{"title":"The Deepest Dye: Obeah, Hosay, and Race in the Atlantic World by Aisha Khan (review)","authors":"Rupa Pillai","doi":"10.1353/cch.2022.0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cch.2022.0017","url":null,"abstract":"In her latest book, The Deepest Dye: Obeah, Hosay, and Race in the Atlantic World , cultural anthropologist Aisha Khan does more than provide a fascinating study of Obeah and Hosay. She illustrates how categories produced through colonialism continue to shape identities and hierarchies today. To accomplish this, Khan focuses her analysis on race and religion, identity categories she expertly demonstrates are mutually constituted. By pursuing this analysis through a parallax view, “the effect by which the position of an object seems to change when it is looked at from different positions,” she challenges the reader to recognize that the mutual constitutions of race and religion vary across time and space (14). In fact, no categories are ever stable, they are always in process, prompting Khan to advocate that any category or identity should be studied in relation to others. Over four chapters, Khan offers a richly diverse body of evidence to support her argument.","PeriodicalId":278323,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History","volume":"46 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123976376","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Convicts: A Global History by Clare Anderson (review)","authors":"Hamish Maxwell-Stewart","doi":"10.1353/cch.2022.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cch.2022.0015","url":null,"abstract":"Convicts: A Global History is a huge temporal and geographical undertaking. A hundred and thirty individual penal destinations scattered across nineteen different polities are covered in the pages of this remarkable book. While the weight lies with the Western Empires, non-European utilisation of convicted labour is also discussed. This is especially true of Qing China and Tokugawa and Meiji Japan. Yet, it is not just geography, or chronological sweep (the book covers five centuries of penal practice), that gives Convicts scale. In an age where much historical writing has retreated into a series of self-contained sub-disciplines, Anderson fashions her narrative out of a swathe of cultural, economic and social thematic detail. The end result is a masterful account of “punitive mobility.”","PeriodicalId":278323,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125998674","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"African Boxing, Social Control and \"Subversive Culture\" in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1900–1960","authors":"Abraham Seda","doi":"10.1353/cch.2022.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cch.2022.0011","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Among \"imperial games\" in colonial Zimbabwe, boxing was arguably the most popular and controversial. While colonial administrators tried to impose the orthodoxy of western style boxing, African boxers, through the use of Indigenous performance enhancing substances, redefined the boxing ring as a space in which they asserted their cultural practices, which were not always legible to colonial administrators. Performance enhancing substances such as mangoromera became key in making claims to power and masculinity among African boxers. African women and men of diverse ethnic backgrounds also reconfigured boxing spaces into important sites for socializing and entertainment.","PeriodicalId":278323,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History","volume":"122 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128148981","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Fluid Jurisdictions: Colonial Law and Arabs in Southeast Asia by Nurfadzilah Yahaya (review)","authors":"M. Vallianatos","doi":"10.1353/cch.2022.0018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cch.2022.0018","url":null,"abstract":"Though focused on elites, Fluid Jurisdictions is unmistakably a book about people in the middle—whether caught there by virtue of colonial racial status or by a willingness to embrace the liminal spaces created by competing legal understandings. Nurfadzilah Yahaya studies the Arab diasporic elite in Southeast Asia as they advocated for themselves using European colonial institutions and legible forms of legal authority, such as standardized paper records, towards the end of the nineteenth and start of the twentieth centuries. This is an engrossing history of legal pluralism—a system in which “law emanates from a multiplicity of normative legal orders” (19)—that investigates how a people endured or seized upon the “inevitable anomalies” characteristic of imperial jurisdictions.","PeriodicalId":278323,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History","volume":"260 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131494166","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"We Slaves of Suriname by Anton de Kom (review)","authors":"T. Burnard","doi":"10.1353/cch.2022.0019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cch.2022.0019","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":278323,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128927752","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Indian Cotton Textiles in West Africa. African Agency, Consumer Demand and the Making of the Global Economy, 1750–1850 by Kazuo Kobayashi (review)","authors":"Gustavo Acioli","doi":"10.1353/cch.2022.0000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cch.2022.0000","url":null,"abstract":"After the Atlantic history vogue, scholars have shifted towards a global focus. Kobayashi’s Indian Cotton Textiles in West Africa is an ambitious new entry in this field. He not only suggests that his subject is best addressed from a global perspective","PeriodicalId":278323,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History","volume":"147 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134150932","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Peace, Poverty and Betrayal, A New History of British India by Roderick Matthews (review)","authors":"Adam Prime","doi":"10.1353/cch.2022.