Colonialism (History)

Du XVe au XVIIIe siècle, l’espace atlantique devint un monde ouvert d’interactions, pacifiques ou violentes, et de circulations, volontaires ou contraintes, d’hommes et de femmes mais aussi d’échanges de marchandises, d’idées, de capitaux, de savoirs, de pratiques et de représentations. Il fut la scène de phénomènes d’une ampleur inédite tels que le colonialisme, les migrations, l’esclavage, la racialisation, l’exploitation économique et la créolité. Leur vigueur fait de l’histoire atlantique une histoire entrelacée de trois continents sur fond d’interconnexions et d’influences réciproques. Polycentrique, fluide et complexe, le monde atlantique, espace de production, de domination, d’échanges croisés et de formation d’identités nouvelles doit être envisagé comme un tout.

The idea that a strong state was necessary to solve the riddle of development has a long history that can be traced back to European origins. Many intellectuals believed that capitalism needed to be combined with socialism as the drive for capital accumulation moved beyond the borders of Europe. The end of World War II placed development at the forefront of the agenda of newly decolonized states. The emergence of an identity among the nations as ‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’ greatly shaped the framework of world politics. In this way, the concept of development ultimately became an identity that manifest itself in various developmental practices that struggled to find the optimal pathway to achieve economic growth.

In 1806 New South Wales Governor Philip Gidley King gifted a prefabricated house to the paramount tribal chief of the Bay of Islands (Northland New Zealand), Te Pahi. The house was erected on Te Pahi's island pa (fortified village) at Wairoa Bay and was the first 'European' house to be built in New Zealand. As a gift, it embodied a nascent trade relationship between two cultures/countries and the recognition of Maori as a sovereign nation led by chiefs. Over a short time, however, it would also come to represent deepening racial and class divisions, among and between European traders and Northland Maori. Te Pahi was blamed (erroneously, many historians have argued) for the burning of the ship Boyd, which had arrived from Port Jackson to Whangaroa harbour in 1809, and the murder of most of her crew and passengers. As a consequence, his people and his house became the focus for three separate revenge attacks by ships' crews outraged by the recognition that had been accorded to Maori, symbolised by the gift of architecture, which was then undermined by the burning of the Boyd. The house was fired-on by cannon and ransacked, and a large number of the island's residents were killed or, in the case of Te Pahi, mortally-wounded. Aside from its historical context, little is known about the house, and its exact location (on either one of two islands) has not been identified. In preparation for a geophysical site survey of potential house sites, this paper discusses the circumstances surrounding the acquisition of the house, its general site context and (inter-)cultural history, and the events surrounding its attacks. The 'remains' of the house are, for now at least, its history, a remnant of an unrealised promise of shared spaces, resources and mutual respect.

This short paper was written for the course "Modern Histories of South and Southeast Asia" in 2015. It researches the character of late colonialism in Indonesia under Dutch rule, and the particular role fascism and conservatism played in maintaining colonialism, shaping and forming colonial society and ideology.

The first attempt at spelling reform in South Korea took place in the early 1950s as the Korean War (1950–53) drew to a close. The subsequent Han’gŭl Crisis is often interpreted as an example of the authoritarianism of President Syngman Rhee (Yi Sŭngman), yet the event also represents a clash of generations between the supporters of the Unified Orthography of 1933 and the previous spelling standard. During the han’gŭl simplification debates, the legacies of Chu Sigyŏng (1876–1914) and Pak Sŭngbin (1880–1943) reemerged as their followers continued a contentious linguistic debate that stretched back into the colonial period. The event ended as a victory for the Unified Orthography of 1933, but several ambiguous questions remain for further investigation. Ultimately, behind the claims of “scientific rationalism” in the current han’gŭl spelling are the forgotten memories of linguistic activism and the difficulties in uniting divergent linguistic practices in post-Liberation Korean society.

https://www.routledge.com/Building-Colonial-Hong-Kong-Speculative-Development-and-Segregation-in/Chu/p/book/9781138344655

Planning, History and Environment Series, Routledge (2022)
ISBN 9781138344655

In the 1880s, Hong Kong was a booming colonial entrepôt, with many European, especially British, residents living in palatial mansions in the Mid-Levels and at the Peak. But it was also a ruthless migrant city where Chinese workers shared bedspaces in the crowded tenements of Taipingshan. Despite persistent inequality, Hong Kong never ceased to attract different classes of sojourners and immigrants, who strived to advance their social standing by accumulating wealth, especially through land and property speculation.

