From the 1850's until the 1880's, British Colonial administrators established wide-ranging legislation aimed at slowing the spread of venereal disease and the loss of soldier-power it brought about. The legislation, known as the Contagious Diseases (CD) ordinances and regulations, identified female prostitutes as the principal source of infection and required them to register officially and undergo regular examinations designed to detect venereal disease.
While most agree that the CD ordinances were put in place primarily to protect the health of British soldiers, a closer examination reveals that the laws were not just about the control of VD but also "a conscious instrument of colonial dominance".

Over the last century, identity as an avenue of inquiry has become both an academic growth industry and a problematic category of historical analysis. This volume shows how the study of medicine can provide new insights into colonial identity, and the possibility of accommodating multiple perspectives on identity within a single narrative. Contributors to this volume explore the perceived self-identity of colonizers; the adoption of western and traditional medicine as complementary aspects of a new, modern and nationalist identity; the creation of a modern identity for women in the colonies; and the expression of a healer's identity by physicians of traditional medicine.

Related link: The Society for the Social History of Medicine
eBook available with sample pages: 0203522311

The process of familiarization with and adaptation to unfamiliar landscapes has been integral to colonization and settlement throughout human history.
This innovative and important volume presents the archaeological and anthropological foundations of the landscape learning process. Contributions apply the related fields of ethnography, cognitive psychology, and historical archaeology to the issues of individual exploration, development of trail systems, folk knowledge, social identity, and the role of the frontier in the growth of the modern world. A series of case studies examines the archaeological evidence for and interpretations of landscape learning from the movement of the first pre-modern humans into Europe, peoplings of the Old and New World at the end of the Ice Age, and colonization of the Pacific, to the English colonists at Jamestown. The final chapters summarize the implications of the landscape learning idea for our understanding of human history and set out a framework for future research.

From sugar to indentured labourers, tobacco to reggae music, Europe and North America have been relentlessly consuming the Caribbean and its assets for the past five hundred years. In this fascinating book, Mimi Sheller explores this troublesome history, investigating the complex mobilities of producers and consumers, of material and cultural commodities, including:
*foodstuffs and stimulants - sugar, fruit, coffee and rum
*human bodies - slaves, indentured labourers and service workers
*cultural and knowledge products - texts, music, scientific collections and ethnology
*entire 'natures' and landscapes consumed by tourists as tropical paradise.

Consuming the Caribbean demonstrates how colonial exploitation of the Caribbean led directly to contemporary forms of consumption of the region and its products. It calls into question innocent indulgence in the pleasures of
thoughtless consumption and calls for a global ethics of consumer responsibility.

This new Seminar Study surveys the history of U.S. territorial expansion from the end of the American Revolution until 1860.

The book explores the concept of 'manifest destiny' and key themes such as 'Indian' removal and the US government land sales policy. The author also looks at 'foreign'expansion such as the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, and the war with Mexico in the 1840s and 'internal' expansion as American settlers moved west. Finally, the book addresses the most recent historiographical trends in the subject and asks how Americans have dealt with the expansionist legacy

The process of familiarization with and adaptation to unfamiliar landscapes has been integral to colonization and settlement throughout human history.
This innovative and important volume presents the archaeological and anthropological foundations of the landscape learning process. Contributions apply the related fields of ethnography, cognitive psychology, and historical archaeology to the issues of individual exploration, development of trail systems, folk knowledge, social identity, and the role of the frontier in the growth of the modern world. A series of case studies examines the archaeological evidence for and interpretations of landscape learning from the movement of the first pre-modern humans into Europe, peoplings of the Old and New World at the end of the Ice Age, and colonization of the Pacific, to the English colonists at Jamestown. The final chapters summarize the implications of the landscape learning idea for our understanding of human history and set out a framework for future research.

The Portuguese appear to have been the first European visitors to encounter East Africa, with the arrival of a lone traveller, Pero da Covilham, in c.1491. Covilham left no account of his experiences, so Vasco da Gama had little idea of what to expect when he led his first voyage to the region in 1497. The account of this expedition paints a vivid portrait of the first contacts between Portugal and the coastal peoples of East Africa. This account, together with a wealth of carefully selected documents comprise this volume of writings which detail Portugal's relationship with East Africa from the late fifteenth century through to the seventeenth century. As these documents demonstrate, the best Portuguese writers had a deep interest in the African peoples and carefully observed the way their societies worked. The Portuguese in East Africa lived alongside their African subjects and the independent chiefs and to a large extent adopted their life style, technology, business practices, and even their beliefs and customs. This collection of contemporary writings from the period brings to life this extraordinary relationship.