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cch.2022.0008","url":null,"abstract":"In his new book, Peace, Poverty and Betrayal, A New History of British India, Roderick Matthews writes, “... events were more often shaped by opportunism, misjudgements, and mistaken assumptions, especially on the British side.” This idea that British rule in India was inconsistent, haphazard, and often more luck than judgement, is the central tenet of Matthews’ tome. Yet, to term this a “new” history of British India is misleading. The uneven nature of the development of British rule on the subcontinent has of course been previously considered by historians. Most notably, Jon Wilson has written of the chaotic nature of British rule in India in his 2016 tome, India Conquered. In his work, Wilson took aim at nostalgia, pointing to the fact that what Britons tell themselves today about empire is coloured by their removal from the period and by notions of nationalism and superiority. Matthews, on the other hand, seeks to exonerate himself from the right wing, nostalgic view of empire or the left wing, revisionist view, aiming for a more critical study of empire. In his opening gambit he states: “the point is not to ask whether British rule in India was a good or bad thing; like all governments it can be seen as both.” Yet, by seeking to take a middle ground, Matthews, on occasion, puts forth arguments from both sides of the political fence.","PeriodicalId":278323,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History","volume":"38 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128756678","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Cannabis: Global Histories ed. by Lucas Richert and James H. Mills (review)","authors":"Utathya Chattopadhyaya","doi":"10.1353/cch.2022.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cch.2022.0001","url":null,"abstract":"Peter Hynd replicates verbatim the language of excise reports in British India to narrate the colonial state's apparently successful fiscal measures to lower cannabis sales and maximize revenue. Besides misnaming Hemchunder Kerr as Dutt and misidentifying the Garhjat in Orissa as Gujarat sixteen hundred kilometers west, Hynd concludes that the infrastructure of cannabis revenue extraction by an oppressive colonial force is that reasonable but rare occasion where \"modern governments stand to learn a thing or two from the example set by the British Raj.” Behind the story of the GW Pharmaceuticals product Sativex, Suzanne Taylor uncovers years of lobbying by middle-class citizen groups like the Multiple Sclerosis Society in the 1990s that pushed for controlled medical research on cannabis and gave it a respectable face. [...]the editors' invitation to a renewed research agenda around this assessment, tediously termed \"globalization without globalizers,” is constrained by their neglect of the teeming scholarly assessments and critiques of the category \"global” and the framework \"globalization.” More importantly, in 2022, even as emerging mass spectrometry research on cannabinoid non-psychoactive acids at the Linus Pauling Institute suggest their potential to successfully bind Covid-19 spike proteins against human epithelial cells, states in the Global South continue to face restrictions from global narcotics control institutions on scientific studies of cannabis.","PeriodicalId":278323,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121704627","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Trading for Empire: Commerce and French Colonial Rule in Senegal, c. 1817–1860","authors":"Jenna Nigro","doi":"10.1353/cch.2022.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cch.2022.0007","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In the early nineteenth century, French officials in Senegal viewed commerce, rather than conquest, as the best means to extend their empire’s “civilizing” influence. Colonial officials simultaneously argued that African trading practices, particularly tribute payments known as coutumes, promoted greed and were a barrier to “free trade.” By the 1840s, the perception that commerce alone had failed to “civilize” West Africans led the French to conclude that military force was necessary to impose order. Nevertheless, much of the basis for the “new imperialism” of the later nineteenth century, I argue, was rooted in the earlier commercial justifications for colonialism.","PeriodicalId":278323,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History","volume":"464 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123379759","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"European Small States and the Role of Consuls in the Age of Empire by Aryo Makko (review)","authors":"Heather Streets-Salter","doi":"10.1353/cch.2022.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cch.2022.0009","url":null,"abstract":"In European Small States and the Role of Consuls in the Age of Empire","PeriodicalId":278323,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117209985","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}