In this engaging and extensively illustrated book, Cecilia L. Chu retells the ‘Hong Kong story’ by tracing the emergence of its ‘speculative landscape’ from the late nineteenth to the early decades of the twentieth century. Through a number of pivotal case studies, she highlights the contradictory logic of colonial urban development: the encouragement of native investment that supported a laissez-faire housing market, versus the imperative to segregate the populations in a hierarchical, colonial spatial order. Crucially, she shows that the production of Hong Kong’s urban landscapes was not a top-down process, but one that evolved through ongoing negotiations between different constituencies with vested interests in property. Further, her study reveals that the built environment was key to generating and attaining individual and collective aspirations in a racially divided, highly unequal, but nevertheless upwardly mobile, modernizing colonial city.

Africa throughout its postcolonial history has been plagued by human rights abuses ranging from intolerance of political dissent to heinous crimes such as genocide. Some observers consequently have gone so far as to suggest that human rights are a concept alien to African cultures. The International Criminal Court (ICC)'s focus on Africa in recent years has reinforced the region's reputation as a hotspot for human rights violations.

But despite Africa's notoriety concerning human rights, Africa and the Shaping of International Human Rights argues that the continent has been pivotal in helping to shape contemporary human rights norms and practices. Challenging prevailing Eurocentric interpretations of human rights' origins and evolution, it demonstrates that from the colonial era to the present Africa's peoples have drawn attention to and prompted rethinking of human rights through their encounters with the world at large. Beginning with the depredations of King Leopold II in the Congo Free State in the 1880s and ending with the ICC's current activities in Africa, it reveals how African events, personalities, groups, and nations have influenced the trajectory of human rights history in intriguing and critical ways, in the end enlarging and universalizing a major discourse of our time.

Paradoxically, the Kohimarama Conference of 1860 stands in contemporary historiography as a shining example of Maori interaction with the Crown and of what might have been possible if the government was not being so dastardly in its other pursuits. However, the month-long conference, attended by over 100 Māori chiefs, was not a “ratification” of the Treaty of Waitangi as argued by some historians, but an attempt by the government, then under extreme pressure during the first Taranaki war, to avert a more wide-spread conflict, and to advance its colonial project. Using both Maori and English-lnguage newspapers, the conference, the largest propaganda effort and political theatre directed towards Maori, was further projected out to the Maori and Pakeha reading publics.

Collective Memory and the Dutch East Indies: Unremembering Decolonization examines the afterlife of decolonization in the collective memory of the Netherlands. It offers a new perspective on the cultural history of representing the decolonization of the Dutch East Indies, and maps out how a contested collective memory was shaped. Taking a transdisciplinary approach and applying several theoretical frames from literary studies, sociology, cultural anthropology and film theory, the author reveals how mediated memories contributed to a process of what he calls "unremembering." He analyses in detail a broad variety of sources, including novels, films, documentaries, radio interviews, memoirs and historical studies, to reveal how five decades of representing and remembering decolonization fed into an unremembering by which some key notions were silenced or ignored. The author concludes that historians, or the historical guild, bear much responsibility for the unremembering of decolonization in Dutch collective memory.

