Empire, Power and Indigenous Elites

Empire, Power and Indigenous Elites
Author: Anne Fitzpatrick-McKinley
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 339
Release: 2015-03-10
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9004292225

Ancient Near Eastern empires, including Assyria, Babylon and Persia, frequently permitted local rulers to remain in power. The roles of the indigenous elites reflected in the Nehemiah Memoir can be compared to those encountered elsewhere. Nehemiah was an imperial appointee, likely of a military/administrative background, whose mission was to establish a birta in Jerusalem, thereby limiting the power of local elites. As a loyal servant of Persia, Nehemiah brought to his mission a certain amount of ethnic/cultic colouring seen in certain aspects of his activities in Jerusalem, in particular in his use of Mosaic authority (but not of specific Mosaic laws). Nehemiah appealed to ancient Jerusalemite traditions in order to eliminate opposition to him from powerful local elite networks.

A Troubled Marriage

A Troubled Marriage
Author: Sean Francis McEnroe
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2020
Genre: America
ISBN: 0826361196

A Troubled Marriage describes the lives of native leaders whose resilience and creativity allowed them to survive and prosper in the traumatic era of European conquest and colonial rule. They served as soldiers, scholars, artists, artisans, and missionaries within early transatlantic empires and later nation-states. These Indian and mestizo men and women wove together cultures, shaping the new traditions and institutions of the colonial Americas. In a comparative study that spans more than three centuries and much of the Western Hemisphere, McEnroe challenges common assumptions about the relationships among victors, vanquished, and their shared progeny.

Indigenous Elites and Creole Identity in Colonial Mexico, 1500–1800

Indigenous Elites and Creole Identity in Colonial Mexico, 1500–1800
Author: Peter B. Villella
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2016-01-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 1316679446

Modern Mexico derives many of its richest symbols of national heritage and identity from the Aztec legacy, even as it remains a predominantly Spanish-speaking, Christian society. This volume argues that the composite, neo-Aztec flavor of Mexican identity was, in part, a consequence of active efforts by indigenous elites after the Spanish conquest to grandfather ancestral rights into the colonial era. By emphasizing the antiquity of their claims before Spanish officials, native leaders extended the historical awareness of the colonial regime into the pre-Hispanic past, and therefore also the themes, emotional contours, and beginning points of what we today understand as 'Mexican history'. This emphasis on ancient roots, moreover, resonated with the patriotic longings of many creoles, descendants of Spaniards born in Mexico. Alienated by Spanish scorn, creoles associated with indigenous elites and studied their histories, thereby reinventing themselves as Mexico's new 'native' leadership and the heirs to its prestigious antiquity.

A Velvet Empire

A Velvet Empire
Author: David Todd
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2023-09-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691205337

How France's elites used soft power to pursue their imperial ambitions in the nineteenth century After Napoleon's downfall in 1815, France embraced a mostly informal style of empire, one that emphasized economic and cultural influence rather than military conquest. A Velvet Empire is a global history of French imperialism in the nineteenth century, providing new insights into the mechanisms of imperial collaboration that extended France's power from the Middle East to Latin America and ushered in the modern age of globalization. David Todd shows how French elites pursued a cunning strategy of imperial expansion in which conspicuous commodities such as champagne and silk textiles, together with loans to client states, contributed to a global campaign of seduction. French imperialism was no less brutal than that of the British. But while Britain widened its imperial reach through settler colonialism and the acquisition of far-flung territories, France built a "velvet" empire backed by frequent military interventions and a broadening extraterritorial jurisdiction. Todd demonstrates how France drew vast benefits from these asymmetric, imperial-like relations until a succession of setbacks around the world brought about their unravelling in the 1870s. A Velvet Empire sheds light on France's neglected contribution to the conservative reinvention of modernity and offers a new interpretation of the resurgence of French colonialism on a global scale after 1880. This panoramic book also highlights the crucial role of collaboration among European empires during this period—including archrivals Britain and France—and cooperation with indigenous elites in facilitating imperial expansion and the globalization of capitalism.

Indigenous Intellectuals

Indigenous Intellectuals
Author: Gabriela Ramos
Publisher: Duke University Press Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014-04-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780822356608

Via military conquest, Catholic evangelization, and intercultural engagement and struggle, a vast array of knowledge circulated through the Spanish viceroyalties in Mexico and the Andes. This collection highlights the critical role that indigenous intellectuals played in this cultural ferment. Scholars of history, anthropology, literature, and art history reveal new facets of the colonial experience by emphasizing the wide range of indigenous individuals who used knowledge to subvert, undermine, critique, and sometimes enhance colonial power. Seeking to understand the political, social, and cultural impact of indigenous intellectuals, the contributors examine both ideological and practical forms of knowledge. Their understanding of "intellectual" encompasses the creators of written texts and visual representations, functionaries and bureaucrats who interacted with colonial agents and institutions, and organic intellectuals. Contributors. Elizabeth Hill Boone, Kathryn Burns, John Charles, Alan Durston, María Elena Martínez, Tristan Platt, Gabriela Ramos, Susan Schroeder, John F. Schwaller, Camilla Townsend, Eleanor Wake, Yanna Yannakakis

Empires in World History

Empires in World History
Author: Jane Burbank
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 528
Release: 2011-07-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691152365

Burbank and Cooper examine Rome and China from the third century BCE, empires that sustained state power for centuries.

