Colonialism

Broadcast 29 May 2001 and covering 1750–1800. The series is the exhilarating and terrible story of how the British Empire came into being through its early settlements--the Caribbean through the sugar plantations (and helped by slavery), the land that later became the United States and India through the British East India Company--and how it eventually came to dominate the world. A story of exploration and daring, but also one of exploitation, conflict, and loss.

Work through the following key terms and concepts using the online course compendium and related materials:

· Ireland as Colonial Model

· British Society and Attitudes in the 19^th Century (women, White Man’s Burden, class)

· Whigs and Tories, Chartists, the Anti-Corn Law League, and the Factory Act of 1833

· East India Company

· Robert Clive

· Tippu Sultan

· Migration and the Indian colonial experience

· Uprising of 1857 (Government of India Act 1858)

· Aboriginal Australia and colonisation

· Australian Rum Rebellion

· Convicts and Australia (Transportation)

· Australia and exploration

· The Scramble for Africa (The Berlin Conference 1884-85)

· British colonisation of the Cape

· Colonial wars in Southern Africa

Colonialism
Colonialism does not occupy a single time frame or set of events or practices. In many situations it is discussed as the representatives of one country taking over, occupying or imposing ideas over another nation or group of people. Such a situation has been part of human history for a very long time. The period of colonialism that we are most interested in for Cultures of Commonwealth English is when the European powers began sending out ships and often through trial and error, began to expand their influence beyond their own borders. The earliest period of modern European colonial expansion was undertaken by the Portuguese and Spanish (1400-1500s), closely followed by the Dutch and the English. The great rival of England for colonial power was France and throughout the history of the British Empire it has been France that has been the foil or enemy in so many battles and discoveries. Other European countries did not expand colonially or create colonies until later, such as Italy and Germany, which both took possessions in the late 19th and 20th century.

What is Colonialism?
Colonialism is the extension of a nation's sovereignty over territory beyond its borders with the establishment of either settler-colonies or administrative dependencies in which indigenous populations are directly ruled and/or displaced. Colonizing nations generally dominate the resources, labor, and markets of the colonial territory, and may also impose socio-cultural, religious and linguistic structures on the conquered population (see also cultural imperialism).

What this means it that colonialism is essentially a system of direct political, economic and cultural intervention based on power. Though the word colonialism is often used interchangeably with imperialism, the latter is sometimes used more broadly as it covers control exercised informally (via influence) as well as formal military control or economic leverage.
A BBC documentary on the British Empire.

The British Empire

The British Empire was the largest empire in history and for over a century the foremost global power. It was a product of the European age of discovery, which began with the maritime explorations of the 15th century, that sparked the era of the European colonial empires.

By 1921, the British Empire held sway over a population of about 458 million people, approximately one-quarter of the world's population. It covered about 36.6 million km² (14.2 million square miles), about a quarter of Earth's total land area. As a result, its legacy is widespread, in legal and governmental systems, economic practice, militarily, educational systems, sports, and in the global spread of the English language. At the peak of its power, it was often said that "the sun never sets on the British Empire" because its span across the globe ensured that the sun was always shining on at least one of its numerous colonies or subject nations.

During the five decades following World War II, most of the territories of the Empire became independent. Many went on to join the Commonwealth of Nations, a free association of independent states.

With the complexity and great size of the British Empire a discussion on the whole development would take a very long time. Instead, we will look at four areas once controlled by Britain but which today are called Australia, India, Southern Africa and England. Colonialism is a complex and often controversial topic, which should always be remembered in this series of lectures. The intention is not to weigh up the positive and negative elements of the colonial period, but rather to examine the historical conditions that created the cultures today that are found in these four areas.

The Beginnings of British Colonialism

The conquest of Ireland by the Tudors in the late 1500s and King James 1 (1566-1625) and the re-conquest by the forces of Oliver Cromwell in 1649-50 can be seen as an ongoing early example of colonialism on the part of England (which had already conquered Wales under the 1284 Statute of Rhuddlan, although a formal Union did not occur until 1536 and in 1707 Scotland was formally united with England to form Great Britain with the Act of Union).


A video covering 1690–1750. As the new century dawned, relations between Scotland and England had never been worse. Yet half a century later the two countries would be making a future together based on profit and interest. The new Britain was based on money, not God. BBC: A History of Britain

The early story of the British Isles is one of colonisation. Firstly, Celtic and Pict tribes arrived and formed the first communities in the British Isles. Then came the Romans. In 250AD, Rome sent a contingent of black legionnaires, drawn from the African part of the empire, to stand guard on Hadrian’s Wall. There is no evidence that these men stayed in Britannia and when the Romans finally quit in the fifth century, the way was clear for the Germanic tribes that would slowly become the English. Four hundred years after the Jutes, Angles and Saxons colonised modern-day southern England, the Vikings arrived, bringing a distinctive new influence to the cultural pot. The Vikings' sphere of influence was northern Britain and modern-day East Anglia. The most dramatic of these immigrations was the Norman Conquest in 1066. The Normans, descended from Vikings who had settled in France, brought with them their early-French language which would fundamentally change the direction of English, government and law. To this day, a number of Parliamentary ceremonies can be dated back to the Franco-Norman era. The first Norman king, William the Conqueror, invited Jews to settle in England to help develop commerce, finance and trade.

