An Archive of “Political Trouble in India”

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Durba Ghosh
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Constitutional Reform ◽  
British Colonialism ◽  
History Writing ◽  
British Rule ◽  
Revolutionary Politics

At the turn of the twentieth century, a campaign of terrorism emerged across India to overthrow British rule. This revolutionary terrorist movement was propelled by three modern practices—terrorism, the establishment of intelligence organizations, and history-writing—as they produced an archive of “political trouble in India.” While historical reports produced by British intelligence officials legitimized the growth of emergency legislation, histories produced by the revolutionary terrorists undermined the liberal imaginary and chronology of British colonialism, arguing that India would gain its independence through radical and revolutionary politics rather than nonviolent protest and constitutional reform. In the postcolonial period, this archive of political trouble has been reprinted, revived, and transformed from a set of documents about colonial counterinsurgency into an archive about an anticolonial movement that was based on political violence and revolutionary terrorism.

Islam and Colonial Rule in Lagos

1995 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-80
Author(s):  
Olakunle A. Lawal
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Muslim Community ◽  
Tropical Africa ◽  
Southwestern Nigeria ◽  
Urban Settlement ◽  
Islam And Politics ◽  
British Rule ◽  
History Of ◽  
Process Of Urbanization

IntroductionThis essay provides an explanation of the dynamics of the interactionbetween Islam and politics by placing emphasis on the role played byMuslims in the collision of traditionalism and British rule as colonialismtook root in Lagos. The focus is on the development of a political schismwithin the nascent Muslim community of metropolitan Lagos at the startof the twentieth century up until the end of the 1940s. It highlights therole of Islam in an emerging urban settlement experiencing rapid transformationfrom a purely rural and traditional center into a colonial urbancenter. The essay is located within the broader issues of urban change andtransition in twentieth-century tropical Africa. Three major developments(viz: the central mosque crisis, the Eleko affair, and the Oluwa land case)are used as the vehicles through which the objectives of the essay areachieved.The introduction of Islam into Lagos has been studied by T. G. O.Gbadamosi as part of the history of Islam in southwestern Nigeria. Thisepic study does not pay specific attention to Lagos, devoted as it is to thegrowth of Islam in a far-flung territory like the whole of modem southwesternNigeria. His contribution to a collection of essays on the historyof Lagos curiously leaves out Islam’s phenomenal impact on Lagosianpolitics during the first half of the twentieth century. In an attempt to fillthis gap, Hakeem Danmole’s essay also stops short of appreciating the fundamentallink between the process of urbanization, symbolized in this caseby colonial rule, and the vanguard role played by Muslims in the inevitableclash of tradition and colonial rule in Lagos between 1900 and 1950.

scholarly journals Solidarity of the shaken: from the experience (Erlebnis) to history

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michaela Belejkaničová
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Critical Dialogue ◽  
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin ◽  
Ex Nihilo ◽  
Post War ◽  
Opening Up ◽  
Usual Pattern

AbstractIn his Heretical Essays, Jan Patočka introduces the concept of the solidarity of the shaken. He argues that it emerges in the conditions of political violence—the frontline experience (Fronterlebnis). Moreover, Patočka brings into discussion the puzzling concepts of day, night, metanoia and sacrifice, which only further problematise the idea. Researching how other thinkers have examined the phenomenon of the frontline experience, it becomes obvious that Patočka did not invent the obscure vocabulary ex nihilo. Concepts such as frontline experience, sacrifice and the metaphors of the day and night were commonly used by thinkers in the inter-war and post-war eras in their examination of community (Gemeinschaft). This study aims to reconstruct the idea of the solidarity of the shaken as contextualized within a broader scholarly debate on the concept of community (Gemeinschaft). Through the critical dialogue between Patočka’s works and the works of Ernst Jünger and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, this study will portray how Patočka, in his discourse on the frontline experience, follows the usual pattern of overcoming one’s individuality, transcending and opening up to the constitution of solidarity. This paper will argue that Patočka defined the solidarity of the shaken in an attempt to revive the positive aspects of a community and break with the regressive (if not sinister) uses to which it was put in the twentieth century.

