Figure 1 - Work in progress at Ain Shems (Beth Shemesh)

 

Chloe Emmott

PhD Candidate, University of Greenwich

 

Photographs of archaeology allow us to examine the visual language of the colonial hierarchies which underpinned the development of archaeology as a discipline. The Mandate system placed Britain in a role of colonial tutelage and guidance over Palestine. As part of this, archaeology was encouraged by the British, and the Mandate era saw a large number of extensive excavations undertaken by teams, mostly from Europe the US. Whilst many Palestinians worked on archaeological sites, their

Rhys Owens

Department of History, Swansea University

Welsh imperialism existed. It was not as prominent as its English and Scottish counterparts, and its participants not as numerous. But setting forth into the world as an integral part of British imperialism, colonial peoples directly experienced its complexities and contradictions.

Like all imperialism, it took many forms. Most familiar to the historian of empire will be its missionaries, influencing and disrupting indigenous cultures in the North-East of India, especially among the Khasi and Lushai, or Mizo as the latter are more properly

Northern Slavery Under the British and French Empires

Aaron Ackerley Blog Post

Chris J. Gismondi,

McGill University

Slavery in North America conjures up images of West Indies plantations or the American south, but its presence in northern sites is noteworthy and under examined. This amnesia is despite Rhode Island’s role as a major hub of the slave trade by the mid-eighteenth century. Figures like Sue fleeing James Clark in Niagara, laboured, toiled, and resisted systems of slavery without cash crops, but served and provided for enslavers in cold, isolated, frontier settlements. Although various regions from Mexico to Canada at different times enslaved both Indigenous


 

Bryan McClure

Department of History, Western University

 

Marking the entrance of Jubilee Park in the town of Te Puke in Bay of Plenty, Aotearoa (New Zealand) stands a twelve-foot tall marble arch. Writing on the pillars in English and Te Rao identifies it as a war memorial to Hera Takuira, a young Māori woman who died in 1918. Erected to commemorate one person, the memorial demonstrates the struggles of the Māori to gain recognition from settler communities as their attempts to showcase loyal service did not translate into meaningful action.

Hera was a teenager during the war, the daughter of

Sumit Guha,

Department of History, University of Texas at Austin

 

William Moorcroft (1767-1825) is now mainly remembered as an explorer. But the English East India Company financed his expensive expeditions into Inner Asia with a major strategic goal: securing a large supply of quality war-horses for their empire. He never found these mythic beasts and died on his return journey with only 50 animals. But his obsessions have misled generations of historians. I will show that while the EIC was pursuing this chimera, indigenous South Asian traditions of horse-rearing were allowed to disappear.

Moor

Myriam Yakoubi,

University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès

Clothilde Houot,

Université Paris 1 - Panthéon-Sorbonne

 

"Everybody Middle East is here".[1] This is how, in a letter to his brother Bob, T.E. Lawrence, better known as “Lawrence of Arabia” described the large gathering which met a century ago, from 12 to 30 March 1921. Organized by the British Colonial Secretary, Winston Churchill, its purpose was to reshape Britain’s policy in the Middle East in the wake of the Ottoman defeat in the First World War.

               The Cairo Conference and its legacies will be the subject of a one-day conference

Nicholas Sprenger,

Department of History, Rutgers University

 

In the early 1880s, Ireland was in the midst of a revolution. This was not a conventional revolution like those in Russia and France but was instead a widespread populist movement that sought to transform Irish society. The issue at hand was land—who could own it, how should it be used—and property rights—fixed tenancy, reasonable rents, and an end to arbitrary evictions. These conflicts over land and property were championed by social reformers like Michael Davitt and John Dillon. These activists allied with powerful politicians such

THE-DIZENGOFF-SQUARE-CIRCLE-IN-TEL-AVIV-D403-037

 

David Schorr

Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University

 

Empires are rife with circulation of ideas. But to what extent are the forces that motivate this movement applied from above, by the colonial power, or generated by those living under colonial rule? In an article I recently published in a legal history journal[1] I explored the phenomenon of legal transplantation between local governments in Mandate Palestine, a territory characterized by both colonial rule and intercommunal conflict. Legal transplantation, circulation, or diffusion — the topic has been much written about by legal scholars and

The Politics of Islamic Law

Nurfadzilah Yahaya Blog Post

Welcome to Toronto to those of you at our annual ASLH meeting! Our blogger today is Iza Hussin, Lecturer in Asian Politics and Mohamed Noah Fellow at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge. Her new book, The Politics of Islamic Law: Local Elites, Colonial Authority and the Making of the Muslim State was published by University of Chicago Press earlier this year. Her profile can be found here.

 

 

In his book The Impossible State: Politics, and Modernity's Moral Predicament published in 2013, Wael Hallaq argues that “(t)he political, legal, and cultural struggles of today’s Muslims stem from a

Launch of the Singapore War Crimes Trials Web Portal (http://www.singaporewarcrimestrials.com): Post-WWII justice in Singapore

For better or worse, war crimes trials have become very much part of today’s international legal landscape. This was not always the case. During the Second World War, the Allied Powers discussed different ways of dealing with Axis wartime atrocities, and even considered the summary execution of Axis war criminals before finally deciding to hold war crimes trials. This resulted in the well-known Nuremberg and Tokyo Trials, which tried a select number of high-ranking Axis