Sumit K. Mandal uncovers the hybridity and transregional connections underlying modern Asian identities. By considering Arabs in the Malay world under European rule, Becoming Arab explores how a long history of inter-Asian interaction was altered by nineteenth-century racial categorisation and control. Mandal traces the transformation of Arabs from familiar and multi-faceted creole personages of Malay courts into alienated figures defined by economic and political function. The racialisation constrained but did not eliminate the fluid character of Arabness. Creole Arabs responded to the constraints by initiating transregional links with the Ottoman Empire and establishing modern social organisations, schools, and a press. Contentions emerged between organisations respectively based on Prophetic descent and egalitarianism, advancing empowering but conflicting representations of a modern Arab and Islamic identity. Mandal unsettles finite understandings of race and identity by demonstrating not only the incremental development of a modern identity, but the contested state of its birth.

Through in-depth, qualitative analysis of data from archives and research sites in Nigeria, the United Kingdom, and the United States, The Making of Mbano: British Colonialism, Resistance, and Diplomatic Engagements in Southeastern Nigeria, 1906-1960 argues that African people in Mbano consistently and fearlessly invoked their pre-colonial socio-cultural, political, and economic values in resisting, scrutinizing, and ultimately negotiating with the British colonial government. In investigating Africa's complex and diverse engagements with the British through the lens of the Mbano colonial experience, Ogechi E. Anyanwu highlights the fascinating intersection of foreign and indigenous notions of community, culture, political economy, religion, and gender in shaping the Mbano colonial identity. Anyanwu carefully introduces readers to a wider variety of people in colonial Mbano who contributed to the historical experience of Southeastern Nigeria and whose names do not appear in history books.

Capturing the history of thousands of German women recruited to colonize Southwest Africa between the 1890s and 1940s, The Servants of Empire engages a radical nationalist history of German efforts to prevent interracial unions and establish permanent white settlement. As colonists, sponsored women often supported or even helped perpetrate extreme patterns of racist violence and vigilantism in Namibia, which linked them inextricably to marked atrocities such as the Herero and Nama Genocides. Navigating the intersections of German attitudes toward race, class, ethnicity, gender, and nation, this revealing study traces the German settler community's gossip and rumors to uncover how the many poor white female settlers in Southwest Africa disrupted bourgeois race and gender relations and contributed to the trenchant sexual and racial violence in the territory.

Those who control the world's commanding economic heights, buttressed by the theories of mainstream economists, presume that capitalism is a self-contained and self-generating system. Nothing could be further from the truth. In this pathbreaking book-winner of the Paul A. Baran-Paul M. Sweezy Memorial Award-radical political economists Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik argue that the accumulation of capital has always required the taking of land, raw materials, and bodies from noncapitalist modes of production. They begin with a thorough debunking of mainstream economics. Then, looking at the history of capitalism, from the beginnings of colonialism half a millennium ago to today's neoliberal regimes, they discover that, over the long haul, capitalism, in order to exist, must metastasize itself in the practice of imperialism and the immiseration of countless people. A few hundred years ago, write the Patnaiks, colonialism began to ensure vast, virtually free, markets for new products in burgeoning cities in the West. But even after slavery was generally abolished, millions of people in the Global South still fell prey to the continuing lethal exigencies of the marketplace. Even after the Second World War, when decolonization led to the end of the so-called "Golden Age of Capitalism," neoliberal economies stepped in to reclaim the Global South, imposing drastic "austerity" measures on working people. But, say the Patnaiks, this neoliberal economy, which lives from bubble to bubble, is doomed to a protracted crisis. In its demise, we are beginning to see - finally - the transcendence of the capitalist system.

