Rethinking the History of Empire
Rethinking the History of Empire

Author: William Gallois

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-05-21

Total Pages: 165

ISBN-13: 1000022994

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This book forms part of the scholarly rejection of the ‘experts’ of empire and calls for us to centre our understanding of colonial praxis upon the lives of the colonised peoples of the past and the present. Western publics are constantly being told by ‘experts’ that they ought to rethink the history of empire. They are told that their (presumed) guilt regarding their countries’ imperial pasts can be assuaged: if people were only able to deploy a ‘balanced scorecard’ they would then recognise that imperialists brought roads as well as death, schools as well as national borders, and hospitals as well as racialised forms of ethnic conflict. Building around an essay by the Algerian writer Hosni Kitouni (here translated into English for the first time), this book shows how the genre and forms of imperial history mirror the actions of colonists and the documents they left behind, erasing the suffering of indigenous people and the after-effects of empire, which last into the present and will continue into the future. This book was originally published as a special issue of Rethinking History.

International Law's Objects
International Law's Objects

Author: Jessie Hohmann

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-12-20

Total Pages: 593

ISBN-13: 0192548964

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International law's rich existence in the world can be illuminated by its objects. International law is often developed, conveyed and authorized through its objects and/or their representation. From the symbolic (the regalia of the head of state and the symbols of sovereignty), to the mundane (a can of dolphin-safe tuna certified as complying with international trade standards), international legal authority can be found in the objects around us. Similarly, the practice of international law often relies on material objects or their image, both as evidence (satellite images, bones of the victims of mass atrocities) and to found authority (for instance, maps and charts). This volume considers these questions; firstly what might the study of international law through objects reveal? What might objects, rather than texts, tell us about sources, recognition of states, construction of territory, law of the sea, or international human rights law? Secondly, what might this scholarly undertaking reveal about the objects - as aims or projects - of international law? How do objects reveal, or perhaps mask, these aims, and what does this tell us about the reasons some (physical or material) objects are foregrounded, and others hidden or ignored. Thirdly what objects, icons and symbols preoccupy the profession and academy? The personal selection of these objects by leading and emerging scholars worldwide, will illuminate the contemporary and historical fascinations of international lawyers. As a result, the volume will be an important artefact (itself an object) in its own right, capturing the mood of international law in a given moment and providing opportunity for reflection on these preoccupations. By considering international law in the context of its material culture the authors offer a new theoretical perspective on the subject.

The Belgian Congo as a Developmental State
The Belgian Congo as a Developmental State

Author: Emizet François Kisangani

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-08-31

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1000636909

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This book challenges assumptions that poor post-colonial economic performance is always a direct product of colonialism by reconsidering the Belgian Congo (1908–1959) as a developmental state. The book demonstrates that despite the colonial system’s economic exploitation and extraction, brutality, excessive taxation, and inequities, the Belgian Congo achieved successes in developing the economy in a short period of time. The Belgian Congo was able to achieve this by investing its higher rates of fiscal revenue in political stability, physical infrastructure, education, and healthcare. By reconsidering the Belgian colonial state as a developmental state, this book encourages scholars to adopt a more nuanced analysis of African history. Considering state capacity and state autonomy as key features of a developmental state, the book demonstrates that colonial state managers in the Belgian Congo were able to supply these public goods that sustained economic growth for decades. Whilst by no means glorifying colonialism or the atrocities that were conducted during the Belgian occupation, the book nonetheless outlines how different forms of capitalism were deployed to further economic development in the country. In contrast, predatory state managers of the Congo Free State (1885–1908) and post-colonial kleptocrats (1960–2018) have squandered Congo’s natural resources with disastrous economic and social consequences. Contrasting the Belgian Congo with colonies of settlement and other colonies of extraction, this book encourages researchers and students to reconsider the dominant narratives within colonial history, development, and African Studies.

Stakes of the War
Stakes of the War

Author: Lothrop Stoddard

Publisher: New York, The Century

Published: 1918

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13:

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Charts the facts involved in European and Asiatic politics, race, trade, industry, and religion which World War I shoved into the foreground of political and business thinking, which will demand solution at the peace-table.

Land of Tears
Land of Tears

Author: Robert Harms

Publisher: Basic Books

Published: 2019-12-03

Total Pages: 510

ISBN-13: 1541699661

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A prizewinning historian's epic account of the scramble to control equatorial Africa In just three decades at the end of the nineteenth century, the heart of Africa was utterly transformed. Virtually closed to outsiders for centuries, by the early 1900s the rainforest of the Congo River basin was one of the most brutally exploited places on earth. In Land of Tears, historian Robert Harms reconstructs the chaotic process by which this happened. Beginning in the 1870s, traders, explorers, and empire builders from Arabia, Europe, and America moved rapidly into the region, where they pioneered a deadly trade in ivory and rubber for Western markets and in enslaved labor for the Indian Ocean rim. Imperial conquest followed close behind. Ranging from remote African villages to European diplomatic meetings to Connecticut piano-key factories, Land of Tears reveals how equatorial Africa became fully, fatefully, and tragically enmeshed within our global world.