Series Information:
Central Asia Research Forum

An examination of French citizenship and cultural identity in Algeria during the last quarter-century of colonial rule. In recent years, a multicultural society and changing conceptions of French identity have been the source of considerable debate in scholarship, literature and the media in France. This book examines equally contested definitionsof French identity from the past, but not those forged within the borders of the French 'Hexagon,' as French geographic space is sometimes called. It is the study of French sentiment in colonial Algeria of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, during the last quarter century of colonial rule in North Africa. It seeks to uncover elements of French identity that were generated past the Pyrenees and the Alps, beyond the bordering Atlantic Ocean, English Channel and Mediterranean Sea, outside the physical space so central to "Frenchness." It asks whether far-reaching state institutions could transform indigenous and settler populations in colonial Algeria -- Europeans, Jews and Muslims -- intoFrench men and women. It examines what these individuals wrote of French sentiment in colonial Algeria. Did they articulate alternative definitions of French identity? The colonial "periphery" is clearly quite central to France'sevolving postcolonial sense of self. Colonial Algerian heterogeneity and the country's unique relationship to France make it an especially rich site in which to study French national and cultural identities. French military conquest and the occupation of the North African coast established one of the oldest and largest settler colonies within the French Empire. Unlike other colonies, Algeria lay relatively close to metropolitan France, a daylong journey by ship from Marseilles. No colony other than Algeria was granted French departmental status. No other land administered under the auspices of the French Empire had as numerous a European settler population, many of whom becamenaturalized French citizens. This study suggests that although Algeria had become officially French, "Algerie francaise", even at the pinnacle of its acceptance, was more diverse and more contested than its title suggests.

"Mestizo: a person of mixed blood; specifically, a person of mixed European and American Indian ancestry."
Serge Gruzinski, the renowned historian of Latin America, offers a brilliant, original critique of colonization and globalization in "The Mestizo Mind." Looking at the 15th century colonization of Latin America, Gruzinski documents the melange that resulted: colonized mating with colonizers; Indians joining the Catholic Church and colonial government; and Amerindian visualizations of Jesus and Perseus. These physical and cultural encounters created a new culture, a new individual, and a phenomenon we now call globalization. Revealing globalization's early origins, Gruzinski then fast forwards to the contemporary melange seen in the films of Peter Greenaway and Wong Kar-Wai to argue that over 500 years of intermingling has produced the mestizo mind, a state of mixed thinking that we all possess.
A masterful alchemy of history, anthropology, philosophy and visual analysis, "The Mestizo Mind" definitively conceptualizes the clash of civilizations in the style of Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak and Anne McClintock.

An analysis of the socio-economic changes brought about by colonial rule in a frontier area of Bengal, Jalpaiguri. Challenging long established debates focused around the powers of dominant groups over a settled peasantry, this book broadens our perspective on the 18th century, promoting a deeper understanding of the change-over from the pre-colonial to the colonial era.

Contents:
Acknowledgements
Abstract
Chapter I. Ideology and Education in Puerto Rico, 1493-1898
Chapter II. The Ideology of US Policy Makers
Chapter III. The Hampton-Tuskegee-Carlisle Model of Education
Chapter IV. Textbooks Used, 1898-1908
Chapter V. Two Master Historians: John Bach McMaster and Salvador Brau
Chapter VI. Conclusions
Bibliography

Colonialist Photography is an absorbing collection of essays and photographs exploring the relationship between photography and European and American colonialism. Packed with over a hundred images, these captivating pictures range from the first experiments with photography as a documentary medium, up to the decolonisation of many regions after the Second World War.
With thirteen essays, Colonialist Photography considers:
* how photographs tended to support the cultural and political rhetoric of racial and geographic difference between the West and its colonies
* the range of images from 'scientific' categorizing and recording methods, to 'commercial' pictures for collection and display, such as postcards and magazine advertisements
* how photographers contributed to cultural, social, and political ideas of race by highlighting racial distinction in their work.