In the modern era colonisation brought great wealth to England but it also cost a lot. Wars were fought, ships sent out, colonies financed, deals made with Spain and France and the infrastructure of empire established. The rewards were of course huge, with raw materials and markets both ruled by the colonial power in the far flung empire.

Oliver Cromwell and the English Civil War



Oliver Cromwell (25 April 1599 – 3 September 1658)


It was Oliver Cromwell who formed the short lived Commonwealth of England, the republican government which ruled first England (including Wales) and then Ireland and Scotland from 1649 to 1660. Cromwell is a pivotal figure in the history of England and the British Empire. Oliver Cromwell was an English military and political leader best known for his involvement in making England into a republican Commonwealth and for his later role as Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland. He was one of the commanders of the New Model Army which defeated the royalists in the English Civil War. After the execution of King Charles I in 1649, Cromwell dominated the short-lived Commonwealth of England, conquered Ireland and Scotland, and ruled as Lord Protector from 1653 until his death in 1658.

Cromwell was born into the ranks of the middle gentry, and remained relatively obscure for the first 40 years of his life, at times his lifestyle resembling that of a yeoman farmer until his finances were boosted thanks to an inheritance from his uncle. After undergoing a religious conversion during the same decade, he made an independent style of Puritanism a core tenet of his life. Cromwell was elected Member of Parliament (MP) for Cambridge in the Short (1640) and Long (1640-49) Parliaments, and later entered the English Civil War on the side of the "Roundheads" or Parliamentarians.

An effective soldier (nicknamed "Old Ironsides") he rose from leading a single cavalry troop to command of the entire army. Cromwell was the third person to sign Charles I's death warrant in 1649 and was an MP in the Rump Parliament (1649-1653), being chosen by the Rump to take command of the English campaign in Ireland during 1649-50. He then led a campaign against the Scottish army between 1650-51. On 20 April 1653 he dismissed the Rump Parliament by force, setting up a short-lived nominated assembly known as the Barebones Parliament before being made Lord Protector of England, Scotland, and Ireland on 16 December 1653 until his death. When the Royalists returned to power in 1660, his corpse was dug up, hung in chains, and beheaded.

For a comical, but nonetheless thought provoking, account of the Lord High Protector see the Mark Steel Lecture on Cromwell

The Plantations of Ireland

The Ulster Plantation and the Cromwellian Genocide in Ireland 1603-1680

Under the Tudor conquest of Ireland a plantation system was begun with confiscated lands made into large plantation farms run by English aristocracy in conjunction with a parallel system with smaller model farms being set up with the intention of the Irish copying them. The plantations in Ireland had a huge impact on Irish culture and society in the areas where they were established;

"The Plantation of Ulster with English and Scottish settlers was not initially intended as a religious campaign against Catholics. But it took on its own dynamic and effectively became such by the turn of the 17th century. For Protestant settlers too the century established the perception of Catholics poised to take revenge and dispossess them at the first opportunity, for the Ulster Irish had risen in 1641 and 'massacred' large numbers of the settler population. That the Ulster Plantation was never as total, nor the 1641 uprising as brutal as tradition allows, matters little. Both have continued to be axioms of respective communal identities and along with the religious demography of Ulster, established by the Plantation, these beliefs have remained virtually unchanged for over three centuries." BBC Wars and Conflict: The Plantation of Ulster (Note this is a British source and therefore may explain the de-emphasis on the brutality of what lay behind the plantation system in Ireland).

In this long quote it is possible to see an example of the goal of this course, to understand that the scattered groups of people who speak varieties of English do so because of what has happened in the past. Not only is the language something they developed through the processes of colonisation, but the sort of society they live in, with its religions, laws, customs, education and media have been formed by the same processes. In the colonization of Ireland, particularly under the direction of Oliver Cromwell it is possible to see elements of all prior colonial projects within the frame of the British Empire; the establishment of administrative centers (usually on the coast), the dispossession of indigenous peoples from land, the imposition of religious and cultural systems by the colonisers (usually through education and propaganda), the implementation of economic systems advantageous to the colonizers and the merciless punishment of resistance and dissent.

Attitudes at the Beginnings of Empire



'A detail from William Hogarth's painting Scene from Shakespeare's The Tempest,
depicting Caliban carrying a load of wood (Circa 1728). It is generally thought that Shakespeare wrote The Tempest in 1610-11 at the dawn of the great age of British colonialism, which was well under way by the time Hogarth painted this painting. Caliban is the sole resident of the island depicted in the play who was actually born there; he is 'the native'. The name of the character is widely considered to be a reference to the Caribs, the indigenes of the Caribbean encountered by early European sailors in their first journeys to the Americas. The name Caliban is also roughly anagrammatic to Cannibal, which was both a fear and a belief held by many Europeans at the time regarding the occupants of the 'New World'. Later, in Hogarth's century the concept of the 'noble savage' became popular in Western European intellectual cultures. The 'noble savage' can be described in relation to the character of Caliban as a representation of the 'natural man', that the tribal and non-industrialized cultures of the lands colonized by European powers where closer to nature and lived more 'genuine' lives reminiscent of the Garden of Eden myth of Christianity.

