European Imperialism and Colonialism Research Papers (original) (raw)

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- Colonialism, Second World War (History), Nazi Germany, Holocaust and Genocide Studies
- by Isabelle Flour
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- Cultural History, Cultural Studies, Visual Studies, Art History
- by victor charles
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- European History, Modern History, African Studies, Marxism

This chapter examines the Herero and Nama war, the genocidal German campaign in Namibia, and the war's aftermath in the colony. Special attention is paid to the conflict between the former colonial governor Theodor Leutwein and the General who took over the colony during the genocidal war, and who directed the genocidal military campaign, Lothar von Trotha.

Between 1500 and 1950, most human societies on the planet fell under the control of European colonial regimes, whether for a few years or for several centuries. No total view of the myriad responses to empire on the part of the colonized is possible: the impact of empire itself varied dramatically, as plural and overlapping systems were applied in differential ways. The multiplicity of colonial arrangements might touch colonized people directly, indirectly or hardly at all. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, untouched areas were shrinking rapidly. The effects of economic globalization and cultural convergence accompanied colonial expansion to create a more complex imperial world order that helped to naturalize racial and cultural hegemony. The distinctiveness of European colonial empire was in its creation of a stable, indeed, legally rigidified category of the colonized “native”, excluded from rights, political participation, and even from history itself. However, viewed from another perspective, colonized peoples have been very much the agents of history and key to the transformation of the modern world.

- by Ian Coller
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- Colonialism, Post-Colonialism, Empires, French colonialism

Today, the East African state of Tanzania is renowned for wildlife preserves such as the Serengeti National Park, the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, and the Selous Game Reserve. Yet few know that most of these initiatives emerged from decades of German colonial rule. This book gives the first full account of Tanzanian wildlife conservation up until World War I, focusing upon elephant hunting and the ivory trade as vital factors in a shift from exploitation to preservation that increasingly excluded indigenous Africans. Analyzing the formative interactions between colonial governance and the natural world, The Nature of German Imperialism situates East African wildlife policies within the global emergence of conservationist sensibilities around 1900.

- by Bernhard Gissibl
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- German History, Political Ecology, Environmental Studies, Environmental History
- by Kyle David Richard Tadman
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- Cold War, Nationalism, Nationalism And State Building, Second World War
- by Christopher Wright
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- European History, Modern History, African Studies, Marxism

These two chapters discuss European and German representations of China during the centuries leading up to the era of European imperialist seizures of land and sovereignty along the Chinese coast in the 19th century. It then tracks the role of these "ethnographic" and Orientalist images in the competition among German colonial policymakers in the Qingdao (Tsingtau) colony.

This article aims to explain in a theoretical way, but with practical historical examples the complex notion of informal imperialism. First analyzing imperialism(s) and colonialism as a whole, it will then try to caracterize and categorize more specifically what is informal imperialism. Comparing imperialism with the our understanding of space, a grid of understanding is thus applied to imperialism as a whole, to then qualify and address the informality of the phenomenon, and give theoretical tools based on practical historical cases for the historian and the political scientist.

- by Mathieu Gotteland
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- Ottoman Empire, Empires, China, British Empire
- by madhura nadarajah
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- Christianity, Nigeria, Chinua Achebe, European Imperialism and Colonialism
- by Matthew Stanard
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- Visual propaganda, Propaganda, Colonialism, History Of Propaganda

This essay examines the figure of the New World in Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum, analyzing the topos of the New World-as-nature in light of Bacon’s writings on colonialism and empire. A number of scholars have recently sought to distance Bacon’s epistemology from his politics, arguing that the metaphor of the “New World” provides a striking contrast between the political dominion of nations over other nations and the extension of humanity’s collective dominion over nature. Tracing the dialectical tension between political and “human” empire in Bacon’s major works, I argue that what appears on the surface to be a metaphor is in fact metonymical in structure. The discovery of the New World is not just a figurative image of an anticipated human empire; it is part of this expanded vision of empire. Nowhere is this more evident than in Bacon’s unfinished work of utopian fiction, the New Atlantis, where the founding event that establishes Bacon’s scientific utopia necessitates the destruction and historical erasure of existing Amerindian empires. Within Bacon’s narrative, this erasure is what makes the utopian extension of “human empire” possible.