Thai Buddhism, Thai Buddhists and the southern conflict

2009 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan McCargo
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Armed Groups ◽  
Local Identity ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
Security Forces ◽  
Southern Border ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Financial Arrangements

Thailand's ‘southern border provinces’ of Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat – along with four districts of neighbouring Songkhla – are the site of fiery political violence characterised by daily killings. The area was historically a Malay sultanate, and was only loosely under Thai suzerainty until the early twentieth century. During the twentieth century there was periodic resistance to Bangkok's attempts to suppress local identity and to incorporate this largely Malay-speaking, Muslim-majority area into a predominantly Buddhist nation-state. This resistance proved most intense during the 1960s and 1970s, when various armed groups (notably PULO [Patani United Liberation Organization] and BRN [Barisan Revolusi Nasional]) waged war on the Thai state, primarily targeting government officials and the security forces. In the early 1980s, the Prem Tinsulanond government brokered a deal with these armed groups and proceeded to co-opt the Malay-Muslim elite. By crafting mutually beneficial governance, security and financial arrangements, the Thai state was able largely to placate local political demands.

The Shaping of a Nation: Palestinians in the Last Century of Ottoman Rule

1994 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 75-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joel S. Migdal ◽  
Baruch Kimmerling
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Social Boundaries ◽  
The Political ◽  
World War ◽  
British Mandate ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
British Rule ◽  
Political Boundaries ◽  
History Of

No period was more decisive in the modern history of Palestine than the British Mandate, which lasted from the end of World War I until 1948. Not only did British rule establish the political boundaries of Palestine, the new realities forced both Jews and Arabs in the country to redefine their social boundaries and self-identity. But the cataclysmic events that continued through 1948, with the creation of Israel and what Arabs called al-Nakba (the catastrophe of dispersal and exile), took shape in the wake of key changes stretching over the last century of Ottoman rule. What was to be Palestine after World War I became increasingly more integrated territorially during the nineteenth century. And Arab society in the last century of Ottoman rule underwent critical changes that paved the way for the emergence of a Palestinian people in the twentieth century.

scholarly journals Zemskii Sobor: Historiographies and Mythologies of a Russian “Parliament”

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivan Sablin ◽  
Kuzma Kukushkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Russian Civil War ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Constituent Assembly ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Modern Russian

Focusing on the term zemskii sobor, this study explored the historiographies of the early modern Russian assemblies, which the term denoted, as well as the autocratic and democratic mythologies connected to it. Historians have discussed whether the individual assemblies in the sixteenth and seventeenth century could be seen as a consistent institution, what constituencies were represented there, what role they played in the relations of the Tsar with his subjects, and if they were similar to the early modern assemblies elsewhere. The growing historiographic consensus does not see the early modern Russian assemblies as an institution. In the nineteenth–early twentieth century, history writing and myth-making integrated the zemskii sobor into the argumentations of both the opponents and the proponents of parliamentarism in Russia. The autocratic mythology, perpetuated by the Slavophiles in the second half of the nineteenth century, proved more coherent yet did not achieve the recognition from the Tsars. The democratic mythology was more heterogeneous and, despite occasionally fading to the background of the debates, lasted for some hundred years between the 1820s and the 1920s. Initially, the autocratic approach to the zemskii sobor was idealistic, but it became more practical at the summit of its popularity during the Revolution of 1905–1907, when the zemskii sobor was discussed by the government as a way to avoid bigger concessions. Regionalist approaches to Russia’s past and future became formative for the democratic mythology of the zemskii sobor, which persisted as part of the romantic nationalist imagery well into the Russian Civil War of 1918–1922. The zemskii sobor came to represent a Russian constituent assembly, destined to mend the post-imperial crisis. The two mythologies converged in the Priamur Zemskii Sobor, which assembled in Vladivostok in 1922 and became the first assembly to include the term into its official name.

