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The substantive and methodological contributions of professional historians to development policy debates was marginal, whether because of the dominance of economists or the inability of historians to contribute. There are broadly three ways in which history matters for development policy. These include insistence on the methodological principles of respect for context, process and difference; history is a resource of critical and reflective self-awareness about the nature of the discipline of development itself; and history brings a particular kind of perspective to development problems . After establishing the key issues, this book explores the broad theme of the institutional origins of economic development, focusing on the cases of nineteenth-century India and Africa. It demonstrates that scholarship on the origins of industrialisation in England in the late eighteenth century suggests a gestation reaching back to a period during which a series of social institutional innovations were pioneered and extended to most citizens of England. The book examines a paradox in China where an emphasis on human welfare characterized the rule of the eighteenth-century Qing dynasty, and has been demonstrated in modern-day China's emphasis on health and education. It provides a discussion on the history of the relationship between ideology and policy in public health, sanitation in India's modern history and the poor health of Native Americans. The book unpacks the origins of public education, with a focus on the emergency of mass literacy in Victorian England and excavates the processes by which colonial education was indigenized throughout South-East Asia.
This chapter opens with the private photographs of a French colonial officer named Emile-Louis Abbat. An amateur, he kept a visual record of his campaigns near Ouagadougou, on the eve of the infamous Voulet-Chanoine scandal (1899). This case study underlines how the popularisation of photography shaped the visuality of colonial campaigns in late nineteenth-century Africa and Asia. From one expedition to another, soldiers, military attachés, and opportunistic local studios developed new ways to envision conflicts. Part of this new material then contaminated professional and journalistic photography, establishing new genres and perspectives on war, repression, and the use of organised violence. The chapter also emphasises that these evolutions were not linear. Several disruptive photographs had a lasting influence. As a consequence, military authorities and colonial governments eventually identified conflict photography as a crucial communication challenge. A discussion of censorship and regulations emerged at the turn of the twentieth century, precisely when colonial visual discursivities consolidated in the wake of major conflicts such as the Sudan Campaign in 1898, the second Boer War (1899–1902), or the international intervention against the so-called ‘Boxers’ in China (1899–1901). By the 1910s, a new visual repertoire of mass armed violence was in place. The work of a first generation of photojournalists, the emergence of a structured use of atrocity photographs by humanitarian movements, the intensifying discussions on the rationale of violent colonial expansion, all contributed to a reshaping of the visual economy of organised violence before 1914.
By expanding the geographical scope of the history of violence and war, this volume challenges both Western and state-centric narratives of the decline of violence and its relationship to modernity. It highlights instead similarities across early modernity in terms of representations, legitimations, applications of, and motivations for violence. It seeks to integrate methodologies of the study of violence into the history of war, thereby extending the historical significance of both fields of research. Thirteen case studies outline the myriad ways in which large-scale violence was understood and used by states and non-state actors throughout the early modern period across Africa, Asia, the Americas, the Atlantic, and Europe, demonstrating that it was far more complex than would be suggested by simple narratives of conquest and resistance. Moreover, key features of imperial violence apply equally to large-scale violence within societies. As the authors argue, violence was a continuum, ranging from small-scale, local actions to full-blown war. The latter was privileged legally and increasingly associated with states during early modernity, but its legitimacy was frequently contested and many of its violent forms, such as raiding and destruction of buildings and crops, could be found in activities not officially classed as war.
This volume aims to disclose the political, social and cultural factors that influenced the sanitary measures against epidemics developed in the Mediterranean during the long nineteenth century. The contributions to the book provide new interdisciplinary insights to the booming field of ‘quarantine studies’ through a systematic use of the analytic categories of space, identity and power. The ultimate goal is to show the multidimensional nature of quarantine, the intimate links that sanitary administrations and institutions had with the territorial organization of states, international trade, the construction of national, colonial, religious and professional identities or the configuration of political regimes. The circum-Mediterranean geographical spread of the case studies contained in this volume illuminates the similarities and differences around and across this sea, on the southern and northern shores, in Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, Italian, English and French-speaking domains. At the same time, it is highly interested in engaging in the global English-speaking community, offering a wide range of terms, sources, bibliography, interpretative tools and views produced and elaborated in various Mediterranean countries. The historical approach will be useful to recognize the secular tensions that still lie behind present-day issues such as the return of epidemics or the global flows of migrants and refugees.
This book recounts the little-known history of the mixed-race children born to black American servicemen and white British women during the Second World War. Of the three million American soldiers stationed in Britain from 1942 to 1945, about 8 per cent (240,000) were African-American; the latter’s relationships with British women resulted in the birth of an estimated 2,000 babies. The African-American press named these children ‘brown babies’; the British called them ‘half-castes’. Black GIs, in this segregated army, were forbidden to marry their white girlfriends. Up to half of the mothers of these babies, faced with the stigma of illegitimacy and a mixed-race child, gave their children up for adoption. The outcome for these children tended to be long-term residency in children’s homes, sometimes followed by fostering and occasionally adoption, but adoption societies frequently would not take on ‘coloured’ children, who were thought to be ‘too hard to place’. There has been minimal study of these children and the difficulties they faced, such as racism in a (then) very white Britain, lack of family or a clear identity. Accessibly written and illustrated with numerous photographs, this book presents the stories of over forty of these children. While some of the accounts of early childhood are heart-breaking, there are also many uplifting narratives of finding American fathers and gaining a sense of self and of heritage.
change, rolling crisis, and anxiety, in part brought on by mounting external threats3 – and Africans sought reassurance from histories in which violence was seen to have moral meaning, was characterized by righteous fervour, and was practiced by those motivated by loftier ambitions. But this was no mere exercise in historical reinvention, although there was certainly something of that too. Nineteenth-century Africans looked back several generations to a period, broadly between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries, in which the exercise of violence had begun to
. M. Brown and Wm. R. Louis (eds), Oxford History of the British Empire: Volume IV – The Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999 ), p. 233. Another example of this type of work, albeit within an earlier context, is R. Price, Making Empire: Colonial Encounters and the Creation of Imperial Rule in Nineteenth-Century Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008
Nineteenth-Century Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Martin J. Wiener, An Empire on Trial: Race, Murder, and Justice under British Rule, 1870–1935 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Michelle Tusan, Smyrna’s Ashes: Humanitarianism, Genocide, and the Birth of the Middle East (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); James Epstein
focuses on the literary marketplace in the twentieth century, the demands made of African American writers by publishers, critics and readers at the beginning of the twenty-first century cannot be fully historicised without reference to the nineteenth-century publishing industry. The discussion that follows foregrounds a nineteenth-century African American text ‘discovered’ at the turn of the twenty-first (Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative) and a contemporary African American novel (Percival Everett’s Erasure) in order to reveal the extent to which
(eds), Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Science (Chicago, 2011,), pp. 255–77. 35 S. J. Rockel, Carriers of Culture: Labor on the Road in Nineteenth-Century Africa (Portsmouth, NH, 2006); J. Prestholdt, Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization (Berkeley