Somalia is generally thought of as a homogenous society, with a common Arabic ancestry, a shared culture of nomadism and one Somali mother tongue. This study challenges this myth. Using the Jareer/Bantu as a case study, the book shows how the Negroid physical features of this ethnic group has become the basis for ethnic marginalization, stigma, social exclusion and apartheid in Somalia. The book is another contribution to the recent deconstruction of the perceived Somali homogeneity and self-same assertions. It argues that the Somalis, just like most societies, employ multiple levels of social and ethnic distinctions, one of which is the Jareer versus Jileec divide. Dr. Eno successfully portrays another Somalia, in which a mythical homogeneity masks the oppression and social exclusion suffered by some ethnic groups in the country

This is an open access book available at: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/51045

In 1603, Dutch Admiral Jacob van Heemskerk plundered a Portuguese merchantman, the Santa Catarina, travelling from Macao to Melaka. The sale of the cargo at a public auction made traders across Northern Europe aware of the riches to be reaped from Asian trade. However, the episode raised legal questions and the United Dutch East India Company (VOC) commissioned the young Hugo Grotius to defend Heemskerk's actions. Grotius produced two classic legal texts, The Law of Price and Booty and its spin-off, The Free Sea, among the greatest works in the history of international legal and political thought. His observations dealt with free trade in the East Indies, the Dutch Republic's military conflict with the Portuguese and Spanish in Asia, and the legal and moral grounds for attacking and plundering Portuguese and Spanish mercantile shipping.

This book considers the background to the treaties then content and significances, and what Grotius actually knew about Southeast Asian politics and Portuguese institutions of trade and diplomacy when he wrote them.

Grotius' work on the freedom of the sea was a cornerstone in his enduring reputation as one of the founders of modern international law. The present book provides a valuable resource for historians of Southeast Asia and for students of international relations, political theory, maritime history and public law.
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Book Contribution - Chapter
Companion to the exhibition CONGOVILLE, Middelheim Museum, May 2021 – October 2021One hundred years after the founding of the École Coloniale Supérieure in Antwerp, the adjacent Middelheim Museum invites Sandrine Colard, researcher and curator, to conceive an exhibition that probes silenced histories of colonialism in a site-specific way. For Colard, the term Congoville encompasses the tangible and intangible urban traces of the colony, not on the African continent but in 21st-century Belgium: a school building, a park, imperial myths, and citizens of African descent. In the exhibition and this adjoining publication, the concept Congoville is the starting point for 15 contemporary artists to address colonial history and ponder its aftereffects as black flâneurs walking through a postcolonial city.Due to the multitude of perspectives and voices, this book is both a catalogue and a reference work comprised of artistic and academic contributions. Together, the participating artists and invited authors unfold the blueprint of Congoville, an imaginary city that still subconsciously affects us, but also encourages us to envision a decolonial utopia.

Een eeuw na de oprichting van de École Coloniale Supérieure in Antwerpen nodigt het naburige Middelheimmuseum onderzoeker en curator Sandrine Colard uit om een tentoonstelling te creëren die sitespecifiek peilt naar de stille geschiedenissen van het kolonialisme. Congoville duidt op de zichtbare en onzichtbare stedelijke sporen van de kolonie, niet op het Afrikaanse continent, maar pal in het België van vandaag: een schoolgebouw, een park, imperialistische mythes en burgers van Afrikaanse origine. Doorheen de tentoonstelling en deze bijhorende publicatie is Congoville de context waarbinnen 15 hedendaagse kunstenaars, als zwarte flâneurs op pad in een postkoloniale stad, het koloniale verleden en de impact ervan adresseren.Door de veelheid aan perspectieven en stemmen is dit boek tegelijk een catalogus en een naslagwerk met zowel academische als artistieke bijdragen. Samen ontvouwen de betrokken kunstenaars en auteurs de blauwdruk van Congoville, een imaginaire stad die ons nog steeds onbewust in haar greep houdt, maar ons ook aanspoort om na te denken over een de-koloniaal utopia.

With contributions by/Met bijdragen van: Pieter Boons, Sandrine Colard, Filip De Boeck, Bas De Roo, Nadia Yala Kisukidi, Sorana Munsya & Léonard Pongo, Herman Van Goethem, Sara Weyns, Nabilla Ait Daoud.

