Colonialism and imperialism Books
Zubaan Contesting Nation – Gendered Violence in South
Book SynopsisAn innovative collection of essays on the turmoil spreading across South Asia, Contesting Nation sheds light on how violence—in wars of direct and indirect conquest—marks the present. Featuring contributions by distinguished South Asian women scholars, the book offers inspired, gendered, and contested histories of the present, exploring nation-making and its intersections with projects of militarization and cultural assertion, modernization, and globalization.The contributors to this volume consider such turbulent events as the Gujarat carnage of 2002, post-9/11 mobilizations, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, shedding light on the force with which brutal events encompass lives and disfigure communities. This powerful book examines the very borders such brutality maintains and its intimate and lasting effects on bodies and memories.
£999.99
NUS Press Uncertainty, Anxiety, Frugality: Dealing With
Book SynopsisThe story of leprosy in the Dutch East Indies from the beginning of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th reveals important themes in the colonial enterprise across the territory that is today’s Indonesia. Operating in a territory with only a few hundred Western-trained doctors and a population in the tens of millions, Dutch colonial officials approached leprosy with uncertainty and anxiety. In the early 19th century, the Dutch administrationsimply removed sufferers from public view: campaigns targetted anyone “looking ugly”. Towards the end of the century, colonial science considered leprosy a hereditary disease of tropical subjects, and therefore undeserving of the colonial government’s limited resources. The leprosariums were emptied. At the start of the 20th century, a growing understanding that leprosy was spread by a bacillus caused a panic that leprosy might spread from the tropics to the colonial metropole. The mixed emotions of pity, fear and revulsion associated with management of the disease intensified, and fed into broader debates on colonial policy. The experts were unsure, and resources were never forthcoming, and despite a view that “bacteria are the same everywhere”, Dutch leprosy treatment in the East Indies mobilized traditional healing practices and relied on home care. Leo van Bergen’s detailed, attentive study to changing policies for treatment and prevention of leprosy (now often called Hansen’s disease) is fascinating medical history, and provides a useful lens for understanding colonialism in Indonesia.
£999.99
Hong Kong University Press The British Presence in Macau, 1635–1793
Book Synopsis
£999.99
NUS Press The Memoirs and Memorials of Jacques de
Book SynopsisJacques de Coutre was a Flemish gem trader who spent nearly a decade in Southeast Asia at the turn of the 17th century. He left history a substantial autobiography written in Spanish and preserved in the National Library of Spain in Madrid. Written in the form of a picaresque tale, with an acute eye for the cultures he encountered, the memoirs tell the story of his adventures in the trading centres of the day: Melaka, Ayutthaya, Patani, Pahang, Johor, Brunei and Manila. Narrowly escaping death several times, De Coutre was inevitably drawn into dangerous intrigues between the representatives of European power, myriad fortune hunters and schemers, and the rulers and courtiers in the palaces of Pahang, Patani, Siam and Johor.In addition to his autobiography, De Coutre wrote a series of memorials to the united crown of Spain and Portugal that contain recommendations designed to remedy the decline in the fortunes of the Iberian powers in Southeast Asia, particularly against the backdrop of early Dutch political and commercial penetration into the region.Annotated and translated into English for the first time, these materials provide a valuable first-hand account of the issues confronting the early colonial powers in Southeast Asia, and deep into the societies De Coutre encountered in the territory that today makes up Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Cambodia and the Philippines. The book is lavishly illustrated with 62 maps and drawings of the period, including many examples not previously published.
£999.99
NUS Press State and Finance in the Philippines, 1898-1941:
Book SynopsisDuring the First World War, ill-advised steps by colonial officials in the Philippines who were responsible for the colony's finances created a crisis which lasted from 1919 until 1922. The circumstances shook the foundations of the American colonial state and contributed to Manuel L. Quezon's successful effort to replace Sergio Osmea as leader of the politically dominant Nacionalista Party. These events have generally been blamed on a corruption scandal at the Philippine National Bank, which had been established in 1916 as a multi-purpose, semi-governmental agency whose purpose was to provide loans for the agricultural export industry, to do business as a commercial bank, to issue bank notes, and to serve as a depository for government funds.Based on detailed archival research, Yoshiko Nagano argues that the crisis in fact resulted from mismanagement of currency reserves and irregularities in foreign exchange operations by American officials, and that the notions of a ""corruption scandal"" arose from a colonial discourse that masked problems within the banking and currency systems and the U.S. colonial administration. Her analysis of this episode provides a fresh perspective on the political economy of the Philippines under American rule, and suggests a need for further scrutiny of historical accounts written on the basis of reports by colonial officials.
£999.99