Territorial issues have historically assumed a central role in international relations. Despite considerations relating to, for example, human rights and economic and social cooperation, the territorially-based view of international law remains the fundamental model and is subscribed to by third world states. The acquisition of territory in Africa by the European powers in the nineteenth century involved the characterization of the status of the various African communities. They were accepted as holding title to their territory, but not apparently regarded as full subjects of international law. Cession was the primary technique used in the colonization of Africa. The present study analyses the colonial acquisition of African territory with particular reference to the evolution of the principles of self-determination and its impact upon the law relating to territory. The first full-length treatment of its subject, this book makes an important contribution to the understanding of one of the crucial areas of international law.

Australia's official Reconciliation project confronted Australians with the continuous violent dispossession suffered by the country's Indigenous peoples and the pressing need to offer a public apology to them. While trauma became a tool whereby to create paths of empathy and reconciliation between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians, it was also a manipulative strategy to deny the country's shameful history. This book examines Gail Jones's literary contribution to such debates. It examines Gail Jones's questioning of Australia's victimology narratives, and offers an insightful discussion of the transmedia, transnational and multidirectional approach to trauma in the reconciliation-related novels she published during John Howard's vexed Liberal Government (1996-2007).

Connected Empires, Connected Worlds: Essays in Honour of John Darwin contains diverse essays on the expansion, experience, and decline of empires. The volume is offered in honour of John Darwin's contribution to the study of empire and its endings. Written by his former students and colleagues, the book's chapters discuss topics from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. While each author has contributed according to their expertise, they also reflect on how John's ideas and approaches continue to stimulate new work in disparate fields. Touching on the experience of empire in Europe, Africa, Asia and Australasia, the authors have engaged with concepts from across Darwin's writings, including his earlier work on decolonisation, 'decline', and 'the dynamics of territorial expansion'. As such, the work in this volume operates across a number of different scales of analysis: from case studies of transnational communities, state formation and military intervention, to imperial politics, inter-imperial comparison, and global historical frameworks. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History.

Building on archival work undertaken in France and fieldwork undertaken in Southeast Asia, Museum-Making in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia provides a critical analysis of museum histories and development in three former colonial territories. This work documents the development of museums in French Indochina (1862-1954), specifically Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The book explores the colonial culture of exhibition, traces the growth of museum collections through archaeological missions to Indochina and other parts of Asia, and examines the role of museums in the cultural life of this colonial society. In particular, the author re-contextualizes the role and part played by colonial museums in the implementation of heritage policies during the colonial era in French Indochina, a dimension that is often overlooked. Additionally, the book addresses the effects that the Second World War, the Vichy Regime, and the Japanese occupation had on these cultural institutions. The transformation of these museums in post-independence Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia is also discussed. Providing comparisons with other colonial and post-colonial experiences, Museum-Making in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia will be a valuable resource for researchers in museum and heritage studies. It will also appeal to researchers and graduate students engaged in the study of history, anthropology, sociology, political science, and development and international studies.

Brecht in India analyses the dramaturgy and theatrical practices of the German playwright Bertolt Brecht in post-independence India. The book explores how post-independence Indian drama is an instance of a cultural palimpsest, a site celebrating a dialogue between Western and Indian theatrical traditions, rather than a homogenous and isolated canon. Analysing the dissemination of a selection of Brecht's plays in the Hindi belt between the 1960s and the 1990s, this study demonstrates that Brecht's work provided aesthetic and ideological paradigms to modern Hindi playwrights, helping them develop and stage a national identity. The book also traces how the reception of Brecht was mediated in India, how it helped post-independence Indian playwrights formulate a political theatre, and how the dissemination of Brechtian aesthetics in India addressed the anxiety related to the stasis in Brechtian theatre in Europe. Tracking the dialogue between Brechtian aesthetics in India and Europe and a history of deliberate cultural resistance, Brecht in India is an invaluable resource for academics and students of theatre studies and theatre historiography, as well as scholars of post-colonial history and literature.

