Colonial Knowledge

This project is focused on reconcentración (literally, “reconcentration”), a phenomenon that has traditionally been neglected despite its crucial relevance for the understanding of mass violence in modern conflicts. This devastating counter-insurgency strategy, first implemented by the Spanish colonial authorities in nineteenth-century Cuba, usually involved three essential elements:
Erection of fortified cordons sanitaires (internal blockades, blockhouse lines, barbed-wire, ...)
Indiscriminate relocation and confinement of non-combatant population in militarised enclaves.
Adoption of a large-scale scorched-earth policy (confiscations, crop destruction, farm-burning, ...)
Frequently referred as the ultimate origin of the modern concept of concentration camp, a similar model has been replicated in many other contexts during the twentieth century. In all these cases, such as South Africa, the Philippines, Libya, Algeria, British Malaya or South Vietnam, the (mainly rural) civilian population became the target of a ruthless military response intended to eliminate, once and for all, any possible support to the local guerrilla groups. Sadly, some of these episodes resulted in tens of thousands of victims, most of the times caused by starvation, poor sanitation and the spread of infectious diseases. Only in Cuba, for instance, more than 150,000 reconcentrados are said to have died as a consequence of these measures, whilst probably over 45,000 Boer and African inmates perished at the 'refugee' camps in South Africa.
Despite some recent efforts to understand the changes in military mentality during the nineteenth century and the conceptual interconnections between these early forms of mass confinement, there still exists a lack of a proper debate and knowledge exchange among doctoral students and researchers working on these topics from disciplines such as History, Archaeology and Anthropology, War Studies, Memory and Post-Conflict Studies, Cultural Heritage Management and Literary Studies.

Taming the Imperial Imagination marks a novel intervention into the debate on empire and international relations, and offers a new perspective on nineteenth-century Anglo-Afghan relations. Martin J. Bayly shows how, throughout the nineteenth century, the British Empire in India sought to understand and control its peripheries through the use of colonial knowledge. Addressing the fundamental question of what Afghanistan itself meant to the British at the time, he draws on extensive archival research to show how knowledge of Afghanistan was built, refined and warped by an evolving colonial state. This knowledge informed policy choices and cast Afghanistan in a separate legal and normative universe. Beginning with the disorganised exploits of nineteenth-century explorers and ending with the cold strategic logic of the militarised 'scientific frontier', this book tracks the nineteenth-century origins of contemporary policy 'expertise' and the forms of knowledge that inform interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere today.

From the book cover:

‘Focusing on the shifting parameters of “knowledge communities,” this impressive book situates Afghanistan and the Afghan frontier in a multi-layered and evolving set of British Imperial and colonial policies and practices during the nineteenth century. It is essential reading for all students of modern Afghanistan and for those concerned with colonial knowledge formations and the history of imperialism.’
Shah Mahmoud Hanifi, Professor of History, James Madison University


‘According to Edward Said, “From travelers’ tales ... colonies were created.” In recent years scholars have explored the details of the dialectical relationship between colonial knowledge and imperial policy. In Taming the Imperial Imagination, Martin Bayly continues the work begun by Christopher Bayly on British information gathering in India, pushing the investigation north of the Durand Line into Afghanistan. Bayly reconstructs the images of Afghanistan upon which British officials drew in crafting their policy decisions. After discussing the work of the founding figures, he tracks the emergence after 1830 of a more unified concept of the Afghan polity. This book is an important contribution to the histories of British imperialism and Anglo-Afghan relations and to the rehistoricization of the International Relations discipline.’
George Steinmetz, Charles Tilly Professor of Sociology, University of Michigan

For more than a century, from about 1600 until the early eighteenth century, the Dutch dominated world trade. Via the Netherlands the far reaches of the world, both in the Atlantic and in the East, were connected. Dutch ships carried goods, but they also opened up opportunities for the exchange of knowledge. The commercial networks of the Dutch trading companies provided an infrastructure which was accessible to people with a scholarly interest in the exotic world. The present collection of essays brings together a number of studies about knowledge construction that depended on the Dutch trading networks.

Reviews: The Journal of Modern History (Harold Cook, Brown University, USA); Studium. Tijdschrift Voor Wetenschaps- en Universiteitsgeschiedenis / Revue D’histoire des Sciences et des Universités (Ernst van den Boogaart, University of Amsterdam); Itinerario, International Journal on the History of European Expansion and Global Interaction (Anne Good, Reinhardt University, USA); Journal of Early Modern History (Markus Vink, State University of New York).