- by Jude Welburn
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- Epistemology, History of Science, Francis Bacon, Early Modern Literature

The primary aim of this thesis is to reconstruct the history of Aboriginal cultural associations with whales and whaling in southwest Victoria in the nineteenth century. Despite there being a considerable corpus of information about Aboriginal peoples and whaling in southeast South Australia and southern New South Wales, there is a relative poverty of information on southwest Victoria. One of the primary objectives of this thesis is to offer explanations for this absence of information. Through an analysis of the Convincing Ground massacre that is believed to have taken place in the early period of whaling at Portland Bay, it will be argued that the violence characterised by this event fundamentally transformed race relations at Portland to such an extent that Aboriginal people avoided interaction with whalers. The rationale for this research is twofold: first to contribute to the history of frontier relations in Victoria; second, to reconstruct from archival sources the cultural and economic associations between Victorian Aboriginal people and whalers.

The impact of European colonization on the ivory trade in West Africa 18th-19th centuries.pdf

- by Isabelle Flour
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- Cultural History, Cultural Studies, Visual Studies, Art History
- by Franco De Angelis
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- Ancient History, Economic History, Economic Sociology, Postcolonial Studies

Decolonisation has become a buzzword in academic circles today, and the efforts to decolonise knowledge and knowledge production are many and complex. However, it can also be argued that 'decolonisation' is not a discipline per se, but rather the outcome of the use of theories and models in the various disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. This is the PowerPoint I gave to accompany my Zoom talk to the Department of History Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of the Universiti Malaya (UM), on 23 March 2022, hosted by Prof. Farish A. Noor (UM), in which I discussed the writing of history in the domain of Indonesian colonial history in particular, and the efforts to decolonize history in the Southeast Asian region in general. The talk was attended by 200+ Zoom participants and generated a lively discussion.

- by Peter B R Carey
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- History, Art History, Southeast Asian Studies, Politics

RESUMO Este artigo teve por base um trabalho de investigação mais abrangente, levado a efeito pela autora, ao longo de 2013, sobre a fundação e os projetos de expansão de Lourenço Marques, em Moçambique. O texto aqui apresentado põe o enfoque em alguns aspetos da implantação do " Projecto de Ampliação da Cidade de Lourenço Marques " , levada a efeito a partir de 1887, inserido no contexto da transição da vila a cidade (1887) e a capital da colónia (1898). A pesquisa permitiu sobretudo concluir sobre as dificuldades técnicas, materiais e de recursos humanos encontradas pelas Obras Públicas no pequeno assentamento urbano de Lourenço Marques ao longo do último quartel do século XIX, em claro contraste com a ambição do seu projeto de ampliação. O anteplano de ampliação da cidade de Lourenço Marques de 1887, implicou o traçado de uma malha urbana a partir das pequenas travessas e quarteirões irregulares que constituíam o pequeno burgo estremado pelas terras alagadas do Maé e da enseada da Maxaquene e pelo Estuário do Espírito Santo. A área alagada foi atravessada por três avenidas longitudinais ligadas por dez avenidas transversais, todas elas construídas, junto à cidade, por aterro, realçando a área interessada em cerca de 2 m. Pelo menos 2/3 do volume de terras necessário a esse fim proveio do extremo este da cidade, das elevações que dominavam o (projeto de) porto, sobre a enseada da Maxaquene. As dificuldades técnicas e financeiras no acesso a materiais de construção e o custo implicado no saneamento de uma área daquela dimensão obrigou a protelar sucessivamente o movimento de terras necessário para o realçamento da área, executado em empreitadas parciais. Grande parte destas avenidas permaneceu até ao final do século XIX com piso em areia, à espera de macadamização, condicionando a edificação nos novos quarteirões devido sobretudo à dificuldade de transportar materiais de construção naquelas condições. A pesquisa teve por base relatórios das Obras Públicas de Moçambique ao Ministério da Marinha e Ultramar, correspondência dos diretores de Obras Públicas de Lourenço Marques das duas últimas décadas do século XIX e primeira do século XX, cartografia e coleções iconográficas desse período presentes no Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino (AHU). Palavras-chave: Moçambique; Plano Araújo; Obras Públicas

