Introduction: Empires and Emotions

Fischer–Tiné, Harald; Whyte, Christine

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-45136-7_1

Cited by 7 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…Between August 1851 and early 1852, rumours circulated among Cape farmers that ex-slave and Khoesan workers planned a violent revolt to reclaim land by murdering landowners and their families (Bradlow 1989; Ross 2013: 274–6). Although the rumours proved unfounded, they exposed the anxiety present among white settlers in post-emancipation economies, which were far more vulnerable and less stable than they may at first appear (Fischer-Tine and Whyte 2016). In November 1851, the former superintendent of the Tygervalley convict station, John Short, now stationed at Bain’s Kloof pass, dealt with a conspiracy by three convicts to liberate their fellow inmates in order to join a prophesied rebellion across the Boland region.…”

Section: The Escapementioning

confidence: 99%

Murder in a quarry: violent encounters and distant intimacy on a Cape convict station

Holdridge

2024

Africa

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This article uses a micro-historical approach to examine an escape and murder among convict labourers between Cape Town and Stellenbosch in Southern Africa in the 1840s. It does so to demonstrate how imperial mobilities and legal conceptions of property crime were interconnected within settler colonial capital and the intimacies of colonial social worlds. Reforms in penal practice in the British Empire – in this instance, adopted in the Cape Colony from Tasmanian experiments in convict labour and moral improvement – formed part of post-abolition shifts in labour control and the management of the itinerant poor, increasingly guided by anxieties over race. Michael O’Brien, the murderer, was a suspected escaped convict from Australia, who claimed to have survived violent encounters in the Pacific as a missionary. His narrative contrasts with the predominantly regional mobilities and crimes of the other Cape convicts – notably stock theft and petty robbery – that occurred in the contested spaces of law, colonialism and property. This article discusses convict narratives around crime and redemption across a maritime empire, and the affective relations of coercion and care between convicts, overseers, constables and superintendents on the smaller scale of a convict station. It further contends that changes in criminal justice and governance in Southern Africa were thus contingent on the intimacies of scale and affect, on connections between the local, the global and the biographical.

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Section: The Escapementioning

confidence: 99%

Murder in a quarry: violent encounters and distant intimacy on a Cape convict station

Holdridge

2024

Africa

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“…19On imperial anxiety, see Reinkowski and Thum, Helpless Imperialists ; Peckham, Empires of Panic ; Condos, Insecurity State ; Fischer-Tiné, Anxieties, Fear and Panic ; Wagner, Amritsar 1919. …”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Press the thumb onto the eye”: Moral Effect, Extreme Violence, and the Transimperial Notions of British, German, and Dutch Colonial Warfare, ca. 1890–1914

Menger¹

2022

Itinerario

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Historiography on the extreme violence of fin de siècle colonial wars has often remained nationally fragmented or actively invested in theories of national exceptionality. Focusing on the British, German and Dutch empires, this article seeks to understand the extreme violence as a transimperial phenomenon and asks how we can conceptualise and give empirical substance to this transimperial dimension. First, I give some indication of the degree of transimperial connectivity in the field of colonial warfare, highlighting how intensive mutual imperial observation and the individual mobility of actors fed knowledge into what Kamissek and Kreienbaum have called an “imperial cloud.” Secondly, I argue that a transimperial body of thought behind the extreme violence can be discerned on the level of colonial warfare's racialisation and the resulting specific communicative and performative aspects. Drawing on fin de siècle manuals of colonial warfare and a selection of case studies, I take the transimperial notion of “moral effect” to demonstrate how such basic notions both generated and legitimised extreme violence in colonial warfare.

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“…50 In addition to the prominence of imperial violence, historians have recently emphasized the degree to which the trajectories of modern colonial empires were shaped by anxiety, fear and panics. 51 Indeed, the British regime in colonial India has been recently characterized as an 'insecurity state.' 52 Ghosh's detailed and penetrating analysis of revolutionary autobiographies and Maclean's insightful exploration of the vast quantities of visual and print literature produced about Bhagat Singh and the HSRA demonstrate the tremendous appeal of the revolutionaries to the Indian public and the ways in which revolutionary politics impacted the mainstream of Indian nationalism.…”

Section: Michael Silvestrimentioning

confidence: 99%

New histories of political violence and revolutionary terrorism in modern South Asia

Amstutz

Elam²,

Choudhury³

et al. 2019

South Asian History and Culture

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This book round table discusses two recent monographs on political violence and revolutionary terrorism in late colonial India, Kama Maclean's A Revolutionary History of Interwar India: Violence, Image, Voice and Text (2015) and Durba Ghosh's Gentlemanly Terrorists: Political Violence and the Colonial State in India, 1919India, -1947India, (2017. Maclean's A Revolutionary History of Interwar India uncovers how revolutionaries in Punjab and northern India reshaped the goals and tactics of the Indian independence movement, especially the policy of nonviolence. Ghosh's Gentlemanly Terrorists explores the relationship of political violence in Bengal to the development of the modern nation-state in India. Both Ghosh and Maclean rethink the conventional narrative of the Indian freedom struggle and connect local developments in South Asia to global trends in anticolonial resistance and to larger conversations about the relationship between democracy and surveillance. In the five review essays, Daniel Elam, Rishad Choudhury, Mou Banerjee, Rohit De, and Michael Silvestri assess the impact of these two monographs on South Asian history, legal studies, histories of religion, studies of anticolonial movements, and British imperial historiography. In their responses, Maclean and Ghosh assess the challenges of writing histories of revolutionaries in the present in relation to the anticipated futures of the revolutionaries themselves.

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Introduction: Empires and Emotions

Cited by 7 publications

References 26 publications

Murder in a quarry: violent encounters and distant intimacy on a Cape convict station

Murder in a quarry: violent encounters and distant intimacy on a Cape convict station

“Press the thumb onto the eye”: Moral Effect, Extreme Violence, and the Transimperial Notions of British, German, and Dutch Colonial Warfare, ca. 1890–1914

New histories of political violence and revolutionary terrorism in modern South Asia

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