Participating artists / Deelnemende kunstenaars: Sammy Baloji, Bodys Isek Kingelez, Maurice Mbikayi, Jean Katambayi, KinAct Collective, Simone Leigh, Hank Willis Thomas, Zahia Rahmani, Ibrahim Mahama, Ângela Ferreira, Kapwani Kiwanga, Sven Augustijnen, Pascale Marthine Tayou, Elisabetta Benassi, Pélagie Gbaguidi

First issue of new academic journal. Studia Turkica Mongolica Tibetica Manchurica Sibirica Russica et cetera.

Tartaria Magna is a peer reviewed e-journal in Russian. Editors accept papers and reviews in English and provide Russian translation. We may consider publication of the papers and reviews that have been published in other journals within the period of 3 years. More info: www.tartaria-magna.ru

Se aborda la difícil situación en que se encontraba la Iglesia católica dominicana a comienzos del periodo anexionista debido, sobre todo, a su estado de acefalia desde 1858, y las diversas posturas existentes dentro del clero con respecto a la dominación española. También se analizan las leyes promulgadas en materia religiosa durante la llamada Primera República (1844-1861), para explicar la polémica que se suscitó con Gran Bretaña y los Estados Unidos como consecuencia de la legislación matrimonial promulgada por las nuevas autoridades españolas, así como en torno a la tolerancia del culto protestante en territorio dominicano.

Abstract
This article studies the difficult situation that the Dominican Catholic Church was suffering at the beginning of the annexation of Santo Domingo to Spain, mainly due to its headless condition from 1858, and the diverse existing positions among the clergy with regard to the Spanish domination. Laws on religious matters passed in the Dominican Republic during the so called First Republic (1844-1861) are also analyzed, in order to explain the polemic provoked by Great Britain and the United States because of marriage legislation promulgated by the new Spanish authorities, as well as concerning the tolerance of Protestant worship in the Dominican territory.

Although literacy and print were essential tools of the New Zealand colonial project ultimately designed to ‘amalgamate’ Māori into the modern Pākehā-dominated world, ironically they also helped in the evolution of a collective Māori consciousness. This collective sense of being manifested itself in such pan-Māori movements as the Kīngitanga, Kotahitanga and Te Aute College Students Association. Māori were not passive recipients of print culture, and each of these movements utilized newspapers as a means of disseminating their discourses. Utilizing aspects of Benedict Anderson’s theory on the role of print in the formation of national consciousness, this essay looks at how Pākehā-run newspapers assisted in the development of a collective Māori consciousness, and how each of these movements projected this identity in their own publications.

The essays in this volume provide a new perspective on the history of convicts and penal colonies. They demonstrate that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were a critical period in the reconfiguration of empires, imperial govern-mentality, and punishment, including through extensive punitive relocation and associated extractive labour. Ranging across the global contexts of Africa, Asia, Australasia, Japan, the Americas, the Pacific, Russia, and Europe, and exploring issues of criminalization, political repression, and convict management alongside those of race, gender, space, and circulation, this collection offers a perspective from the colonies that radically transforms accepted narratives of the history of empire and the history of punishment. In this introduction, we argue that a colony-centred perspective reveals that, during a critical period in world history, convicts and penal colonies created new spatial hierarchies, enabled the incorporation of territories into

Manchuria remains a problematic region in modern Korean historiography. The intense interactions between the Korean peninsula and Manchuria before 1945 often become subsumed into nationalist narratives of anti-Japanese resistance and the suffering of impoverished Korean migrants. While recent Korean historiography on Manchuria has addressed a broader array of historical issues, there is still much more research necessary to understand fully the position of Manchuria in modern Korean history. This study examines the postliberation narratives of Korean returnees from Manchuria during the immediate liberation period and reconnects their collective experiences with some key events of Korea and Manchuria under the Japanese empire. Through a discussion of the large scale Korean migration and economic integration that took place within Manchuria before 1945, the need for a broader historical paradigm becomes apparent. Colonial era historians developed their own historiographical models to explain the interconnections between the two regions. While the colonial historiography need not be rehabilitated for such purposes, there is still a need to conceptualize Manchuria and Korea from a transnational historical framework that can better elucidate the deep interconnections between the two regions before 1945.

