This is a cultural history of borders, hygiene and race. It is about foreign bodies, from Victorian Vaccines to the pathologized interwar immigrant, from smallpox quarantine to the leper colony, from sexual hygiene to national hygiene to imperial hygiene. Taking British colonialism and White Australia as case studies, the book examines public health as spatialized biopolitical governance between 1850 and 1950. Colonial management of race dovetailed with public health into new boundaries of rule, into racialized cordons sanitaires.

Using case studies of cholera, plague, malaria, and yellow fever, this book analyzes how factors such as public health diplomacy, trade, imperial governance, medical technologies, and cultural norms operated within global and colonial conceptions of political and epidemiological risk to shape infectious disease policies in colonial India.

"Religious Transactions in Colonial South India" locates the "making" of Protestant identities in South India within several contesting discourses. It examines evolving attitudes to translation and translation practices in the Tamil literary and sacred landscapes initiated by early missionary translations of the Bible in Tamil. Situating the Tamil Bible firmly within intersecting religious, literary, and social contexts, Hephzibah Israel offers a fresh perspective on the translated Bible as an object of cultural transfer. She focuses on conflicts in three key areas of translation--locating a sacred lexicon, the politics of language registers and "standard versions," and competing generic categories--as discursive sites within which Protestant identities have been articulated by Tamils. By widening the cultural and historical framework of the Tamil Bible, this book is the first to analyze the links connecting language use, translation practices, and caste affiliations in the articulation of Protestant identities in India.

An area in the midst of deep change, Southern Africa was in turmoil a short decade ago, its politics framed by white versus black, colonialism versus decolonialism, majority rule versus minority rights. With new political discourses beginning in the early 1990s, the mood today is one of interdependencies between the SADC member countries. To enhance one's understanding of the area, this book provides a comprehensive guide to the history of Southern Africa since the demise of colonialism. In detailed chronologies, it traces the history of the twelve developing Southern African countries-Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Bringing together information on the political development of the SADC member countries, the book aims to provide easy access to the information. The detailed chronologies show the political events as they unfolded, while the two indexes provide easy access to the events. The book is a useful guide to key developments, the role played by political parties, treaty information, and individual personalities.

In "Making Settler Cinemas," Peter Limbrick argues that the United States, Australia, and New Zealand share histories of colonial encounters that have shaped their cinemas in distinctive ways. Going beyond readings of narrative and representation, this book studies the production, distribution, reception, and reexhibition of cinema across three settler societies under the sway of two empires. Investigating films both canonical and overlooked, "Making Settler Cinemas "not only shows how cinema has mattered to settler societies but affirms that practices of film history can themselves be instrumental in encountering and reshaping colonial pasts.""

This book analyzes the memoirs of 42 'missionary kids' - the children of North American Protestant missionaries in countries all over the world during the 20th century. Using a postcolonial lens the book explores ways in which the missionary enterprise was part of, or intersected with, the Western colonial enterprise, and ways in which a colonial mindset is unconsciously manifested in these memoirs. The book explores how the memoirists' sites and experiences are exoticized; the missionary kids' likelihood of learning - or not learning - local languages; the missionary families' treatment of servants and other local people; and gender, race and social class aspects of the missionary kids' experiences. Like other Third Culture Kids, the memoirists are migrants, travelers, border-crossers and border-dwellers who alternate between insider and outsider statuses, and their words shed light on the effects of movement and travel on children's lives and development.

In 1898 the United States acquired new overseas territories and expanded its influence in geopolitics. Acquisition and expansion did not go unopposed. Hundreds of thousands of Americans rejected their nation's foreign policy calling it imperialism. These dissenters established the first national anti-imperialist movement. In this book Michael Patrick Cullinane tells the story of anti-imperialist activists who resisted the expansion of American power at the turn of the century. He explores new ways of looking at anti-imperial protest and demonstrates that the movement was not a complete failure.

This book, the first long-range history of the voluntary sector in Australia and the first internationally to compare philanthropy for Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in a settler society, explores how the race and gender ideologies embedded in philanthropy contributed to the construction of Australia's welfare state.

