European Trade and Colonial Conquest

European Trade and Colonial Conquest
Author: Biplab Dasgupta
Publisher: Anthem Press
Total Pages: 408
Release: 2005
Genre: Bengal (India)
ISBN: 1843310287

This first of three volumes focuses on the evolution of Bengal's economy and society over the entire pre-colonial period beginning from pre-historic days. There is no documented, authentic history of Bengal. Indeed, more of the early history of India can be learned from the writings of other nationals. Yet even this material is very much related to chronologies of regimes and local to urban settlements and centres of trade. There remains little or no information on the villages where the vast majority lived and still live. Furthermore, until this work, little or no consideration has been given to the hugely influential period between Vasco de Gama's journey to India in 1498 and the battle of Palashi in 1757, a period in which the Mughal Empire held political power while the English, Dutch, French and Danes and other European nations grasped and held on to economic power. Much has been written on the Mughal Empire, but little of the role of the European trading companies in the two and a half centuries preceding Clive's victory. This book addresses that void and seeks also to explore the political, social and historical context in Bengal that facilitated the transfer of power into European hands. Given such a lack of source information, the author examines oral history, carried from generation to generation, recognizing their fallibility, but using those histories to corroborate what is known from other sources - from archaeological findings (coins, inscriptions, copper plates) through (invariably biased or localized) accounts from travellers, to economic, agricultural and ecological factors - relating them to known chronological events to provide a well-rounded history and, indeed, a study that uncovers the roots of the many issues in the colonial and post-colonial eras.

The Great Agrarian Conquest

The Great Agrarian Conquest
Author: Neeladri Bhattacharya
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 544
Release: 2019-09-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1438477414

This book examines how, over colonial times, the diverse practices and customs of an existing rural universe—with its many forms of livelihood—were reshaped to create a new agrarian world of settled farming. While focusing on Punjab, India, this pathbreaking analysis offers a broad argument about the workings of colonial power: the fantasy of imperialism, it says, is to make the universe afresh. Such radical change, Neeladri Bhattacharya shows, is as much conceptual as material. Agrarian colonization was a process of creating spaces that conformed to the demands of colonial rule. It entailed establishing a regime of categories—tenancies, tenures, properties, habitations—and a framework of laws that made the change possible. Agrarian colonization was in this sense a deep conquest. Colonialism, the book suggests, has the power to revisualize and reorder social relations and bonds of community. It alters the world radically, even when it seeks to preserve elements of the old. The changes it brings about are simultaneously cultural, discursive, legal, linguistic, spatial, social, and economic. Moving from intent to action, concepts to practices, legal enactments to court battles, official discourses to folklore, this book explores the conflicted and dialogic nature of a transformative process. By analyzing this great conquest, and the often silent ways in which it unfolds, the book asks every historian to rethink the practice of writing agrarian history and reflect on the larger issues of doing history.

A Concise History of South Africa

A Concise History of South Africa
Author: Robert Ross
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 242
Release: 1999-05-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521575782

This book provides a succinct synthesis of South African history from the introduction of agriculture about 1500 years ago up to and including the government of Nelson Mandela. Stressing economic, social, cultural and environmental matters as well as political history, it shows how South Africa has become a single country. On the one hand it lays emphasis on the country's African heritage, and shows how this continues to influence social structures, ways of thought and ideas of governance. On the other, it chronicles the processes of colonial conquest and of economic development and unification stemming from the industrial revolution which began at the end of the nineteenth century. This leads on to a description and analysis of the fundamental political changes which South Africa is currently undergoing, while providing a background for the understanding of those many things which have not changed.

The Conquest of History

The Conquest of History
Author: Christopher Schmidt-Nowara
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2006-11-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822971097

As Spain rebuilt its colonial regime in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines after the Spanish American revolutions, it turned to history to justify continued dominance. The metropolitan vision of history, however, always met with opposition in the colonies.The Conquest of History examines how historians, officials, and civic groups in Spain and its colonies forged national histories out of the ruins and relics of the imperial past. By exploring controversies over the veracity of the Black Legend, the location of Christopher Columbus's mortal remains, and the survival of indigenous cultures, Christopher Schmidt-Nowara's richly documented study shows how history became implicated in the struggles over empire. It also considers how these approaches to the past, whether intended to defend or to criticize colonial rule, called into being new postcolonial histories of empire and of nations.

Contact, Conquest and Colonization

Contact, Conquest and Colonization
Author: Eleonora Rohland
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2021-06-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000395391

Contact, Conquest and Colonization brings together international historians and literary studies scholars in order to explore the force of practices of comparing in shaping empires and colonial relations at different points in time and around the globe. Whenever there was cultural contact in the context of European colonization and empire-building, historical records teem with comparisons among those cultures. This edited volume focuses on what historical agents actually do when they compare, rather than on comparison as an analytic method. Its contributors are thus interested in the ‘doing of comparison’, and explore the force of these practices of comparing in shaping empires and (post-)colonial relations between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. This book will appeal to students and scholars of global history, as well as those interested in cultural history and the history of colonialism.