A modern production of The Tempest.In Julie Taymor's version of 'The Tempest,' the gender of Prospero has been switched to Prospera. Going back to the 16th or 17th century, women practicing the magical arts of alchemy were often convicted of witchcraft. In Taymor's version, Prospera is usurped by her brother and sent off with her four-year daughter on a ship. She ends up on an island; it's a tabula rasa: no society, so the mother figure becomes a father figure to Miranda. This leads to the power struggle and balance between Caliban and Prospera; a struggle not about brawn, but about intellect.

In Shakespeare's day, most of the planet was still being "discovered", and stories were coming back from distant islands, with myths about the Cannibals of the Caribbean, faraway Edens, and distant Tropical Utopias. With the character Caliban Shakespeare may be offering an in-depth discussion into the morality of colonialism. Different views are discussed, with examples including Gonzalo's Utopia, Prospero's enslavement of Caliban, and Caliban's subsequent resentment. Caliban is also shown as one of the most natural characters in the play, being very much in touch with the natural world (and modern audiences have come to view him as far nobler than his two Old World friends, Stephano and Trinculo, although the original intent of the author may have been different). There is evidence that Shakespeare drew on Montaigne's essay Of Cannibals (1603), which discusses the values of societies insulated from European influences, while writing The Tempest.

Beginning in about 1950, with the publication of Psychology of Colonization by Octave Mannoni, The Tempest was viewed more and more through the lens of postcolonial theory. This new way of looking at the text explored the effect of the colonizer (Prospero) on the colonized (Ariel and Caliban). Though Ariel is often overlooked in these debates in favor of the more intriguing Caliban, he is still involved in many of the debates. The French writer Aimé Césaire, in his play Une Tempête sets The Tempest in Haiti, portraying Ariel as a mulatto who, unlike the more rebellious Caliban, feels that negotiation and partnership is the way to freedom from the colonizers. Fernandez Retamar sets his version of the play in Cuba, and portrays Ariel as a wealthy Cuban (in comparison to the lower-class Caliban) who also must choose between rebellion or negotiation. Although scholars have suggested that his dialogue with Caliban in Act two, Scene one, contains hints of a future alliance between the two when Prospero leaves, in general, Ariel is viewed by scholars as the good servant, in comparison with the conniving Caliban—a view which Shakespeare's audience would have shared. Ariel is used by some postcolonial writers as a symbol of their efforts to overcome the effects of colonization on their culture. Michelle Cliff, for example, a Jamaican author, has said that she tries to combine Caliban and Ariel within herself to create a way of writing that represents her culture better. Such use of Ariel in postcolonial thought is far from uncommon, as Ariel is even the namesake of a scholarly journal covering post-colonial criticism. (Wikipedia)


The People of Empire

Many people (not all) who participated in the colonisation of subjected lands in the British Empire did so with the belief that they were better than the peoples they had conquered. Often using philosophies of Social Darwinism (not to be confused with Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution,which it really does not represent - this film), where the survival of the fittest idea was adapted to social and cultural contexts, the industrialized and militarized organisations that represented the British Empire oppressed, enslaved and regulalry massacred outright the peoples of the lands they colonised.

Along with this brutal collective face of colonialism there existed other aspects. Christian missionaries who worked to convert the peoples of the colonies. The orientalists who studied them with a romantic sense of admiration. The merchants and entrepreneurs who wished to make money and develop businesses in the colonies. As well there were the poor and middle class citizens of England who either immigrated or were sent to the colonies to either better their lives or because they had no choice. It is important to remember that the urban working class of England were often not so far behind the most oppressed in the colonies, considering a boy born in inner Liverpool in 1851 had a life expectancy of only 26 years (BBC). The urban centers of the Midlands, London and the north grew enourmously between the late 18th and mid-19th century.


The poverty of 19th century Victorian England was extream. By looking at the lives of the most vunerable members of the urban population we can gain an idea of how it was to be poor in England in the 1800s. Children suffered particularly when their surroundings where defined by poverty. An example from 1849 of living conditions in relation to sewage:

Henry Mayhew was an investigative journalist who wrote a series of articles for the Morning Chronicle about the way the poor of London lived and worked.

In an article published on 24th September 1849 he described a London Street with a tidal ditch running through it, into which drains and sewers emptied. The ditch contained the only water the people in the street had to drink, and it was ‘the colour of strong green tea’, in fact it was ‘more like watery mud than muddy water’. This is the report he gave:


‘As we gazed in horror at it, we saw drains and sewers emptying their filthy contents into it; we saw a whole tier of doorless privies in the open road, common to men and women built over it; we heard bucket after bucket of filth splash into it’.

Mayhew’s articles were later published in a book called London Labour and the London Poor and in the introduction he wrote:

‘…the condition of a class of people whose misery, ignorance, and vice, amidst all the immense wealth and great knowledge of “the first city in the world”, is, to say the very least, a national disgrace to us’.

(For more on the conditions for impoverished children in Victorian England)

Please read (print it out if you can) this account of Liberals and Conservatives: from AD 1832
in England. You need to be able to say what are Whigs and Tories, Chartists and the Anti-Corn Law League, and say what the Factory Act of 1833 was in response to.

