Looking for Indigenous Agency in the Archives

This week, I presented my MA portfolio for the Public History Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The event, which has taken the place of the Department’s old comprehensive exams, was a great chance to talk about the work I’ve done in the program, including this blog, over the last two and a half years. It was also an opportunity to articulate how Kathryn Burns’ book, Into the Archives: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru has helped me think about some of my other work as a graduate student on nineteenth-century slave revolts.

Indigenous Knowledge and Colonial Cartography

It would be easy to start my post this week with a snide remark about academics who are not historians writing history. But there's something to be said for generosity in scholarly writing, and the critique of others' scholarly writing, so I'll set my snide remarks aside. In Cartographic Encounters: Indigenous Peoples and the Exploration of the New World John Rennie Short has pulled together a fascinating body of evidence, and convinced me that there's plenty of readily accessible documents that attest to the presence of Native Americans along side the Europeans, and eventually Americans, who explored North America.

Talking Past the Archives: Oral History and Colonial Categories

Though I didn't know that Ann Stoler's book would be the place where I found it, I've been waiting to read something like Stoler's chapter, “Memory Work in Java: A Cautionary Tale” all semester. As an Americanist who studies slavery, I'm interested in the question of how slaves survived and made sense of the experience of enslavement. In the context of a course on Comparative Empire, this has translated into an interest in how scholars of colonialism approach the colonized, and how the perspective of colonized people is–or fails to be–captured in scholarship of the colonial.

Where Have all the Amerindians Gone? Indigenous Knowledge in Canizares-Esguerra's New History of Science

Ok – maybe it's not fair to suggest that Amerindians make no appearance in Jorge Canizares-Esguerra's collection of essays, Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World. And it would be ungenerous to dismiss the historographical work that Canizares-Esquerra accomplishes in such a slim volume. But reading Nature, Empire, and Nation in close proximity with books like Nicholas Thomas' Islanders: The Pacific in the Age of Empire, it's hard to ignore the discrete boundaries of Canizares-Esguerra's study: Europeans and their decedents in the New World populate his pages. Amerindians, at least as historical agents rather than objects of study or scientific theorizing, do not.

Nature, Empire, Genocide? Struggling with Robins

Mercury, Mining, and Empire: The Human and Ecological Cost of Colonial Silver Mining in the Andes weaves together global and local stories of Spain's conquest in South America. Historian Nicholas A. Robins connects the demand for silver from New Spain with the very local environmental affects of silver and mercury mining on two towns in present day Bolivia and Peru. Robins characterizes his book as “a socio-ecological history which explores the noxious interrelationships between mercury and silver production, urban environments, and the people who lived and worked in them” (4).

In the late sixteenth century, the administrators of Spain's empire in South America increased the colony's output of silver by implementing an ancient refining technique at an industrial scale. Mercury and silver were mined, combined, and refined to keep up with global demand for silver. Much of the raw materials (silver and mercury) necessary for these processes cane from two towns, Huancavelica and Potosí.

What's in a Name? Likaka on Names and Naming in African Colonial History

Charles Van de Lanoitte was a Belgian colonial administrator in the Congo in the 1930s. The Congolese villagers in the district where he was a tax collector knew Van de Lanoitte by a more sinister name: Tshoma-Tshoma or “he who burns people.” Osumaka Likaka open his monograph, Naming Colonialism: History and Collective Memory in the Congo, 1870 – 1960 with an epigraph from Van de Lanoitte, and later uses Van de Lanoitte as an example of a colonial official who understood and exploited the power of a violent reputation embodied in his Congolese name. By taking full advantage of his reputation as an official who inflicted devastating violence on the villagers in region, Van de Lanoitte was able to achieve his colonial ends – in this case tax collection - without continuing to exercise violence.

Should Nicholas Thomas Write More about Today's Islander?

Islanders: The Pacific in the Age of Empire draws together vignettes, voyages, and historical figures from islands throughout the Pacific, from Easter Island and Hawaii to New Guinea and New Zealand, and examines the long nineteenth century, from the 1790s to the 1900s. The book is not, as its author Nicholas Thomas makes clear, a comprehensive history of European colonization in the Pacific, but is instead an argument about “the kind of dealings that shaped the colonial relationships and cultures which emerged in the Pacific during the nineteenth century” (25).

Thomas argues that the European exploration and subsequent colonization of the Pacific islands was not a unilateral domination of primitive, static societies. Instead, Europeans encountered people whose political and cultural lives had long included travel and exchange between islands, as well as travel beyond the boundaries of the Pacific. Islanders incorporated the presence of Europeans into inter- and intra-island conflict, adopted and adapted European material culture, and traveled to Europe, bringing their regional agendas with them. Without denying the violence and destruction that accompanied the nineteenth colonization of the Pacific, Thomas demonstrates that island societies “had long had dealings with people who were more or less unlike themselves” (13).