This volume is about the mythologies of land exploration, and about space and the colonial enterprise in particular. It is an investigation of the presumptions, aesthetics and politics of Australian explorers texts that looks at the journals of John Oxley, Thomas Mitchell, Charles Sturt and Ludwig Leichhardt, and shows that they are not the simple, unadorned observations the authors would have us believe, but, rather, complex networks of tropes. The text argues that contact with Aborigines and the virgin land are occasions of discursive contest, and that, however much explorers construct themselves as monarchs of all they survey, this monarchy is not absolute. This book intention is to scrutinize and undermine the scientific and literary methodology of exploration.

These essays, by thirteen specialists from Japan and the United States, provide a comprehensive view of the Japanese empire from its establishment in 1895 to its liquidation in 1945. They offer a variety of perspectives on subjects previously neglected by historians: the origin and evolution of the formal empire (which comprised Taiwan, Korea, Karafuto. the Kwantung Leased Territory, and the South Seas Mandated Islands), the institutions and policies by which it was governed, and the economic dynamics that impelled it. Seeking neither to justify the empire nor to condemn it, the contributors place it in the framework of Japanese history and in the context of colonialism as a global phenomenon. Contributors are Ching-chih Chen. Edward I-te Chen, Bruce Cumings, Peter Duus, Lewis H. Gann, Samuel Pao-San Ho, Marius B. Jansen, Mizoguchi Toshiyuki, Ramon H. Myers, Mark R. Peattie, Michael E. Robinson, E. Patricia Tsurumi. Yamada Sabur?, Yamamoto Y?zo?.

Liberty or Death is Patrick French's vivid and surprising account of the chaotic final years of colonial rule in India, acclaimed as the definitive book on this subject. At midnight on 14 August 1947, Great Britain's 350-year-old Indian Empire was broken into three pieces. The greatest mass migration in history began, as Muslims fled north and Hindus fled south, and Britain's role as an imperial power came to an end. Journeying across India, Bangladesh and Pakistan, Patrick French brings to life a cast of characters including spies, idealists, freedom fighters and politicians from Winston Churchill to Mahatma Gandhi. The result is a compelling story of deal-making, missed opportunities, hope and tragedy. 'A fine, lucid book ... vividly drawn with novel-like touches' Hanif Kureshi 'Extraordinarily able and nuanced ... a brilliant book on an important subject ... French is the most impressive Western historian of modern India currently at work' Herald 'Beautifully written' Sunday Times 'French is a natural storyteller ... a delightful tale of intrigue, ham-handedness and just plain blundering' India Today Patrick French is the author of India: A Portrait, Younghusband: The Last Great Imperial Adventurer, which won the Somerset Maugham Award and the Royal Society of Literature W. H. Heinemann Prize, Tibet, Tibet: A Personal History of a Lost Land, The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul, which was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Hawthornden Prize.

Intended for classroom use, work contains 47 pages from Las Casas' life of Columbus plus 24 other selections--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.

Countries throughout Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe are moving from semi-closed to open economies and from authoritarian to democratic political systems. Despite important differences between the regions, these transitions involve similar tasks: the establishment of governmental institutions and electoral systems conducive to legitimation of the new and fragile democracies and expansion of the institutional infrastructure of a market economy.This volume looks at both regions, focusing on the relationship between the tasks of institutional design and the outcomes of the process of economic and political liberalization. In particular, the contributors emphasize the design of institutions to serve a market economy, the design of electoral laws, and the design of executive-legislative relations. Each chapter discusses the legacy of the pre-existing authoritarian regime; the range of preferences among various strategic actors (the government, state bureaucracies, opposition parties, and interest groups) with regard to the pace and mix of reforms; and the consequences of final choices for the institutionalization of effective economies and the process of democratization.

