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.
In May 1958, and four years into the Algerian War of Independence, a revolt again appropriated the revolutionary and republican symbolism of the French Revolution by seizing power through a Committee of Public Safety. This book explores why a repressive colonial system that had for over a century maintained the material and intellectual backwardness of Algerian women now turned to an extensive programme of 'emancipation'. After a brief background sketch of the situation of Algerian women during the post-war decade, it discusses the various factors contributed to the emergence of the first significant women's organisations in the main urban centres. It was only after the outbreak of the rebellion in 1954 and the arrival of many hundreds of wives of army officers that the model of female interventionism became dramatically activated. The French military intervention in Algeria during 1954-1962 derived its force from the Orientalist current in European colonialism and also seemed to foreshadow the revival of global Islamophobia after 1979 and the eventual moves to 'liberate' Muslim societies by US-led neo-imperialism in Afghanistan and Iraq. For the women of Bordj Okhriss, as throughout Algeria, the French army represented a dangerous and powerful force associated with mass destruction, brutality and rape. The central contradiction facing the mobile socio-medical teams teams was how to gain the trust of Algerian women and to bring them social progress and emancipation when they themselves were part of an army that had destroyed their villages and driven them into refugee camps.
, existed, where 1.66 million received, and themselves paid for, the limited vernacular education intended for them. But this was only 8 percent of the population between walking age and adulthood. The numbers of Indonesians in European schools amounted to only 0.14 for the total population: there were 178 Indonesians in university and 392 in vocational agricultural or forestry schools, where, under the logic of colonial education policy, investment was supposed to be directed (Ricklefs 2001: 202–3). The principles of colonial education had a long afterlife. As Syed
fracture Ngugi’s many indictments of the repressions and exclusions of colonial education. In Decolonising the Mind (1986), his study of colonial and national cultural practice, he chooses to overlook the ways in which women have been silenced by colonial and traditional power structures. Despite his professed delight at hearing women’s voices (as entertainment on the side perhaps), he never mentions a woman writer, neither in his numerous inventories of canonical literary names nor in the lists of respected figures which he himself suggests for university curricula.12 It
different vantage point. This would be not the west as the east due to its colonial education in the English classics believed it was to be seen, but the east as shaped by the west, represented by an eastern woman writing from the perspective of the west. In her second and third collections, The Golden Threshold (1905), and The Bird of Time: Songs of Life, Death and the Spring (1912), as Gosse goes on to write, Naidu no longer concealed ‘the exclusively Indian source of her inspiration’.6 Addressing herself to ‘emotions which are tropical and primitive’, she now became
even further in representing the range of roles, activities and social positions available to women. In the event, her representations may have been constrained by the values she herself acquired as part of a Christian colonial education. 40 Davies and Graves (eds), Ngambika, pp. 243, 249; Amadiume, Male Daughters, p. 29. 41 The calculating materialism dramatised in the later stories belongs to an urban context where the restraining forces of village values and commentary are no longer available. The cut-throat individualism of a heroine such as Amaka in One Is
, including Shakespeare, Dickens and the Victorian poets. Recollecting the shape of this curriculum years later, Mistry valued its breadth, but also recognised the mismatch of a colonial education in a postcolonial environment: ‘Part of the tragedy of the educated middle classes in Bombay was this yearning for something unattainable that came from what they read. Would that sense of a future elsewhere have been avoided if we had concentrated on an Indian literary canon? I don’t know.’3 Essentially, Mistry seems to be describing the same predicament that Salman Rushdie has
4 David Hardiman, ‘Introduction’, in David Hardiman (ed.), Healing Bodies, Saving Souls: Medical Missions in Asia and Africa , Amsterdam and New York, Rodopi, 2006, p. 20 5 Ana Madeira, ‘Portuguese, French and British Discourses on Colonial Education: Church
17 Before 1928 the president was usually the highest-ranking medical official on the island, after that time, presidents included S.B.B. McElderry, of the Colonial Agricultural Service and W. Hendry, of the Colonial Education Service. 18 Zanzibar Protectorate, Annual Medical Report, 1922
leadership roles in Lebanon and Algeria; also Martin Thomas, ‘Women and Colonialism and Colonial Education’ in The French Empire Between the Wars. Imperialism, Politics and Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 151–84. 26 The French Revolution has been described as the ‘supreme point of reference’ in Mustapha Kemal’s life: see Mango, Atatürk, 42, 49. 27 Contemporaries saw a fascistic parallel between the generals’ Algiers coup, code-named Operation Resurrection, to topple the Paris government, and General Franco’s 1939 ‘reconquest’ of Spain from his base