control in the periphery was conceived by the imperial actors involved as a pivotal part of the disarmament policies and that the disarmament policies had far-reaching consequences for the imperial periphery. The study uses archival sources to investigate the arms control in the Persian Gulf as a case study for the consequences of the disarmament policies in the imperial periphery. By analysing the goals and ends British imperial actors sought to achieve through arms control and particularly arms trade controls in the Gulf, this approach deepens the understanding of imperial disarmament policies beyond the mere assessment that they were somehow important to imperialism. It moreover diversifies and rectifies the understanding of the ‘peace’ that was to be achieved by the inter-war disarmament. Furthermore, it analyses the concrete practices and measures that arose out of the inter-war disarmament policies as well as their effects on the actual arms trade in the Gulf. Based on these results, the study investigates how actors from the Gulf itself positioned themselves within these developments, how and why they did or did not take part in them and how the Gulf's societies in general dealt with the disarmament efforts. Hence, by shifting the level of analysis to the imperial periphery itself, the study seeks to expose the global dimension of disarmament policies and their effects on the region, its inhabitants and the imperial order, thereby stressing the importance of this perspective for a comprehensive understanding of inter-war disarmament.

Colonizing Animals

Animals were vital to the British colonization of Myanmar. In this pathbreaking history of British imperialism in Myanmar from the early nineteenth century to 1942, Jonathan Saha argues that animals were impacted and transformed by colonial subjugation. By examining the writings of Burmese nationalists and the experiences of subaltern groups, he also shows how animals were mobilized by Burmese anticolonial activists in opposition to imperial rule. In demonstrating how animals - such as elephants, crocodiles, and rats - were important actors never fully under the control of humans, Saha uncovers a history of how British colonialism transformed ecologies and fostered new relationships with animals in Myanmar. Colonizing Animals introduces the reader to an innovative historical methodology for exploring interspecies relationships in the imperial past, using innovative concepts for studying interspecies empires that draw on postcolonial theory and critical animal studies.