This is the first full-length survey in any language of the fiction and film generated in France by the Algerian war (1954 - 1962). Although part of a much wider process of decolonization, the conflict was so traumatic decolonization, the conflict was so traumatic that it brought France to the verge of civil war. Its memory continues to haunt French society today. Like America's experience in Vietnam, it has been understood as a paradigm of the collapse of Western certainties in the post-war period. Philip Dine's ground-breaking study examines the novels and films which deal with the war in an attempt to understand the lasting impact of the conflict. By locating texts within institutional and public discourses, it addresses issues of historical agency and ideological dissemination and casts light on the mechanics of literary mystification. Among the writers discussed are Camus, Etcherelli, Millecam, Peree, Cesbron, Clavel, Ikor, Larteguy, Saint-Laurent, and Jules Roy, and the book also explores the films of directors including Godard, Schoendoerffer, Resnais, Tavernier, and Pontecorvo. All quotations in French are accompanied by English translations. Innovative and accessible, Images of the Algerian War will interest all teachers and students of the culture and politics of modern France, together with all those concerned with issues of decolonization.

From the acclaimed author of The Gunpowder Age, a book that casts new light on the history of China and the West at the turn of the nineteenth century George Macartney's disastrous 1793 mission to China plays a central role in the prevailing narrative of modern Sino-European relations. Summarily dismissed by the Qing court, Macartney failed in nearly all of his objectives, perhaps setting the stage for the Opium Wars of the nineteenth century and the mistrust that still marks the relationship today. But not all European encounters with China were disastrous. The Last Embassy tells the story of the Dutch mission of 1795, bringing to light a dramatic but little-known episode that transforms our understanding of the history of China and the West. Drawing on a wealth of archival material, Tonio Andrade paints a panoramic and multifaceted portrait of an age marked by intrigues and war. China was on the brink of rebellion. In Europe, French armies were invading Holland. Enduring a harrowing voyage, the Dutch mission was to be the last European diplomatic delegation ever received in the traditional Chinese court. Andrade shows how, in contrast to the British emissaries, the Dutch were men with deep knowledge of Asia who respected regional diplomatic norms and were committed to understanding China on its own terms. Beautifully illustrated with sketches and paintings by Chinese and European artists, The Last Embassy suggests that the Qing court, often mischaracterized as arrogant and narrow-minded, was in fact open, flexible, curious, and cosmopolitan.

The initial religious encounters between settlers in southern Africa and the indigenous inhabitants entailed the establishment of settler churches and the relationships with their home countries. However, this era saw little by way of the spread of Christianity. In 1799, with the arrival of Johannes van der Kemp and other missionaries from the London Missionary Society, Christianity began to cross colonial boundaries, marking the great era of missions in southern Africa. At the outset, the missionary presence remained precariously perched between success and failure. While missionary influence among the indigenous peoples was relatively insignificant, the opposite was true within the colony. At the same time, expansion pressures from the Cape precipitated growing conflict between settlers and indigenous peoples. Increasingly, missionaries were caught between the interests of indigenous peoples and those of the colony. For the most part, they sided with their colonial heritage and roots, but in some significant instances, their identification with indigenous people led them to take extremely unpopular stands against both Boer and British colonial authority. Such conflicts are traced at various levels throughout this book. The broader spread of Christianity during this period is also examined through multiple voices and stories.

This 1992 book is a full-length study in English of the 'confetti of empire', the former French colonies which have not gained their independence but remain part of France as the departements et territoires d'outre-mer (DOM-TOMs). More recent French governments have shown a determination to retain these possessions, despite independence movements (notably in New Caledonia) and international criticism. The authors' comprehensive description of the history, economy, geography and politics of the DOM-TOMs will make this the standard English reference on France's overseas territories.

Treaties and Indigenous Peoples is an edited version of Professor Ian Brownlie's 1990 Robb Lectures, delivered at the University of Auckland in the sesquicentennial year of the establishment of New Zealand as a British colony.

Whereas most sesquicentennial writing necessarily deals with Treaty and related problems in the immediate context of New Zealand law and politics, Professor Brownlie, bringing the external perspective and the expertise of an eminent academic and practising international lawyer, deals with those problems in the international context of the rights of indigenous peoples.

