By James Halcrow Kulangsu (Gulangyu) Island was host to Amoy’s (modern day Xiamen, in the Fujian Province, China) foreign resident community during the long nineteenth century. The port city had been forcibly opened to Western trading at the end of the First Opium War in 1842. By 1900, a population of around 280 foreign residents […]
By Eva Ward Contemporary drug laws in the Philippines are primarily associated with the draconian policies of the current government. However, long before Duterte, the United States took control of the Philippines following the Spanish-American War and instituted drug regulations that were also quite strict by their standards of their colonial contemporaries. The end of […]
By Niels Boender The sudden ubiquitousness of debates about historical memory, driven by important awakenings regarding systematic injustices, have thrust historians to the centre of what is now popularly called ‘the culture wars’. This offers an opportunity for historians to share their findings in ways that palpably impact understandings of global and national histories, as […]
By Emma Wordsworth Food, despite being both a biological necessity and a symbolic cultural touchstone, has only recently been recognised as a major historical force. As historian David Arnold persuasively argued in 1988, “food was, and continues to be, power in a most basic, tangible, and inescapable form”.[1] Certainly, in the early 1870s, the issue […]
By Joseph Wagner The study of Scottish interactions with the world outside of Europe in the seventeenth century has greatly expanded over the past twenty-five years. It has been galvanised by moving away from a focus on Scotland’s ‘national’ attempts at empire-building, such as the unsuccessful attempts to colonise Nova Scotia in the 1620s and […]
By Nandini Bhattacharya. A difficult summer overlain with the tragedies and vicissitudes of a global pandemic has nonetheless provided moments of hope and unbridled joy. The latter related to the Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion protests in Britain. Of the many soul-stirring moments that BLM raised for me this season, the removal at Bristol […]
By Lauren Brown. The history of the British Empire has long been framed as a heroic, civilising mission that successfully thrust ‘inferior’ societies into modernity. Thankfully, such rose-tinted nostalgia has begun to fade. The Mau Mau Rebellion of 1952-1964 was a particularly brutal period of British colonial history. Fed by decades of anger over the […]