"This paper was presented with the title “Hybrid colonial architecture in early 20th century Goa. Luis Maravilhas and the ‘Recolhimento da Serra’” at the international meeting, “Sharing Architectural cultures across the (Mediterranean) Space(s)”, organized by Évora University (C.I.E in Architecture), between the 6th and 8th October 2006 in Évora, Portugal.
A shorter version was published with the tile: Matters of Style. Indian Architect & Builder, February 2007, Bombay, India."

Beginning in the 1970s, as the federal government began to negotiate comprehensive land claims based on extant Aboriginal title, historical understandings of Indigenous land use and occupancy gained new significance as a means of demonstrating title. As Indigenous groups – such as the Kaska Dena – tried to demonstrate their Aboriginal title, they grappled with the legacy of colonial perspectives of their land use and occupancy. These colonial perspectives had the complex and sometimes contradictory effects of supporting their claims, while simultaneously circumscribing them within a Eurocentric framework. Historical renderings of Kaska Dena land use occurred within specific historical and environmental contexts. Moreover, outsider representations of Kaska Dena land use were shaped by the particular interests of the outsider or colonial observer – be it the interests of pursuing fur trade or bringing Indigenous peoples under state administration. This dissertation examines the historical unfolding of colonial knowledge relating to Kaska Dena land use and occupancy, beginning with contact and extending to the 1970s, when the federal government agreed to negotiate outstanding Indigenous land claims. The dissertation then focuses on how these past understandings of Kaska Dena land use influenced their abilities to advance their territorial rights within the context of comprehensive land claim negotiations and the emerging regime of environmental impact assessments. This analysis also considers how the Kaska Dena mobilized community-based knowledge to sometimes support and sometimes counter colonial representations of Kaska Dena land use.

I originally wrote this paper in English to present at the 2017 ESCAS conference in Bishkek. The Russian version was translated by my friend Olga Berard and has now been published in a memorial volume for Dmitrii Arapov. It is still really just a preliminary reflection on the use of the colonial archive in Central Asia.

This article argues that recurring communal problems in Malaysia can be traced to not only economic and social policies undertaken by pragmatically rather than ideologically-inclined National Front-led governments, but they can also be located to weaknesses of their educational policies which have failed to disentangle Malaysians from colonial knowledge which had epistemologically moulded the conceptions of 'race' and 'nation' as prevalent in Malaysia. The article seeks to show that, despite the apparent success of Malaysia's national education system in producing a relatively large number of skilled and semiskilled workers who went on to form constantly expanding vibrant middle classes, these cohorts of new labour market entrants have largely failed to live up to expectations of them as socially progressive in the way envisaged by Wawasan 2020 – a liberal, rational, inclusive, scientific and progressive Malaysian nation. As a matter of fact, after fifty years, Malaysia's educational system remains unsuccessful in tackling its twin problems before independence – communal and class polarisation. We hereby argue that the Malaysia Education Blueprint 2013-2025, notwithstanding the hulabaloo which accompanied its launching, not only also fails to confront the critical issue of identity and nation-building, but it also lacks credible solutions beyond the colonial-designed educational framework which accepts communal divisions as a fait accompli.

During the early years of white administration in Southern Rhodesia, few whites spoke the local vernaculars. The state used those few, largely traders and farmers, to translate and interpret. Members of the Native Affairs Department were expected to learn ‘on the job’. However, by the early 1920s, poor language abilities in the civil services, combined with growing segregationist tendencies in the face of African competition, prompted the state to reconsider whites’ knowledge of the vernaculars. The issue raised important questions about defining the boundary between ‘natives’ and ‘civilized peoples’, interactions between white and African communities, and the long-term project for the state.

This is a text of a Distinguished Professor Lecture that argues that Malaysia dreams of a 'unity in diversity' but it actually exists on 'cohesion in diversity', which means as a society Malaysia is characterized by its intense diversity. This, in turn, makes Malaysia continuously having to contend with differences, contestations, conflicts and divergences. But it has managed to steer away from open bloody conflict because of its ability to find consensus, compromises, convergences through a non-stop process of negotiation and bargaining. As such Malaysia's 'unity and integraton' is still 'a work-in-progress'.