Through two World Wars and the Great Depression, this book explores the turbulent history of colonial Indian industry in the period immediately prior to independence. Focusing on five major industries in Bengal - coal mining, iron-smelting, jute manufacturing, paper making and tea plantation - the book looks at the impact of the war efforts on production, employment and capital: some industries experienced rapid growth due to additional investment, others suffered due to the dislocation of markets. Moreover, by drawing lessons from the war economy (especially the dearth of various essential commodities including war materials), the colonial government took up various measures in the inter-war period to promote India's domestic industries for the first time. Additionally, the book also argues that many of the expatriate firms in India became financially weak because of the Depression which paved the way for the 'Indianisation' of corporate houses. These elements were significant factors in the decline of British industrial hegemony in India and aided the de-colonisation process which followed. This book will be of interest to scholars of Indian economic history as well as those with wider interests in decolonisation, industrial history and the first half of the twentieth century.

The fact that the Malaysian state has managed to maintain a relatively democratic regime, while an authoritarian regime came to power in Indonesia has never been the focus of historical and comparative analyses despite certain cultural, social, and historical affinities between these two countries. This book takes a look at contrasting class structures and alliances, elite cohesion, state strength, as well as differences in political challenges to the state in order to understand two different paths to post-colonial state formation.

A Postcolonial African American Re-reading of Colossians: Identity, Reception, and Interpretation Under the Gaze of Empire examines the identities of two seemingly unrelated groups of people; the initial recipients of the letter and the enslaved African in the North American Diaspora. Both groups, although unrelated, share a common element. They are both considered erroneous in their interpretations of the gospel. They are labeled and summarily silenced. This work gives both a voice and determines from their identities their response to the gospel. Despite the lack of harsh labels given to the initial readers of Colossians by modern commentators, the author of the letter was guilty of error in that the letter lacked deference to their former beliefs and culture.

As a Princely State, Hyderabad was the largest in population among over 560 tributary states under British paramountcy in colonial India. This book is a collection of profiles and sketches of some of the most important and influential people from the erstwhile Hyderabad State during the first half of the 20th century, which marked the last decades of its existence as a distinct entity under the British Raj. It features profiles of Mir Osman Ali Khan, the Seventh Nizam; Mir Laik Ali, the last Prime Minister of Hyderabad; Kasim Razvi; some of the Nizam's administrators and diplomats; as well as Sir Walter Monckton, the Nizam's British Constitutional Advisor; amongst others. Unfolding the pages of history, the text gives an insight into the administration and affairs of Hyderabad during this time, through an examination of the lives of the people closely associated with it. A unique contribution to the literature on modern Indian and colonial history, this book will be indispensable for students and researchers of history, modern Indian history, colonialism, imperial history, biography, and South Asia studies. It will also appeal to general readers interested in the history of Hyderabad.

This book is an original, systematic, and radical attempt at decolonizing critical theory. Drawing on linguistic concepts from 16 languages from Asia, Africa, the Arab world, and South America, the essays in the volume explore the entailments of words while discussing their conceptual implications for the humanities and the social sciences everywhere. The essays engage in the work of thinking through words to generate a conceptual vocabulary that will allow for a global conversation on social theory which will be necessarily multilingual. With essays by scholars, across generations, and from a variety of disciplines - history, anthropology, and philosophy to literature and political theory - this book will be essential reading for scholars, researchers, and students of critical theory and the social sciences.

This book is a pioneering study of Joshua Mqabuko Nkomo, a Zimbabwean nationalist whose crucial role in the country's anti-colonial struggle has largely gone unrecognized. These essays trace his early influence on Zimbabwean nationalism in the late 1950s and his leadership in the armed liberation movement and postcolonial national-building processes, as well as his denigration by the winners of the 1980 elections, Mugabe's Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front. The Nkomo that emerges is complex and contested, the embodiment of Zimbabwe's tortured trajectory from colony to independent postcolonial state. This is an essential corrective to the standard history of twentieth-century Zimbabwe, and an invaluable resource for scholars of African nationalist liberation movements and nation-building.

