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Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in (Post) Colonial Studies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 June 2011

Ann Laura Stoler
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This essay takes as its subject how intimate domains - sex, sentiment, domestic arrangement and child rearing - figure in the making of racial categories and in the management of imperial rule. For some two decades my work on Indonesia's Dutch colonial history has addressed patterns of governance that were particular to that time and place but resonant with practices in a wider global field. My perspective thus is that of an outsider to, but an acquisitive consumer of comparative historical studies, one long struck with the disparate and congruent imperial projects in Asia, Africa and the Americas. This essay invites reflection on those domains of overlap and difference. My interest is more specifically in what Albert Hurtado refers to as ‘the intimate frontiers’ of empire, a social and cultural space where racial classifications were defined and defied, where relations between coloniser and colonised could powerfully confound or confirm the strictures of governance and the categories of rule. Some two decades ago, Sylvia van Kirk urged a focus on such ‘tender ties’ as a way to explore the ‘human dimension’ of the colonial encounter.’ As she showed so well, what Michel Foucault has called these ‘dense transfer point[s]’ of power that generate such ties were sites of production of colonial inequities and, therefore, of tense ties as well. Among students of colonialisms in the last decade, the intimacies of empire have been a rich and well-articulated research domain. A more sustained focus on the relationship between what Foucault refers to as ‘the regimes of truth’ of imperial systems (the ways of knowing and establishing truth claims about race and difference on which macro polities rely) and those micro sites of governance may reveal how these colonial empires compare and converge.

Type
Conference: ‘An Apartheid of Souls’
Information
Itinerario , Volume 27 , Special Issue 3-4: An Apartheid of Souls , November 2003 , pp. 263 - 284
Copyright
Copyright © Research Institute for History, Leiden University 2003

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References

Notes

1 See, for example, Staler, Ann Laura and Cooper, Frederick, ‘Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda’ in: Cooper, Frederick and Staler, Ann Laura eds, Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley 1997) 1–56Google Scholar.

2 Motivation for taking on this task derives from my own pedagogic, political and archival trajectories. The work of feminist scholars and historians of United States labour and race history has informed my approach to race, sexuality and colonial rule since my early ethno-graphic research in North Sumatra in the late 1970s on Goodyear and Uniroyal's vast rubber and oil palm plantations. From this multinational site that was colonial from the start (now the home of Reebok and Nike shoe factories), it was difficult not to see the racial history of United States economic expansion and the racially organised labour systems in the Indies, as overlapping histories. See Staler, Ann Laura, Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra's Plantation Belt, 1870-1979 (Ann Arbor 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Hurtado, Albert, Intimate Frontiers: Sex, Gender and Culture in Old California (Albuquerque 1993)Google Scholar.

4 Kirk, Sylvia Van, Many Tender Ties: Women in the Fur-Trade Society in Western Canada, 1670-1870 (Oklahoma 1983)Google Scholar.

5 Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality 1 (New York 1980) 103Google Scholar.

6 On the notion of ‘regimes of truth’ (and ‘grids of intelligibility’) see the helpful discussion in Dreyfus, Herbert and Rabinow, Paul, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago 1982) 120–121.Google Scholar Sexual and affective intimacies are not the only micro-sites of governance from which to explore the relationship between metropolitan and colonial histories. Studies in public health, histories of deportment, labour, communication and transport provide other nodal points as well. I thank James Vernon for making this point Still I would argue that sexual and affective intimacies are a privileged site and that these other sites turn back on and converge on this intimate domain.

7 Among those who make related arguments but with different emphasis, see Appardurai, Arjun, Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for a Transnational Anthropology, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis 1996) 48–65Google Scholar; and Burton, Antoinette, ‘Introduction: The Unfinished Business of Colonial Modernities’ in: Burton, Antoinette ed., Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Modernities (New York 1999) 1–16Google Scholar.

8 On ‘biopower’ as a political technology focused on individual and aggregate bodies see Foucault, , History of Sexuality, 139–146.Google Scholar For a helpful explication of his historical treatment of biopower see Dreyfus, and Rabinow, , Foucault: Beyond Structuralism, 133–142Google Scholar.