As well the Great Exhibition of 1851 took place in London, it celebrated the power and achievements of the Empire. The Great Exhibition was the first international fair of trade and industry, that is it was international in that it showed off products from the whole of the Empire. As well the machines of industrialised England were on display;

"James Nasmyth’s famous steam hammer was there (the machine used by Robert Stephenson to drive home the piles of his bridge at Newcastle). Garforth’s riveting machine, marine engines from Maudsley’s works, McNicholl’s travelling crane and De La Rue’s Patent Envelope Machine. Operated by only two boys, this could cut , fold, gum and stack thousands of envelopes an hour in “a series of the most beautiful mechanical movements it is possible to conceive ”. There was even an alarm bed that ejected its occupant at a pre-set time." The Great Exhibition

[]

Abel Magwitch, escaped convict in a depiction set in 1823 from Charles Dickens' Great Expectations adapted to film by David Lean in 1946. The life of convicts kept on the prison hulks, huge floating prisons in river estuaries was horrible, and transportation to Australia was worse.



Prison hulk

A prison ship, historically sometimes called a prison hulk, is a vessel used as a prison, often to hold convicts awaiting transportation to penal colonies. The vessels were a common form of internment in Britain and elsewhere in the 18th and 19th centuries. Charles F. Campbell writes that around 40 ships of the British Navy were converted for use as prison hulks. One was established at Gibraltar, others at Bermuda, at Antigua, and off Brooklyn in Wallabout Bay and Sheerness. Other hulks were anchored off Woolwich, Portsmouth, Chatham, Deptford, and Plymouth. Private companies owned and operated the hulks holding prisoners bound for penal transportation.


Women in the British Empire

While British women in the empire were always outnumbered by British men, from the beginning of empire women traveled to many sites of empire, where they established homes and found opportunities and a way of life not available to them in Britain. Beginning around 1850, the numbers of white women living in the empire increased, partly because the empire grew considerably in the later 19th century—the period historians call the Age of New Imperialism—and partly because of the rising concern in Britain over the relationships between British men and indigenous women. Encouraging white British women to travel to the colonies was seen by the British as a way to protect and maintain the social hierarchy of the colonial world, while preserving British racial purity.

In evaluating the role of British women in the empire, it is important to differentiate between colonies in Africa and India and white settler colonies where the situation of British women was substantially different. In Australia, where the number of British settlers rapidly outnumbered the indigenous population, men substantially outnumbered women, especially in the early stages of white settlement. Male convicts outnumbered female convicts 4 to 1, and the beginning of the colony in Australia was marked by the rape of women—both white and indigenous. In Australia, the numbers of women did not equal that of men until after World War II. As the colony developed, most settlers moved to isolated rural farms where women lived hard working lives. By contrast, in New Zealand, while men did outnumber women, it was a colony that encouraged settlement by families—a factor that shaped the lives of women. Interestingly, in 1893, New Zealand became the first country in the world to give women the vote.

The White Man's Burden

The White Man's Burden



"The White Man's Burden" is a poem by the English poet Rudyard Kipling (December 30, 1865 – January 18, 1936). It was originally published in the popular magazine McClure's in 1899, with the subtitle 'The United States and the Philippine Islands'. "The White Man's Burden" was written in regard to the U.S. conquest of the Philippines and other former Spanish colonies. Although Kipling's poem mixed exhortation to empire with sober warnings of the costs involved, imperialists within the United States latched onto the phrase "white man's burden" as a characterization for imperialism that justified imperial policy as a noble enterprise.

"The White Man's Burden"

Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.

Take up the White Man's burden--
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain
To seek another's profit,
And work another's gain.

Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.

Take up the White Man's burden--
No tawdry rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper--
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go make them with your living,
And mark them with your dead.

Take up the White Man's burden--
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard--
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:--
"Why brought he us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?"

Take up the White Man's burden--
Ye dare not stoop to less--
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloke your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh your gods and you.

Take up the White Man's burden--
Have done with childish days--
The lightly proferred laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers.


The Navy and Empire
The British navy was the largest and most effective in the world between the early 18th and late 19th century. As well as its military role the Royal Navy sponsored and trained many of the most successful explorers who charted territories and claimed lands in the name of the crown. One of the most famous of these was Captain James Cook. Captain James Cook FRS RN (7 November O.S. 27 October 1728 – 14 February 1779) was an English explorer, navigator and cartographer, ultimately rising to the rank of Captain in the Royal Navy. Cook was the first to map Newfoundland prior to making three voyages to the Pacific Ocean during which he achieved the first European contact with the eastern coastline of Australia and the Hawaiian Islands as well as the first recorded circumnavigation of New Zealand. Cook died in Hawaii in a fight with Hawaiians during his third exploratory voyage in the Pacific in 1779.

India

The first organised presence of British forces in India were under the banner of the Honorable East India Company. The Honorable East India Company (HEIC), most commonly referred to as the East India Trading Company, though often colloquially referred to as "John Company", and simply as the East India Company or the "Company Bahadur" in India, was an early joint-stock company (the Dutch East India Company was the first to issue public stock). The company's main trade was in cotton, silk, indigo dye, saltpeter, tea and opium. It was granted an English Royal Charter by Elizabeth I on December 31, 1600, with the intention of favouring trade privileges in India. The Royal Charter effectively gave the newly created HEIC a 21-year monopoly on all trade in the East Indies.