American Empire and the Politics of Meaning

American Empire and the Politics of Meaning
Author: Julian Go
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 392
Release: 2008-03-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822389320

When the United States took control of the Philippines and Puerto Rico in the wake of the Spanish-American War, it declared that it would transform its new colonies through lessons in self-government and the ways of American-style democracy. In both territories, U.S. colonial officials built extensive public school systems, and they set up American-style elections and governmental institutions. The officials aimed their lessons in democratic government at the political elite: the relatively small class of the wealthy, educated, and politically powerful within each colony. While they retained ultimate control for themselves, the Americans let the elite vote, hold local office, and formulate legislation in national assemblies. American Empire and the Politics of Meaning is an examination of how these efforts to provide the elite of Puerto Rico and the Philippines a practical education in self-government played out on the ground in the early years of American colonial rule, from 1898 until 1912. It is the first systematic comparative analysis of these early exercises in American imperial power. The sociologist Julian Go unravels how American authorities used “culture” as both a tool and a target of rule, and how the Puerto Rican and Philippine elite received, creatively engaged, and sometimes silently subverted the Americans’ ostensibly benign intentions. Rather than finding that the attempt to transplant American-style democracy led to incommensurable “culture clashes,” Go assesses complex processes of cultural accommodation and transformation. By combining rich historical detail with broader theories of meaning, culture, and colonialism, he provides an innovative study of the hidden intersections of political power and cultural meaning-making in America’s earliest overseas empire.

Empires and Indigenous Peoples

Empires and Indigenous Peoples
Author: Michael Maas
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 419
Release: 2024-09-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 080619510X

The Romans who established their rule on three continents and the Europeans who first established new homes in North America interacted with communities of Indigenous peoples with their own histories and cultures. Sweeping in its scope and rigorous in its scholarship, Empires and Indigenous Peoples expands our understanding of their historical parallels and raises general questions about the nature of the various imperial encounters. In this book, leading scholars of ancient Roman and early anglophone North America examine the mutual perceptions of the Indigenous and the imperial actors. They investigate the rhetoric of civilization and barbarism and its expression in military policies. Indigenous resistance, survival, and adaptation form a major theme. The essays demonstrate that power relations were endlessly adjusted, identities were framed and reframed, and new mutual knowledge was produced by all participants. Over time, cultures were transformed across the board on political, social, religious, linguistic, ideological, and economic levels. The developments were complex, with numerous groups enmeshed in webs of aggression, opposition, cooperation, and integration. Readers will see how Indigenous and imperial identities evolved in Roman and American lands. Finally, the authors consider how American views of Roman activity influenced the development of American imperial expansion and accompanying Indigenous critiques. They show how Roman, imperial North American, and Indigenous experiences have contributed to American notions of race, religion, and citizenship, and given shape to problems of social inclusion and exclusion today.

Empire And Others

Empire And Others
Author: Professor M Daunton
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 653
Release: 2020-09-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000144542

Much has been written about the forging of a British identity in the 17th and 18th centuries, from the multiple kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland. But the process also ran across the Irish sea and was played out in North America and the Caribbean. In the process, the indigenous peoples of North America, the Caribbean, the Cape, Australia and New Zealand were forced to redefine their identities. This text integrates the history of these areas with British and imperial history. With contributions from both sides of the Atlantic, each chapter deals with a different aspect of British encounters with indigenous peoples in Colonial America and includes, for example, sections on "Native Americans and Early Modern Concepts of Race" and "Hunting and the Politics of Masculinity in Cherokee treaty-making, 1763-1775". This book should be of particular interest to postgraduate students of Colonial American history and early modern British history.

Empire of Nations

Empire of Nations
Author: Francine Hirsch
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 389
Release: 2014-10-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 0801455944

When the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, they set themselves the task of building socialism in the vast landscape of the former Russian Empire, a territory populated by hundreds of different peoples belonging to a multitude of linguistic, religious, and ethnic groups. Before 1917, the Bolsheviks had called for the national self-determination of all peoples and had condemned all forms of colonization as exploitative. After attaining power, however, they began to express concern that it would not be possible for Soviet Russia to survive without the cotton of Turkestan and the oil of the Caucasus. In an effort to reconcile their anti-imperialist position with their desire to hold on to as much territory as possible, the Bolsheviks integrated the national idea into the administrative-territorial structure of the new Soviet state. In Empire of Nations, Francine Hirsch examines the ways in which former imperial ethnographers and local elites provided the Bolsheviks with ethnographic knowledge that shaped the very formation of the new Soviet Union. The ethnographers—who drew inspiration from the Western European colonial context—produced all-union censuses, assisted government commissions charged with delimiting the USSR's internal borders, led expeditions to study "the human being as a productive force," and created ethnographic exhibits about the "Peoples of the USSR." In the 1930s, they would lead the Soviet campaign against Nazi race theories . Hirsch illuminates the pervasive tension between the colonial-economic and ethnographic definitions of Soviet territory; this tension informed Soviet social, economic, and administrative structures. A major contribution to the history of Russia and the Soviet Union, Empire of Nations also offers new insights into the connection between ethnography and empire.