- by Lisandra Franco de Mendonça
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- African Studies, Urban History, Colonialism, Urban Studies

In October, 1860, an Anglo-French army entered Yuanmingyuan, the palace compound of the Chinese emperor north-west of Beijing. First the French looted the palaces then the British burned them to the ground. The reason why they engaged in this barbarian behavior, they explained, was that they wanted to "civilize the Chinese." This book explains how liberals then as now turn into barbarians when making war in non-European settings. The book discusses 1860, but the implications for today are obvious.

A major problem standing in the way of progress of what should be a joint front is that academics have clung to the myth that academics are observers, not participants, and that they should stand beyond politics. Unfortunately, in the Area Studies of the American and the British Academies, the ‘discipline IS political’. Our disciplines have emerged from the colonial period as tools of empire and were preserved after the retreat of Europe because they had utility in the Cold War.

- by Michael W Charney
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- Area Studies, African Studies, Asian Studies, Education

South Carolina was a staggeringly weak polity from its founding in 1670 until the 1730s. Nevertheless, in that time, and while facing significant opposition from powerful indigenous neighbors, the colony constructed a robust plantation system that boasted the highest slave-to-freeman ratio in mainland North America. Taking this fact as a point of departure, I examine the early management of unfree labor in South Carolina as an exemplary moment of settler- colonial state formation. Departing from the treatment of state formation as a process of centralizing “legitimate violence,” I investigate how the colonial state, and in particular the Commons House of Assembly, asserted an exclusive claim to authority by monopolizing the question of legitimacy itself. In managing unfree laborers, the colonial state extended its authority over supposedly private relations between master and slave and increasingly recast slavery in racial terms. This recasting of racial slavery rested, I argue, on a distinction, pervasive throughout English North America, which divided the world into spheres of savagery and civility. Beneath the racial reordering of colonial life, the institution of slavery was rooted in the same ideological distinction by which the colonial state’s claims to authority were justified, with the putative “savagery” of the slave or of the Indian being counterpoised to the supposed civility of English settlers. This article contributes to the literatures on Atlantic slavery and American colonial history, and invites comparison with accounts of state formation and settler colonialism beyond Anglo-America.

- by Daragh Grant
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- History, American History, Sociology, Native American Studies

By 1900, the situation was grim for Africa with the onset of the final stage of European penetration representing imperialism at its mightiest. This essay rewinds back to focus on how Africa arrived at such a grim state starting in the late 19th century. Specifically, this essay examines if the impact of Europeans on 19th century Africa across the domains of politics, religion, and disease is captured in the phrase “things fall apart.” This essay will support the view that European imperialism caused things to fall apart in Africa.

33 ID's, 14 Short Answer Questions, and 3 Short Essays that served as the final exam for HIST 356.

- by Samuel C Ehrhart
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- History, African Studies, African Philosophy, North Africa Studies

Gunflint production variability and its association with specific manufacturing locations have been used as mechanisms for understanding distribution networks between Euro-pean powers, Indigenous peoples, and settlers in the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Americas. Gunflint production mechanisms and scale varies between production locations , but recent studies illustrate that the spatial and temporal variability in production activities is more diverse than previously thought. Here we examine three gunflint assemblages from eighteenth-and nineteenth-century sites in Louisiana to address gunflint production variability's relationship with temporal differences and changing economic networks. Broadly, this study finds greater variability in exchange of gunflints than previously thought and suggests that interactions between European colonial powers and their colonies were more complex and nuanced than previously suspected.

