The Developing Dream

how do nations negotiate with modernity? What lessons can be learned? How should we reinvent journalism?

[developingdream]

Rather than using ‘political society’ and ‘civil society’ as concepts referring to pre-eminently divided domains, it is useful, then, to return to a focus on the production of this division, which, under the global dominance of finance capital, has become increasingly salient (Smith 2011). For hegemony under neoliberal-ism is particularly ‘selective’, resting on manipulating distinctions among the population (Smith 2014: 194). Hence, public politics in general tends to become ‘a frantic arena for the negotiation of selection’ (Smith 2011)

Luisa Steur, Theorizing Thervoy

[developingdream]

Certainly forced labour was the most important causative factor in the collapse of the imperial Merina economy in the early 1890s. It thus indirectly laid the basis for the French takeover. More directly, desertion from the imperial army –itself a form of fanompoana (always unremunerated) –guaranteed the success of the French troops in 1895.  Moreover, when the French declared a protectorate that maintained a highly unpopular Merina regime, a massive revolt erupted in which one of the key rebel targets was not the French, but the Merina state church structure used to implement fanompoana.  Ethiopia forms a contrasting case study. Its ability to retain independence during the European scramble for Africa has conventionally been attributed to its remote mountainous terrain. However, this did not prevent major trade routes operating for centuries across highland Ethiopia, or a successful British invasion in 1868. Similarly, the Merina, who believed that natural factors, notably malaria in the lowlands, and a thickly forested and steep eastern escarpment, would deter foreign invasion, were ultimately conquered by the French. Some Western observers underscored Ethiopia’s superior (paler skinned) non- African and “Christian” culture as a core element in preserving its independence, but again, the Merina were also considered nonAfrican, and in 1869 converted to Christianity. ... unlike Egypt and Imerina, where soldiers increasingly sought to evade military conscription, or even rebel,Ethiopian soldiers, for the most part, remained loyal to the imperial regime. Moreover, they used their military superiority to ruthlessly suppress dissent from colonised peoples such as the Oromo. Indeed, anti- imperial revolt in Ethiopia manifested itself only from the 1960s.

Gwyn Campbel, The Scramble for Indian Ocean Africa

[developingdream]

the 1821 Egyptian conquest of the Funj sultanate of Sennar, in the north of Sudan, and the forcible levying of slaves in Sudan in 1822– 3, led Sudanese slave- owners to revolt. The indigenous IOA aristocracy did experience crisis, but it had less to do with anti- slave trade measures, commodity prices, or superior European military technology, than a combination of misguided domestic policies and environmental factors. ... There is clear evidence that the economic and expansionist policies adopted by the Egyptian and Merina regimes backfired to the extent that they undermined their economies and caused widespread domestic hostility to the ruling regime. First, their attempts to industrialise failed. Had they succeeded and a modern industrial sector been created based on free wage labour, the story could have been very different. However, both states relied on the unfree labour of mostly unpaid peasant farmers for their factories and workshops, infrastructural improvements, and cash crop production. Growing peasant animosity to the state- run forced labour regime (called fanompoana in Madagascar) was one of the chief reasons for the failure of the industrial experiment in Egypt and Madagascar. Also economically damaging was the erosion of the traditionally strong artisan class due chiefly to state- imposed, sometimes permanent, corvée labour. This crushed individual enterprise and pushed artisans into abandoning their trades. Most serious of all, a deepening crisis developed in the agricultural sector as peasants were coerced into the army, factories, or other state enterprises, or fl ed the land to avoid forced labour and other taxes. demands made by Egyptian forces upon nomadic Arabs in the border region with Ethiopia,north of Khartoum,provoked revolt by the nomads. Mek Nimmur, one of the nomad leaders, fl ed to Ethiopia from where, every dry season,he launched cross- border attacks on Egyptians as, after his death, did his son and namesake. These confrontations led to much of the Ethiopian borderlands in Kordofan- Darfur and Darfur- Wadai becoming depopulated and hence uncultivated. Similarly, Egyptian raids south of Bahr al- Ghazal, in Sudan, for cattle, ivory, and slaves, aroused great local animosity. Indeed, due to imperial expansionism, the Egyptian army found itself increasingly overstretched.

[developingdream]

For [Ranajit] Guha, while there can be no proper understanding of this "pure" state after the advent of colonialism, it can be understood somewhat better in histories of peasant resistance to dominance and subordination in colonial India prior to the emergence of the politics of nationalism, variants and vagaries of state socialism, and the strange clamor for the "free market" in late twentieth-century India.