9 See, for example, Ming, Hanneke, ‘Barracks-Concubinage in the Indies, 1887-1920’, Indonesia 35 (1983) 65–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hansen, Karen Tranberg, Distant Companions: Servants and Employers in Zambia, 1900-1985 (Ithaca 1989)Google Scholar; White, Luise, The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (Chicago 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Clancy-Smith, Julia and Gouda, Frances eds, Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender and Family Life in French and Dutch Colonialism (Virginia 1998)Google Scholar; Levine, Philippa, ‘Orientalist Sociology and the Creation of Colonial Sexualities’, Feminist Review 65 (2000) 5–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 On the prescriptions placed on Javanese nursemaids in Dutch colonial homes, and how those former nursemaids now remember them, see Staler, Ann and Strassler, Karen, ‘Castings for the Colonial: Memory Work in “New-Order” Java’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 42 (January 2000) 4–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 See Staler, Ann Laura, Race and the Education of Desire (Durham 1995)Google Scholar; Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley - in press)Google Scholar.

12 On the latter point, I think not. One reader of this essay suggested that since Native American identity ‘only became a “race”’ under the Dawes Act in 1887 - when Indian identity became tied to the quantum of blood - race as such is less relevant in this prior U.S. context. Legal acts may help produce racial taxonomies but they alone are not the measure of social facts. (On the legal system as a site of production of racial ideologies see Pascoe, Peggy, ‘Miscegenation Law, Court Cases and Ideologies of “Race”’ in: Sex, Loue and Race (Hodes 1999) 464–490Google Scholar.) The Dutch East Indies experience makes that point clear. In 1854 when racial classification of the Indies population was first established in government regulation, it was mapped on to discriminations that had long been culturally commonsense. And in 1892 when new Dutch’ nationality laws made all native Indonesians and ‘Foreign Orientals’ (i.e. Chinese) residing in the Netherlands Indies ‘foreigners’, race had already saturated the practical reason of rule. Sites of comparison should not be tied to legal acts alone, but to the conditions of possibility, the narrative frames and the particular practices that made those laws possible. The colonial contexts of Southeast and South Asia show repeatedly that in the absence of legal demarcations, the cultural coordinates of race could produce and secure exclusions without calling upon and putting into law distinctions based on chromatic visual markers. But the evidence is more than abundant for the U.S. as well. As Takaki, Ronald has argued in Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (Seattle 1979)Google Scholar, a similar logic meant that Native Americans became racialized not by law alone but by how they were culturally marked.

13 McMichael, Philip, ‘Incorporating Comparison within a World Historical Perspective: An Alternative Comparative Method’, American Sociological Review 55 (1990) 385–397CrossRefGoogle Scholar and more recently Margaret Somers, ‘“We're No Angels”: Realism, Rational Choice and Relationality in Social Science’, American Journal of Sociology 104/3-4 (1998) 722–784CrossRefGoogle Scholar where she astutely notes that ‘the lines of independence between cases [are] based upon what it is [historical sociologists] are trying to explain’, 758.

14 Grew, Raymond, ‘The Comparative Weakness of American History’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 16/1 (1985) 93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Gregg, Robert, ‘Inside Out, Outside’ in: Essays in Comparative History (New York 2000) 6Google Scholar.

16 Cooper, Frederick, ‘Review Essay: Race, Ideology and the Perils of Comparative History’, American Historical Review 101/4 (1996) 1122–1138.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Also see his The Problem with Globalization: Continents, Connections and History, ms.

17 Ian Tyrrell makes a related point in ‘American Historians in the Context of Empire’, Journal of American History (1999) 1015–1044.Google Scholar See, for example, Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London 1992).CrossRefGoogle Scholar Also see Richard Grove's analysis of colonial expansion and the origins of environmentalism that traces some of these crosscutting connections in Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (Cambridge 1995)Google Scholar.