The Government General of Korea took over a decade after seizing control of Korea to promulgate the Census Ordinance in 1921 along with the first compilation of the colonial census registry or koseki. Koreans during the previous Choson dynasty did take a census, but the data only clearly recorded the head of household. The 1921 registry was not comprehensive as many Koreans had left the country or never voluntarily identified themselves during the colonial period. Thus the transition from the household registry system of the Choson dynasty to the colonial koseki took several decades and the process was not complete by the end of colonial rule in 1945. Today, the unregistered Korean returnees from the former Soviet Union or China still remain a perplexing problem, because the Republic of Korea refuses to grant resident rights to these ethnic Koreans who cannot produce the proper documentation.

This study examines the complex dynamics behind the emergence of the colonial koseki and the subsequent social and legal interactions that surrounded the registration process in colonial Korea. A fascinating social history can be discovered in the instances of multiple fictitious names that appear on the colonial koseki and the attempts by the colonial state to clear up the legal confusion triggered by an inability to register all the Koreans. The colonial registration process took on a new dimension once the Second Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1937, when a sudden necessity to register all Koreans for military and labor conscription arose. Thus, understanding the process by which the colonial koseki took shape is important in understanding both the complexities of colonial society as well as the subsequent issue of who is or is not a constituent member of South Korean society today.

Chinese laborers migration to colonial Korea became a major issue that resulted in entry restrictions in 1934. During the early years of colonial rule, the Government General of Korea did not actively limit the entry of Chinese laborers and the colonial state was one of the largest employers. However, in the 1930s migration restrictions appeared not only in Korea but also in neighboring Manchuria. The efforts at border control in colonial Korea need to be viewed in conjunction with labor policies in Japan and Manchuria. The restrictions on Chinese labor were ultimately linked to efforts to reconfigure Japan’s new territorial possessions after the Manchurian Incident in 1931 as the region became a space for resolving the intractable social and economic problems of the Japanese empire.

This article explores the politics of literacy in late colonial Sudan. Drawing upon hitherto untapped archival sources in English and Arabic, it focuses on two key-questions: what were the purposes and uses of literacy in the eyes of colonial authorities? What means were used to spread Arabic literacy skills among Sudanese people? Replacing these issues in the context of British imperial policy in Africa, I argue that mixed teams of British and Sudanese educationalists came to view literacy as a central tool to foster social progress and political modernity. The analysis puts special emphasis on literacy campaigns and follow-up literature as experimental means used to promote and perpetuate Arabic literacy in the Northern Sudan. Examining both "nation-wide" and provincially based magazines, it highlights their multifaceted role as pedagogic materials, vehicles of political, cultural and ideological representations, social networks, as well as public platforms of expression for young Sudanese literates.

Visit: http://www.saharanresearch.org/www.douglaspostpark.org/SARA_Initiative/SARA_Initiative.html

This research explores human response to climate change and asks how this interaction may have helped to form the large-scale prehistoric urbanism in the Timbuktu region. New understandings on the nature of prehistoric urbanism on the Niger Bend have been laid out by employing various theories and working models that deal with the social relationship with the changing climate and seasonal environment. The archaeological data used to address these theories and models were obtained over three seasons of research between 2008 and 2010. Field research involved intensive excavation and survey at the Iron Age tell complex of Tombouze (9 kilometers southeast of modern Timbuktu). Additionally, a wide ranging reconnaissance of the larger Timbuktu region and various forms of paleo-climate studies were also undertaken.

My findings suggest that the roles of changing climate regimes, a highly variable seasonal environment, and the unique ways local populations interacted with a difficult and marginal landscape, were all important in the formation of a dense and expansive prehistoric urban landscape. Incipient and small-scale semi-sedentary groups which came to the Timbuktu region at approximately 500 BC gave rise to a fully permanent yet highly flexible form of urbanism circa AD 650. Abandonment of the large urban centers and their hinterlands occurred at approximately AD 1000, soon before the foundation of historic Timbuktu by the Tuareg.

