Hidden Hands and Divided Landscapes

Hidden Hands and Divided Landscapes PDF Author: Anoma Pieris
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 082486283X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
During the nineteenth century, the colonial Straits Settlements of Singapore, Penang, and Melaka were established as free ports of British trade in Southeast Asia and proved attractive to large numbers of regional migrants. Following the abolishment of slavery in 1833, the Straits government transported convicts from the East India Company’s Indian presidencies to the settlements as a source of inexpensive labor. The prison became the primary experimental site for the colonial plural society and convicts were graduated by race and the labor needed for urban construction. Hidden Hands and Divided Landscapes investigates how a political system aimed at managing ethnic communities in the larger material context of the colonial urban project was first imagined and tested through the physical segregation of the colonial prison. It relates the story of a city, Singapore, and a contemporary city-state whose plural society has its origins in these historical divisions. A description of the evolution of the ideal plan for a plural city across the three settlements is followed by a detailed look at Singapore’s colonial prison. Chapters trace the prison’s development and its dissolution across the urban landscape through the penal labor system. The author demonstrates the way in which racial politics were inscribed spatially in the division of penal facilities and how the map of the city was reconfigured through convict labor. Later chapters describe penal resistance first through intimate stories of penal life and then through a discussion of organized resistance in festival riots. Eventually, the plural city ideal collapsed into the hegemonic urban form of the citadel, where a quite different military vision of the city became evident. Hidden Hands and Divided Landscapes is a fascinating and thoroughly original study in urban history and the making of multiethnic society in Singapore. It will compel readers to rethink the ways in which colonial urban history, postcolonial urbanism, and governance have been theorized by scholars and represented by governments.

Hidden Hands and Divided Landscapes

Hidden Hands and Divided Landscapes PDF Author: Anoma Pieris
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 082486283X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Get Book Here

Book Description
During the nineteenth century, the colonial Straits Settlements of Singapore, Penang, and Melaka were established as free ports of British trade in Southeast Asia and proved attractive to large numbers of regional migrants. Following the abolishment of slavery in 1833, the Straits government transported convicts from the East India Company’s Indian presidencies to the settlements as a source of inexpensive labor. The prison became the primary experimental site for the colonial plural society and convicts were graduated by race and the labor needed for urban construction. Hidden Hands and Divided Landscapes investigates how a political system aimed at managing ethnic communities in the larger material context of the colonial urban project was first imagined and tested through the physical segregation of the colonial prison. It relates the story of a city, Singapore, and a contemporary city-state whose plural society has its origins in these historical divisions. A description of the evolution of the ideal plan for a plural city across the three settlements is followed by a detailed look at Singapore’s colonial prison. Chapters trace the prison’s development and its dissolution across the urban landscape through the penal labor system. The author demonstrates the way in which racial politics were inscribed spatially in the division of penal facilities and how the map of the city was reconfigured through convict labor. Later chapters describe penal resistance first through intimate stories of penal life and then through a discussion of organized resistance in festival riots. Eventually, the plural city ideal collapsed into the hegemonic urban form of the citadel, where a quite different military vision of the city became evident. Hidden Hands and Divided Landscapes is a fascinating and thoroughly original study in urban history and the making of multiethnic society in Singapore. It will compel readers to rethink the ways in which colonial urban history, postcolonial urbanism, and governance have been theorized by scholars and represented by governments.

India in the World

India in the World PDF Author: Rajeshwari Dutt
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000988392
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
If we look back at world history in the past five hundred years, it is evident that Indian ideas, peoples, and goods helped drive world connections. From the quest to reach the Indies that drove Iberian rulers to fund costly expeditions that ultimately connected the Old World with the Americas to Gandhi’s creed of non-violence that created transnational resistance movements, India has been crucial to world history. In what ways have the movement of goods, people, and ideas from India served to connect the world? Conversely, how has India’s global history shaped the many boundaries and inequalities that have divided the world despite—and at times because of—the transnational connections often lumped together under the aegis of globalization? Through its emphasis on both linkages and boundaries, India in the World examines the range of connections between India and the world in a truly global perspective.