18 See Engseng Ho, ‘Empire through Diasporic Eyes: A View from the Other Boat", Comparative Studies in Society and History (forthcoming.)

19 Iriye, Akira, Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore 1997)Google Scholar.

20 See, for example, Albert Schrauwers’ tracing of Johannes van den Bosch's hand in the administration of poverty in the Netherlands and colonial Indonesia, in ‘The “Benevolent” Colonies of Johannes van den Bosch’, Comparative Studies in Society and History (forthcoming).

21 Balandier, George, ‘“La Situation Coloniale”: Approche theorique’ in: Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie 11 (1951) 44–79Google Scholar; Fanon, Franz, Black Skin, White Masks (London 1952, 19862)Google Scholar; Cohn, Bernard, An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (Oxford 1987)Google Scholar.

22 See Wright, Gwendolyn, ‘Tradition in the Service of Modernity: Architecture and (Jrbanism in French Colonial Policy, 1900-1930’ in: Cooper, and Stoler, eds, Tensions of Empire, 322–345Google Scholar.

23 Heyningen, E. van, The Social Evil in the Cape Colony 1868-1902 (1984) 170–197Google Scholar.

24 Pratt, Imperial Eyes.

25 Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire.

26 Edward Said calls for a ‘contrapuntal’ perspective rather than a comparative approach in Culture and Imperialism (New York 1993) 32.Google Scholar Also see Viswanathan, Guari, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British rule in India (New York 1989)Google Scholar where she traces the political origins of modem English studies to the colonial education system designed for natives in nineteenth-century India. For Latin American studies, Enrique Dussel's argument that colonialism is the ‘underside of modernity’ has set an important agenda. See The Underside of Modernity (Atlantic Highlands 1999).Google Scholar For work in progress, I think of Peter Zinoman's on inventions of the modern in colonial Vietnam and Andrew Goss’ dissertation research on transnational scientific communities in which European advancements were dependent on colonial botany.

27 Horst, D.W., ‘Opvoeding en onderwijs van kinderen van Europeanen en Indo-Europeanen in Indies’, Indische Gids 2 (1900) 989Google Scholar.

28 See Hunt, Nancy, ‘“Le Bebe en Brousse”: European Women, African Birth-spacing and Colonial Intervention in Breastfeeding in the Belgian Congo’ in: Tensions of Empire, 287–321Google Scholar; , Jean and Comaroff, John, ‘Home-made Hegemony: Modernity, Domesticity and Colonialism in South Africa’, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (Boulder 1992) 265–296Google Scholar; Davin, Anna, ‘Imperialism and Motherhood’ in: Tensions of Empire, 87–151Google Scholar.

29 Gramsci, Antonio, Selections from Prison notebooks (London 1971) 259Google Scholar.

30 This section draws on the following, where I develop this point fully ‘A Sentimental Education’ in: Sears, Laura ed., Fantasizing the Feminine (Durham 1997)Google Scholar; Race and the Education of Desire, 151-164, and Along the Archival Grain: Colonial Cultures and their Affective States (Princeton, forthcoming).

31 Durkheim quoted in Corrigan, Philip, Social Forms/Human Capacities (London 1990) 110Google Scholar.

32 Cott, Nancy F., ‘Notes Toward an Interpretation of Antebellum Childrearing’, Psychohistory (Spring 1978) 4–20Google Scholar.

33 Pigeaud, J.J., lets over kinderopvoeding: raadgevingen voor moeders in Indie (Semarang 1898)Google Scholar.

34 Synnott, Anthony, ‘Little Angels, Little Devils: A Sociology of Children’, Review of Canadian Sociology and Anthropology 20/1 (1983) 88Google Scholar.

35 Quoted in Sunley, Robert, ‘Early Nineteenth-Century American literature on Childrearing’ in: Mead, Margaret and Wolfenstein, Martha eds. Childhood in Contemporary America (Chicago 1995) 158Google Scholar; also see Wishy, Bernard, The Child and the Republic: The Dawn of American Child Nurture (Philadelphia 1967)Google Scholar who also notes the belief that infantile sexual depravity (masturbation) was due to ‘the low and depraved character of nurses and “licentious domestic[s]”’, 40.