European unity is a dream that has appealed to the imagination since the Middle Ages. Its motives have varied from a longing for peace to a deep-rooted abhorrence of diversity, as well as a yearning to maintain Europe's colonial dominance. This book offers a multifaceted history that takes in account the European imagination in a global context.

This publication provides a lively study of the role that Australians and New Zealanders played in defining the British sporting concept of amateurism. In doing so, they contributed to understandings of wider British identity across the sporting world.

China has moved from being one of the poorest societies to a level now similar with other relatively developed Third World societies - like Mexico and Brazil. The dominant idea that it somehow threatens to 'catch up' economically, or overtake the rich countries paves the way for imperialist military and economic aggression against China. King's meticulous study punctures the rising-China myth. His empirical and theoretical analysis shows that, as long as the world economy continues to be run for private profit, it can no longer produce new imperialist powers. Rather it will continue to reproduce the monopoly of the same rich countries generation after generation. The giant social divide between rich and poor countries cannot be overcome. -- .

Material Encounters and Indigenous Transformations in the Early Colonial Americas brings together 15 case studies focusing on the early colonial history and archaeology of indigenous cultural persistence and change in the Caribbean and its surrounding mainland(s) after AD 1492. With a special emphasis on material culture and by foregrounding indigenous agency in shaping the diverse outcomes of colonial encounters, this volume offers new perspectives on early modern cultural interactions in the first regions of the 'New World' that were impacted by European colonization. The volume contributors specifically investigate how foreign goods were differentially employed, adopted, and valued across time, space, and scale, and what implications such material encounters had for indigenous social, political, and economic structures. Contributors are: Andrzej T. Antczak, Ma. M. Antczak, Oliver Antczak, Jaime J. Awe, Martijn van den Bel, Mary Jane Berman, Arie Boomert, Jeb J. Card, Charles R. Cobb, Gerard Collomb, Shannon Dugan Iverson, Marlieke Ernst, William R. Fowler, Perry L. Gnivecki, Christophe Helmke, Shea Henry, Gilda Hernandez Sanchez, Corinne L. Hofman, Menno L.P. Hoogland, Rosemary A. Joyce, Floris W.M. Keehnen, J. Angus Martin, Clay Mathers, Maxine Oland, Alberto Sarcina, Russell N. Sheptak, Roberto Valcarcel Rojas, Robyn Woodward.

Seafarers were the first workers to inhabit a truly international labour market, a sector of industry which, throughout the early modern period, drove European economic and imperial expansion, technological and scientific development, and cultural and material exchanges around the world. This volume adopts a comparative perspective, presenting current research about maritime labourers across three centuries, in the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, to understand how seafarers contributed to legal and economic transformation within Europe and across the world. Focusing on the three related themes of legal systems, labouring conditions, and imperial power, these essays explore the dynamic and reciprocal relationship between seafarers' individual and collective agency, and the social and economic frameworks which structured their lives.

Achille Mbembe is one of the world’s most profound critics of colonialism and its consequences, a major figure in the emergence of a new wave of French critical theory. His writings examine the complexities of decolonization for African subjectivities and the possibilities emerging in its wake. In Out of the Dark Night, he offers a rich analysis of the paradoxes of the postcolonial moment that points toward new liberatory models of community, humanity and planetarity.

In a nuanced consideration of the African experience, Mbembe makes sweeping interventions into debates about citizenship, identity, democracy, and modernity. He eruditely ranges across European and African thought to provide a powerful assessment of common ways of writing and thinking about the world. Mbembe criticizes the blinkers of European intellectuals, analyzing France’s failure to heed postcolonial critiques of ongoing exclusions masked by pretenses of universalism. He develops a new reading of African modernity that further develops the notion of Afropolitanism, a novel way of being in the world that has arisen in decolonized Africa in the midst of both destruction and the birth of new societies.

Out of the Dark Night reconstructs critical theory’s historical and philosophical framework for understanding colonial and postcolonial events and expands our sense of the futures made possible by decolonization..