The New Zealand constitutional background to the work is provided by Professor Brookfield's annotations.

This book includes the first five, thematic, chapters from the Cambridge History of Africa, Volume 7. They deal with Africa south of the Sahara, during a period in which economic and cultural changes greatly enlarged the horizons of Africans, even though colonial rule seemed set to last for a very long time. The contributors break much new ground in exploring a variety of topics which transcend colonial frontiers: the impact of Africa on the thought of the colonial powers; impulses to economic growth, and new frameworks directing the movement of people, goods and money; the rapid expansion of world religions and their interaction with indigenous beliefs and colonial regimes; the circulation of ideas among Africans, and the growth of new social identities, as reflected in the press, literature, art and music. Each chapter is accompanied by a bibliography updated for this edition.

A look at the encounter between the French and the peoples of Southern Gabon in terms of their differing conceptions of boundaries. In the second half of the nineteenth century, two very different practices of territoriality confronted each other in Southern Gabon. Clan and lineage relationships were most important in the local practice, while the French practice was informed by a territorial definition of society that had emerged with the rise of the modern nation-state and industrial capitalism. This modern territoriality used an array of bureaucratic instruments -- such as maps andcensuses -- previously unknown in equatorial Africa. Such instruments denied the existence of locally created territories and were fundamental to the exercise of colonial power. Thus modern territoriality imposed categories and institutions foreign to the peoples to whom they were applied. As colonial power became more effective from the 1920s on, those institutions started to be appropriated by Gabonese cultural elites who negotiated their meanings in reference to their own traditions. The result was a strongly ambiguous condition that left its imprint on the new colonial territories and subsequently the postcolonial Gabonese state. Christopher Gray was Assistant Professor of History, Florida International University.

In this book, the prominent theorist Partha Chatterjee looks at the creative and powerful results of the nationalist imagination in Asia and Africa that are posited not on identity but on difference with the nationalism propagated by the West. Arguing that scholars have been mistaken in equating political nationalism with nationalism as such, he shows how anticolonialist nationalists produced their own domain of sovereignty within colonial society well before beginning their political battle with the imperial power. These nationalists divided their culture into material and spiritual domains, and staked an early claim to the spiritual sphere, represented by religion, caste, women and the family, and peasants. Chatterjee shows how middle-class elites first imagined the nation into being in this spiritual dimension and then readied it for political contest, all the while "normalizing" the aspirations of the various marginal groups that typify the spiritual sphere.

While Chatterjee's specific examples are drawn from Indian sources, with a copious use of Bengali language materials, the book is a contribution to the general theoretical discussion on nationalism and the modern state. Examining the paradoxes involved with creating first a uniquely non-Western nation in the spiritual sphere and then a universalist nation-state in the material sphere, the author finds that the search for a postcolonial modernity is necessarily linked with past struggles against modernity.

A multifaceted portrait of the early American republic as seen through the lens of the Burr Conspiracy In 1805 and 1806, Aaron Burr, former vice president of the newly formed American republic, traveled through the Trans-Appalachian West gathering support for a mysterious enterprise, for which he was arrested and tried for treason in 1807. This book explores the political and cultural forces that shaped how Americans made sense of the uncertain rumors and reports about Burr's intentions and movements, and examines what the resulting crisis reveals about their anxieties concerning the new nation's fragile union and uncertain republic. Burr was said to have enticed some people with plans to liberate Spanish Mexico, others with promises of land in the Orleans Territory, still others with talk of building a new empire beyond the Appalachian Mountains. The Burr Conspiracy was a cause celebre of the early republic--with Burr cast as the chief villain of the Founding Fathers--even as the evidence against him was vague and conflicting. Rather than trying to discover the real intentions of Burr or his accusers--Thomas Jefferson foremost among them--James E. Lewis Jr. looks at how differing understandings of the Burr Conspiracy were shaped by everything from partisan politics and biased newspapers to notions of honor and gentility. He also traces the enduring legacy of the stories that were told and accepted during this moment of uncertainty. The Burr Conspiracy offers a panoramic and multifaceted portrait of the United States at a time when it was far from clear to its people how long it would last.