Investigation and analysis into the unique character of the prehistoric settlements of the Timbuktu region has produced a new hypothetical model of urbanism which may have application to the rest of the Niger Bend region. Known as the "Tombouze Model", this hypothetical construct suggests that urbanism fluctuates on a seasonal basis in accordance with the high and low flood seasons. During the high flood season, when dry land is limited, the prehistoric urban populations coalesced onto numerous large focus tells reaching probable dimensions of up to 100 hectares. During the low flood season, when land is plentiful but water scarce, the prehistoric populations radiated out into the hinterlands of the focus tells establishing temporary yet specialized seasonal camps in the floodplains while a much reduced permanently inhabited settlement core remained at the focus tells.

Como uma elite local profundamente ligada à produção de uma commodity lidava com as vicissitudes do comércio Atlântico? Esta questão é enfrentada a partir da principal cidade do Ultramar português entre 1630-1730 e um dos principais portos do Novo Mundo nesse período.

Colonial Korea underwent a major transformation as the Japanese Empire mobilised the colonial population to aid its expansion into the Asian mainland during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45). This article examines the development of colonial print culture and the use of visual images to generate support for Japanese colonial rule.The Japanese colonisers did not undertake their wartime mobilisation alone, for Japan’s spectacular military victories encouraged prominent Korean collaborators to join in the war effort. This analysis of the visual representations from late colonial Korea provides a glimpse into the internal logic and symbolic universe of Korean collaborators and discusses the techniques of mobilisation that were deployed in a bid to achieve hegemony in colonial Korea

This article revisits the trope of the traffic in body parts in colonial and postcolonial Equatorial Africa. Current analyses, mostly written by anthropologists and sociologists, explain these rumors by the destructive integration of Africa in the world’s economy and the commodification of the human body.
While acknowledging their fertility, I argue that these approaches fail to understand how, during the colonial era, Europeans and Africans participated in the re-enchanting of the human body. The first part of the article examines
Equatorial African conceptions of the body as central in the crafting of power and social reproduction, and reconstructs how these views were disturbed by colonial intrusion. The second part turns to European discourses and suggests that the colonial situation revealed significant contradictions in the western fiction of a modern disconnect between the body and power. The series of political and moral transgressions triggered by the conquest made apparent how Europeans themselves
envisioned political survival as a form of positive exchange revolving around the body-fetish. The third section puts these ideas to the test of funeral practices to show how, in the colony, black and white bodies became re-sacralized
as political resources. Building on these findings, the conclusion questions anthropologists’ and historians’ tendency to draw epistemic boundaries between
western and African imaginaries.

The issue of collaboration strikes at the heart of the question of ‘voluntarism’ in mass dictatorship. We may view colonial collaboration as a particular form of collective reinvention and modern governmentality, where dominated subjects are encouraged to internalize social norms and regulate their everyday conduct in the hopes of satisfying the demands of the colonizers. Postliberation regimes attempted to punish collaborators, but they could not overcome the ambiguities of historical memory and the difficulties in defining certain actions as crimes against the nation. Ultimately, the ability of collaborators to detach themselves from the consequences of their everyday conduct provided support for mass dictatorships around the world.

The Japanese often explained that they could not implement certain policies in Korea because of the low mindo or cultural and economic level of the Korean population. This denigrating term then became internalised among Korean participants in the colonial public sphere, and they often expressed views that the Korean public was backward and not able to fully express its collective political will. However, Korean pundits did not accept their fate quietly and a critical public debate developed within the limits of the dominant colonial rationality, especially over the perceived failures of colonial policy. The discourse of mindo changed rapidly with the outbreak of World War II, as Koreans would later claim that their level of civilisation had finally become high enough to achieve equality with the Japanese. Political pressure for colonial reforms continued to build even during the height of World War II and assumed a different character under the particular circumstances of wartime mobilisation. Through an examination of the trajectory of mindo, we may gain insights into the ‘alternative rationalities’ of the colonial order that shaped the colonial public sphere.