The establishment of a settlement at the Cape of Good Hope in the seventeenth century and an expansion of the sphere of colonial influence in the eighteenth century made South Africa the only part of sub-Saharan Africa where Europeans could travel with relative ease deep into the interior. As a result individuals with scientific interests in Africa came to the Cape. This book examines writings and drawings of scientifically educated travellers, particularly in the field of ethnography, against the background of commercial and administrative discourses on the Cape. It is argued that the scientific travellers benefited more from their relationship with the colonial order than the other way around.

Reviews: British Journal for the History of Science (Saul Dubow, History Dept., University of Sussex), Internationale Neerlandistiek (Samira Sassi, Dutch Dept., University of Oldenburg), Isis (Alette Fleischer, Department of History of Science & Technology, University of Twente), Centaurus: Journal for the European Society for the History of Science (James E. McClellan III, Stevens Institute of Technology, New Jersey), Werkwinkel (Ryszard Bartnik, Dept. of English, University of Poznan), South African Historical Journal (Wayne Dooling, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London), Mitteilungen der Berliner Gesellschaft für Missiongeschichte (Ulrich van der Heyden), Humboldt Universität, Berichte für Wissenschaftsgeschichte (S. Müller-Wille, University of Exeter); Etudes littéraires africaines (Nicholas Brucker, Université de Lorraine), Journal of the Social and Economic History of the Orient (Nigel Penn, University of Cape Town).

“Missionaries and Commanders: The Jesuits in Mindanao, 1718-68,” in Journal of Jesuit Studies 9 (2022) (https://brill.com/view/journals/jjs/9/2/article-p207_207.xml, open access) (ISSN: 2214-1324) (SJR2020: 0.100), 207-228. // ABSTRACT: In the Philippines, at the fringes of the Spanish empire, the Society of Jesus took on a difficult task, the mission and pastoral work on the Island of Mindanao, which was ruled mostly by Muslim polities. In the frontier zone between Spanish and Islamic spheres of influence, Jesuit missionaries, in symbiosis with Spanish and native Christian troops, tried to expand their zone of influence and force Islam back. Thereby, the priests participated actively in defensive and offensive military tasks. This article gives an overview of the Jesuits' presence in the south of the Philippines and then, by studying printed Jesuit sources, analyzes the image cultivation of the local members of the order. Putting the topic in the context of the anti-Jesuit discussion in Europe, the article reasons that the communication strategy of the Jesuits in the middle of the eighteenth century was particularly aimed at highlighting the usefulness of the missionaries to the colony and the empire in general.

Este artículo revisa las caracterizaciones que, desde la crítica y la bibliografía académica, han recibido las crónicas de Indias en sus semejanzas y diferencias con la crónica occidental –y con la española específicamente—, vinculadas desde sus orígenes con el poder gobernante. Propongo que este género discursivo, que proliferó entre los documentos de Indias, dio lugar oportunamente entre sus páginas al testimonio de un mundo que, desde la lejanía, se esperaba que fuera vencido por los hombres enviados a conquistar y colonizar el continente. Las crónicas de Indias se propusieron a sí mismas como testimonios de vista de un mundo desaparecido y, a la vez, esperanzador, nuevo y deseable. Cuestiono, además, el efecto de verdad de la reiteración gramatical del enunciador en primera persona de estos textos (el yo) para poner el acento, en cambio, en sus posibilidades discursivas de certificación del propio sujeto. Por último, propongo que, como en espejo, las visiones del testigo de vista están constituidas por algo conocido y algo nuevo a la vez; codificadas por tradiciones, pero también transformadas por el contexto transatlántico. En esto, lo maravilloso –lo novedoso sobrenatural indiano—jugó un rol fundamental, incluso, en sus formas amenazantes y perturbadoras, ajenas a lo milagroso y hasta a lo demoníaco.