The project of Indian art cinema began in the years following independence in 1947, at once evoking the global reach of the term "art film" and speaking to the aspirations of the new nation-state. In this pioneering book, Rochona Majumdar examines key works of Indian art cinema to demonstrate how film emerged as a mode of doing history and that, in so doing, it anticipated some of the most influential insights of postcolonial thought. Majumdar details how filmmakers as well as a host of film societies and publications sought to foster a new cinematic culture for the new nation, fueled by enthusiasm for a future of progress and development. Good films would help make good citizens: art cinema would not only earn global prestige but also shape discerning individuals capable of exercising aesthetic and political judgment. During the 1960s, however, Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, and Ritwik Ghatak-the leading figures of Indian art cinema-became disillusioned with the belief that film was integral to national development. Instead, Majumdar contends, their works captured the unresolvable contradictions of the postcolonial present, which pointed toward possible, yet unrealized futures. Analyzing the films of Ray, Sen, and Ghatak, and working through previously unexplored archives of film society publications, Majumdar offers a radical reinterpretation of Indian film history. Art Cinema and India's Forgotten Futures offers sweeping new insights into film's relationship with the postcolonial condition and its role in decolonial imaginations of the future.

In Colonial Transactions Florence Bernault moves beyond the racial divide that dominates colonial studies of Africa. Instead, she illuminates the strange and frightening imaginaries that colonizers and colonized shared on the ground. Bernault looks at Gabon from the late nineteenth century to the present, historicizing the most vivid imaginations and modes of power in Africa today: French obsessions with cannibals, the emergence of vampires and witches in the Gabonese imaginary, and the use of human organs for fetishes. Struggling over objects, bodies, agency, and values, colonizers and colonized entered relations that are better conceptualized as "transactions." Together they also shared an awareness of how the colonial situation broke down moral orders and forced people to use the evil side of power. This foreshadowed the ways in which people exercise agency in contemporary Africa, as well as the proliferation of magical fears and witchcraft anxieties in present-day Gabon. Overturning theories of colonial and postcolonial nativism, this book is essential reading for historians and anthropologists of witchcraft, power, value, and the body.

Traces the consequences of agricultural development in western Kenya in the 1950s and 1960s After more than fifty years of development, why have interventions and aid failed to yield greater poverty alleviation in Sub-Saharan Africa? Why did the agricultural development projects that were transpiring in places like Kenyaduring the "development era" of the 1950s and 1960s not take-off? Cultivating Their Own: Agriculture in Western Kenya during the "Development" Era explores these questions and others that continue to drive the research agendas of international aid agencies and development scholars in the twenty-first century. The book centers on four agricultural development projects unfolding in a densely populated rural area of western Kenya during the country'stransition to independence and its first few years under de facto one-party rule. Drawing on an array of primary sources and oral interviews, Saeteurn argues that the project of agrarianism failed to germinate in places like western Kenya because of competing interests, conflicting agendas, and structural problems inherent in the process of development at the international, national, and local level. Cultivating Their Own is a timely reminder of theimportance of paying attention not only to local people's aspirations but also to the realities of rural life when creating projects that mobilize agriculture for poverty reduction.

Arguing that the European and white American destruction of the native American people was the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world, Stannard attempts to set the records straight on what befell American Indians over the last five centuries.

