Showing titles in Colonialism & Post-Colonialism

When Thomas Roe arrived in India in 1616 as James I’s first ambassador to the Mughal Empire, the English barely had a toehold in the subcontinent. Their understanding of South Asian trade and India was sketchy at best, and, to the Mughals, they were minor players on a very large stage. Roe was representing a kingdom that was beset by financial woes and deeply conflicted about its identity as a unified ‘Great Britain’ under the Stuart monarchy.

In 2016, while working as a journalist in Yangon, Clare Hammond discovered an obscure map that showed a web of new railways spanning the length and breadth of the country - railways not shown on any other publicly available maps. She was determined to uncover the railways' origins, purpose, and most of all, the silence that surrounded them. She would spend three months travelling on these mysterious railways, and the next five years piecing their story together.

The Haitian Revolution began in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue with a slave revolt in August 1791 and culminated a dozen years later in the proclamation of the world's first independent Black state. After the abolition of slavery in 1793, Toussaint Louverture, himself a former slave, became the leader of the colony's Black population, the commander of its republican army and eventually its governor. Treacherously seized by Napoleon's invading army in 1802, he ended his days, in Wordsworth's phrase, 'the most unhappy man of men', imprisoned in a fortress in France.

In the 1960s, its colonial instinct ignited once more: a secret decision was taken to offer the US a base at Diego Garcia, one of the islands of the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean, create a new colony (the 'British Indian Ocean Territory') and deport the entire local population. One of those inhabitants was Liseby Elysé, 20 years old, newly married, expecting her first child. One suitcase, no pets, the British ordered, expelling her from the only home she had ever known.

For generations, the history of the British Empire was written by its victors. British historians' accounts of conquest guided the consolidation of imperial rule in India, the Middle East, Africa and the Caribbean. Their narratives of the development of imperial governance licensed the brutal suppression of colonial rebellion. Their reimagining of empire during the two World Wars compromised the force of decolonisation. In this brilliant work, Priya Satia shows how these historians not only interpreted the major political events of their time but also shaped the future that followed.

This book is not easy: It contains no quick-fix plan for a better, brighter tomorrow, and gives no ready-made answers. Instead, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira presents us with a challenge: to grow up, step up, and show up for ourselves, our communities, and the living Earth, and to interrupt the modern behavior patterns that are killing the planet we’re part of.

What if the British Museum isn't a house of learning, but a vast sinkhole of still-bubbling historic injustice? What if it presents us not with a carefully ordered cross section of history but is instead a palatial trophy cabinet of colonial loot swarming with volatile and errant spirits? When artist and writer Noah Angell first heard murmurs of ghostly sightings at the British Museum he had to find out more. What started as a trickle soon became a landslide as staff old and new brought forth testimonies of their inexplicable supernatural encounters.

As the daughter of a white Welsh-speaking mother and black father from Guyana, Charlotte Williams's childhood world was one of mixed messages dominated by the feeling that 'somehow to be half-Welsh and half Afro-Caribbean was to be half of something but never quite anything whole at all.' Sugar and Slate tells the fascinating story of her journey of self-discovery, from the small north Wales town of her birth to Africa, the Caribbean and back to Wales.

Rebels Against the Raj tells the little-known story of seven people who chose to struggle for a country other than their own: foreigners to India who across the late 19th to late 20th century arrived to join the freedom movement fighting for independence. Of the seven, four were British, two American and one Irish. Four men, three women. Before and after being jailed or deported they did remarkable and pioneering work in a variety of fields: journalism, social reform, education, organic agriculture, environmentalism.

This is the story of the "Benin Bronzes", their creation, theft, and what should happen to them now. When first exhibited in London, they caused a sensation and helped reshape European attitudes towards Africa, challenging the prevailing view of the continent as "backward" and without culture. But seeing them in the British Museum today is, in the words of one Benin City artist, like "visiting relatives behind bars". In a time of fevered debate about the legacies of empire, loot, museums, and history, what does the future hold for the Bronzes themselves?