The Company transformed from a commercial trading venture to one that virtually ruled India and other Asian colonies as it acquired auxiliary governmental and military functions, until by the Government of India Act 1858 the British Crown assumed direct rule, following the events of the Indian Rebellion of 1857. The Company was finally dissolved on January 1, 1874, as a result of the East India Stock Dividend Redemption Act.

Perhaps the most famous employee of the East India Company was Robert Clive who started his career as a clerk in Madras (now Chennai) . By the mid-eighteenth century the Mughal Empire had become divided into a number of successor states. For the forty years since the death of the Emperor Aurangzeb in 1707, the power of the Emperor had gradually fallen into the hands of his provincial viceroys or subahdars. The three most powerful were the Nizam of the Hyderabad State in the Deccan region (Asaf Jah), of south and central India, who ruled from Hyderabad, the Nawab of Bengal (Murshid Quli Khan), whose capital was Murshidabad, and the wazir or Nawab of Awadh (Sa'adat Ali Khan, Burhan ul-Mulk). The European Trading companies still acknowledged the sovereignty of the Emperor at Delhi, Bahadur Shah I, but their relations with these regional rulers were of much greater importance. In addition the relationship between the Europeans was influenced by a series of wars and treaties on mainland Europe. Since the late seventeenth century the European merchants had raised bodies of troops to protect their commercial interests and latterly to influence local politics to their advantage. Military power was rapidly becoming as important as commercial acumen in securing India's valuable trade, and increasingly it was also the means of securing riches by another route: the right to collect land revenue.

After Clive's arrival in India, the rich lands of the Coromandel Coast were contested between the French Governor General Joseph François Dupleix and the British. This rivalry included the British and French supporting various factions as Nawab of the remaining parts of the Mughal Empire. Clive was the first of the "soldier-politicians" (as they came to be called) who helped the British gain ascendancy in India. While the British would later be challenged in the South by Tipu Sultan of Mysore, Clive's fame and notoriety principally lie in his military conquest of the province of Bengal.

Robert Clive

Major-General Robert Clive, 1st Baron Clive of Plassey, KB (29 September 1725–22 November 1774), also known as Clive of India, was a British soldier who established the military and political supremacy of the East India Company in Southern India and Bengal. Together with Warren Hastings he was one of the key figures in the creation of British India. Wikipedia

The Battle of Plassey 23 June 1757

The Battle of Plassey was a decisive British East India Company victory over the Nawab of Bengal and his French allies, establishing British rule of India for the next two centuries. The battle took place on 23 June 1757 at Palashi, West Bengal, India, on the banks of the Bhagirathi River, about 150 km north of Calcutta, near Murshidabad, then the capital of the Nawab of Bengal. The opponents were Siraj Ud Daulah, the last independent Nawab of Bengal, and the British East India Company. The battle was waged during the Seven Years' War in Europe (1756–1763) and in a mirror of their European rivalry the French East India Company sent a small contingent to fight against the British East India Company. Siraj-ud-Daulah had a numerically superior force, and made its stand at Plassey. The British, worried about being outnumbered and not above some bribery, reached out to Siraj-ud-Daulah's deposed army chief - Mir Jafar, along with others such as Yar Latif and Rai Durlabh. Mir Jafar thus assembled his troops near the battlefield, but made no move to actually join the battle, causing Siraj-ud-Daulah's army to be defeated. Siraj-ud-Daulah fled, eventually to be captured and executed. As a result, the entire province of Bengal fell to the Company, with Mir Jafar appointed as their puppet Nawab.

The Defeat of Tippu Sultan

After Horatio Nelson had defeated Napoleon at the Battle of the Nile in Egypt in 1798 CE, three armies, one from Bombay, and two British (one of which included Arthur Wellesley, the future first Duke of Wellington), marched into Mysore in 1799 and besieged the capital Srirangapatnam in the Fourth Mysore War. There were over 26,000 soldiers of the British East India Company comprising about 4000 Europeans and the rest Indians. A column was supplied by the Nizam of Hyderabad consisting of ten battalions and over 16,000 cavalry, and many soldiers were sent by the Marathas. Thus the soldiers in the British force numbered over 50,000 soldiers whereas Tippu Sultan had only about 30,000 soldiers. The British broke through the city walls, and Tippu Sultan died defending his capital on May 4 1799. With the defeat of Tippu Sultan the last substantial autonomous remains of the Mughal Empire (yet another story of colonial imperialism - links to the video documentary The Mughals 1526-1707) on the Indian subcontinent was defeated and the way was clear for the establishment of a colonial administration with Hindu Maharajas appointed by the British administration. Tippu is today revered as an Indian hero and remembered as a great leader and military inovator, (video of Tipu's use of rockets).

Three major migrations took place during the colonial period in India.

(1) Indentured labour Migration (1834 – 1920).

(2) Indians used as soldiers abroad and on the colonised subcontinent.

(3) The migration of Indians as labourers to Africa.