Europe has long imagined itself as the centre of the universe, although its precise geographical, cultural and social terrains have always been amorphous. Exploring the fear and fascination associated with the continent as an allegory, Hamid Dabashi considers Europe to be a historically formed barricade against the world. Frantz Fanon's assessment that 'Europe is literally the creation of the Third World' is still true today; but in more than one sense for the colonial has always been embedded in the capital, and the capital within the colonial. As the condition of coloniality shifts, so have the dividing lines between coloniser and colonised, and this shift calls for a reappraisal of our understanding of nationalism, xenophobia and sectarianism as the dangerous indices of the emerging worlds. As the far-right populists captivate minds across Europe and Brexit upsets the balance of power in the European Union, this book, from a major scholar of postcolonial thought, is a timely and transformative intervention.

The Failure of Latin America is a collection of John Beverley's previously published essays and pairs them with new material that reflects on questions of post-colonialism and equality within the context of receding continental socialism. Beverley sees an impasse within both the academic postcolonial project and the Bolivarian idea of Latin America. The Pink Tide may have failed to permanently reshape Latin America, but in its failure there remains the possibility of an alternative modernity not bound to global capitalism. Beverley proposes that equality, modified by the postcolonial legacy, is a particularly Latin American possibility that can break the impasse and redefine Latin-Americanism.

This widely acclaimed book analyzes the political effects of scientific research as exemplified by one field, economic botany, during one epoch, the nineteenth century, when Great Britain was the world's most powerful nation. Lucile Brockway examines how the British botanic garden network developed and transferred economically important plants to different parts of the world to promote the prosperity of the Empire. In this classic work, available once again after many years out of print, Brockway examines in detail three cases in which British scientists transferred important crop plants-cinchona (a source of quinine), rubber and sisal-to new continents. Weaving together botanical, historical, economic, political, and ethnographic findings, the author illuminates the remarkable social role of botany and the entwined relation between science and politics in an imperial era.

Decolonization revolutionized the international order during the twentieth century. Yet standard histories that present the end of colonialism as an inevitable transition from a world of empires to one of nations-a world in which self-determination was synonymous with nation-building-obscure just how radical this change was. Drawing on the political thought of anticolonial intellectuals and statesmen such as Nnamdi Azikiwe, W.E.B Du Bois, George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah, Eric Williams, Michael Manley, and Julius Nyerere, this important new account of decolonization reveals the full extent of their unprecedented ambition to remake not only nations but the world. Adom Getachew shows that African, African American, and Caribbean anticolonial nationalists were not solely or even primarily nation-builders. Responding to the experience of racialized sovereign inequality, dramatized by interwar Ethiopia and Liberia, Black Atlantic thinkers and politicians challenged international racial hierarchy and articulated alternative visions of worldmaking. Seeking to create an egalitarian postimperial world, they attempted to transcend legal, political, and economic hierarchies by securing a right to self-determination within the newly founded United Nations, constituting regional federations in Africa and the Caribbean, and creating the New International Economic Order. Using archival sources from Barbados, Trinidad, Ghana, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, Worldmaking after Empire recasts the history of decolonization, reconsiders the failure of anticolonial nationalism, and offers a new perspective on debates about today's international order.

The library of America is dedicated to publishing America's best and most significant writing in handsome, enduring volumes, featuring authoritative texts. Hailed as the "finest-looking, longest-lasting editions ever made" (The New Republic), Library of America volumes make a fine gift for any occasion. Now, with exactly one hundred volumes to choose from, there is a perfect gift for everyone.

An introduction to the causes and consequences of the Korean War, this history seeks to challenge presumptions about Korea favoured by American politicians and network news pundits. Through a judicious survey of the historical record, Martin Hart-Landsberg demonstrates that the basic aim of U.S. foreign policy in Korea from the outset has been regional control - not democracy, despite Washington's claims. Reconstructing the long pattern of Korean struggles for national unity and independence from foreign domination, he shows that the division of the country into hostile states after World War II produced an "imaginary line" contrary to the interests and desires of a majority of Koreans. He examines the post-war history of North and South Korea, showing how Cold War foreign policy and division undermined valuable efforts at social change on both sides of the 38th parallel. Reunification, he concludes, is the optimal solution for Korea, so long as it transpires on a democratic and egalitarian basis, with participation by popular social movements.