Across Colonial Lines

This collection takes a multi-perspective approach in the study of empire and commodities beyond temporal and spatial boundaries. From early modern Venetian trade to tea in the Eurasian world, the role of gold in Portuguese imperial ambitions and British sailors as traders, Across Colonial Lines uses commodity networks as a lens to study empire and the links between them. Offering a comparative understanding of the movement of commodities across the British, French, Dutch, Portuguese and Venetian empires, it demonstrates the impact of commodity production, consumption and movement on colonial and post-colonial societies. It further explores the nexus between the local and the global to consider the role played by individual producers, petty traders, sailors and the consumer in creating regional circulations and a wider global political economy. Re-examining 'commodities' and highlighting the interwoven character of multiple commodity networks to explain both the trade and fiscal aspects of imperialism alongside its ideology, governance and knowledge production, each chapter takes an individual commodity to illuminate the history of commodity transmission within trans-imperial contexts. They show how these networks shaped traditions of knowledge production, social organisation, political control and even impetus to globalisation from as early as the 13th century.

Across Colonial Lines takes a multi-perspective approach to the study of empire and commodities, and encourages readers to look at commodity histories in alternative spatial and temporal contexts. It offers a comparative understanding of commodities in the Venetian, Portuguese, Dutch, French and British Empires. Highlighting the interwoven character of multiple commodity networks, this book situates commodities like gold, coffee, tea and indigo, to name a few, within pre-existing networks of labour, consumption and knowledge production. It explores the nexus between the local and the global, and highlights the role played by individual producers, petty traders, sailors and even consumers in creating regional circulations within a global political economy. In this volume, commodity networks are not just sites of production and trade, but also of political control, social organisation and consumption choices. They provide the impetus for globalisation from as early as the thirteenth century. Each chapter takes an individual commodity to illustrate the history of commodity transmission within imperial contexts. From early modern Venetian commerce to the trade networks of the Eurasian world; from the trading ambitions of British sailors to Portuguese global imperial ambitions; from the cross-imperial knowledge networks of indigo to the assertion of indigenous agency in Angola; and from the commodification of labour to the experience of tourism in the Caribbean and Indian Ocean World, Across Colonial Lines uses commodity networks as a lens to study empire building across varied yet connected geographies and chronologies.

"In 1949, revolutionary women from Asia who fought colonial occupation and patriarchal oppression gathered in Beijing for the Asian Women's Conference. Together, they drew from their experiences to develop a political strategy for women's internationalism that sought to end imperialism and build socialism. Connected with the Women's International Democratic Federation, women from Latin America, the Caribbean, and North, West, and Southern Africa also joined the conversation before the rise of Afro-Asian solidarity movements gained the name. Their strategy for internationalism demanded that women from occupying colonial nations contest imperialism with the same dedication as women whose countries were occupied"--

Centering on cases of sexual violence, this book illuminates the contested introduction of British and French colonial criminal justice in the Pacific Islands during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, focusing on Fiji, New Caledonia, and Vanuatu/New Hebrides. It foregrounds the experiences of Indigenous Islanders and indentured laborers in the colonial court system, a space in which marginalized voices entered the historical record. Rape and sexual assault trials reveal how hierarchies of race, gender and status all shaped the practice of colonial law in the courtroom and the gendered experiences of colonialism. Trials provided a space where men and women narrated their own story and at times challenged the operation of colonial law. Through these cases, Gender, Violence and Criminal Justice in the Colonial Pacific highlights the extent to which colonial bureaucracies engaged with and affected private lives, as well as the varied ways in which individuals and communities responded to such intrusions and themselves reshaped legal practices and institutions in the Pacific. With bureaucratic institutions unable to deal with the complex realities of colonial lives, Stevens reveals how the courtroom often became a theatrical space in which authority was performed, deliberately obscuring the more complex and violent practices that were central to both colonialism and colonial law-making. Exploring the intersections of legal pluralism and local pragmatism across British and French colonialization in the Pacific, this book shows how island communities and early colonial administrators adopted diverse and flexible approaches towards criminal justice, pursuing alternative forms of justice ranging from unofficial courts to punitive violence in order to deal with cases of sexual assault.