Coolies: How Britain Reinvented Slavery

This ten minute documentary tells the astonishing and controversial story of the systematic recruitment and migration of over a million Indians to all corners of the Empire. It is a chapter in colonial history that implicates figures at the very highest level of the British establishment and has defined the demographic shape of the modern world.
Combining archive footage and historical evidence the programme includes interviews with Gandhi's great-grandaughter, Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie, about Gandhi's campaign to end indentured labour and David Dabydeen - author and academic - whose great-grandfather was an indentured labourer in British Guyana.
Coolies: How Britain Reinvented Slavery traces family stories through epic voyages across South America, the South Pacific and Africa, as descendants invetigate their past and trace the last surviving witnesses.


The Armed Rebellion of 1857




Lakshmibai, The Rani of Jhansi (c. 1828 – 17 June 1858) A leader of the Indian Rebellion of 1857.

The Indian Rebellion of 1857 began as a mutiny of sepoys of British East India Company's army on the 10th of May 1857, in the town of Meerut, and soon erupted into other mutinies and civilian rebellions largely in the upper Gangetic plain and central India, with the major hostilities confined to present-day Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, northern Madhya Pradesh, and the Delhi region. The rebellion posed a considerable threat to Company power in that region, and it was contained only with the fall of Gwalior on 20 June 1858. The rebellion is also known as India's First War of Independence, the Great Rebellion, the Indian Mutiny, the Revolt of 1857, and the Sepoy Mutiny.

The rebels quickly captured large swathes of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh, including Delhi, where they installed the Mughal ruler, Bahadur Shah Zafar, as Emperor of Hindustan. The Company response came rapidly as well: by September 1857, with help from fresh reinforcements, Delhi had been retaken. Nevertheless, it then took the better part of 1858 for the rebellion to be completely suppressed in Oudh.

Other regions of Company controlled India—Bengal province, the Bombay Presidency, and the Madras Presidency—remained largely calm. In Punjab, only recently annexed by the East India Company, the Sikh princes backed the Company by providing both soldiers and support. The large princely states, Hyderabad, Mysore, Travancore, and Kashmir, as well as the smaller ones of Rajputana, by not joining the rebellion, served, in the Governor-General Lord Canning's words, as "breakwaters in a storm" for the Company.

In some regions, especially in Oudh, the rebellion took on the attributes of a patriotic revolt against European presence; however, although the rebel leaders, especially the Rani of Jhansi, became folk heroes in the burgeoning nationalist movement in India half a century later, they themselves "generated no coherent ideology or programme on which to build a new order." Still, the rebellion proved to be an important watershed in Indian history; it led to the dissolution of the East India Company in 1858, and forced the British to reorganize the army, the financial system, and the administration in India. India was thereafter governed directly from London—by the British government India Office and a cabinet level Secretary of State for India—in the new British Raj, a system of governance that lasted until 1947.

[]




Clash of the Worlds (Episode 1 of 3): The Indian Mutiny of 1857

Aired: October 28, 2007 on BBC 2

Exploring how past conflicts between a Christian West and Islam can help explain more recent violence. The first programme tells the story of the Indian uprising in which both sides committed atrocities in the name of their faiths

Government of India Act 1858

The British Raj (Rule) of India began with the Government of India Act 1858, actually entitled An Act for the Better Government of India. An Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom (21 & 22 Vict. c. 106) passed on August 2, 1858. Its provisions called for the liquidation of the British East India Company (who had up to this point been ruling India under the auspices of Parliament) and the transference of its functions to the British Crown. Lord Palmerston, then-Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, introduced a bill for the transfer of control of the Government of India from the East India Company to the Crown, referring to the grave defects in the existing system of the government of India.

The title "Empress of India" was taken by Queen Victoria from May 1, 1876. The title was created nineteen years after the formal incorporation into the British Empire of Britain's possessions and protectorates on the Indian subcontinent, comprising most of modern-day India (excluding the Portuguese colony Goa, the State of Sikkim, and the French colony Pondicherry), Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Burma (though the latter would be made a separate colony in 1937). When Victoria died, and her son Edward VII ascended the throne, his title became "Emperor of India". The title continued until India and Pakistan became independent from the United Kingdom at midnight on 14/15 August 1947. The title itself was not formally abandoned by Edward VIII's successor, George VI, until 1948.

Zafar Delhi and Dalrymple

This is an article by the British historian William Dalrymple on New and Old Delhi. The capital of India is an amazing mixture of history with examples of ancient, modern and even postmodernist architecture often within meters of each other. Everywhere in Delhi are examples of the colonial past; be it the Mughal period or the British rule of India. Dalrymple describes the early period of colonialism in India under the British when the East India Company did business with local rulers and whose officials where often as much "Hindoos as Christians". In the article Dalrymple describes Delhi in the 18th century as

"I am hardly alone in being struck by this: the ruins of Delhi are something visitors to Delhi have always been amazed by, perhaps especially in the 18th century when the city was at the height of its decay and its mood most melancholic. For miles in every direction, half collapsed and overgrown, robbed and re-occupied, neglected by all, lay the remains of six hundred years of trans-Indian Imperium- the wrecked vestiges of a period when Delhi had been the greatest city between Constantinople and Canton. Hammams and garden palaces, thousand pillared halls and mighty tomb towers, empty mosques and semi-deserted Sufi shrines- there seemed to be no end to litter of ages: “It has a feeling about it of ‘Is this not the great Babylon?’ all ruins and desolation,” wrote Emily Eden in her diary. “How can I describe the desolation of Delhi,” agreed the poet Sauda. “There is no house from which the jackals cry cannot be heard. In the once beautiful gardens, the grass grows waist-high around fallen pillars and ruined arches. Not even a lamp of clay now burns where once the chandeliers blazed."

