This blog post looks at a nineteenth-century primary source in Chinese from Batavia (present-day Jakarta) in the Netherlands Indies. The legal document which can be seen here recorded the pleas and ruling by the Chinese Council of Batavia in 1874. In the 1870s, the Chinese population in Batavia comprised slightly more than 20% of population of the Dutch colonial capital city. The bulk of the population were of course Javanese. There were also other Indonesians, as well as Arabs, Jews and Europeans. They were all bound by Dutch colonial rule, but possessed different degrees of autonomy with
Coloniazation, Empire, and Nationalism Reading List
Africa (Books)
Appiah, Anthony, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture
Bills, Scott, The Libyan Arena: The United States, Britain, and the Council of Foreign Ministers, 1945-1948
Boahen, A. Adu, African Perspectives on Colonialism
Coombes, Annie E., Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture, and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England
Cooper, Frederick, Africa Since 1940: The Past of the Present (New Approaches to African History)
Curtin, Philip D., Disease and Empire: The Health of European Troops in the
Andrew Thompson
Director, Centre for Imperial & Global History, University of Exeter
Cross-posted from the Imperial & Global Forum
‘Globalization’ is among the biggest intellectual challenges facing the humanities and the social sciences today. It is a concept that conveys the sense that we are living in an age of transformation, where change is the only constant, nothing can be taken for granted, and no-one knows what the future might bring. But globalization is also much more than that. To borrow the phrase of the historical sociologist, Mike Savage, it is an ‘epoch description’, something that