Convicts

Clare Anderson provides a radical new reading of histories of empire and nation, showing that the history of punishment is not solely connected to the emergence of prisons and penitentiaries, but to histories of governance, occupation, and global connections across the world. Exploring punitive mobility to islands, colonies, and remote inland and border regions over a period of five centuries, she proposes a close and enduring connection between punishment, governance, repression, and nation and empire building, and reveals how states, imperial powers, and trading companies used convicts to satisfy various geo-political and social ambitions. Punitive mobility became intertwined with other forms of labour bondage including enslavement, with convicts a key source of unfree labour that could be used to occupy territories. Far from passive subjects, however, convicts manifested their agency in various forms, including the extension of political ideology and cultural transfer, and vital contributions to contemporary knowledge production.

Introduction

This tale of animals and Empire in colonial Calcutta rests at the intersection of three scholarships: history of science/medicine, environmental history and urban history. The introduction situates this study in the larger historiographical narrative and describes the contribution of the project to South Asian scholarship and beyond. Much of the extant literature on environmental history has gone toward arguing for the role of nature as a historical actor. But it has been relatively less emphatic toward the study of non-human subjects, particularly domestic animals in empire building. The novelty and richness of the book lies in its invocation of complex networks of human and nonhuman actors in an empire to inform the metropolitan scientific imagination. It also foregrounds the theoretical underpinnings and methodology of this book by highlighting what is new about this work.

The Textual Architecture of Empire in Two Early Qing Anthologies

During the first half century of the Qing dynasty, Manchu emperors commissioned massive publication projects on the Chinese classics. In early Qing interpretations of classics on the family, negotiations between Manchu and Han family and gender norms furthered the empire-building project. This article compares the spatial form of the Yuding Nei ze yanyi 御定内則衍義 (1656), an expansion of the “Inner Standards” chapter of the Classic of Rites commissioned by the Shunzhi emperor, to that of the Yuding Xiao jing yanyi 御定孝經衍義 (1682), an expansion of the Classic of Filial Piety commissioned by the Kangxi emperor. These works are textual spaces where the cultural and political negotiations of the early Qing empire play out; they use spatial strategies of juxtaposition and hierarchy to balance different messages for different constituencies, creating textual models of empire.

A contested financial frontier: banking and empire building in Eritrea, c.1952–73

This article provides an account of the relationship between imperial Ethiopia and Eritrea in the realm of banking governance from the start of the federation to the last years of the imperial regime. It looks in particular at the relationship between the Ethiopian administrations and an Italian bank, Banco di Roma, which had its headquarters in Eritrea from 1948 to 1967 before moving to Addis Ababa. The struggle for control of the economic flows generated by the Italian bank is an index of the changes in centre–periphery linkages between Addis Ababa and the sub-regional centre of Asmara. Archival evidence highlights the multifaced nature of Ethiopian governance and the role performed by the Italian institution in providing alternative sources of diplomatic leverage and wealth accumulation to the Eritrean elite. It is argued that the extraterritorial status enjoyed by Banco di Roma until 1967 was actively tolerated by a section of the Ethiopian establishment, which resorted to an established pattern of imperial governance based on flexibility in return for tribute. This centre–periphery arrangement was harshly opposed by prominent Ethiopian officials from the Ministry of Finance and the National Bank of Ethiopia, who struggled to enforce tighter government control over capital flows within and across the country's borders. The National Bank's final success in the quest for financial centralization drained significant resources out of Eritrea, with adverse effects on the preservation of the pax aethiopica in the former Italian colony.

General Henning’s Yekaterinburg: An Attempt at Reading the “Urban Text”

The author of this article attempts a semiotic interpretation of the features of the architectural and planning system of early Yekaterinburg (1723–1734). The method is based on an improvisation on Michel de Certeau’s ideas about the city as a complex text, which results from the simultaneous and inconsistent creativity of its founders and administrators on the one hand and ordinary people on the other. Another source for the author’s improvisation is the ideas of some representatives of the French school of genetic criticism, more particularly, the concepts of avant-text and text. From these positions, the author considers the activity of V. I. Henning (Rus. transcription: Gennin), the founder and first head of Yekaterinburg and a general in Russian service. The main milestones of his career, the accumulation of experience as an engineer and administrator, and the formation of a worldview before his Ural period are evaluated as work on the avant-text, while Yekaterinburg becomes the actual text. The author proves that Yekaterinburg was created by Henning not just as a large mining and metallurgical enterprise. General Henning’s Yekaterinburg appears as a manifesto city, a material text that embodies the aesthetics of the Baroque and the postulates of cameralism in its layout and execution. The city became a symbol of Petrine empire building on the border with Russia’s Asian possessions.

Manchukuo voices: re-interpreting a monumental space in Northeast China (1932–1945)

This article revisits Japan's empire-building in Northeast China through the construction of and reactions to the Daidō hiroba 大同広場 (Plaza of Great Unity) in Shinkyō, showing how Chinese and Japanese challenged the top-down attempt for building a totalitarian empire. These re-interpretations and definitions of Hiroba unveiled the diversity, dynamics, and complexity of Manchukuo society that cannot be fully grasped in a nation-state framework. Moreover, their voices challenged the previous depiction of such imperial monumental space as the physical materialization of imperial governmentality but a contested site where individuals challenged the official vision of Manchukuo. This article examines documents ranging from governmental documents to works of literature in both Chinese and Japanese. Compared to Japanese planners' vision of the Hiroba as a site of governmentality, visitors and local residents held differing interpretations of this space: some Japanese disapproved the attempt to reframe the urban space by a totalitarian regime, and many Chinese redefined the meaning of this “utopian” urban space to accord with their own tradition and everyday life.