Today Delhi remains a tissue of influences and presences, as this video of former colonial palaces in Delhi shows:

[]

These were the New Delhi palaces of the princely rulers during the British Raj - Hyderabad House, Jaipur House, Bikaner House, Baroda House. They are now home to government offices and museums.

Australia

Aboriginal Australia and Colonisation



Aboriginal tribal and language groups prior to colonisation. The Europeans who came to Australia imagined that the Aboriginal people where far more homogeneous than they actually were. Different groups differ greatly, speaking totally different languages and having totally different customs, although there were great similarities between some groups as well. Aboriginal Australia could be considered as a continent of nations. The organisation of Aboriginal societies did not however have such a system of centralised political leadership that resembled that of the colonisers, but was rather led by customs, laws and elders within the society.

[

''An Aboriginal history of white Australia.''

The continent of Australia was known to exist by European sailors at least since 1606 when the Duyfken captained by Dutchman, Willem Janszoon landed on the northern coast. The Dutch were repelled by Aboriginal warriors at Keer Weer (Dutch for "Turn Back!"). Of course, Australia had been hosting visitors long before this, the most well known being Macassan traders from the Indonesian archipelego who had been trading with the Yolongu people of the central north of Australia for hundreds of years. It was not until 1906 that the trade with the Macassans was stopped with the national boarder of the recently created Commonwealth of Australia (1901) being enforced and their entry into what was now 'Australian waters' being denied. Between 1606 and 1770, an estimated 54 European ships from a range of nations made contact. Many of these were merchant ships from the Dutch East Indies Company and included the ships of Abel Tasman. Tasman charted parts of the north, west and south coasts of Australia which was then known as New Holland.


In 1770, Englishman Lieutenant James Cook charted the Australian east coast in his ship HM Barque Endeavour. Cook claimed the east coast under instruction from King George III of England on 22 August 1770 at Possession Island, naming eastern Australia 'New South Wales'. The first British settlement on Australian soil was established at Port Jackson, (today Sydney) on the 26th January 1788. Captain Arthur Phillip and the First Fleet, comprising 11 ships and around 1,350 people, arrived at Botany Bay between 18 and 20 January 1788. However, this area was deemed to be unsuitable for settlement and they moved north to Port Jackson on 26 January 1788, The coast of Australia, featuring Tasmania as a separate island, was mapped in detail by the English mariners and navigators Bass and Flinders, and the French mariner, Baudin. A nearly completed map of the coastline was published by Flinders in 1814. From 1788 until 1823, the Colony of New South Wales was a penal colony. This meant that there were mainly convicts, marines and the wives of the marines although free settlers started to arrive in 1793. In 1823, the British government established a New South Wales parliament by setting up a Legislative Council as well as a Supreme Court under the New South Wales Act 1823 (UK). This Act is now seen as a first step towards a 'responsible' Parliament in Australia. A more detailed time line of law and order in Australia can be found [http://www.cultureandrecreation.gov.au/articles/australianhistory/ HERE].





"Portrait of Bennilong, a native of New Holland, who after experiencing for two years the luxuries of England, returned to his own country and resumed all his savage habits" (1798)

Bennelong was captured on a fishing forage with his friend Colby at Manly in November 1789. Bundled into a long boat at the behest of Arthur Phillip, who was under instructions from King George III to "endeavour by every possible mean, to open an intercourse with the natives, and to conciliate their affections, enjoining all our subjects to live in amity and kindness." Bennelong and another Aborigine named Yemmerrawanie (or Imeerawanyee) travelled with Arthur Phillip to England in 1792, and were presented to King George III on 24 May 1793. Yemmerrawanie died while in Britain, and Bennelong's health deteriorated. He returned to Sydney in February 1795 on HMS Reliance, the ship that took surgeon George Bass to the colony for the first time. He taught Bass some of his language on the voyage.[3] Increasingly overwhelmed by European culture, Bennelong quickly became alienated from his own people after this return.

Bennelong was long troubled by the consumption of alcohol. He frequented Sydney less often and eventually died at Kissing Point (now known as Putney, in Sydney’s North West) on 3 January 1813. The area now has Bennelong Park named in his honour. He was buried on the estate of James Squire. His obituary in the Sydney Gazette was unflattering, referring to him as a thorough savage unable to be warped from that form, which presumably reflected where he had sunk to in the esteem of white society in his last years.

'''Aboriginal Australia, Colonisation and the Law'''

I use the examples discussed in the Bringing Them Home Report into the removal of Aboriginal children by the state of Australia. Indigenous children have been forcibly separated from their families and communities since the very first days of the European occupation of Australia.