"This book offers annotated translations of documents touching on Dutch admiral Cornelis Matelieff de Jonge and his voyage to Asia between 1605 and 1608. These translations are aimed at a contemporary English-speaking Asian readership interested in the early modern history of European trade, warfare and expansion in Southeast Asia with a focus on Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia. Researchers specialising in early European colonialism, international law, international relations, security studies, and diplomatic history will also find that the documents translated in this volume offer new and unfamiliar perspectives. Materlieff’s business acumen, military and diplomataic prowess as well as his vision of empire all have implications for examining not only European expansion into Southeast Asia, but also into other regions at large, including especially south Asia, Africa and the Americas.
Admiral Matelieff was a director of the Rotterdam Chamber of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) formed in 1602. He was appointed fleet commander on one of the company’s first voyages to Asia. Matelieff’s mission was both commercial and military: he launched a major sea-borne attack on the Portuguese colony of Melaka, arranged for the signing of treaties with the rulers of Johor, Aceh and Ternate, and founded the first Dutch fort on the island of Ternate. His endeavours, however, to open the Chinese market for the Dutch company proved unsuccessful.
Following his return to the Dutch Republic in September 1608, Matelieff penned a series of memorials and letters. In these he advanced recommendations for changing the way the company organized its fleets and conducted business. More importantly he offered  his Dutch contemporaries a vision of empire in Asia. The materials contained in this volume offer important observations of a perceptive analyst who was also determined to grasp the political and economic structures of Asia, and also of inter-state relations in across this vast region. At a time of Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, French and English engagement in Southeast Asia, Matelieff sought to critically assess and strategize on the ways in which Europeans were increasingly engaging with Asian polities and their rulers.

This book will be released for sale in Australasia and Europe in June 2014 and available in the Americas after September 2014
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This special issue addresses the possible connections and mutual benefits of examining together two analytic concepts – memory and periphery. These concepts receive much attention in various scholarly discussions, yet they have done so rather independently from each other. The potential applications and utilities of combining memory and periphery and the epistemic insights they provide for various disciplins are presented in the different contributions to this issue.

The new philosophies of the 21st century will be cross-cultural philosophies. The self-critical meeting of cultures will be the driving force behind new forms of philosophical creativity, the newness of thought that arises out of the movement between different ways of attending to the world. New institutional infrastructures are needed, ones in which the distinctive sorts of philosophical innovation that a cross-cultural and cosmopolitan outlook enables are actively cultivated and enhanced.

John Turnbull Thomson was one of the important nineteenth-century figures in New Zealand, Singapore and Malaysia. A man of many talents, he was a surveyor, engineer, architect, artist, philosopher and writer, and was New Zealand’s first Surveyor General. Thomson spent a total of fifteen years in the Malay Peninsula, serving as an architect, engineer and government surveyor to the East India Company before migrating to New Zealand in 1855. This dissertation argues that his time in the Malay Peninsula was crucial in the development of his thoughts and literary works in New Zealand. The research aims to establish this argument by connecting Thomson’s writings and theories in New Zealand to his experience and observations in Southeast Asia. Thomson has left us with a wide range of writings that is an invaluable source for scholars. It is these writings where this research places the bulk of its focus. The first three chapters cover Thomson’s life in the Malay Archipelago by analysing a selection of his writings on the ‘Far East.’ The fourth chapter ties together the discussions of the previous chapters on his experiences in the Malay Peninsula, and connects them to his literary works in New Zealand. It will be shown that many of the concepts that occupied his writings, from his books to his racial philosophies, were inspired by his sojourn in Southeast Asia.

This paper challenges the broad consensus in current historiography that holds the Indian stereotype of criminal tribe to be a myth of colonial making. Drawing on a selection of precolonial descriptions of robber castes—ancient legal texts and folktales; Jain, Buddhist and Brahminical narratives; Mughal sources; and Early Modern European travel accounts—I show that the idea of castes of congenital robbers was not a British import, but instead a label of much older vintage on the subcontinent. Enjoying pride of place in the postcolonial critics’ pageant of “colonial stereotypes,” the case of criminal tribes is representative and it bears on broader questions about colonial knowledge and its relation to power. The study contributes to the literature that challenges the still widespread tendency to view colonial social categories, and indeed the bulk of colonial knowledge, as the imaginative residue of imperial politics. I argue that while colonial uses of the idea of a criminal tribe comprises a lurid history of violence against communities branded as born criminals in British law, the stereotype itself has indigenous roots. The case is representative and it bears on larger problems of method and analysis in “post-Orientalist” historiography.

