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Tropical Africa was one of the last regions of the world to experience formal European colonialism, a process that coincided with the advent of a range of new scientific specialties and research methods. This book studies the relationship between imperialism and the role of scientific expertise—environmental, medical, racial, and anthropological—in the colonization of British Africa. A key source for the author's analysis is the African Research Survey, a project undertaken in the 1930s to explore how modern science was being applied to African problems. This project both embraced and recommended an interdisciplinary approach to research on Africa that underscored the heterogeneity of African environments and the interrelations among the problems being studied. While the aim of British colonialists was to transform and modernize Africa, their efforts were often unexpectedly subverted by scientific concerns with the local and vernacular. The book examines imperial history, colonial development, and the role science played in both.

A commercial company established in 1600 to monopolize trade between England and the Far East, the East India Company grew to govern an Indian empire. Exploring the relationship between power and knowledge in European engagement with Asia, this book examines the Company at work and reveals how writing and print shaped authority on a global scale in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Tracing the history of the Company from its first tentative trading voyages in the early seventeenth century to the foundation of an empire in Bengal in the late eighteenth century, the book takes readers into the scriptoria, ships, offices, print shops, coffeehouses, and palaces to investigate the forms of writing needed to exert power and extract profit in the mercantile and imperial worlds. Interpreting the making and use of a variety of forms of writing in script and print, it argues that material and political circumstances always undermined attempts at domination through the power of the written word. Navigating the juncture of imperial history and the history of the book, this title uncovers the intellectual and political legacies of early modern trade and empire and charts a new understanding of the geography of print culture.

The book argues that Atlantic slavery – as a practice of subjugation, a source of wealth and a focus of political struggle – was entangled with the production, circulation and reception of geographical knowledge. On the one hand, the debate over slavery was informed by, and involved the deployment of, geographical discourses, practices and representational forms, including maps, surveys and regional comparisons. In addition, more abstract debates were staged about how it was possible to obtain knowledge about different Atlantic places and who was best placed to do so. On the other hand, Atlantic slavery shaped geographical inquiries into Africa. Involvement in Atlantic slavery shaped European knowledge about Africa, while plans and proposals for alternatives to slavery, such as legitimate commerce, free labour settlements and the suppression of the slave trade, created a need for new knowledge to be obtained through exploration and the collation of existing geographical sources. Particular ways of understanding Atlantic commerce, including that associated with slavery, also found expression in how geographical knowledge of Africa was produced and made credible. No figure better encapsulates the entangled nature of African geographical knowledge and Atlantic slavery in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century than geographer, plantation manager, Glasgow merchant and proslavery propagandist, James MacQueen (1778-1870). The book focuses on the West African facts and theories he promulgated, especially about the course and termination of the River Niger, and his proposals for increased British presence in Africa that were founded on these.

This book examines the rise and development of plantation societies in British America between 1650 and 1820. It explains the development of the large integrated plantation in Barbados in the mid seventeenth century and traces the spread of this institution to British North America and to the rest of the British Caribbean. This institution, based on the employment of African slaves in arduous gang labor, proved to be a highly successful means of creating wealth for planters, as well as for the imperial government in Britain. Yet it took a while for plantation societies to develop outside Barbados as it took special circumstances for ordinary white men to be prepared to use the violence that was necessary to control slaves. Jamaica is looked at in this work as a special case study of the development of plantations societies in the eighteenth century. The wealth of Jamaica was extraordinary, for both planters and merchants, allowing white men a degree of prosperity impossible in non-plantation societies. Its wealth explains, more than commitment to white supremacy, why white people embraced the plantation system. The major challenge to the plantation system in the eighteenth century was the American Revolution, a war that divided one half of plantation British America from the other half. The division of plantation America into the United States and the British West Indies strengthened the plantation system and slavery in the former but weakened it considerably in the latter. Colonialism, not republicanism, threatened plantations after the 1780s.

The phrase “The Black Legend” was coined in 1912 by a Spanish journalist in protest of the characterization of Spain by other Europeans as a backward country defined by ignorance, superstition, and religious fanaticism, whose history could never recover from the black mark of its violent conquest of the Americas. Challenging this stereotype, this book contextualizes Spain's uniquely tarnished reputation by exposing the colonial efforts of other nations whose interests were served by propagating the “Black Legend.” A group of contributors here examine early modern imperialisms including the Ottomans in Eastern Europe, the Portuguese in East India, and the cases of Mughal India and China, to historicize the charge of unique Spanish brutality in encounters with indigenous peoples during the Age of Exploration.

The Jews of southern Algeria under French colonial rule were different than the Jews of Algeria’s north: they were not French. This book presents their history and through it, a history of legal difference born of colonial imperatives under eighty years of French rule (1882-1962). In 1870, France granted citizenship to the Jews of Algeria’s north, effectively rendering them European at the stroke of a pen. The Jews of the Algeria’s south were handed a different legal fate. After the conquest of the Algerian Sahara, the state categorized its Jews as it categorized the majority of Algerian Muslims—as indigèènes [indigenous subjects], whose political rights were radically curtailed. The case of southern Algerian Jewry provides evidence of another variation of colonial rule produced as the French authorities sought—sometimes methodically, sometimes with frantic desperation—to achieve mastery over their diverse subject populations in North Africa. Indigenous Jews considers why French law and military policy treated the Jews of the Algerian Sahara differently than it did the Jews of Algeria’s north and, in time, than Algerian Muslims, and explores how this “difference” was mistaken as innate by generations of social scientists. It investigates how members of the southern Jewish community experienced and negotiated with the legal categories imposed upon them. Finally, it argues that the so-called “indigeneity” of southern Algerian Jewry, which was essentially colonial and juridical in formulation, continued to haunt France, southern Algerian Jewish émigrés, and scholarship on modern Jewry long after Algeria became a sovereign nation and France entered the post-colonial world.

The contrast between the temperate and the tropical is one of the most enduring themes in the history of the Western geographical imagination. Caught between the demands of experience and representation, documentation and fantasy, travelers in the tropics have often treated tropical nature as a foil to the temperate, to all that is civilized, modest, and enlightened. This book explores images of the tropical world—maps, paintings, botanical drawings, photographs, diagrams, and texts—produced by European and American travelers over the past three centuries. This book contains eleven chapters—arranged in three sections devoted to voyages, mappings, and sites—that consider the ways that tropical places were encountered, experienced, and represented in visual form. The book covers a wide range of tropical sites in the Pacific, South Asia, West Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America.

In 1899 an American could open a newspaper and find outrageous images, such as an American soldier being injected with leprosy by Filipino insurgents. These kinds of hyperbolic accounts, this book argues, were just one element of the visual and material culture that played an integral role in debates about empire in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. The book explores the ways visual imagery and design shaped the political and cultural landscape. Drawing on a myriad of sources—including photographs, tattoos, the decorative arts, the popular press, maps, parades, and material from world's fairs and urban planners—it offers a distinctive perspective on American imperialism. Exploring the period leading up to the Spanish–American War, as well as beyond it, the book argues that the way Americans visualized the Orient greatly influenced the fantasies of colonial domestication that would play out in the Philippines. Throughout, it examines visual culture's integral role in the machinery that runs the colonial engine.