This book is an in-depth study of the importnace of the Empire-Commonwealth in the two decades after WWII for Britain's self-image as a great power. By studying a wide range of debates on general and specific imperial problems, the book highlights the "official mind" of decolonization - and of late imperialism.

This collection fills the need for a resource that adequately conceptualizes the place of non-European histories in the larger narrative of world history. These essays were selected with special emphasis on their comparative outlook. The chapters range from the British Empire (India, Egypt, Palestine) to Indonesia, French colonialism (Brittany and Algeria), South Africa, Fiji, and Japanese imperialism. Within the chapters, key concepts such as gender, land and law, and regimes of knowledge are considered.

When he was elected President in 1845, James K. Polk was only 49 years old-at that time the youngest president ever to be elected. He faced a conflicted nation on the verge of tremendous territorial expansion. James K. Polk's four years in office marked the greatest period of territorial acquisition in the history of the country-what New York journalist John O'Sullivan termed as the 'Manifest Destiny' of the United States to expand across the continent. By the end of Polk's presidency in 1849, U.S. possessions included the California, Oregon, and New Mexico territories. In addition, Texas had become part of the Union. This book analyzes Polk's political career and his role in each of these territorial expansions. James K. Polk: A Clear and Unquestionable Destiny shows that they were far more complex than the moral crusade that had been labeled 'Manifest Destiny.' Southern planters wanted to protect their 'peculiar institution' of slavery by adding new territories from which slave states would be carved. Commercial interests feared that war with England over any of these territories would adversely impact upon the nation's trade. Although the Oregon boundary dispute was settled with little friction, the Mexican War erupted after the annexation of Texas. This fascinating biography of our eleventh president and his successful efforts for expansion of U.S. territory will be of interest to students studying United States history, foreign policy, and the massive territorial expansion in the 1840s known as Manifest Destiny.

"Betts is to be commended on his careful and insightful elucidation of the complex and novel sets of dilemnas now facing the British people at a time of superficial calm masking serious divisions."--"Albion"
The erosion of British sovereignty, national identity and culture, the subversion of its history and traditions, and the demoralization of its institutions and public services, are a source of increasing unease to many. The process began, Betts argues, with the end of the colonial empires. Since the beginning of the last decade, concern about the consequences has been heightened by global instability. The demise of the Communist empire, the rise of national independence movements, and the eruption of long standing and bitter ethno-national conflicts have resulted in a mass migration of economic refugees and asylum seekers to Britain and other Western nations.
In Britain, public attitudes are ambivalent. In part this is a consequence of the promotion of the myth of the multiracial Commonwealth, the regional devolution of the United Kingdom, and the transition from a European Economic Union into a politically federalized European super-state. Britain's national interests have become secondary to those of the United Nations and an inchoate and unwilling international community. Influenced by an outmoded UN Convention on Refugees and the lack of a consistent immigration policy and failure of those immigration controls that do exist, gradual but major political, social, and cultural shifts have occurred without the express consent of the majority of the British electorate. Virtually all public debate by the government and by politicians on these issues has been taboo, effectively silenced by fear of being accused of xenophobia, discrimination, and racism. The result is cynicism and disenchantment with the political process as a whole.
Betts's objective is to promote responsible and informed discussion of these issues. In the absence of this, he warns, we risk the twilight of a harmonious British society, diminished pride in British institutions and national identity, and competing and conflicting separatist ethnic, racial, and cultural claims. "Twilight of Britain" will be of interest to general readers, those interested in modern Britain and Europe, as well as sociologists, political scientists, and philosophers.
G. Gordon Betts was educated in the Universities of Cambridge, Birmingham, Greenwich, and Kent at Canterbury. He is a chartered chemical engineer, having spent his professional career with a major British oil company in the petrochemical industry.

This book examines the various factors that have influenced the growth and development process of contemporary Africa. After discussing and weighing the schools of thought that have attempted to explain the paradox of Africa's reduced growth and development in the midst of abundant resources, this volume comes up with comprehensive and detailed suggestions and recommendations to address this painful experience. This book consistently states that the average Africans, forming the overwhelming majority of the African population, are the least, if at all, to be blamed for the paradox; but rather the African leadership and its external cronies are to be fully blamed. Contemporary Africa's Growth and Development seeks a solution to the African growth and development puzzle in proper allocation and oversight of resources, vision, perseverance, courage, corruption-free and good governance, as well as concrete, provable, solid, and genuine unity.

