Engaging Colonial Knowledge Reading European Archives in World History

by Roque, Ricardo; Wagner, Kim A.

• ISBN13: 9780230241985
• ISBN10: 0230241980
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-12-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Presenting a set of rich case-studies which demonstrate novel and productive approaches to the study of colonial knowledge, this volume covers British, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish colonial encounters in Africa, Asia, America and the Pacific, from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.

Author Biography

RICARDO ROQUEResearch Fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, Portugal. He works on the history and anthropology of colonialism, human sciences, and cross-cultural contact in the Portuguese empire. He is the author of Headhunting and Colonialism: Anthropology and the Circulation of Human Skulls in the Portuguese Empire, 1870-1930 (2010).
KIM A. WAGNERLecturer in Imperial and World History at the University of Birmingham, UK. He has published extensively on crime and rebellion in British India, including Thuggee: Banditry and the British in Early Nineteenth-Century India (2007) and The Great Fear of 1857: Rumours, Conspiracies and the Making of the Indian Uprising (2010).

Table of Contents

Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: Engaging Colonial Knowledge; R.Roque & K.A.Wagner
PART I: EPISTEMIC FISSURES
'In Cold Blood': Hierarchies of Credibility and the Politics of Colonial Narratives; A.L.Stoler
North Indian Lives in the Archives of the Colonial State; L.Denault
Reading Farm and Forest: Colonial Forest Science and Policy in Southern Nigeria; P.von Hellermann
PART II: INDIGENOUS VOICES IN COLONIAL RECORDS
Insights from the 'Ancient Word': The Use of Colonial Sources in the Study of Aztec Society; C.Dodds Pennock
'In unrestrained conversation': Approvers and the Colonial Ethnography of Crime in Nineteenth-Century India; K.A.Wagner
From Civil Servant to Little King: an Indigenous Construction of Colonial Authority in Early Nineteenth-century South India; N.Brimnes
French Anthropology and the Durkheimians in Colonial Indochina; S.Bayly
PART III: ARCHIVES OF ENTANGLEMENT
Treachery and Ethnicity in Portuguese Representations of Sri Lanka; A.Strathern
William Hodges as Anthropologist and Historian; N.Thomas
Entangled with Otherness: Military Ethnographies of Headhunting in East Timor; R.Roque
'What do you Really Want in German East Africa, Herr Professor?' Counterinsurgency and the Science Effect in Colonial Tanzania; A.Zimmerman
Endnotes