Seeking to challenge the totalizing theory of an 'ethnographic state', this article examines a mid-nineteenth-century paradigm shift that impacted the colonial study of borderland populations along India's North-West Frontier. While the establishment of metropolitan ethnographic societies in the 1870s facilitated the rise of socio-cultural evolutionism, colonial agents also utilized folklore and proverb studies to represent the borderland societies as dynamic cultural entities reactive to British encroachment. Four case-studies, moreover, demonstrate that a variety of motivations compelled colonial agents to produce ethnographic material. These factors included personal scholarly ambition, political activism, and a commitment to transregional 'scientific' data collection projects. This study complicates the relationship between knowledge production and state power by reasserting the significance of personality as an operative force in the formation of colonial discourse.

Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Über die Kawi-Sprache auf der Insel Java can be seen as the first comparative grammar of non-Indo-European languages. While Humboldt’s practice of collecting and re-assembling linguistic information has been documented extensively in the Berlin Academy edition of his Schriften zur Sprachwissenschaft, this article puts his work in perspective by tracing it back to its sources and treating it as part of a wider parallel process of expanding the comparative view. In three sections, this article discusses 1) the research agendas of the three British colonial scholars upon whose works Humboldt drew for Malayan languages; 2) to which extent his Polynesian language material was ‘rawer’ than these compendia; and 3) how he reworked this material into a comparative Malayo-Polynesian grammar. Finally, a comparison is drawn with the work of his assistant and continuator Eduard Buschmann, and with Horatio Hale’s slightly later survey of the languages of the Pacific.

Edited by Timothy Lubin, Donald R. Davis Jr., and Jayanth K. Krishnan. 
Covering the earliest Sanskrit rulebooks through to the codification of 'Hindu law' in modern times, this interdisciplinary volume examines the interactions between Hinduism and the law. The authors present the major transformations to India's legal system in both the colonial and post colonial periods and their relation to recent changes in Hinduism. Thematic studies show how law and Hinduism relate and interact in areas such as ritual, logic, politics, and literature, offering a broad coverage of South Asia's contributions to religion and law at the intersection of society, politics and culture. In doing so, the authors build on previous treatments of Hindu law as a purely text-based tradition, and in the process, provide a fascinating account of an often neglected social and political history.

Download: Front matter and introduction.

Original, English version of the text from: Rapport des experts. Commission Spéciale chargée d'examiner l'état independent du Congo et le passé colonial de la Belgique au Congo, au Rwanda et au Burundi, ses consequences et les suites qu'il convient d'y réserver. Chambre des représentants de Belgique. 26 Octobre 2021.Doc 55 1462/002 Available in French and Dutch. Please use official documents for citations purposes.

Le visage que revêt un milieu de vie est toujours le résultat d'un processus de développement dans la longue durée historique. L'histoire est ainsi importante dans l’analyse des processus de développement. Elle permet notamment de comprendre les changements s'opérant au niveau d'un territoire, les changements s’opérant au niveau des rapports entre acteurs sociaux. Elle est également importante parce qu'elle nous empêche de croire que les phénomènes que nous étudions sont nouveaux, ou qu’ils sont issus d'une génération spontanée.
En nous intéressant au cas de la ville de Kinshasa, nous nous sommes interrogés sur le processus de structuration dans la longue durée du territoire sur lequel elle est bâtie, étant donné que celui-ci a existé comme milieu de vie bien avant la fondation de la ville. Un regard sur un tel processus dans le temps long, prenant en compte à la fois les continuités et les ruptures, pourrait peut être amener un autre éclairage dans la compréhension des problèmes et défis qui se posent à ce milieu de vie aujourd’hui. Il nous faut d’emblée préciser que cette contribution n’a pas l’ambition de proposer une nouvelle version de l’histoire de la ville.Il s’agit plutôt d’une tentative de compréhension de la dynamique des transformations ayant affecté ce milieu de vie, ainsi que les modes de vie des populations.