" The building of the Suez Canal in Egypt offers many lessons about business-government relations, international lobbying, public relations and business communications, scandals and public diplomacy.

GERMAN/DEUTSCH - Die Geschichte des Suezkanals ist ein Lehrstück über das Verhältnis von Unternehmen und Staaten, internationale Lobbyarbeit, PR-Kampagnen, Skandale und Public Diplomacy.
Schlagwörter: Ägypten, Börse, Corvée, Diplomatie, Dreyfus-Affäre, Eisenbahn, Finanzmärkte, Frankreich, Großbritannien, Imperialismus, Interessenvertretung, Lobby, Osmanisches Reich, Panamakanal, Skandal, Sklaverei, Staatsschulden, Suezkanal, Zwangsarbeit
Organisationen: Anonyme Studiengesellschaft für den Orient
Unternehmen: Compagnie Universelle du Canal Maritime de Suez, GDF Suez
Personen: Kaiserin Eugenie, Frédéric Bartholdi, Ferdinand de Lesseps, Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon III., Abdel Nasser, Lord Palmerston (Henry John Temple), Muhammad Said, Giuseppe Verdi, Königin Victoria
Publikationen: Der Isthmus von Suez, La Lune, Standard (London)"

ESTEVÃO RAFAEL FERNANDES, Estevão. O QUE A HOMOSSEXUALIDADE INDÍGENA PODE ENSINAR SOBRE COLONIALISMO – E COMO RESISTIR A ELE. Somanlu: Revista de Estudos Amazônicos, [S.l.], v. 17, n. 1, p. 103-118, fev. 2018. ISSN 2316-4123. Disponível em: <http://www.periodicos.ufam.edu.br/somanlu/article/view/4276>. Acesso em: 20 fev. 2018. doi: https://doi.org/10.17563/somanlu.v17i1.4276.

With respect to the historical aspect of Grotius’ oeuvre, five main themes emerge: (1) the polarity, in his historical works proper, between constitutionalism and patriotism on the one hand, and reason of state and scepticism on the other; (2) Grotius’ ‘secularising’ reading of history; (3) the close correlation between scholarship and politics; (4) Grotius’ use of sources and his relation to contemporary developments in antiquarianism; and (5) the important role of historical perspectives in his other works, such as De Iure Belli ac Pacis and the Annotationes on the New Testament. Although, for Grotius, history was always subservient to political ends and this led him to creative overinterpretation of sources in some cases, this does not mean he has not contributed to the discipline as such or to its methods. For him, the progress of the historical discipline lay in the movement towards secularism and realism/naturalism, not so much in the antiquarian direction. In his correspondence of the 1630s, Grotius includes the Annales et Historiae among his chief achievements and expresses his expectation that the work would earn him a lasting fame with posterity. The chief methodological thrust of the work is an attempt at analysis of the true logic behind human history; i.e. of the real causes, motives and effects, regardless of the demands of moral exemplarity and religious teleology. Obviously, this separation runs parallel to the rise of reason of state in politics itself and the gradual ‘emancipation’of politics from the demands of ethics and religion; as Grotius’ ideas on the statesman-historian show, politics and the writing of history were intimately connected activities.

The collective memory inscribed in Korean history books recalls when the Japanese colonial state requi23sitioned brassware from Korean households during World War II. This study explores the complex mechanism behind these campaigns. Copper was a scarce commodity in the Japanese empire. The colonial brassware industry expanded but struggled due to fluctuating copper prices before the war. To overcome the reluctance of Koreans to part with their brassware, the colonial state had to coordinate various actors across multiple organisations, provide
ceramic replacements, and establish a system of financial payments. The Japanese also ultimately created a ‘brass bureaucracy’ capable of carrying out the sensitive task of removing copper from Korean households. The Korean case reminds us that institutional frameworks are necessary for wartime salvage. Finally, brassware collections also resulted in fundamental changes in Korean society and everyday material culture that require careful analysis.