Recognized as one of the great poets of modern times, and as a deeply respected and influential political and cultural activist and social critic, Linton Kwesi Johnson is also a prolific writer of non-fiction. Here, he selects some of his most powerful prose for the first time. Written over many decades, it is a body of work that draws creatively and critically on Johnson’s own Jamaican roots and on Caribbean history to explore the politics of race and ethnicity that continue to inform the Black British experience.

Rise and Fall opens with the Akkadian Empire, which ruled over a vast expanse of the region of ancient Mesopotamia, then turns to the immense Roman Empire, where we trace back our Western and Eastern roots. Next Strathern describes how a great deal of Western classical culture was developed in the Abbasid and Umayyid Caliphates. Then, while Europe was beginning to emerge from a period of cultural stagnation, it almost fell to a whirlwind invasion from the East, at which point we meet the Emperors of the Mongol Empire....

Lewis Gordon, one of the leading scholars of Black existentialism, has spent decades nurturing intellectual reflection as a vital component of ongoing activism for racial justice around the world. In this boldly original book, he delves into history, art, politics and popular culture to show how the process of racialization - and its absence - affects not only how individuals and society perceive Black people but also how Black people perceive themselves.

Colombia's recent past has been characterized by what its Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez once called "a biblical holocaust" of human savagery. Along with the scourge of drug-related massacres facing the country, politically-motivated assassinations (averaging 30 per day in the 1990s), widespread disappearances, rapes, and kidnappings have run rampant through the country for decades.

This Very Short Introduction looks at Pakistan as one of the two nation-states of the Indian subcontinent that emerged in 1947. Pippa Virdee reaches into the ancient past to demonstrate the influence of trajectories of human settlement and civilization on Pakistan's contemporary political arena, and shows how the longer continuities between the land and its peoples are as important as the short-term changes in the political landscape. She considers Pakistan's religion and society, the state and the military, everyday life, popular culture, languages and literature.

Johannesburg, Easter weekend, 1993. Nelson Mandela has been free for three years and is in slow-moving power-sharing talks with President FW de Klerk when a white supremacist shoots Mandela’s popular young heir apparent, Chris Hani, in the hope of igniting an all-out civil war. Will he succeed in plunging South Africa into chaos, safeguarding apartheid for perhaps years to come? Or can Mandela and de Klerk overcome their differences and mutual suspicion and calm their followers, plotting a way forward?

Shunned by society, and sometimes in mortal danger, many coolie women were either runaways, widows, or outcasts. Many of them left husbands and families behind to migrate alone in epic sea voyages-traumatic "middle passages"—only to face a life of hard labor, dismal living conditions, and sexual exploitation. Coolie Woman is a meditation on survival, a gripping story of a double diaspora—from India to the West Indies in one century, Guyana to the United States in the next-that is at once a search for one's roots and an exploration of gender and power, peril and opportunity.

Migration, terrorism, the tensions between global capitalism and nationalism, the promise and peril of a technological and communications revolution: these forces shaped the life and work of Joseph Conrad at the dawn of the 20th century. In this brilliant new interpretation of one of the great voices in modern literature, Maya Jasanoff reveals Conrad as a prophet of globalization as we recognize it today.

In this book, we explore British Colonialism in India, a history of oppression and exploitation, whilst celebrating the contributions that the diaspora and its descendants have made to British society. We explore the origins of the British East India Company, navigating through the dark history of a struggle for independence. On the way we meet Mahatma Gandhi, and recognize his significance in the fight for independence, before we discuss the partition of India and creation of Pakistan. We conclude with Indian emigration to the UK, and the history of the modern-day British Indian.

In March 1906, American soldiers on the island of Jolo in the southern Philippines surrounded and killed 1000 local men, women, and children, known as Moros, on top of an extinct volcano. The so-called ‘Battle of Bud Dajo’ was hailed as a triumph over an implacable band of dangerous savages, a “brilliant feat of arms” according to President Theodore Roosevelt. Some contemporaries, including W.E.B. Du Bois and Mark Twain, saw the massacre for what it was, but they were the exception and the U.S. military authorities successfully managed to bury the story.