This book produces a major rethinking of the history of development after 1940 through an exploration of Britain’s ambitions for industrialisation in its Caribbean colonies. Industrial development is a neglected topic in histories of the British Colonial Empire, and we know very little of plans for Britain’s Caribbean colonies in general in the late colonial period, despite the role played by riots in the region in prompting an increase in development spending. This account shows the importance of knowledge and expertise in the promotion of a model of Caribbean development that is best described as liberal rather than state-centred and authoritarian. It explores how the post-war period saw an attempt by the Colonial Office to revive Caribbean economies by transforming cane sugar from a low-value foodstuff into a lucrative starting compound for making fuels, plastics and medical products. In addition, it shows that as Caribbean territories moved towards independence and America sought to shape the future of the region, scientific and economic advice became a key strategy for the maintenance of British control of the West Indian colonies. Britain needed to counter attempts by American-backed experts to promote a very different approach to industrial development after 1945 informed by the priorities of US foreign policy.
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.
modernisation theory. It describes how the late colonial Caribbean was a laboratory for the emergence of new ideas about the development of manufacturing and shows how initiatives on the ground could in fact contribute to later theoretical work; a rather different relationship between theory and practice from that typically described. This account also broadens our understanding of development by focusing on a region that has been overlooked in historical studies. The riots in Britain’s Caribbean colonies during the 1930s persuaded the British government to greatly increase
reforms, but merged several strands of regional revolt into a great rebellion which spread over a large area of the southern Andes (in modern Peru and Bolivia). Did these late colonial rebellions challenge the colonial system in an upsurge of collective violence? Not necessarily. Neither the Quito nor the Comunero rebellions involved significant casualties or damage, and both demobilized peacefully. This restraint is best explained in terms of the rebels’ limited goals, leadership, and social composition. Their avowed aim was to restore the political and fiscal status
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.
, scientists could become part of networks, but useful contacts that would facilitate the transfer of knowledge at the level of the individual colony did not necessarily have the time and opportunity to develop in the late colonial period. Fundamental research into the chemistry of sugar was done on the basis that the results of scientific research would be of interest to businessmen. It became clear, however, that sugar manufacturers that operated in the Caribbean did not possess the necessary chemical and commercial skills to capitalise on the results
political sovereignty in spite of geographical dispersion’.8 Post-colonialism will be used here to describe the period in which political and theoretical struggles of previously colonised societies broached their transition from political, military and economic dependence to independent sovereignty.9 Medicine’s and, by association, nursing’s role in this later colonial process may be seen as part of an attempt by the colonisers to justify the harsher sides of imperialism. These attempts at justification were taking place at the same time that political and religious
modernisation or attachment theory, as well as tribal particularism. Significantly, this development worked against the liberal tendencies of many late colonial doctors, who were eager to separate disease susceptibility from broad-based assumptions associating race with certain behaviours, and instead continued to foster a tendency to pathologise African social life through generalised discourses. 3
that one of the most striking contrasts between the late-colonial period and the period after independence lies in the extent to which the Indian political elite concerned itself with questions of public health. The instrumental argument, that it has not been in the ‘interests’ of India’s elite to prioritize public health – given their easy access to high-quality, urban curative health services – is indisputable; but interests can come into being and unravel through political discourse and as a result of political mobilization. In the first half of the twentieth
was no provision for commercial education. It was the Islamic religious schools that by the 1930s first began to offer Malays courses on accountancy, the madrasahs of Sumatra that, by the 1940s, produced some of the most dynamic women leaders and teachers. Above all, for all the thrusting modernity of the late colonial period, technical accomplishment was acquired by Asians mostly though their own initiative. This was one reason why it became such a rallying cry for young nationalists. In his fascinating study of technology and nationalism in Indonesia, Rudolf