The position of India's princely states is a relatively under-studied aspect of the British withdrawal from India and the early years of Indian and Pakistani independence. Far from playing second fiddle to events in the British Indian provinces, the princely states played an integral role in the transfer of power in 1947. Under the British Raj, the princely states were politically autonomous, and the rulers of each state had to be cajoled and, in some cases, forced to accede to India or Pakistan. The princes' commitment to preserving their sovereignty not only threatened the territorial integrity of both South Asian countries but brought them to the brink of war on multiple occasions. Conquering the maharajas tells the often overlooked history of Princely India through the tumultuous end of empire in South Asia and the early years of Indian and Pakistani independence. -- .

In The Agency of Empire: Connections and Strategies in French Expansion (1686-1746) Elisabeth Heijmans places directors and their connections at the centre of the developments and operations of French overseas companies. The focus on directors' decisions and networks challenges the conception of French overseas companies as highly centralized and controlled by the state. Through the cases of companies operating in Pondicherry (Coromandel Coast) and Ouidah (Bight of Benin), Elisabeth Heijmans demonstrates the participation of actors not only in Paris but also in provinces, ports and trading posts in the French expansion. The analysis brings to the fore connections across imperial, cultural and religious boundaries in order to diverge from traditional national narratives of the French early modern empire.

Britain's Moment in the Middle East: was it an imperial triumph or a decisive staging post in the end-of-empire story? Sir Percy Cox (1864-1937) was a vital figure in the history of the British Empire in the Middle East, part of the pantheon with such legends as T.E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell. As High Commissioner in Iraq from 1920 to 1923 he presided over the birth of modern Iraq - the climax of his career -- but left an infant state fraught with political, ethnic and religious problems which have bedevilled Iraq and the Middle East to the present day.

John Townsend paints a convincing picture of Britain's global empire and brings Cox to life as an archetypal patrician proconsul. This is the first major biography of Cox, based on extensive research in original sources and long experience in the region. It strikingly illustrates the troubled contemporary history of Iraq and the modern Middle East and will become the standard work on Cox.

This book is an examination of the concept of 'character' as a moral marker in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its main purpose is to investigate how the 'character talk' that helped to shape elite Britons' sense of themselves was used at this time to convince audiences, both in Britain and in the places they had conquered, that empire could be morally as well as materially justified and was a great force for good in the world. A small group of radical thinkers questioned many of the arguments of the imperialists but found it difficult to escape entirely from the sense of moral superiority that marked the latter's language.

The army in India was the principal pillar of British power in South Asia from the mid-nineteenth century until Indian independence. This volume aims to evaluate the combat effectiveness of the army in British India from the mutiny of 1857 until the British departed India in 1947. It examines how the army in India developed from a colonial police force into one of the world's largest volunteer armies which saw service around the globe. The author presents new primary material from international archival sources and develops original interpretations of the political and military role of the army in colonial India. These new arguments include: the army's conduct of 'small wars' on the North-West frontier aided it in conducting tactical warfare in Burma during World War II; small unit raids developed in India were put to good effect beyond India's borders; the army's practical experience of counter-insurgency was used in Greece and Indonesia after 1945; and, contrary to existing scholarship, the British did not follow a deliberate policy of 'Indianization' of the officer corps .

Whereas the Spanish-American War has long been studied as a turning point in American history, Grover Cleveland's foreign policy. Nick Cleaver's study illuminates the dynamism and ideals of Cleveland's diplomatic moment, revealing their continuities with the engagement and expansionism of the McKinley presidency.

Kourou was to be a wonderful revenge, a French colony in America after the Seven Years War in 1763. However, the fantastic ideal became a grand failure and political disaster, marking the end of the French attempts for an American colony.

In the colonial context of South Asia, there is a glaring asymmetry in the written records of the interaction between the Bengali women and their European counterparts, which is indicative of the larger and the overall asymmetry of discursive power, including the flow and access to information between the colonizers and their subjects. This book explores the idea of gazing through literature in Colonial India. Based on literary and historical analysis, it focuses on four different genres of literary writing where nineteenth-century Bengali women writers look back at the British colonizers. In the process, the European culture becomes a static point of reference, and the chapters in the book show the ideological, social, cultural, political, and deeper, emotional interactions between the colonized and the colonizer. The book also addresses the lack of sufficient primary sources authored by Bengali women on their European counterparts by anthologizing different available genres. Taking into account literary narratives from the colonized and the less represented side of the divide, such as a travelogue, fantasy fiction, missionary text and journal articles, the book represents the varying opinions and perspectives vis-a-vis the European women. Using an interdisciplinary approach charting the fields of Indology, colonial studies, sociology, literature/literary historiography, South-Asian feminism, and cultural studies, this book makes an important contribution to the field of South Asian Studies, studies of empire, and to Indian women's literary history.