This book adopts a global approach to analysing Danish nationhood in the current context of a Europe paralysed by crises. Focusing on the global strands which have produced understandings of national selfhood as a consequence of a series of historical and contemporary global encounters, it calls for the production of narratives which better capture how European nations, including Denmark, are shaped by narratives that cannot be understood in (national) isolation, but are contingent on ideas about the nation's globality. In historical terms, this entails examining how colonialism shaped national self-perceptions; in a contemporary context, it requires looking at colonialism's unfinished business. The first chapters revisits colonialism throughout the Danish empire. In the second section, the book revisits Danish (post-1945) attempts to restage global interventions and military intervention since 2000, and considers how migration since 1965 has led to a profound questioning of relationships with the non-European world - and increasingly with Europe itself. Postcolonial Denmark situates Denmark at the centre of a number of current and ever more urgent challenges facing Europe. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, political science and cultural studies with interests in Europe, the Nordic region through a postcolonial, a whiteness and a decolonial inspired approach.

A study of the first three decades of British rule in Hong Kong, focusing on the troubled and controversial process of establishing a British colony at Hong Kong and on the reception of British rule by people in the region.

Drawing from a range of materials, including religious texts, women's literature, field interviews, historical archives, critical theories, and rap music, this book offers important critiques of the way religious and feminist knowledge is constructed. This text looks at white feminist theology and its misunderstanding of Native North American women, Chinese footbinding, and veiling by Muslim women, as well as the Jewish emancipation in France, the symbolic dissection of black women by rap and sermons, and the potential to rewrite and reclaim religious stories. This important reassessment of religious studies offers new visions for the development of anti-colonialist, anti-racist, and anti-sexist discourses of liberation.

First published in 1993. How is it possible for the three tiny Baltic republics to gain their freedom from the Soviet Union, without a single shot being fired or a single stone thrown at the oppressor? The topic of this book is the implosion of the Soviet empire. It tells the parallel stories of how the three Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania struggled successfully to gain their freedom, and how the policies pursued by Mikhail Gorbachev served to mobilize and politicize Baltic demands. Particular emphasis is placed on unintended consequences that resulted from repeated interventions by Moscow. The authors develop a loose theoretic framework for the examination of this critical struggle. The study starts by developing the analytical tools and then proceeds to outline, as background, the most salient features of Gorbachev's reform programme and of the history of the Baltic States. The core of the analysis is then presented in three chapters, devoted to three consecutive stages in the game. The first shows how strategies on both sides were initially formulated in consensus. In the second it is shown how consensus transformed into pure conflict, and in the third all actors are seeking to escape general collapse. The main conclusion points at the absence of 'politics' in the Soviet System as a main cause of its self-destruction.

When African Modernism was first published in 2015, it was showered with international praise and has been sought after ever since it went out of print in 2018. Marking Park Books' 10th anniversary, this landmark book will now be available again. Over the course of the 1950s and 1960s, most African countries gained independence from their respective colonial powers. Architecture became one of the principal means by which the newly formed states expressed their national identity. African Modernism investigates the close relationship between architecture and nation-building in Ghana, Senegal, Cote d'Ivoire, Kenya, and Zambia. It features 100 buildings with brief descriptive texts, images, site plans, selected floor plans and sections. The vast majority of images were taken by Iwan Baan and Alexia Webster especially for the book's first edition, documenting the buildings in their present state. Each country is portrayed through an introductory text and a timeline of historic events. Additional essays on specific aspects and topics of postcolonial Africa, likewise richly illustrated with images and documents, round out this outstanding volume.

Imperial Networks investigates the discourses and practices of British Colonialism. It reveals how British colonialism in the region was informed by, and itself informed, imperial ideas and activities elsewhere, both in Britain and in other colonies.
Drawing on materialist South African historiography, postcolonial theory and geographical conceptions, imperial Networks examines:
* the origins and early nineteenth century development of the three interacting discourses of colonialism - official, humanitarian and settler
* the contests, compromises and interplay between these discourses and their proponents
* the analysis of these discourses in the light of a global humanitarian movement in the aftermath of the antislavery campaign
* the eventual colonisation of the Xhosa and the construction of colonial settler identities.
Imperial Networks introduces students to key debates in the historiography of nineteenth century South Africa, as well as in materialist and postcolonial constructions of the past.