Deeptanil Ray (Sree Chaitanya College) reviews Cultivating Community: Interests, Identity, and  Ambiguity in an Indian Social Mobilization

[developingdream]

How, for instance, are we to understand the real importance and efficacy of academic critique in the politics of development? Considering how central the project of critique is to many academics who work on development we have remarkably little understanding of what it actually accomplishes. Clearly critique is not as all-powerful a force as we might like to believe. (Consider only how little difference the academic-theoretical destruction of ‘‘modernization theory’’ seems to have had on the practices of many development agencies, where practitioners assure us it remains alive and well.) Yet it is equally clear that what happens in the domain of academic critique is not wholly cut off from the wider world, either. What kinds of flows exist, linking academic theories and knowledges to the world of agencies, policies, and practical politics? What does this mean for the tactics of a critical intellectual activity that seeks to participate in the crucial political struggles surrounding the governing and managing of what has come to be called ‘‘the Third World’’?

James Ferguson, The Anthropology of Development and Globalization

[developingdream]

the discipline itself was historically constituted as the ‘‘science of ‘less developed’ peoples,’’ and although the social evolutionist underpinnings of this conception have eroded during the 20th century, it remains relevant to anthropology’s place in the academic division of labor (Ferguson, this volume). Anthropological discomfort with development, Ferguson argues, does not signal the discipline’s critical distance from it but rather its uncomfortable intimacy with development.

The Anthropology of Development and Globalization

[developingdream]

Afaf Marsot: "to listen to a good chanter [of the Quran] is a universal treat," ... "it was the one of the few means at the fallah's disposal which was not censored, punished, taxed, or confiscated, unlike everything else he owned."

Quoted in the Voice of Egypt

[developingdream]

The process [Foucault] described in The History of Sexuality (1978)—the process of naming something as “sexual”—was fundamentally the process of European colonialism in non-European worlds from the sixteenth century itself. When Spanish Catholics encountered Andean ritual specialists (tinkuy), they described them as “sodomites” (Horswell 2005). An identical move occurred in India between the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when revered tantric warrior-priests, merchants, and Sufi Muslim stewards of treasuries (khwajaserais) were all reduced to being “eunuchs” (Chatterjee 1999a, forthcoming).

Indrani Chatterjee, When “Sexuality” Floated Free of Histories in South Asia

[developingdream]

Across its colonies, protectorates, and informal spheres of influence, Britain defined its own judicial authority as territorial while classifying non-European laws as personal, a rubric that promised to discipline plural legal regimes into clear and consistent hierarchies. This terminology drew on an emerging body of scholarship on the historical development of European law. One of the most influential scholars in this field, Friedrich Carl von Savigny, argued that after the fall of the Roman Empire, the Germanic tribes that invaded Europe allowed the inhabitants to retain their own laws, fostering a system in which laws attached to persons, rather than to territory. 19 In Europe, according to von Savigny, territorial law gradually replaced personal law because of increasing interaction between different peoples and the unifying force of Christianity, which had “thrown their characteristic differences more and more into the background.” 20 In contrast, legal historicists such as von Savigny often cited the Ottoman Empire and India, where different communities enjoyed a considerable degree of legal autonomy, as contemporary examples of personal law.

Julia Stephens, An Uncertain Inheritance 2014

[developingdream]

In both India and the Ottoman Empire, Britain deployed the twinned concepts of territorial and personal law to assert British paramountcy. A substantial body of scholar-ship has charted the rising influence of territoriality during the nineteenth century, as European nations at home and in their empires centralized law within geographically bounded spaces, displacing the more plural legal orders that had dominated the early-modern world.10 Far less attention, however, has been paid to how these new discourses of territoriality relied on juxtaposing European territorial sovereignty against the supposed personal sovereignty of non-European powers. Where a single uniform legal system was impossible, Britain relied on the distinction between territorial and personal law to reorder the overlapping legal jurisdictions they inherited from the Mughals and Ottomans into clear hierarchies and divisions. By promising that these newly ordered legal systems would deliver certainty in the place of arbitrary “Oriental” justice, Britain justified increasingly aggressive legal interventions in its colonies and informal spheres of influence. However, as the legal disputes over the Awadh inheritances make clear, when we shift from a birds-eye perspective of this legal landscape to an in-depth analysis of how cases unfolded in practice, this vision of certainty unravels into dynamics of uncertainty. Consular courts in Iraq and courts in India competed for jurisdiction over the estates, while Ottoman and British officials squabbled over who was responsible for administering the property.