Given the years of refusal to confront its uncomfortable colonial past, the notion of a museum of British colonialism offers the possibility of the country finally facing the shame of its colonialism. Yet, a museum of British colonialism requires careful consideration of its form, structure and process to act as a catalyst of social and political debate, and to challenge the promotion and sustenance of white cultural hegemony. The idea also raises other concerns about the existing British museums; their role in decolonising histories and their engagement with the thorny question of restitution. The question is no longer what Britain’s colonies would have been without the Empire, but what Britain would have been without the exploitation of its colonies, and how to acknowledge and address this colonial past in its modern-day legacy. These uncomfortable memories of colonialism reside not only in museums born of the Empire but also in museums in the colony, and both need to confront this agonising legacy.

Korean historians have long noted the importance of tobacco in colonial finances and highlighted the economic exploitation of the farmers and laborers involved in the tobacco production system. However, the economic history of tobacco production is far more complex than can be subsumed under the predominant narratives of colonial exploitation. The production of tobacco in colonial Korea has to be understood within the broader context of Japan’s imperial expansion and the regional competition for the East Asian tobacco market in the early twentieth century. British and American Tobacco (BAT) was a formidable presence in the region, which forced the Japanese to concentrate on markets within the Japanese empire. A new period of expansion commenced after the Manchurian Incident in 1931, and the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 allowed for the rapid growth of the Japanese tobacco industry in Manchuria and China. As Japanese imperial tobacco production expanded in colonial Korea, the commodity had an immense impact on Korean society and culture. Korean consumers constructed new cultural meanings and identities around tobacco that varied considerably depending on one’s social status and position within Korean society. Through a nuanced examination of tobacco’s multifaceted interactions within the Japanese empire, we can better understand many important aspects of colonial Korea’s economy, society and culture.

Western missionaries arrived in Korea decades before the Japanese annexation of 1910, and they established a major presence before the advent of colonial rule. The missionaries initially clashed with the colonial state over state intervention in their religious affairs. Through a series of confrontations, the missionaries eventually gained key concessions which allowed them to expand their presence in Korea, especially in the cities of Pyongyang and Seoul. The reasons why Christian organizations flourished under Japanese colonial rule are often attributed to their nationalist reputation gained through the March First Movement, but this line of analysis tends to provide an incomplete picture. Through a careful examination of the process by which the Western missionaries became institutionalized in the colonial order through the pursuit of education, medicine, and other forms of “social work,” we may better understand the dynamics between state and religion in colonial Korea

Japanese colonial bureaucrats in Korea made frequent references to ‘industrial warriors’ and announced special material provisions and awarded medals to Korean workers during WWII. The Japanese hoped to solve the empire-wide labour shortage through the mobilisation of workers, and the paise given to labour heroes was a part of this broader campaign. The Japanese used both coercion and material incentives for their mobilisation. A careful focus on the theme of ‘industrial warriors’ can be useful in highlighting the complexities of the mobilisation system. The fact that so many Korean workers had been mobilised so far away from their homes meant that the Japanese had to pay special attention managing their 'leisure time'. In essence, they had to devise a way of keeping the Korean workers preoccupied and entertained when they were outside the factories and mines. Therefore, behind the rhetoric of the ‘industrial warriors’ was an attempt to restructure everyday life and introduced a more totalistic conception of industrial labour management under a ‘rationalised’ modernity.

Yun Hae-dong's essay discusses a long-running debate among mostly historians in Japan concerning the presence or absence of the public sphere in colonial Korea. Rather than accept the problematic assumptions behind a Habermasian public sphere, Yun offers the concept of ‘publicness’ as a suitable substitute for analysing the multiple dimensions of colonialism. A public sphere in the civic society sense could not, and did not, exist under colonialism, he argues. However, this does not mean that colonised subjects lacked a sense of publicness that ultimately served both the interests of the colonial state as well as offered opportunities for Korean appropriations. Therefore, Yun explores alternative venues for discovering notions of ‘publicness’ in colonial Korea and highlights several neglected aspects of the period for further consideration.