This translation of Rita Segato's seminal book La critica de la colonialidad en ocho ensayos offers an anthropological and critical perspective on the coloniality of power as theorized by the Peruvian thinker Anibal Quijano. Segato begins with an overview of Quijano's conceptual framework, emphasizing the power and richness of his theory and its relevance to a range of fields. Each of the seven subsequent chapters presents a scenario in which a persistent colonial structure or form of subjectivity can be identified. These essays address urgent issues of gender, sexuality, race and racism, and indigenous forms of life. They set the decolonial perspective to work, and are connected by two central preoccupations: the critical analysis of coloniality and the effort to reimagine anthropology as "responsive anthropology," a practice at once answerable and useful to the communities previously regarded as the "objects" of ethnographic thought. The Critique of the Coloniality makes important and original contributions to our understanding of colonial and decolonial processes, drawing on the author's experience of feminist and antiracist movements and struggles for indigenous and human rights. This book will appeal to students and scholars working in anthropology, Latin American studies, political theory, feminist and gender studies, indigenous studies, and anticolonial, post-colonial, and decolonial thought.

This translation of Rita Segato's seminal book La critica de la colonialidad en ocho ensayos offers an anthropological and critical perspective on the coloniality of power as theorized by the Peruvian thinker Anibal Quijano. Segato begins with an overview of Quijano's conceptual framework, emphasizing the power and richness of his theory and its relevance to a range of fields. Each of the seven subsequent chapters presents a scenario in which a persistent colonial structure or form of subjectivity can be identified. These essays address urgent issues of gender, sexuality, race and racism, and indigenous forms of life. They set the decolonial perspective to work, and are connected by two central preoccupations: the critical analysis of coloniality and the effort to reimagine anthropology as "responsive anthropology," a practice at once answerable and useful to the communities previously regarded as the "objects" of ethnographic thought. The Critique of the Coloniality makes important and original contributions to our understanding of colonial and decolonial processes, drawing on the author's experience of feminist and antiracist movements and struggles for indigenous and human rights. This book will appeal to students and scholars working in anthropology, Latin American studies, political theory, feminist and gender studies, indigenous studies, and anticolonial, post-colonial, and decolonial thought.

These are the essential writings of a man who inspired a new, egalitarian socialist regime in the Middle East, which is currently fighting for survival against religious extremism and state violence. Abdullah Ocalan led the struggle for Kurdish liberation for more than 20 years until his capture in 1999. Now, writing from prison in Turkey, he has inspired a new political movement. Called Democratic Confederalism, this revolutionary model is developing on the ground in parts of Syria and Turkey; it represents an alternative to religious sectarianism, patriarchy, capitalism and chauvinistic nationalism, providing the blueprint for a burgeoning radical democratic society. This selection of Ocalan's writings is an indispensable introduction for anyone wanting to engage with his political ideas. His central concepts address the Kurdish question, gender, Democratic Confederalism and the future of the nation. With The Political Thought of Abdullah Ocalan, his most influential ideas can now be considered and debated in the light of his continuing legacy, most notably in the ongoing revolution in Rojava.

This book examines the impact of British education policies on the Muslims of Colonial Bengal. It evaluates the student composition and curriculum of various educational institutions for Muslims in Calcutta and Dacca to show how they produced the educated Muslim middle class. The author studies the role of Muslim leaders such as Abdul Latif and Fazlul Huq in the spread of education among Muslims and looks at how segregation in education supported by the British fueled Muslim anxiety and separatism. The book analyzes the conflict of interest between Hindus and Muslims over education and employment which strengthened growing Muslim solidarity and anti- Hindu feeling, eventually leading to the demand for a separate nation. It also discusses the experiences of Muslim women at Sakhawat Memorial School, Lady Brabourne College, Eden College, Calcutta, and Dacca Universities at a time when several Brahmo and Hindu schools did not admit them. An important contribution to the study of colonial education in India, the book highlights the role of discriminatory colonial education policies and pedagogy in amplifying religious separatism. It will be useful for scholars and researchers of modern Indian history, religion, education, Partition studies, minority studies, imperialism, colonialism, and South Asian history.

Layers of dispossession and disruption are definitive of South African history. Bouncing from Griqua Philippolis (1824-1862) to Afrikaner Orania (1990-2013), this book shows how land rights are prioritised in pre-apartheid and post-apartheid contexts. The result is a new way of looking at the country's history - different to the version of history partially redressed by an idiosyncratic system of restitution and reconciliation during transformation.