Colonial Fantasies

Colonial Fantasies
Author: Susanne Zantop
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 306
Release: 1997-09-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822382113

Since Germany became a colonial power relatively late, postcolonial theorists and histories of colonialism have thus far paid little attention to it. Uncovering Germany’s colonial legacy and imagination, Susanne Zantop reveals the significance of colonial fantasies—a kind of colonialism without colonies—in the formation of German national identity. Through readings of historical, anthropological, literary, and popular texts, Zantop explores imaginary colonial encounters of "Germans" with "natives" in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century literature, and shows how these colonial fantasies acted as a rehearsal for actual colonial ventures in Africa, South America, and the Pacific. From as early as the sixteenth century, Germans preoccupied themselves with an imaginary drive for colonial conquest and possession that eventually grew into a collective obsession. Zantop illustrates the gendered character of Germany’s colonial imagination through critical readings of popular novels, plays, and travel literature that imagine sexual conquest and surrender in colonial territory—or love and blissful domestic relations between colonizer and colonized. She looks at scientific articles, philosophical essays, and political pamphlets that helped create a racist colonial discourse and demonstrates that from its earliest manifestations, the German colonial imagination contained ideas about a specifically German national identity, different from, if not superior to, most others.

Empire, Colony, Genocide

Empire, Colony, Genocide
Author: A. Dirk Moses
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 502
Release: 2008-06-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1782382143

In 1944, Raphael Lemkin coined the term “genocide” to describe a foreign occupation that destroyed or permanently crippled a subject population. In this tradition, Empire, Colony, Genocide embeds genocide in the epochal geopolitical transformations of the past 500 years: the European colonization of the globe, the rise and fall of the continental land empires, violent decolonization, and the formation of nation states. It thereby challenges the customary focus on twentieth-century mass crimes and shows that genocide and “ethnic cleansing” have been intrinsic to imperial expansion. The complexity of the colonial encounter is reflected in the contrast between the insurgent identities and genocidal strategies that subaltern peoples sometimes developed to expel the occupiers, and those local elites and creole groups that the occupiers sought to co-opt. Presenting case studies on the Americas, Australia, Africa, Asia, the Ottoman Empire, Imperial Russia, and the Nazi “Third Reich,” leading authorities examine the colonial dimension of the genocide concept as well as the imperial systems and discourses that enabled conquest. Empire, Colony, Genocide is a world history of genocide that highlights what Lemkin called “the role of the human group and its tribulations.”

African Perspectives on Colonialism

African Perspectives on Colonialism
Author: A. Adu Boahen
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 174
Release: 2020-10-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1421441217

This history deals with the twenty-year period between 1880 and 1900, when virtually all of Africa was seized and occupied by the Imperial Powers of Europe. Eurocentric points of view have dominated the study of this era, but in this book, one of Africa's leading historians reinterprets the colonial experiences from the perspective of the colonized. The Johns Hopkins Symposia in Comparative History are occasional volumes sponsored by the Department of History at the Johns Hopkins University and the Johns Hopkins University Press comprising original essays by leading scholars in the United States and other countries. Each volume considers, from a comparative perspective, an important topic of current historical interest. The present volume is the fifteenth. Its preparation has been assisted by the James S. Schouler Lecture Fund.

Memories of Conquest

Memories of Conquest
Author: Laura E. Matthew
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2012
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807835374

Indigenous allies helped the Spanish gain a foothold in the Americas. What did these Indian conquistadors expect from the partnership, and what were the implications of their involvement in Spain's New World empire? Laura Matthew's study of Ciudad Vieja,

Lawful Conquest?

Lawful Conquest?
Author: Constanze Weiske
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2021-10-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 3110690225

The global expansion of European colonization is commonly perceived as lawful according to the valid European colonial law of the time. This book is substantially challenging this belief by uncovering its legal justifications based on discovery and terra nullius as retrospectively created legal fictions and demonstrating it ́s untenability in practice. Focused on the critical reconstruction of Spanish and Dutch colonization practices in northeastern South America, Trinidad and Tobago between 1498 and 1817, the book offers an illuminating view on the European shadow of the colonial past in the Americas. Based on the application of an innovative comparative spatio-legal Global History approach to 1,770 excavated European colonial written sources from archives of both sides of the Atlantic in comparison to the colonial legal provisions of Europe ́s most influential legal writers, the book, moreover, provides a substantial argument to the contemporary Caribbean-European reparation debate in favor of the return of Indigenous Peoples ́ historical territories. Therefore, the book calls for the extension of the traditional territory approach to reparations of the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIPs) and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR).