Coloniality, reproduction, and the climate crisis, or

This forum focuses on the topic of coloniality, investigating the ways in which it shapes the contemporary world. We will look at how colonial structures of power shape the development of new technologies, as well as emergent manifestations of anti-colonial resistance. --- Luiza Prado de Oliveira Martins, Editor

Unsettling Entitlement and ‘Ginx’s Baby’

This story traces the many adventures of a title, from Edward Jenkins’s 1870 novel, Ginx’s Baby, through colonial resistance to imperial copyright law in Canada, to the photograph of a distressed baby that Charles Darwin featured in The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals and that the art photographer Oscar Rejlander reproduced as popular cartes de visites. The reiterative use of the title across genres and oceans conjures an image of Victorian popular culture as an unregulated bazaar affording the surprising emergence of unintended creators. Copyright history, frame analysis, and name theory help explain how the title of a popular novel could lend itself to so many unrelated creative objects.

“Never to Be Forgotten”

This chapter explores the clergy’s doctrine of political resistance expressed during the Stamp Act crisis of 1765. The clergy’s justifications of political resistance as the Revolutionary-era troubles began emerged against the backdrop of clerical arguments for resistance articulated after the overthrow of Governor Edmund Andros in 1689. The memory of Andros, his tyrannical reign over New England, and the clergy’s resistance to him were evoked by the clergy during the Revolutionary era. This act of pre-Revolutionary resistance provides important context for understanding how the clergy themselves thought about the moral legitimacy of resisting one’s political authorities in the Revolutionary period. Colonial resistance to oppressive British agents was not a new or novel idea.

War in the Italian Colonies

In August 1915 Italy declared war on the Ottoman Empire. While it sent no troops to the main Allied fronts against the Ottomans, it fought this enemy both at sea and on land, in a form of proxy conflict. Turkey, Germany, and Austria sent funds and army officers to support anti-Italian insurrections both in Cyrenaica and Tripolitania, with varying results; a combination of religious and political motives encouraged the indigenous peoples of Libya to resist Italian control vigorously, in what should be understood as another theatre of the First World War. Examining the actions and objectives of anti-colonial leaders as well as Italian policies and practices help explain the weakness of Italian colonial control in Libya. At one stage Italy feared an Islamic insurrection might also break out in their East African colonies. Anti-colonial resistance, real or feared, placed a great strain on relatively scarce Italian resources which were needed in other theatres.

Afterword

This afterword recaptures the sense of uncertainty that accompanied the final decades of the British Empire. It is easy to forget the array of possible futures that emerged from anti-colonial resistance, in particular when it took the shape of massive working-class movements, before such initiatives from below were constrained by the framework of the new nation-states. It is easy to forget the dreams and practical attempts of the radical minorities who believed that coordinated efforts across borders might lead not only to the destruction of the British Empire but to that of capitalism and imperialism in general, and to its replacement by some form of universal socialism. Our edited volume helps understand why the 1945-1965 anti-colonial revolts were eventually not led under the flag of socialist internationalism but under that of national liberation. It also emphasises the roads not taken, to retrieve, in a gesture inspired by E.P. Thompson’s philosophy, the sheer sense of openness and opportunity so prevalent in the phase when the foundations of the British Empire started to shake. This afterword also outlines several dimensions that may deserve more attention in future research.