The Kariba Dam, stretching across the Zambezi River between today's Zambia and Zimbabwe, was one of the most famous development projects in Africa in the late 1950s. As a producer of abundant and cheap power, Kariba was to boost the economy of the newly established Central African Federation. The book shows how the dam project crystallised both the hopes and the flaws of the Federation, a highly controversial experiment of 'multiracial' nation-building by which the British colonial power meant to appease both settler and African aspirations for independence. The author sketches the perspectives of a great variety of people involved in the Kariba project, including World Bank experts, colonial administrators, the local population, nationalist politicians, and the workers building the dam. By drawing out what these different groups imagined a 'developed nation' to be like and how they tried to put their visions into practice, the study provides a nuanced understanding of one of the most pervasive ideologies of the twentieth century. Refraining from both uncritical praise and blanket condemnations, the author draws out the fundamental ambivalence at the heart of modernisation, oscillating between empowerment and domination.

Focusing on the 1950s and early 1960s, Culture Writing argues that this period in Britain, the United States, France, and the Caribbean was characterized by dynamic exchanges between literary writers and anthropologists on both sides of the Atlantic. As the British and French empires collapsed and the United States rose to global power in the early Cold War, and as intellectuals from the decolonizing world challenged the cultural hegemony of the West, some anthropologists began to assess their discipline's complicity with empire and experimented with literary forms and technique. Culture Writing shows that the "literary turn" in anthropology took place earlier than has conventionally been assumed, in the 1950s rather than the 1970s and 80s. Simultaneously, some literary writers reacted to the end of the period of modernist experimentation by turning to ethnographic methods for representing the people and cultural practices of Britain, France, and the United States, bringing anthropology back home. There is analysis of literary writers who had a significant professional engagement with anthropology and brought some of its techniques and research questions into literary composition: Barbara Pym (Britain), Ursula Le Guin and Saul Bellow (United States), Edouard Glissant (Martinique), and Michel Leiris (France). On the side of ethnography, the book analyzes works by anthropologists who either explicitly or surreptitiously adopted literary forms for their writing about culture: Laura Bohannan (United States), Michel Leiris and Claude Levi-Strauss (France), and Mary Douglas (Britain). Culture Writing concludes with an epilogue that shows how the literature-anthropology conversation continues into the postcolonial period in the work of Indian author-anthropologist Amitav Ghosh and Jamaican author-sociologist Erna Brodber.

This book promotes constructive and nuanced transdisciplinary understandings of some of the critical problems that we face on a global scale today by thinking with and from the Global South. It is engaged in transmodernising, pluriversalising, decolonising, queering, and/or posthumanising thinking and practice. The book aims to contribute to and challenge current debates regarding knowledge, diversity, and change. This is achieved through the application of transdisciplinary and indisciplined perspectives to the Himalayan Anthropocene; transport services in Mexico City; the EU-Turkey border regimes and policy; egoism and the decolonisation of whiteness; the Witch and the decolonisation of the gender binary; Nepalese students in Denmark; and the decolonisation of global health promotion. The book thereby provides the reader a multiplicity of pathways of knowledges and practices that address current problems co-produced by the dominant Western colonial onto-epistemic outset, giving way to 'other' knowledge-practices, towards a pluriversal approach. This book will be of interest to upper-level undergraduate and graduate students in disciplines such as human geography, development studies, politics, international relations, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, planning, and philosophy. It is also relevant to researchers, development workers and human rights/environmental activists, and other intellectual practitioners.

In Decolonizing the Social Sciences and the Humanities Bernd Reiter contributes to the ongoing efforts to decolonize the social sciences and humanities, by arguing that true decolonization implies a liberation from the elite culture that Western civilization has perpetually promoted. Reiter brings together lessons learned from field research on a Colombian indigenous society, a maroon society, also in Colombia, from Afro-Brazilian religion, from Spanish Anarchism, and from German Council democracy, and from analyzing non-Western ontologies and epistemologies in general. He claims that once these lessons are absorbed, it becomes clear that Western civilization has advanced individualization and elitism. The chapters present the case that human beings are able to rule themselves, and have done so for some 300,000 years, before the Neolithic Revolution. Self-rule and rule by councils is our default option once we rid ourselves of leaders and rulers. Reiter concludes by considering the massive manipulations and the heinous divisions that political elitism, dressed in the form of representative democracy, has brought us, and implores us to seek true freedom and democracy by liberating ourselves from political elites and taking on political responsibilities. Decolonizing the Social Sciences and the Humanities is written for students, scholars, and social justice activists across cultural anthropology, sociology, geography, Latin American Studies, Africana Studies, and political science.