WINNER OF THE PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE 2020 'Reads like a thriller...colourful, detailed and meticulously researched' Sunday Times 'Gripping from start to finish' Peter Frankopan, bestselling author of The Silk Roads 'Remarkable and brilliantly researched non-fiction thriller...focussing on one extraordinary story that had never been properly told before' William Dalrymple, Spectator Anita Anand tells the remarkable story of one Indian's twenty-year quest for revenge, taking him around the world in search of those he held responsible for the Amritsar massacre of 1919, which cost the lives of hundreds. When Sir Michael O'Dwyer, the Lieutenant Governor of Punjab, ordered Brigadier General Reginald Dyer to Amritsar, he wanted him to bring the troublesome city to heel. Sir Michael had become increasingly alarmed at the effect Gandhi was having on his province, as well as recent demonstrations, strikes and shows of Hindu-Muslim unity. All these things, in Sir Michael's mind at least, were a precursor to a second Indian Mutiny. What happened next shocked the world. An unauthorised political gathering in the Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar in April 1919 became the focal point for Sir Michael's law enforcers. Dyer marched his soldiers into the walled garden, filled with thousands of unarmed men, women and children, blocking the only exit. Then, without issuing any order to disperse, he instructed his men to open fire, turning their guns on the thickest parts of the crowd. For ten minutes, they continued firing, stopping only when 1650 bullets had been fired. Not a single shot was fired in retaliation. According to legend, a young, low-caste orphan, Udham Singh, was injured in the attack, and remained in the Bagh, surrounded by the dead and dying until he was able to move the next morning. Then, he supposedly picked up a handful of blood-soaked earth, smeared it across his forehead and vowed to kill the men responsible, no matter how long it took. The truth, as the author has discovered, is more complex but no less dramatic. She traced Singh's journey through Africa, the United States and across Europe before, in March 1940, he finally arrived in front of O'Dwyer in a London hall ready to shoot him down. The Patient Assassin shines a devastating light on one of the Raj's most horrific events, but reads like a taut thriller, and reveals some astonishing new insights into what really happened.

This book takes a closer look at colonial despotism in early nineteenth-century India and argues that it resulted from Indians' forum shopping, the legal practice which resulted in jurisdictional jockeying between an executive, the East India Company, and a judiciary, the King's Court. Focusing on the collisions that took place in Bombay during the 1820s, the book analyses how Indians of various descriptions-peasants, revenue defaulters, government employees, merchants, chiefs, and princes-used the court to challenge the government (and vice versa) and demonstrates the mechanism through which the lawcourt hindered the government's indirect rule, which relied on local Indian rulers in newly conquered territories. The author concludes that existing political anxiety justified the East India Company's attempt to curtail the power of the court and strengthen their own power to intervene in emergencies through the renewal of the company's charter in 1834. An insightful read for those researching Indian history and judicial politics, this book engages with an understudied period of British rule in India, where the royal courts emerged as sites of conflict between the East India Company and a variety of Indian powers.

The current ethno-religious mosaic in the western Balkans cannot be methodologically analyzed and understood without the in-depth study of the peculiar millet system, which was the very bedrock of the Ottoman society and statehood. This monograph provides the readers with a comprehensive analysis on the establishment and main pillars of this social structure. Furthermore, one will find information on the main dynamics of adoption of Islam in the border area between Serbia and Montenegro which is presently called Sandzak and on the geopolitical wrangling that hastened the decay of the millets and introduced the nations in this volatile part of the Balkans. The impact of conflict and the resulting migrations on the ethno-religious landscape is also given considerable space in this volume. Lastly, the analysis describes the discrepancy between the policies adopted and enforced by the Sublime Porte and the lack on impact of those on the remote provinces and regions where the power of the Sultans was limited, or even in some cases only nominal. The author relies heavily on primary sources, such as contemporary travelogues, reports, and field studies. The chronological analysis is divided into three periods which correspond with the internal and external power and strength of the Ottoman Empire: period of stability, period of challenges, and a period of irreversible decay.

This book provides fresh insights into how the British press affected both British perceptions of decolonisation in Africa and British policy towards it during the 'wind of change' period. It also reveals, for the first time, the extent to which British newspaper coverage was of relevance to African and white settler readerships. British newspapers informed the political strategies and civic cultures of African activists, nationalists, liberal whites in Africa, the staunchest of white settler communities, and the first governments of independent African states and their opponents. The British press, British public opinion and British journalists became etched into the lived experiences of the end of empire affecting Anglo-African and Anglo-settler relations to this day. Arguing that the press cast a transnational web of influence over the decolonisation process in Africa, the author explores the relationships between the British, African and settler public and political spheres, and highlights the mediating power of the British press during the late 1950s. The book draws from a range of British newspapers, official government documents, newspaper archives, interviews, memoirs, autobiographies and articles printed in African and white settler papers. It will be of interest to historians of decolonisation, Africa, the media and the British Empire.