36 Brace, Charles Loring, The Dangerous Classes of New York and Twenty Years’ Work among Them (Montclair, New Jersey 1967) 36, 43Google Scholar.

37 Bellingham, Bruce, ‘Waif and Strays: Child Abandonment, Foster Care, and Families in Mid-Nineteenth Century New York’ in: Mandler, Peter ed., The Uses of Charity: The Poor on Relief in the Mid-Nineteenth Century Metropolis (Philadelphia 1990) 123–160, 127-128Google Scholar.

38 Quoted in McKenzie, Kirsten, The Making of an English Slave-owner: Samuel Eusebius Hudson at the Cape of Good Hope, 1796-1807 (Cape Town 1993) 76Google Scholar.

39 Shapiro, Michael S., Child's Garden: The Kindergarten Movement from Froebel to Dewey (Pennsylvania 1983)Google Scholar.

40 Allen, Ann Taylor, ‘Gardens of Children, Gardens of God: Kindergarten and Daycare Centers in Nineteenth-Century Germany’, Journal of Social History 19 (1986) 437CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 Seville, Armand, ‘Les Métis Parias de l'Indo-Chine: Appel au Peuple Français’, Annales Diplomatiques el Consulaires, 5 March 1905, 228–31; 244-50; 261-63Google Scholar.

42 Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York 1977) 293, 296Google Scholar.

43 On the European wide development of the Mettray model see Corssley, Ceri, ‘Using and Transforming the French Countryside: The “Colonies Agricoles” (1820-1850), French Studies 45/1 (1991) 36–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For a comprehensive and detailed study of Mettray's visions and disciplines see Dekker, Jeroen J.H., Straffen, Redden en Opvoeden: Het onstaan en de ontwikkeling uan de residentiele heropvoeding in West-Europa, 1814-1914, met bijzondere aandacht voor ‘Nederlandsche Mettray’ (Van Gorcum 1985).Google Scholar On disagreements over this model and a more detailed discussion of these debates in the Indies see my ‘Developing Historical Negatives: Race and the Modernist Visions of a Colonial State’ in: Axel, Brian ed., From the Margins: New Directions in Historical Anthropology (Durham, forthcoming)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44 Dekker, , Straffen, Redden en Opvoeden, 55, 76Google Scholar.

45 Swaan, Abram de, In Care of the State: Health Care, Education and Welfare in Europe and the U.S. in the Modem Era (London 1988) 57Google Scholar.

46 Nationaal Archief Den Haag, Koloniale Verslagen 28 Maart 1874, 47, no. 2668.

47 Idem, Kol. Versl. 13 March 1869, letter from the Department of Education to the Governor-General.

48 Idem, Kol. Versl. 28 Maart 1874, 47.

49 Fredrickson, George, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (Oxford 1981)Google Scholar and Lamar, Howard and Thompson, Leonard eds, The Frontier in History: North American and Southern Africa Compared (Yale 1981).Google Scholar Even John Cell's study of the origins of segregation in South Africa and the American South that opens with the observations of Maurice Evans, a South African who wrote about American race relations, sets aside the fact that Evans, like many of the social scientists Cell names, travelled back and forth between the two locales; Cell, John, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South (New York 1982).CrossRefGoogle Scholar Also see Gregg, "Inside Out’, who draws on the excellent new work in South-African historiography to make the very same point, and Giliomee, this volume.

50 If many early studies approached these cases as two-column entries, there were already others challenging that frame. See Greenberg, Stanley, Race and State in Capitalist Development: Comparative Perspectives (New Haven 1980)Google Scholar that treats the racial formations in these two societies as the product of expanding capitalist process that produced similar practices and priorities. On the circuits of knowledge production in South Africa and the U.S. see Cuthbertson, Greg, ‘Racial Attraction: Tracing the Historiographical Alliances between South Africa and the United States’, Journal of American History (December 1994) 1123–1136, an essay that focuses on the politics of knowledge production less than the history of what has been compared. For a recent example, seeCrossRefGoogle ScholarCampbell, James T., Songs of Zion The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa (New York 1995)Google Scholar.