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In this dissertation I examine the uses of the notions of civilization, race, and culture within a set of British 19 th century discourses on especially Southeast Asian societies, their present state and history. Taking the point of departure in John Crawfurd's (1783-1868) publications, it contains a study of the many debates on economic, ethnological, historical, and linguistic issues in which he participated throughout six decades and to which he contributed significantly. Through this approach I aim at providing a densely contextualized analysis of the colonial, intellectual, political, and socio-cultural aspects of Crawfurd et al's knowledge production, its routes of transmission, receptions, and appropriations. The analytic focus is directed at the evaluative-descriptive qualities attributed to the terms civilization, race, and culture, and immanent in the concepts they refer to; on the surface claiming to be primarily descriptive, they nonetheless were normatively cogent in their inherent hierarchal and classificatory structures, as well as in providing a theoretical template delineating the naturalized historical trajectories. Arguing that the notions of civilization, race and culture were pivotal key concepts in this colonial knowledge production, I chart the intertwined dynamics between these notions-both in their conceptual framings and contextualized uses. During this quest I endeavour to demonstrate the interpretive primacy of the concept of civilization throughout the entire period, even though racial concerns clearly were on the ascendancy and by the 1860s constituted the major theme of discussion and dissent. Common to all the analysed discourses is that they were hinged upon these three fundamental notions and their ability to address the universal as well as the particular, their capacity to encompass the past, present and future within one interpretive framework, and not at least their provision of a conceptual common ground which also, however, facilitated the possibilities of fundamental dissent within the actual interpretations. ii

This article presents a new perspective on the master-slave relationship in New Netherland in order to complement the existing theories on the treatment of slaves in that Dutch colony. It shows how prior to the loss of Dutch Brazil, the West India Company modeled its slave policy after Portuguese practices, such as the formation of black militias and the use of Christianity as a means to foster slave loyalty. It also points out that in the initial slave policy of the Dutch Reformed Church was characterized by the ambition to replace the Iberian Catholic Church in the Americas. While the Reformed Church in the early decades of the Dutch colonial expansion was characterized by a community-building spirit and a flexible attitude toward newcomers, the loss of Brazil shattered the dream of a Protestant American continent and gave way to a more exclusivist approach with a much stronger emphasis on orthodoxy. This led to a dramatic change in attitude vis-à-vis slaves, which is reflected in the segregationist policies―both at a social and a religious level―in later Dutch slave colonies such as Suriname.

Review essay about:
Javed Majeed, "Colonialism and Knowledge in Grierson’s 'Linguistic Survey of India'" and "Nation and Region in Grierson’s “Linguistic Survey of India” (Routledge, 2018);
Ned Blackhawk and Isaiah Lorado Wilner, eds., "Indigenous Visions: Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas" (Yale University Press, 2018);
Regna Darnell, Michelle Hamilton, Robert Hancock, and Joshua Smith, eds., "Franz Boas as Public Intellectual—Theory, Ethnography, Activism" (The Franz Boas Papers I; University of Nebraska Press, 2015);
Michel Espagne and Isabel Kalinowski, eds., "Franz Boas: Le Travail du Regard" (Armand Colin, 2013)

El presente trabajo se propone analizar los con-ceptos de “civilización” y “barbarie” que subyacen al “debatede Valladolid” en el siglo
XVI, a la luz del pensamiento crítico de América Latina (Modernidad / Colonialidad). Re-visando y sintetizando parte de la literatura existente, se demostrará que los argumentos de Bartolomé de LasCasas, y aquellos que defendían abiertamente la dignidad de los nativos, constituían un “encubrimiento” de la “diferencia colonial” como una “diferencia cultural”. Este “encubrimiento”, no sólo servirá como estrategia o mecanismo de justificación y legitimación de la Conquista, y su consecuente dominación y explotación indígena; sino también como una plataforma sobre la que se inscribirá la noción de “civilizar al otro” (o idea de “progreso”) durante el pensamiento ilustrado de los siglos XVII y XVIII.

In recent years, several works have been published on the history of anthropology in specific national contexts (e.g., Stocking 1974, 1995; Kuklick 1991; Barth et al. 2005; Ranzmaier 2011) but little on the history of anthropology in Portugal—and the exceptions have largely been written from and for the Portuguese community (e.g., Areia and Rocha 1985; Branco 1986; Pereira 1986, 1998; Pina-Cabral 1991; Leal 2000, 2006; Roque 2001; Santos 2005; Sobral 2007; Matos 2013). Even then, with the exception of some authors such as Guimarães (1995), Pereira(1998),Roque(2001),Santos(2005),andmyownwork(Matos 2013), it has been uncommon for Portuguese anthropologists and historians to recognize the existence of a distinct school of anthropology connected to the city of Porto, originating with the Portuguese Society of Anthropology and Ethnology (spae, Sociedade Portuguesa de Antropologia e Etnologia) and its legacy. This chapter intends, therefore , to contribute to a more inclusive international history of anthropology , as suggested by Richard Handler (2000), who reminded us of the need to interpret past anthropological practices in relation to specific historical and cultural moments.