The Haitian Revolution may have galvanized subjects of French empire in the Americas and Africa struggling to define freedom and 'Frenchness' for themselves, but Lorelle Semley reveals that this event was just one moment in a longer struggle of women and men of color for rights under the French colonial regime. Through political activism ranging from armed struggle to literary expression, these colonial subjects challenged and exploited promises in French Republican rhetoric that should have contradicted the continued use of slavery in the Americas and the introduction of exploitative labor in the colonization of Africa. They defined an alternative French citizenship, which recognized difference, particularly race, as part of a 'universal' French identity. Spanning Atlantic port cities in Haiti, Senegal, Martinique, Benin, and France, this book is a major contribution to scholarship on citizenship, race, empire, and gender, and it sheds new light on debates around human rights and immigration in contemporary France.

Modern perceptions of race across much of the Global South are indebted to the Brazilian social scientist Gilberto Freyre, who in works such as The Masters and the Slaves claimed that Portuguese colonialism produced exceptionally benign and tolerant race relations. This volume radically reinterprets Freyre's Luso-tropicalist arguments and critically engages with the historical complexity of racial concepts and practices in the Portuguese-speaking world. Encompassing Brazil as well as Portuguese-speaking societies in Africa, Asia, and even Portugal itself, it places an interdisciplinary group of scholars in conversation to challenge the conventional understanding of twentieth-century racialization, proffering new insights into such controversial topics as human plasticity, racial amalgamation, and the tropes and proxies of whiteness.

As the French public debates its present diversity and its colonial past, few remember that between 1946 and 1960 the inhabitants of French colonies possessed the rights of French citizens. Moreover, they did not have to conform to the French civil code that regulated marriage and inheritance. One could, in principle, be a citizen and different too. "Citizenship between Empire and Nation" examines momentous changes in notions of citizenship, sovereignty, nation, state, and empire in a time of acute uncertainty about the future of a world that had earlier been divided into colonial empires.

Frederick Cooper explains how African political leaders at the end of World War II strove to abolish the entrenched distinction between colonial "subject" and "citizen." They then used their new status to claim social, economic, and political equality with other French citizens, in the face of resistance from defenders of a colonial order. Africans balanced their quest for equality with a desire to express an African political personality. They hoped to combine a degree of autonomy with participation in a larger, Franco-African ensemble. French leaders, trying to hold on to a large French polity, debated how much autonomy and how much equality they could concede. Both sides looked to versions of federalism as alternatives to empire and the nation-state. The French government had to confront the high costs of an empire of citizens, while Africans could not agree with French leaders or among themselves on how to balance their contradictory imperatives. Cooper shows how both France and its former colonies backed into more "national" conceptions of the state than either had sought.

Those who control the world's commanding economic heights, buttressed by the theories of mainstream economists, presume that capitalism is a self-contained and self-generating system. Nothing could be further from the truth. In this pathbreaking book-winner of the Paul A. Baran-Paul M. Sweezy Memorial Award-radical political economists Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik argue that the accumulation of capital has always required the taking of land, raw materials, and bodies from noncapitalist modes of production. They begin with a thorough debunking of mainstream economics. Then, looking at the history of capitalism, from the beginnings of colonialism half a millennium ago to today's neoliberal regimes, they discover that, over the long haul, capitalism, in order to exist, must metastasize itself in the practice of imperialism and the immiseration of countless people. A few hundred years ago, write the Patnaiks, colonialism began to ensure vast, virtually free, markets for new products in burgeoning cities in the West. But even after slavery was generally abolished, millions of people in the Global South still fell prey to the continuing lethal exigencies of the marketplace. Even after the Second World War, when decolonization led to the end of the so-called "Golden Age of Capitalism," neoliberal economies stepped in to reclaim the Global South, imposing drastic "austerity" measures on working people. But, say the Patnaiks, this neoliberal economy, which lives from bubble to bubble, is doomed to a protracted crisis. In its demise, we are beginning to see - finally - the transcendence of the capitalist system.