- by Rachel A Horowitz and +1
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- Lithic Technology, Lithics, Lithic Technology (Archaeology), Lithic Analysis
- by Thijs Korsten
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- Discourse Analysis, Ottoman History, Middle East Studies, Lebanon
- by Brian K Pennington
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- Religion, Hinduism, Colonialism, India

The first genocide of the 20th century occurred not in Europe but in Southwest Africa, a colony that had been annexed by Germany in the early 1880s. Between August 1904 and 1907, the Germans attempted to exterminate the indigenous Ovaherero people, along with the groups of rebellious Khoikhoi. The Germans did not succeed in killing all of these insurgents, but their explicit intentional effort to do so qualifies their actions clearly as genocidal.

- by George Steinmetz
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- African History, Colonialism, Genocide, German Colonialism

Historians and sociologists alike have rightfully cautioned against assuming a simplistic and unbroken continuity between colonial racial politics and the racial project of Nazi Germany in particular – and, in general, against mistaking parallels for causation (Keim 2014, Kössler 2005, Melber 2011). With this proviso in mind, the chapter examines the relationship between race and politics in the twentieth century with particular attention to the German case, while pointing to some of the clearest and most immediate connections to racial politics under colonialism and their current legacies worldwide.

- by Manuela Boatcă
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- Postcolonial Studies, Race and Racism, Citizenship, Nazi Germany
- by George Steinmetz
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- Colonialism, Post-Colonialism, German Colonial Empire, Post-Colonial Theory

This article begins with an empirical puzzle: Modern colonies treated their subject populations in radically differing ways, ranging from genocide to efforts to “salvage” precolonial cultures. In Southwest Africa Germany massacred the Ovaherero and Witbooi; in Samoa Germany pursued a program of cultural re-traditionalization; and in the Chinese leasehold colony of Qingdao/Kiaochow the colonizers moved from racialized segregation to a respectful civilizational exchange. Where the colonial state was able to autonomize itself from the metropolitan government and colonial economic interests, it began to function as a field in the Bourdieusian sense. Pierre Bourdieu has not generally been seen as a theorist of empire, despite the partial genesis of his lifelong research program in the late colonial crucible of French Algeria (Bourdieu 1958; 2002a, 2004a, Yacine 2004). Nonetheless, Bourdieu’s theoretical approach helps to solve the main riddle of the colonial state. Different European social groups competed within the field’s ambit for a specific form of symbolic capital, ethnographic capital. This involved exhibiting ethnographic acuity, defined as a specific talent for judging the culture and character of the colonized, a gift for understanding “the natives.” Competitive dynamics among the colonizers decisively shaped the ongoing production of the colonial state’s native policies. Policy formation was also influenced by geopolitical and economic interests, responses by the colonized, and the metropolitan government’s ability to appoint and dismiss colonial officials. The effects of these additional mechanisms were typically mediated by the dynamics of the semi-autonomous colonial state.

- by George Steinmetz
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- Archaeology of Empires, Genocide, German Colonialism, Namibia

Three works by Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) entail mythologized scenes of spontaneous generation, or the creation of species from nature’s raw matter: Head of Medusa (ca. 1613–1618), The Discovery of Erichthonius (ca. 1616), and the oil sketch Deucalion and Pyrrha (ca. 1636). In these works Rubens naturalizes the life of painting within its materials, implying matter—paint, with its pigments and mediating liquids—as an intrinsic, animating quality of his images and even as a counterpart to or collaborator with the artist. This essay explores these ideas to show how Rubens’s technical and artisanal understanding of painting and its materials could have informed his interpretation of ancient myths.

