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time onwards it is probably fair to say that almost all the major episodes of coordinated popular resistance to colonial rule in India especially in 1856–57, in 1920–21 and the early 1930s were, almost barometrically, preceded by phases of vigorous resistance to colonial forest control. Some of these episodes were directly linked with the more urban-based protest episodes, while others were not. 83
14 PATTERNS OF POPULAR RESISTANCE AND THE CROFTERS’ WAR, 1790–1886 I To many contemporary observers and some later historians one of the most perplexing and puzzling questions of the Highland clearances was the failure of the people to show more active resistance to landlord policies. The economic transformation had caused social havoc, enormous displacement of populations and the destruction of an ancient way of life, yet, the people had apparently remained quiet and accepted their fate. It became common to contrast the violent truculence of the Irish and their
Imperial power, both formal and informal, and research in the natural sciences were closely dependent in the nineteenth century. This book examines a portion of the mass-produced juvenile literature, focusing on the cluster of ideas connected with Britain's role in the maintenance of order and the spread of civilization. It discusses the political economy of Western ecological systems, and the consequences of their extension to the colonial periphery, particularly in forms of forest conservation. Progress and consumerism were major constituents of the consensus that helped stabilise the late Victorian society, but consumerism only works if it can deliver the goods. From 1842 onwards, almost all major episodes of coordinated popular resistance to colonial rule in India were preceded by phases of vigorous resistance to colonial forest control. By the late 1840s, a limited number of professional positions were available for geologists in British imperial service, but imperial geology had a longer pedigree. Modern imperialism or 'municipal imperialism' offers a broader framework for understanding the origins, long duration and persistent support for overseas expansion which transcended the rise and fall of cabinets or international realignments in the 1800s. Although medical scientists began to discern and control the microbiological causes of tropical ills after the mid-nineteenth century, the claims for climatic causation did not undergo a corresponding decline. Arthur Pearson's Pearson's Magazine was patriotic, militaristic and devoted to royalty. The book explores how science emerged as an important feature of the development policies of the Colonial Office (CO) of the colonial empire.
expressing common ones. Most of all, this violent culture provided a way through which the lower classes could express their relationship to the establishment: extreme representations of violence became a vehicle of popular resistance. To understand how this state of affairs might have come about, we need to Crone, Violent Victorians.indd 28 16/01/2012 10:49:12 london 18 0 0 –1 9 0 0 : change and resistance 29 return to an examination of the structures of authority and expressions of resistance that E. P. Thompson located in eighteenth-century society. In Thompson
In the first book detailing the social and economic history of Ireland during the Second World War, Dr Bryce Evans reveals the hidden story of the Irish Emergency. If the diplomatic history of Irish neutrality is familiar, the realities of everyday life are much less so. This work provides a clear summary of Ireland’s economic survival at the time as well as an indispensable overview of every published work on Ireland during the Second World War. While useful as a textbook introducing writing about the period, the book contributes a new and enlightening take on popular material and spiritual existence as global conflict impacted the country. It compares economic and social conditions in Ireland to those of the other European neutral states: Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Portugal. It explores how the government coped with the crisis and how ordinary Irish people reacted to emergency state control of the marketplace. With their government wounded by British economic warfare, the Irish people engaged in the black market, cross-border smuggling, and popular resistance. Exploring how notions of morality intersected with state-regulated production, consumption and distribution, this study reveals a colourful history detailing exploitation, deprivation, deviance and intolerance amidst the state’s shaky survival. Drawing on a wealth of archival material, this book provides a slice of real life during a pivotal episode in Irish and world history. It will be essential reading to the informed general reader, students, and academics alike.
This chapter provides a case study of the use of the lazaretto as an instrument of colonial rule in the British Protectorate of the Ionian Islands. The British, notwithstanding their metropolitan anti-contagionist discourse, consolidated the quarantine system – inherited from the Venetians – not only for public health, but also to strengthen their presence in society as well as to facilitate their shipping, commerce and naval power. Through this essay, the authors unearth the connections between public health institutions – especially quarantine – medical theory and power politics. Focus is also put on the contrasting experiences and perceptions of travellers passing through quarantine as well as on the challenges faced by contraband, the inflow of Greek refugees, but also by the popular resistance of the Ionians who came to associate this institution with British colonialism.
This chapter tracks the pre-modern popularity of a tale of a scholarly slave girl who wins a knowledge contest over the greatest scholars of her time. It investigates what made the tale of Tawaddud/Teodor so gripping to its medieval readers and translators. The argument is simple: that the tale’s medieval appeal lay in its encyclopaedic capacity for making knowledge into worlds, with the added benefit of moral inculcation into the world it creates. However, this worlding is double-faced – so intimately translatable is this tale that it can be levied not only in the service of colonial indoctrination but also to spur decolonising popular resistance. The translations of this tale, then, enact a literal war of the worlds. The tale seems to have struck a global chord that resonated long beyond the medieval period, only to dwindle to relative obscurity in modern times. Tawaddud in Arabic means ‘To show love or affection, to attract, captivate.’ A looser translation might be ‘Beloved’, and like her counterpart in Toni Morrison’s novel, Tawaddud’s uncanny medieval afterlife is filled with translators who seem unable to let go of her. The chapter ends by charting the ripples of Tawaddud’s post-medieval translations and transculturations – to Spain and Europe, but also to the New World of the Maya, to nineteenth-century Brazil and to the Philippines.
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.
Reconstructing modernity assesses the character of approaches to rebuilding British cities during the decades after the Second World War. It explores the strategies of spatial governance that sought to restructure society and looks at the cast of characters who shaped these processes. It challenges traditional views of urban modernism as moderate and humanist, shedding new light on the importance of the immediate post-war for the trajectory of urban renewal in the twentieth century. The book shows how local corporations and town planners in Manchester and Hull attempted to create order and functionality through the remaking of their decrepit Victorian cities. It looks at the motivations of national and local governments in the post-war rebuilding process and explores why and how they attempted the schemes they did. What emerges is a picture of local corporations, planners and city engineers as radical reshapers of the urban environment, not through the production of grand examples of architectural modernism, but in mundane attempts to zone cities, produce greener housing estates, control advertising or regulate air quality. Their ambition to control and shape the space of their cities was an attempt to produce urban environments that might be both more orderly and functional, but also held the potential to shape society.
This book explores contemporary urban experiences connected to practices of sharing and collaboration. Part of a growing discussion on the cultural meaning and the politics of urban commons, it uses examples from Europe and Latin America to support the view that a world of mutual support and urban solidarity is emerging today in, against, and beyond existing societies of inequality. In such a world, people experience the potentialities of emancipation activated by concrete forms of space commoning. By focusing on concrete collective experiences of urban space appropriation and participatory design experiments this book traces differing, but potentially compatible, trajectories through which common space (or space-as-commons) becomes an important factor in social change. In the everydayness of self-organized neighborhoods, in the struggles for justice in occupied public spaces, in the emergence of “territories in resistance,” and in dissident artistic practices of collaborative creation, collective inventiveness produces fragments of an emancipated society.