51 Based on the published Carnegie Commission Reports from South Africa, Carnegie Corporation archives at Columbia University and the Butterfield papers from the Library of Congress.

52 Nielsen, Waldemar A., The Big Foundations (New York 1972) 32–33Google Scholar.

53 Lagemann, Ellen Condliffe, The Politics of Knowledge: The Carnegie Corporation, Philanthropy and Public Policy (Middletown n.d.) 30, 81.Google Scholar The Carnegie Corporation retracted its funding of the Eugenic Records Board in 1939 because of increasing condemnation of the Board's overt racism, especially that of its superintendent Harry Laughlin. I thank Alexander Stem for making this point to me.

54 The relationship to American social science is particularly clear in the case of Dr Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd, a psychologist who received his PhD from Stellenbosch, who worked closely with members of the Carnegie Commission. See Miller, Roberta Balstad, ‘Science and Society in the Early Career of H.F. Verwoerd’, Journal of Southern African Studies 19/4 (1993) 634–661.CrossRefGoogle Scholar I thank Grace Davie for pointing me to this article.

55 Report of Dr Kenyon L Butterfield on Rural Conditions and Sociological Problems in South Africa. Carnegie Corporation of New York, September 1929, 9.

56 Ashforth, Adam, The Politics of Official Discourse in Twentieth-Century South Africa (Oxford 1990) 105, n. 31.Google Scholar Ashforth makes a similar point that the recommendations of the Carnegie Commission were not simply aimed at ‘replacing unskilled “Native” workers with “poor Whites” but at establishing employment sanctuaries for white workers […]’.

57 Articles in the Carnegie archives for the commission included the following on intelligence tests in South Africa and Tennes see: Wheeler, L.R., ‘The Intelligence of East Tennessee Mountain Children’, Journal of Educational Psychology 23/5 (1932) 351–370CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Wilcocks, R.W., ‘On the Distribution and Growth of Intelligence’, Journal of General Psychology 5/2 (1932) 233–275.CrossRefGoogle Scholar While Wilcocks was one of the principal investigators for the Carnegie Commission, this subsequent research was carried out at the psychological laboratory of the University of Stellenbosch and funded by the South African government.

58 According to Ellen Lagemann, ‘racial thinking played a prominent part in the early years of Carnegie Corporation grant-making, thereby providing dismaying but significant evidence of the reinforcement "science" could and, in this case, did bring to the exclusionary sentiments of a relatively small, culturally based elite’. Lagemann, Politics of Knowledge, 30.

59 The Carnegie grant given for the poor white study not only included experts from the U.S. but was later disseminated to educational facilities throughout the U.S. During the same years as the South African Carnegie Commission studies of ‘race crossing’ were carried out by the Carnegie Institute in Jamaica and Central America as well. See Davenport, Charles B. and Steggerda, Morris, Race Crossing in Jamaica (Washington 1929) 395Google Scholar, and Steggerda, Morris, Anthropometry of Adult Maya Indians (Washington 1932).Google Scholar I thank Alexander Stem for providing these references and those to the website below. For some sense of the range of studies that the Carnegie funded Eugenics office published see the website: See Dolan DNA Learning Centre, Image Archive on the American Eugenics Movement http://vector.cshl.org/eugenics (17 July 2001).

60 This is not to suggest that central premises of apartheid policy were not formulated earlier. For one who locates what William Beinart and Saul Dubow define as the ‘core elements of segregrationist theory within wider imperial debates’, see Legassick, Martin, ‘British Hegemony and the Origins of Segregation in South Africa, 1901-1914’ in: Beinart, William and Dubow, Saul eds, Segregation and Apartheid in Twentieth-Century South Africa 1995 (London 1995) 43–59, 43Google Scholar.