This article seeks to add to the exploration and development of Imperial History’s contribution to the discipline of International Relations (IR). Focusing on British perceptions of Afghanistan in the period preceding the first Anglo-Afghan war the article considers colonial knowledge as a source of identity construction, but in a manner that avoids deploying anachronistic concepts, in this case that of the Afghan ‘state’. This approach, which draws on the insights brought to IR by historical sociology, shows that engaging with Imperial History within IR can encourage a more reflexive attitude to core disciplinary categories. This not only reveals alternative approaches to the construction of specific political communities but it also allows for a more historicist mode in the use of history by IR as a discipline. Furthermore, by moving away from material based purely on diplomatic history, Afghanistan’s imperial encounter can be recovered from the dominance of ‘Great Game’ narratives, offering an account that is more appreciative of the Afghanistan context.

Abstract: There is no accepted, unified, politico-economic theory of development. In critical development studies, there is a general agreement that two counter-posing theories of political economy, modernization and dependency, were most prominent in the three decades following World War II. Both of these schools of thought fell out of popularity in the mid-1970s, though some of their core temporal and spatial assumptions live on today. In Section One of this paper, I analytically reflect on the modernization/dependency debate to lay a foundation for a discussion in Section Two on the timing of development and of modernity. Timing is an area of debate that goes to the heart of modernization and dependency theories, development practice, and critical development studies. World-systems analysis (WSA) is one of the approaches involved in the space/time debate in critical development studies. In Section Three, the final analytic section, I explore WSA as a school of thought currently in vogue in critical development studies, though not without some controversy. I show that WSA's theory of the subject is Eurocentric.

A census is an example of the social construction of knowledge and the politics of measurement. Measuring people assumes a political significance because it entails converting heterogeneous populations into numbers – stable pieces of knowledge that can be easily combined and manipulated. In constructing such numerical representations, census officials claim to be creating an objective portrait of the population. Censuses, however, also contribute to something less tangible by playing a key role in the creation of what Benedict Anderson has termed an " imagined community. " 1 General censuses provide states with a unique opportunity to unify space and populations with a single instrument. Furthermore, in their quest to secure a statistical portrait of what their polity " is " census officials shape the resultant outcome on the basis of categories derived from their own conceptions of what their polity has been. Measurers' agendas and biases become objecti-fied in the construction of the census form, the creation of census categories, and the publication of census data. The census-taking component of the imagining process is itself divided between central census administrators (those who create census forms, rules for their completion, etc.) and census workers in the field – local census authorities and enumerators whose own conceptions of what is being counted intrude into the interpretation of rules

A visit to the St. Sophia of Istanbul is like a visit to the nearly 2000 year old history of the city itself. The church is one the finest & most famous examples of Byzantine architecture in the world. It is located in the heart of old Istanbul, next to the also famous Blue Mosque, in the Sultan Ahmet Square of Istanbul. The above photograph above shows the actual view of the Hagia Sophia Church Museum (Aya Sofya Muzesi) as it appears in Istanbul today. Four minarets have been added to Hagia Sophia, after the Ottomans captured Constantinople at 1453 and converted the building from a church into the mosque. Today, Saint Sophia is neither a Church nor a Mosque, but a museum that is open to the public. The Hagia Sophia was built as a Constantinian Church by the emperor Justinian I, between A.D. 532 and 537 and at the time, it was estimated to be the largest covered space in the world. Its architects were Isidore of Miletus and Anthemius of Tralles. It was built in only five years. On May 558, the dome of the church collapsed due to a December 557 earthquake, and though a new dome was quickly rebuilt afterwards.Hagia Sophia is a Greek phrase that means 'Holy Wisdom'. This ancient basilica was also called Saint Sophia. The Turks call it 'Aya Sofya Muzesi' (Hagia Sophia Museum) or in short, Ayasofya. After its construction ended, Hagia Sophia served as a Church for the following nine centuries, until  Constantinople was invaded and taken over by the Ottomans on the 29th of May, 1453. After this date, the Hagia Sophia was converted into a mosque.
Then in 1935, during the first years of the Republic of Turkey, the Mosque was secularized and made into a museum under the direction of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the Turkish Republic.    It became a national museum, as it remains today.