- by Marisa Mandabach
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- Materiality of Art, Medusa, Creation myths, Peter Paul Rubens

El objetivo de este artículo es mostrar, mediante tres instancias específicas, las diferentes maneras en las que el imaginario urbano europeo impactó y muchas veces dio forma a las utopías y a las pesadillas coloniales. Para llevar a cabo esta tarea, he dividido el presente artículo en tres acápites: 1) “Colón y la decepción del archivo cultural europeo”, donde analizo la compleja relación entre el imaginario europeo
colombino (emplazamiento de la utopía paradisíaca fundacional) y la realidad cultural y étnica que se encontró; 2) “La organización social indígena como desafío del ‘salvajismo’ y la ‘desposesión’ en Bartolomé de Las Casas”, donde exploro críticamente la Apologética historia sumaria de Bartolomé de las Casas para
mostrar cómo el fraile se sirvió de la descripción de la organización urbana, administrativa y política de los indígenas con el fin de desmentir la supuesta inferioridad cultural que los diversos actores de la Conquista (cronistas, encomenderos y algunos religiosos) les achacaban y; 3) “La destrucción de la ciudad indígena y la imposición del nuevo orden colonial”, donde realizo el abordaje crítico de algunos textos y autores (Acosta, Las Casas, Cortés, Landa, Gómara) que dan cuenta de la violencia que aplicaron los conquistadores en los centros urbanos indígenas y sobre los modelos conceptuales (como la idolatría, los sacrificios humanos, la
adoración de “falsos” dioses) que sirvieron como justificación de la destrucción de su cultura material.

This study analyzes the most important phases of the Ottoman Empire’s foreign debt between 1881 and 1914. Examining the three major financial operations of the period – 1881, 1890-92 and 1903 – we can document the way in which foreign loans, besides increasing the empire’s public spending, served the ends the great European powers imposed upon the Ottoman governing class. At the same time, the choice for foreign loans and deficit spending seemed to be the only path towards some form of modernization of the state open to the Ottoman Empire and so to a role within the European context which, if not equal to that of the great players, might at least be that of a regional power.

Attraversando l'intero bacino di studi di Ronald Robinson e John Gallagher, si ricercano le cause del fenomeno della spartizione, con un importante focus sul concetto di "imperialismo preventivo" e con accenti imprescindibili posti sui giochi di potere interni al vecchio continente.
La Spartizione è un fenomeno che deriva dall'Europa e dalla degenerazione delle sue forze, rilasciate a tutela dell'equilibrio di potere interno al vecchio continente, irreversibilmente travolgenti suoli non europei.

By the 1570’s, Potosí, and its silver, had become the hub of a commodity revolution that reorganized Peru’s peoples and landscapes to serve capital and empire. This was a decisive moment in the world-ecological revolution of the long seventeenth century. Primitive accumulation in Peru was particularly successful: the mita’s spatial program enabled the colonial state to marshal a huge supply of low-cost and tractable labor in the midst of sustained demographic contraction. The relatively centralized character of Peru’s mining frontier facilitated imperial control in a way the more dispersed silver frontiers of New Spain did not. Historical capitalism has sustained itself on the basis of exploiting, and thereby undermining, a vast web of socio-ecological relations. As may be observed in colonial Peru, the commodity frontier strategy effected both the destruction and creation of premodern socio-ecological arrangements.

- by Jason W. Moore
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- Economic History, Historical Sociology, Marxism, Early Modern History

Los restos de uno de los primeros ingenios azucareros de las Américas ubicados al sur-este de la ciudad dominicana de San Juan de La Maguana, escenario de los comienzos del encuentro entre europeos, indígenas y africanos que marcó para siempre lo que sería el “Nuevo Mundo”, están hoy inundados por canales agrícolas que podrían deshacer para siempre sus estructuras en muy poco tiempo.

- by Kevin Gould
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- Military History, Asian History, Chinese history (History), US History