Muslim identity and separatism in India: the significance of M. A. Ansari

1991 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 104-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. G. Robb
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Muslim Identity ◽  
British Rule ◽  
Empirical Level ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This paper arises out of dissatisfaction with wholly instrumentalist explanations of Muslim separatism in India, views which have their critics but which generally prevail nowadays, reinforced by no less an influence than that of Michel Foucault. The problem is the fundamental one of what constitutes a group, and in particular of whether or not there can be objective harmonization, ‘orchestration sans chef d'orchestre qui confère regularité’, within any set of people. At an empirical level, in regard to Indian Muslims, the debate has three main elements: what was the nature of communalism, how far Muslim separatism was a process, and whether its development was a sufficient explanation for the partition of 1947. To the extent that Muslims became separatist, they obviously might have been diverted into other attitudes, and to that extent is it important to identify events which encouraged or errors which prevented that diversion.On this occasion the discussion will begin as a review of A nationalist conscience, Mushirul Hasan's study of M. A. Ansari, and then move on to some of the issues suggested by Ansari's life and Hasan's treatment of it. The book provides an important corrective, in its emphasis and viewpoint, to the tendency to attribute the partition in India to a consistent and inevitable conflict between increasingly irreconcilable forces. The study extends and rounds out earlier work; it brings to life the alternative symbolized by Ansari, and thus casts into relief the occasions when Hindu–Muslim agreement and a common front against the British seemed possible, as in 1919–22 and 1935. The book exhibits the familiarity and maturity of understanding resulting from such an intense and long-term project of research. It is a timely contribution too, as intercommunal tensions once again mount in South Asia, and voices are heard suggesting that the secular constitution of India is inappropriate to the essential character of its people. The book's implicit thesis is that separatism did indeed evolve, with clear stages from the late nineteenth to the mid twentieth century; that its opponents were unable to arrest its advance; and that Ansari is significant for exemplifying these two points. Hasan thus illustrates an alternative to communalism offered during the struggles against British rule; it was an alternative which failed. The question is whether or not it could have succeeded.

Constitutional History

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olof Petersson
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
General Pattern ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Constitutional Reform ◽  
The Other ◽  
Constitutional History ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Parliamentary Government ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Trade Offs

In one sense, Sweden follows the general pattern of constitution-making. The major shifts in the constitutional history have occurred in the aftermath of great crises. Constitutions have been important as descriptions and justifications of the prevailing forces of power. On the other hand, the constitutions of Sweden have been relatively insignificant as norms regulating political and public life. Constitutions have been important as history writing but relatively unimportant as normative principles shaping society, and, indeed, profound changes such as the introduction of parliamentary government have taken place without constitutional reform. The Swedish welfare state was built upon negotiations and practical trade-offs rather than constitutional arguments.

Another Colonial History: How Cosmopolitan Was Cavafy's Contemporary Alexandria?

boundary 2 ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 89-121
Author(s):  
Alexander Kazamias
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
British Colonialism ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
British Rule ◽  
Colonial Oppression ◽  
The Impact ◽  
New Evidence ◽  
Late Ottoman ◽  
Alternative Reading

This essay provides an alternative reading of modern Alexandria's social and cultural history as a basis for a better contextualization of Cavafy's poetry. It revisits the watershed year 1882, which marks the city's destruction after its bombardment by the British fleet, using new evidence from a little-known diary by the nineteen-year-old Cavafy. It then examines the overlooked context of Alexandria's late Ottoman cosmopolitanism and shows its decisive contribution to the city's modern culture, including Cavafy's own diasporic ethnic group, the Egyptian Greeks. Finally, the argument reassesses some prevalent misconceptions about the impact of British rule in Egypt, including the problematic view that it purportedly enhanced the city's cosmopolitan life. Instead, the article shows that British colonialism sought to constrain Alexandrian cosmopolitanism, whereas Cavafy, and a circle of radical intellectuals around him, actively defended it through nuanced expressions of opposition to the injustices of colonial oppression in Egypt, Cyprus, and Greece.

Cuban Revolutionary Politics in Diaspora

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dalia Antonia Muller
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
National Association ◽  
The Political ◽  
Independence Movement ◽  
Revolutionary Politics ◽  
Revolutionary Party ◽  
And Gender

This chapter tells the story of two key and connected institutions of the Cuban Independence movement outside of Cuba: the Cuban Revolutionary Party (PRC) and the National Association of Cuban Revolutionary Émigrés (ANERC). These institutions and their records have much to teach us about the political culture of Cubans in exile during the second half of the nineteenth century. More specifically, the chapter explores the tension between inclusion and exclusion that marked both institutions during the 1890s and the first few decades of the twentieth century, with a special emphasis on race, class and gender.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document