This edited volume systematically analyzes the connection between xenophobia, nativism, and Pan-Africanism. It situates attacks on black Africans by fellow black Africans within the context of ideals such as Pan-Africanism and Ubuntu, which emphasize unity. The book straddles a range of social science perspectives to explain why attacks on foreign nationals in Africa usually entail attacks on black foreign nationals. Written by an international and interdisciplinary team of scholars, the book is divided into four sections that each explain a different facet of this complicated relationship. Section One discusses the history of colonialism and apartheid and their relationship to xenophobia. Section Two critically evaluates Pan-Africanism as a concept and as a practice in 21st century Africa. Section Three presents case studies on xenophobia in contemporary Africa. Section Four similarly discusses cases of nativism. Addressing a complex issue in contemporary African politics, this volume will be of use to students and scholars interested in African studies, African politics, human rights, migration, history, law, and development economics.

What were the origins of British ideas on rural poverty, and how did they shape development practice in Malawi? How did the international development narrative influence the poverty discourse in postcolonial Malawi from the 1960s onwards? In The State and the Legacies of British Colonial Development in Malawi: Confronting Poverty, 1939-1983, Gift Wasambo Kayira addresses these questions. Although by no means rehabilitating colonialism, the book argues that the intentions of officials and agencies charged with delivering economic development programs were never as ill-informed or wicked as some theorists have contended. Raising rural populations from poverty was on the agenda before and after independence. How to reconcile the pressing demand of stabilizing the country's economy and alleviating rural poverty within the context of limited resources proved an impossible task to achieve. Also difficult was how to reconcile the interests of outside experts influenced by international geopolitics and theories of economic development and those of local personnel and politicians,. As a result, development efforts always fell short of their goals. Through a meticulous search of the archive on rural and industrial development projects, Kayira presents a development history that displays the shortfalls of existing works on development inadequately grounded in historical study.

This book examines the full range of counterinsurgency intelligence during the Malayan Emergency. It explores the involvement of the Security Service, the Joint Intelligence Committee (Far East), the Malayan Security Service, Special Branch and wider police service, and military intelligence, to examine how British and Malayan authorities tackled the insurgent challenge posed by the Malayan Communist Party. This study assesses the nature of the intelligence apparatus prior to the declaration of emergency in 1948 and considers how officials attempted to reconstruct the intelligence structures in the Far East after the surrender of the Japanese in 1945. These plans were largely based upon the legacy of the Second World War but quickly ran into difficultly because of ill-defined remits and personality clashes. Nevertheless, officials did provide prescient warning of the existential threat posed by the Malayan Communist Party from the earliest days of British reoccupation of Malaya. Once a state of emergency had been declared, officials struggled to find the right combination of methods, strategy and management structures to eliminate the threat posed by the Communist insurgents. This book argues that the development of an effective counterinsurgency intelligence strategy involved many more organisations than just Special Branch. It was a multifaceted, dynamic effort that took far longer and was more problematic than previous accounts suggest. The Emergency remains central to counterinsurgency theory and thus this wide-ranging analysis sheds crucial light not only on the period, but on contemporary doctrine and security practices today.

This edited collection explores the complexities of Irish involvement in empire. Despite complaining regularly of treatment as a colony by England, Ireland nevertheless played a significant part in Britain's imperialism, from its formative period in the late eighteenth century through to the decolonizing years of the early twentieth century. Framed by two key events of world history, the American Revolution and Indian Independence, this book examines Irish involvement in empire in several interlinked sections: through issues of migration and inhabitation; through literary and historical representations of empire; through Irish support for imperialism and involvement with resistance movements abroad; and through Irish participation in the extensive and intricate networks of empire. Informed by recent historiographical and theoretical perspectives, and including several detailed archival investigations, this volume offers an interdisciplinary and evolving view of a burgeoning field of research and will be of interest to scholars of Irish studies, imperial and postcolonial studies, history and literature.