In The Political Economy of Indigo in India, 1580-1930: A Global Perspective Ghulam A. Nadri explores the dynamics of the indigo industry and trade from a long-term perspective and examines the local and global forces that affected the potentialities of production in India and elsewhere and caused periods of boom and slump in the industry. Using the commodity chains conceptual framework he examines the stages in the trajectory of indigo from production to consumption. Nadri shows convincingly that the growth or decline in indigo production and trade in India was a part of the global processes of production, trade, and consumption and that indigo as a global commodity was embedded in the politics of empire and colonial expansion.

In the late eighteenth century, French emigre priests fled the religious turmoil of the French Revolution and found themselves leading a new wave of Roman Catholic missionaries in the United States. Fathers on the Frontier explores the diverse ways these missionary priests guided the development of the early American church in Maryland, Kentucky, Louisiana, and other pockets of Catholic settlement throughout much of the trans-Appalachian West. Over the course of their evangelistic endeavor, this relatively small group of priests introduced Gallican, ultramontane, and missionary principles to a nascent institutional church prior to the immigration of millions of European Catholics in the nineteenth century.
As author Michael Pasquier shows, this transformation of American Catholicism did not come easily. Several generations of French priests struggled to reconcile their romantic expectations of missionary life with their actual experiences as servants of a foreign church scattered throughout a frontier region with limited access to friends and family members still in France. As they became more accustomed to the lifeways of the American South and West, French missionaries expressed anxiety about apparent discrepancies between how they were taught to practice the priesthood in French seminaries and what the Holy See expected them to achieve as representatives of a universal missionary church.
At no point did French missionaries engage more directly in distinctively American affairs than in the religious debates surrounding slavery, secession, and civil war. These issues, Pasquier argues, compelled even the most politically aloof missionaries to step out of the shadow of Rome and stake their church on the side of the Confederacy. In so doing, they set in motion a strain of Catholicism more amenable to Southern concepts of social conservatism, paternalism, and white supremacy, and strikingly different from the liberal, progressive strain that historians have usually highlighted. Focusing on the collective thoughts, feelings, and actions of priests who found themselves caught between the formal canonical standards of the church and the informal experiences of missionaries in American culture, Fathers on the Frontier illuminates the historical intersection of American, French, and Roman interests in the United States."

The movement of people from small towns and villages of India to places outside the country raises a number of questions- about the networks that enable their mobility, the aspirations that motivate them, what they give back to their home regions, and how their provincial home worlds engage with and absorb the consequent transnational flows of money, ideas, influence and care. This book analyzes the social consequences of the transmission of migrant resources to provincial places in India. Bringing together case studies from four regions, it demonstrates that these flows are very diverse, are inflected by regional histories of mobility and development, and may reinforce local power structures or instigate social change in unexpected ways. The chapters collected in this volume examine conflicts over migrant-funded education or rural development projects, how migrants from Dalit, Muslim and other marginalized groups use their new wealth to promote social progress or equality in their home regions, and why migrants invest in property in provincial India or return regularly to their ancestral homes to revitalize ritual traditions. These studies also demonstrate that diaspora philanthropy is routed largely through social networks based on caste, community or kinship ties, thereby extending them spatially, and illustrate how migrant efforts to 'develop' their home regions may become entangled in local politics or influence state policies. This collection of eight original ethnographic field studies develops new theoretical insights into the diverse outcomes of international migration and the influences of regional diasporas within India. These collected studies illustrate the various ways in which migrants remain socially, economical and politically influential in their home regions. The book develops a fresh perspective on the connections between transnational migration and processes of development, revealing how provincial India has become deeply globalized. It will be of interest to academics and students in the fields of anthropology, geography, transnational and diaspora studies, and South Asian studies.