The Architecture of Confinement

The Architecture of Confinement PDF Author: Anoma Pieris
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 131651918X
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 397

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Book Description
An innovative account of prisoners of war and internment camps around the Pacific basin during the Second World War. In this comparative and global study, Anoma Pieris and Lynne Horiuchi offer an architectural and urban understanding of the Pacific War approached through spatial, physical and material analyses of incarceration camp environments.

The Indian Uprising of 1857-8

The Indian Uprising of 1857-8 PDF Author: Clare Anderson
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 1843312956
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
An in-depth study of the 1857 Indian mutiny-rebellion, exploring the political and social themes of this remarkable phenomenon.

Capitalism and the Sea

Capitalism and the Sea PDF Author: Liam Campling
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1784785261
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
What keeps capitalism afloat? The global ocean has through the centuries served as a trade route, strategic space, fish bank and supply chain for the modern capitalist economy. While sea beds are drilled for their fossil fuels and minerals, and coastlines developed for real estate and leisure, the oceans continue to absorb the toxic discharges of our carbon civilization - warming, expanding, and acidifying the blue water part of the planet in ways that will bring unpredictable but irreversible consequences for the rest of the biosphere. In this bold and radical new book, Campling and Colás analyze these and other sea-related phenomena through a historical and geographical lens. In successive chapters dealing with the political economy, ecology and geopolitics of the sea, the authors argue that the earth's geographical separation into land and sea has significant consequences for capitalist development. The distinctive features of this mode of production continuously seek to transcend the land-sea binary in an incessant quest for profit, engendering new alignments of sovereignty, exploitation and appropriation in the capture and coding of maritime spaces and resources.

Belonging across the Bay of Bengal

Belonging across the Bay of Bengal PDF Author: Michael Laffan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350022632
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Belonging across the Bay of Bengal discusses themes connecting the regions bordering the Bay of Bengal, mainly covering the period from the mid-19th through the mid-20th centuries – a crucial period of transition from colonialism to independence. Focusing on the notion of 'belonging', the chapters in this collection highlight themes of ethnicity, religion, culture and the emergence of nationalist politics and state policies as they relate to the movement of peoples in the region. While the Indian Ocean has been of interest to scholars for decades, there has been a notable tilt towards historicizing the Western half of that space, often prioritizing Islamic trade as the key connective glue prior to the rise of Western power and the later emergence of transnational Indian nationalism. Belonging across the Bay of Bengal enriches this story by drawing attention to Buddhist and migrant connectivities, introducing discussions of Lanka, Burma and the Straits Settlements to establish the historical context of the current refugee crises playing out in these regions. This is a timely and innovative volume that offers a fresh approach to Indian Ocean history, further enriching our understanding of the current debates over minority rights and refugee problems in the region. It will be of great significance to all students and scholars of Indian Ocean studies as well as historians of modern South and Southeast Asia.

Empire of Convicts

Empire of Convicts PDF Author: Anand A. Yang
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520967593
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
Empire of Convicts focuses on male and female Indians incarcerated in Southeast Asia for criminal and political offenses committed in colonial South Asia. From the seventeenth century onward, penal transportation was a key strategy of British imperial rule, exemplified by deportations first to the Americas and later to Australia. Case studies from the insular prisons of Bengkulu, Penang, and Singapore illuminate another carceral regime in the Indian Ocean World that brought South Asia and Southeast Asia together through a global system of forced migration and coerced labor. A major contribution to histories of crime and punishment, prisons, law, labor, transportation, migration, colonialism, and the Indian Ocean World, Empire of Convicts narrates the experiences of Indian bandwars (convicts) and shows how they exercised agency in difficult situations, fashioning their own worlds and even becoming “their own warders.” Anand A. Yang brings long journeys across kala pani (black waters) to life in a deeply researched and engrossing account that moves fluidly between local and global contexts.