This book explores cross-cultural medical encounters involving non-Western healers in a variety of imperial contexts from the Arctic, Asia, Africa, Americas and the Caribbean. It highlights contests over healing, knowledge and medicines through the frameworks of hybridisation and pluralism. The intertwined histories of medicine, empire and early globalisation influenced the ways in which millions of people encountered and experienced suffering, healing and death. In an increasingly global search for therapeutics and localised definition of acceptable healing, networks and mobilities played key roles. Healers' engagements with politics, law and religion underline the close connections between healing, power and authority. They also reveal the agency of healers, sufferers and local societies, in encounters with modernising imperial states, medical science and commercialisation. The book questions and complements the traditional narratives of triumphant biomedicine, reminding readers that 'traditional' medical cultures and practitioners did not often disappear, but rather underwent major changes in the increasingly interconnected world.

This book argues that International Investment Law system - IIL - was the result of a colonial project within a capitalist system that has been influenced by the developmentalism discourse and the neoliberal ideology, becoming an instrument that facilitated forms of systemic violence against Third World countries. In order to develop this argument, Enrique Prieto-Rios uses post-war critical thought, chiefly Fanon as interpreted by Lewis R Gordon, the works pursued by academics, part of the Caribbean Philosophical Association, the Institute for Global Law and Policy, the international law from below (southern perspectives), and critical economic thought- particularly the notable economic contributions of Ha-Joon Chang and Latin-American philosopher Enrique Dussel.

Contesting Extinctions: Decolonial and Regenerative Futures critically interrogates the discursive framing of extinctions and how they relate to the systems that bring about biocultural loss. The chapters in this multidisciplinary volume examine ecological and social preservation movements from a variety of fields, including environmental studies, literary studies, political science, and philosophy. Grounded in a de-colonialist approach, the contributors advocate for discourses of renewal grounded in Indigenous, counter-hegemonic, and de-colonialist frameworks which shift the discursive focus from ruin to regeneration.

While human cannibalism has attracted considerable notice and controversy, certain aspects of the practice have received scant attention. These include the connection between cannibalism and xenophobia: the capture and consumption of unwanted strangers. Likewise ignored is the connection to slavery: the fact that in some societies slaves and persons captured in slave raids could be, and were, killed and eaten. This book explores these largely forgotten practices and ignored connections while making explicit the links between cannibal acts, imperialist influences and the role of capitalist trading practices. These are highly important for the history of the slave trade and for understanding the colonialist history of Africa.

Germany's imperial era (1871-1918) continues to attract both scholars and the general public alike. The American historian Roger Chickering has referred to the historiography on the Kaiserreich as an 'extraordinary body of historical scholarship', whose quality and diversity stands comparison with that of any other episode in European history. This Companion is a significant addition to this body of scholarship with the emphasis very much on the present and future. Questions of continuity remain a vital and necessary line of historical enquiry and while it may have been short-lived, the Kaiserreich remains central to modern German and European history. The volume allows 25 experts, from across the globe, to write at length about the state of research in their own specialist fields, offering original insights as well as historiographical reflections, and rounded off with extensive suggestions for further reading. The chapters are grouped into five thematic sections, chosen to reflect the full range of research being undertaken on imperial German history today and together offer a comprehensive and authoritative reference resource. Overall this collection will provide scholars and students with a lively take on this fascinating period of German history, from the nation's unification in 1871 right up until the end of World War I.

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..

This volume addresses the ways the 'native labour' question in the Portuguese late colonial empire in Africa became a recurrent topic of international and transnational debate and regulation after the Second World War. As other European colonial empires were tentatively transforming their labour and social policies in the aftermath of the war, the Portuguese Empire in Africa resisted significant changes in this domain, preserving a strict dual labour regime. As a result, a growing number of individuals, networks and institutions abroad engaged with labour and social realities in Portuguese African colonies, giving origin to a series of instances of denunciation of labour-related abuses. Portuguese authorities responded to these initiatives by selectively engaging with international norms, languages and mechanisms. However, as global decolonisation gained momentum, international and transnational events and processes would significantly constrain Portuguese imperial and colonial decision-making procedures, with the aim of retaining the empire. Therefore, the 'native labour' question became in its own right a crucial political and diplomatic element of the broader struggles over the meaning of Portuguese imperial legitimacy. As this volume argues, these historical processes are critical to properly understanding the history of Portuguese late colonialism and its protracted trajectory of decolonisation.