In Decolonizing the Social Sciences and the Humanities Bernd Reiter contributes to the ongoing efforts to decolonize the social sciences and humanities, by arguing that true decolonization implies a liberation from the elite culture that Western civilization has perpetually promoted. Reiter brings together lessons learned from field research on a Colombian indigenous society, a maroon society, also in Colombia, from Afro-Brazilian religion, from Spanish Anarchism, and from German Council democracy, and from analyzing non-Western ontologies and epistemologies in general. He claims that once these lessons are absorbed, it becomes clear that Western civilization has advanced individualization and elitism. The chapters present the case that human beings are able to rule themselves, and have done so for some 300,000 years, before the Neolithic Revolution. Self-rule and rule by councils is our default option once we rid ourselves of leaders and rulers. Reiter concludes by considering the massive manipulations and the heinous divisions that political elitism, dressed in the form of representative democracy, has brought us, and implores us to seek true freedom and democracy by liberating ourselves from political elites and taking on political responsibilities. Decolonizing the Social Sciences and the Humanities is written for students, scholars, and social justice activists across cultural anthropology, sociology, geography, Latin American Studies, Africana Studies, and political science.

Cultures of decolonisation combines studies of visual, literary and material cultures in order to explore the complexities of the 'end of empire' as a process. Where other accounts focus on high politics and constitutional reform, this volume reveals the diverse ways in which cultures contributed to wider political, economic and social change. The book demonstrates the transnational character of decolonisation, thereby illustrating the value of comparison - between different cultural forms and diverse places - in understanding the nature of this wide-reaching geopolitical change. Individual chapters focus on architecture, theatre, museums, heritage sites, fine art and interior design, alongside institutions such as artists' groups, language agencies and the Royal Mint, across Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Europe. -- .

The story of the transformation of the old British Empire into the modern Commonwealth had often been told from the point of view of Great Britain and the 'white dominions'. No attempt had so far been made to describe the decisive role of India in the shaping of the multi-racial Commonwealth of today. Originally published in 1965, the main theme of this work by an Indian author is the growth of the idea of Commonwealth in India from 1885, the year in which the Indian National Congress was organized, to 1929, when Congress declared 'complete independence' to be its goal. What did the British Empire mean to early Indian nationalists? How did the ideal of self-government of India on the Dominion model grow? What was India's continued association with the Commonwealth valued in India and in Britain? Answers to these and similar questions are attempted in this book. Despite its great importance, the role of India in the Commonwealth in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had received little attention from scholars. Dr Mehrotra's clear, incisive, informed and balanced study was therefore the more welcome, not only for its source, but because it lent a new dimension to our understanding of India's part in defining and enlarging the idea of Commonwealth. It is an important contribution to Commonwealth and to modern Indian history.

Decolonising Europe? Popular Responses to the End of Empire offers a new paradigm to understand decolonisation in Europe by showing how it was fundamentally a fluid process of fluxes and refluxes involving not only transfers of populations, ideas, and sociocultural practices across continents but also complex intra-European dynamics at a time of political convergence following the Treaty of Rome. Decolonisation was neither a process of sudden, rapid changes to European cultures nor one of cultural inertia, but a development marked by fluidity, movement, and dynamism. Rather than being a static process where Europe's (former) metropoles and their peoples 'at home' reacted to the end of empire 'out there', decolonisation translated into new realities for Europe's cultures, societies, and politics as flows, ebbs, fluxes, and cultural refluxes reshaped both former colonies and former metropoles. The volume's contributors set out a carefully crafted panorama of decolonisation's sequels in European popular culture by means of in-depth studies of specific cases and media, analysing the interwoven meaning, momentum, memory, material culture, and migration patterns of the end of empire across eight major European countries. The revised meaning of 'decolonisation' that emerges will challenge scholars in several fields, and the panorama of new research in the book charts paths for new investigations. The question mark in the title asks not only how European cultures experienced the 'end of empire' but also the extent to which this is still a work in progress.