A Subaltern History of the Indian Diaspora in Singapore

A Subaltern History of the Indian Diaspora in Singapore PDF Author: John Solomon
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317353803
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Untouchable migrants made up a substantial proportion of Indian labour migration into Singapore in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. During this period, they were subject to forms of caste prejudice and discrimination that powerfully reinforced their identities as untouchables overseas. Today, however, untouchability has disappeared from the public sphere and has been replaced by other notions of identity, leaving unanswered questions as to how and when this occurred. The untouchable migrant is also largely absent from popular narratives of the past. This book takes the "disappearance" as a starting point to examine a history of untouchable migration amongst Indians who arrived in Singapore from its modern founding as a British colony in the early nineteenth century through to its independence in 1965. Using oral history records, archival sources, colonial ethnography, newspapers and interviews, this book examines the lives of untouchable migrants through their everyday experience in an overseas multi-ethnic environment. It examines how these migrants who in many ways occupied the bottom rungs of their communities and colonial society, framed transnational issues of identity and social justice in relation to their experiences within the broader Indian diaspora in Singapore. The book trances the manner in which untouchable identities evolved and then receded in response to the dramatic social changes brought about by colonialism, war and post-colonial nationhood. By focusing on a subaltern group from the past, this study provides an alternative history of Indian migration to Singapore and a different perspective on the cultural conversations that have taken place between India and Singapore for much of the island's modern history.

Resisting the Rule of Law in Nineteenth-Century Ceylon

Resisting the Rule of Law in Nineteenth-Century Ceylon PDF Author: James S. Duncan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000089827
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
This book offers in-depth insights on the struggles implementing the rule of law in nineteenth century Ceylon, introduced into the colonies by the British as their “greatest gift.” The book argues that resistance can be understood as a form of negotiation to lessen oppressive colonial conditions, and that the cumulative impact caused continual adjustments to the criminal justice system, weighing it down and distorting it. The tactical use of rule of law is explored within the three bureaucracies: the police, the courts and the prisons. Policing was often “governed at a distance” due to fiscal constraints and economic priorities and the enforcement of law was often delegated to underpaid Ceylonese. Spaces of resistance opened up as Ceylon was largely left to manage its own affairs. Villagers, minor officials, as well as senior British government officials, alternately used or subverted the rule of law to achieve their own goals. In the courts, the imported system lacked political legitimacy and consequently the Ceylonese undermined it by embracing it with false cases and information, in the interests of achieving justice as they saw it. In the prisons, administrators developed numerous biopolitical techniques and medical experiments in order to punish prisoners’ bodies to their absolute lawful limit. This limit was one which prison officials, prisoners, and doctors negotiated continuously over the decades. The book argues that the struggles around rule of law can best be understood not in terms of a dualism of bureaucrats versus the public, but rather as a set of shifting alliances across permeable bureaucratic boundaries. It offers innovative perspectives, comparing the Ceylonese experiences to those of Britain and India, and where appropriate to other European colonies. This book will appeal to those interested in law, history, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, cultural and political geography.

A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies

A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies PDF Author: Clare Anderson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 135000068X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
Between 1415, when the Portuguese first used convicts for colonization purposes in the North African enclave of Ceuta, to the 1960s and the dissolution of Stalin's gulags, global powers including the Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, British, Russians, Chinese and Japanese transported millions of convicts to forts, penal settlements and penal colonies all over the world. A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies builds on specific regional archives and literatures to write the first global history of penal transportation. The essays explore the idea of penal transportation as an engine of global change, in which political repression and forced labour combined to produce long-term impacts on economy, society and identity. They investigate the varied and interconnected routes convicts took to penal sites across the world, and the relationship of these convict flows to other forms of punishment, unfree labour, military service and indigenous incarceration. They also explore the lived worlds of convicts, including work, culture, religion and intimacy, and convict experience and agency.