61 Joint Findings and Recommendations of the Commission, 1929, xix.

62 R.W. Wilcocks, ‘Rural Poverty among Whites in South Africa and in the South of the United States’, Butterfield Papers, Collections of Manuscripts, Library of Congress, 1933.

63 Ibid., x, xvii.

64 Ibid., xi, xvii.

65 Dubow, Saul, Scientific Racism in Modem South Africa (New York 1995) 172.Google Scholar

66 Ibid, 173, n. 20.

67 See that last of Foucault's 1976 College de France lectures (To Defend Society’), that deals with the birth of modem racism, ‘Faire vivre et laisser mourir: la naissance du racisme’, Les Temps Modemes (February 1991) 37–61Google Scholar.

68 Wilcocks, , ‘Rural Poverty’, xviGoogle Scholar.

69 Murray, W.A., Health Factors in the Poor White Problem, Part IV of The Poor White Problem in South Africa (Stellenbosch 1932) 7, 34Google Scholar.

70 Ibid., 7.

71 Rothman, M.E., The Mother and Daughter in the Poor Family, Part V of The Poor White Problem in South Africa (Stellenbosch 1932) xxiii, 206–207, 212Google Scholar.

72 Wilcocks, R.W., The Poor White, Part V of The Poor White Problem in South Africa (Stellen-bosch 1932) 62Google Scholar.

73 Earlier philanthropic missions, like that of the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission piloted studies of hookworm in the American South before exporting such models of public health to the Dutch East Indies. According to Eric Stein, who I thank for providing me with these references, the visit of the head of Java's colonial Dienst der Volksgezondheid (Department of Public Health) to the American south in the 1930s may have encouraged the development of Rockefeller projects on Java.

74 Gouda, Frances, ‘Nyonyas on the Colonial Divide’, Gender and History 5 (1993) 335–336CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

75 Consul General Coert du Bois, The Problem of the Half Caste’, Batavia, Java, Department of State, Division of Western European Affairs, 9 Oct. 1928. M 682, Roll 33. 856d.00-.40

76 Consul General Coert du Bois, ‘The European Population of Netherland India’, Batavia, Java, Department of State, Relating to the Internal Affairs of the Netherlands, 1910-1929, 25 Aug. 1929. M682, Roll 33, 856d, p. 12.

77 Memmi, Albert, The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston 11967) 4Google Scholar.

78 Bois, Du, ‘The Problem of the Half Caste’, 3Google Scholar.

79 On this modular quality, see our ‘Between Metropole and Colony’ in: Tensions of Empire, 1-58.

80 Also see Gregg, , ‘Inside Out’, 9–18Google Scholar, who too argues that histories of the international traffic in women between London, South Africa and Bowery in New York is a well-chosen field in which to study the intersecting histories.

81 Hacking, Ian, The Taming of Chance (London 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

82 See Alan Sheridan's discussion of the relationship between Nietzsche's concept of a ‘will to knowledge’ and Foucault's reworking of it in Foucault, Michel, The Will to Truth (New York 1980) 118–123.Google Scholar See also Dussel, , The Underside. 83Google Scholar SeeDussel, , The UndersideGoogle Scholar; Coronil, Fernando, ‘Beyond Occidentalism: Toward Nonimperial Geopolitical Categories’, Cultural Anthropology 11/1 (1996) 51–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Mignolo, Walter, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality: Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking (Princeton 2000).Google Scholar On the question of what is ‘outside’ of colonialism and what is not, see Winichakul, Thongchai, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu 1994)Google Scholar where he suggests that even in non-colonised regions like Siam, its ‘geopolitical’ history as a nation was shaped by impingements of European imperial expansion and colonial discourses of race.

84 McClintock, A., Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest (New York 1995) 24Google Scholar.

85 I think here of Rudolph Mrazek, ‘Let (Us All Become Radio Mechanics’, Comparatioe Studies in Society and History (1999) and dissertation work in progress on telephones in Indonesia in the 1920s by Joshua Barker, and on regulation of prostitution in colonial Indonesia and the Philippines that tracks changing structures of colonial rule and different notions of what was modem, by Andrew Abalahin.