Julia Stephens, an Uncertain Inheritance. Law and History Review, November 2014

[developingdream]

Syrians come to Lebanon, where wages are several times higher than at home, determined to improve their lot in life. ... Migrants seek also to raise capital for land or a small business in Syria, as they are expected to do back home. As Radwan, a supermarket worker from Aleppo, relates: “When I…go to Syria, they don’t say to me, what did you eat, what did you drink. [Instead they ask] how much money did you bring?” Workers know the stigma associated with failure: only the “zeroes” or “less-than-zeroes” stay behind, said one. In order to compete, Syrians have to be willing to be sweated in labor-intensive, low-wage, exhausting and insecure work. Employers emphasize that they take on Syrians because they are cheaper and cause fewer problems than less hard-working and more regulated Lebanese. As Abu ‘Uthman puts it, “We work Sunday, seven days a week, without stopping. Therefore, I want a worker who is willing to sacrifice himself.” Hours are long, holiday and night work is the norm, breaks are infrequent and workers can be fired at any time without compensation. Work can be dangerous and is largely unregulated. Written contracts are absent, as is social insurance. Armange, from Aleppo, who worked in both radiography and decorating, was asked if employers offered him accident insurance. He replied, “No. And we don’t even ask…. All we care about is [getting] the work…. If we asked [about insurance], the employer would say, are you here to work or to flirt?”

http://www.merip.org/mer/mer236/specters-disciplined-commodities

[developingdream]

As early as the seventeenth century, French Catholic missionaries began their proselytizing activities among these Christian communities. They succeeded in making converts because the French king had acquired from the Ottoman court the right to protect all the Sultan's Catholic subjects. Many Armenians were converted, and the westernmost half of the Assyrians. The latter converts were called Kaldani (Chaldaeans) after their conversion. In the 1830s, British and American missionaries started to work among the Assyrians who had remained Nestorians. This contributed to the exacerbation of tension between Christians and Muslims and was not unrelated to the massacres of Nestorians a few years later

Martin van Bruinessen, Agha, Shaikh and State

[developingdream]

Rumors swept through the countryside in the fall of 1865 that Christmas would bring a “Jubilee” in which past wrongs would be made right and the land turned over to its legitimate inheritors. As with other millenarianisms, the dreamed-of future amounted to a political demand in the present. And what freedpeople demanded was a transformation in the structure of Southern society. They believed that through federal action or, barring that, armed black insurrection, ex-slaves could gain control of the land they had worked and lived on. In the words of one black farmer (quoted in Steven Hahn’s history A Nation under Our Feet), “Our wives, our children, our husbands, has been sold over and over again to purchase the lands we now locates on,” and for this reason, “We has a right to [that] land.” After all, “Didn’t we clear the land and raise de crops. . . . And den didn’t dem large cities in de North grow up on de cotton and de sugars and de rice dat we made?”

Race and the American Creed https://nplusonemag.com/issue-24/politics/race-and-the-american-creed/

[developingdream]

“a minority of waqfs gave women larger inheritances than they would otherwise have had, and some women were waqf trustees, again indicating significant variations.”

Shiism and Social Protest, chapter on sexuality

[developingdream]

They may opt for jobs in self-employed activities rather than working under ... the modern workplace; resorting to informal dispute resolution rather than reporting to police; getting married through local informal procedures (in the Middle East under local sheikhs) rather than by governmental offices; borrowing money from informal credit associations rather than modern banks. This is so not because these people are essentially non- or anti-modern, but because the conditions of their existence compel them to seek an informal mode of life. For modernity is a costly affair; not everyone can afford to be modern. ... In their quest for security, the poor then are in constant negotiation and vacillation between autonomy and integration. Yet they continue to pursue autonomy in any possible space available within the integrating structures and processes.

Asef Bayat

[developingdream]

'India,' during the half-millenium before the colonial conquest, may best be seen as situated at a vital junction point between three 'networks of trade and civilization' reaching much beyond its shores: first linking its West coast to Arabia and the Levant, the second its North-West to Central Asia and Iran; and the third its South-East to South-East Asia. (K.N. chaudhuri) … Each represented dense flows of peoples, goods and ideas--often in both directions--which contributed to the extraordinary pluralism of Indian societies and the material richness of their civilizations. From the West and North-west came Islam, the Persian wheel, systems of commercial and state organisation, several different military technologies and vast quantities of silver. From the East came copper, areca nut, silk, spices and large quantities of gold. What returned in all directions was many things but above all, cotton cloth. Until the 16th century, except indirectly, the Europeans were scarcely part of this Asian world and, until the eighteenth century, they remained in awe of its wealth and power, particularly expressed through its imperial traditions.

[developingdream]

An interesting and short video made by history graduate student Vincent Chen, on the the political (self-)representations of Robert Shirley (1581-1628), based on his conference paper. Shirley, though born in a British family, attempted to compete with the East Indian Company through serving as a Persian diplomat. He put in much efforts, such as commissioning artwork and plays about himself, in order for others to be convinced of his claims and representations. In the concluding remarks, Chen connects these competing claims to authenticity with new ideas of self-hood inspired by the Renaissance.