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Dutch colonial presentations at the world exhibitions in the period 1880-1931 served to legitimize the Dutch imperialist project and highlight the problem of Dutch identity and the Netherlands' place in the world. At these exhibitions, the Netherlands showed off its colonies by erecting models of schools, sugar-factories, bridges, and railways exhibits, which were meant to give proof of the good works of modern colonial administration and enterprise. Not only were there displays of ethnographic objects, life-size temples and villages inhabited by authentic Javanese and Sumatrans were brought to Europe specifically for these expositions. Their presence took the viewer into an "Other" world that provided an "immediacy" for visitors to the exhibition. While these colonial spectacles helped legitimize Dutch imperialism project, they also provided lenses for understanding the colonial world as it was constructed according to the prevailing evolutionist worldview at the time.
Opium smoking was a widespread social custom in nineteenth-century Java, and commercial trade in opium had far-reaching economic and political implications. As in many of the Dutch territories in the Indonesian archipelago, the drug was imported from elsewhere and sold throughout the island under a government monopoly - a system of revenue "farms". These monopoly franchises were regulated by the government and operated by members of Java's Chinese elite, who were frequently also local officials appointed by the Dutch. The farms thus helped support large Chinese patronage networks that vied for control of rural markets throughout Java. James Rush explains the workings of the opium farm system...
Christian-Muslim Relations, a Bibliographical History 18 (CMR 18), covering the Ottoman Empire in the period 1800-1914, is a further volume in a general history of relations between the two faiths from the 7th century to the early 20th century. It comprises a series of introductory essays and the main body of detailed entries. These treat all the works, surviving or lost, that have been recorded. They provide biographical details of the authors, descriptions and assessments of the works themselves, and complete accounts of manuscripts, editions, translations and studies. The result of collaboration between numerous new and leading scholars, CMR 18, along with the other volumes in this series...
List of members in each volume.
In this fascinating study, Carol Hakim presents a new and original narrative on the origins of the Lebanese national idea. Hakim’s study reconsiders conventional accounts that locate the origins of Lebanese nationalism in a distant legendary past and then trace its evolution in a linear and gradual manner. She argues that while some of the ideas and historical myths at the core of Lebanese nationalism appeared by the mid-nineteenth century, a coherent popular nationalist ideology and movement emerged only with the establishment of the Lebanese state in 1920. Hakim reconstructs the complex process that led to the appearance of fluid national ideals among members of the clerical and secular Lebanese elite, and follows the fluctuations and variations of these ideals up until the establishment of a Lebanese state. The book is an essential read for anyone interested in the evolution of nationalism in the Middle East and beyond.
The League of Nations Advisory Committee on the Traffic in Opium and Other Dangerous Drugs, created in 1920, culminated almost eight decades of political turmoil over opium trafficking, which was by far the largest state-backed drug trade in the age of empire. Opponents of opium had long struggled to rein in the profitable drug. Opium’s Long Shadow shows how diverse local protests crossed imperial, national, and colonial boundaries to gain traction globally and harness public opinion as a moral deterrent in international politics after World War I. Steffen Rimner traces the far-flung itineraries and trenchant arguments of reformers—significantly, feminists and journalists—who viewed op...
A complex examination of "criminality" and "the criminal" as constructs and active presences in Southeast Asia. Contributors explore such themes as surveillance, incarceration, law and custom, secrecy, and corruption. A fascinating study of power and subversion in the modern postcolonial nation-state. Contributors include Daniel S. Lev, Henk M. J. Maier, Rudolf Mrazek, James T. Siegel, and others.
European colonial expansion led to Dutch notions of civilised society, or the Dutch's community's flexible and relatively charitable attitudes toward 'others', being scattered (as in the Greek word 'diaspeirein') to the four corners of the earth. In some cases, the exportation of Dutch cultural values to places overseas, like North America, endowed 'Dutchness' with subtle new meanings. But in colonial Indonesia, Dutch political customs and traditions were transformed in the process of migrating to exotic locales. In this book, Frances Gouda examines the ways in which the Netherlands portrayed its unique colonial style to the outside world. Why were citizens of a small and politically insigni...
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