Violent battles over rights to land, food and water sources characterised race relations in the nineteenth century. Throughout this conflict Indigenous children were kidnapped and exploited for their labour. Indigenous children were still being `run down' by Europeans in the northern areas of Australia in the early twentieth century.

"... the greatest advantage of young Aboriginal servants was that they came cheap and were never paid beyond the provision of variable quantities of food and clothing. As a result any European on or near the frontier, quite regardless of their own circumstances, could acquire and maintain a personal servant" (Reynolds 1990 page 169).

Governments and missionaries also targeted Indigenous children for removal from their families. Their motives were to `inculcate European values and work habits in children, who would then be employed in service to the colonial settlers' (Ramsland 1986 quoted by Mason 1993 on page 31). In 1814 Governor Macquarie funded the first school for Aboriginal children. Its novelty was an initial attraction for Indigenous families but within a few years it evoked a hostile response when it became apparent that its purpose was to distance the children from their families and communities.

Although colonial governments in the nineteenth century professed abhorrence at the brutality of expansionist European settlers, they were unwilling or unable to stop their activities. When news of the massacres and atrocities reached the British Government it appointed a Select Committee to inquire into the condition of Aboriginal people.

The government response was to reserve land for the exclusive use of Indigenous people and assign responsibility for their welfare to a Chief Protector or Protection Board. By 1911 the Northern Territory and every State except Tasmania had `protectionist legislation' giving the Chief Protector or Protection Board extensive power to control Indigenous people. In some States and in the Northern Territory the Chief Protector was made the legal guardian of all Aboriginal children, displacing the rights of parents. The management of the reserves was delegated to government appointed managers or missionaries in receipt of government subsidies. Enforcement of the protectionist legislation at the local level was the responsibility of `protectors' who were usually police officers.

The Rum Rebellion

The Rum Rebellion, also known as the Rum Puncheon Rebellion, of 1808 was the only successful armed takeover of government in Australia's recorded history. The Governor of New South Wales, William Bligh, was deposed by the New South Wales Corps under the command of Major George Johnston, working closely with John Macarthur, on 26 January 1808, 20 years to the day after Arthur Phillip founded European settlement in Australia. Afterwards, the colony was ruled by the military, with the senior military officer stationed in Sydney purporting to act as the Lieutenant-Governor of the colony until the arrival from Britain of Major-General Lachlan Macquarie as the new Governor at the beginning of 1810.

The Reverend Langhorne on Civilization (1839)
My mother's mother's mother's father's father came to Australia in the 1830s as a Christian missionary. I obviously never met him but my grandmother knew his son when she was a little girl and she spoke to me about him and his family a lot when I was growing up. He was a very devout Christian and believed that he was working to save the souls of the Aborigines and that their way of life was morally wrong. Today it seems strange or even outrageous that someone could come to such a conclusion, but the Reverend Langhorne not only believed he was doing the Lord's work, he wrote letters about it, collected funds to support it and even instilled the same beliefs in his own children. George Langhorne, his son and when he was growing up with his missionary father he learned to speak the language of the local Aboriginal people (in what is today Melbourne) and could track animals and people using Aboriginal techniques. He once tracked a man over 1000 kilometers who was wanted for murder and found him. My grandmother, who knew the younger George said he was kind to the Aborigines, giving them food and not stopping them from performing their ceremonies when they passed though the land that was actually theirs and had been for thousands of years. My grandmother spoke about lying in bed at night and hearing the singing of the Aborigines down by the nearby creek.

This is an extract from a long letter which is online written by George Langhorne senior (c1810-1897 pictured) to the Governor of the Colony of Victoria regarding what he thinks should be done about the Aboriginal people who had lived in the Prahran area of what is today Melbourne for thousands of years. The entire letter as a scan of the original documents can be seen by following this link. The following is an extract from the letter which you can read online as a typed page by following the title link in this section:

Melbourne Port Phillip

15th October 1839

Sir,

In accordance with your Honor’s desire I proceed to make a few remarks relative to my late employment as Government Agent for the civilization of the Aborigines

Your Honor I believe is already acquainted with the nature of my Instructions as received from Sir Richard Bourke, it is therefore unnecessary for me to dwell upon them further than to remark that Sir Richard’s ultimate view appeared to be (had his plan in embryo at all promised success) the intermixture by marriage of the Aborigines among the lower order of our Countrymen as the only likely means of raising the former from their present degraded and benighted state. Utopian as this scheme now appears to me I must confess I was sanguine enough to contemplate in prospect the final realization of such hopes with this difference, that whilst the Governor forbid the slightest restraints to be placed upon the movements of the Natives the children not excepted, I contended that the only likely mode under God of effecting the desired object, would be to promote with some degree of compulsion if necessary, the partial migration of the Natives from one district to another so distant as to leave faint hopes of return and thus oblige them to have recourse to their white friends for protection, and render them more available, to the Missionary or Instructors, who should be placed among them.


To His Honor


C J La Trobe Esre

No 39/96
19th October 1839
Mr. Langhorn
The aborigines




“Facing the Enemy”, in WARBURTON, Peter Egerton,
Journey across the Western Interior of Australia (London, Sampson Low, Marston, Low, & Searle, 1875)

(More early Images of the Australian Aborigines)

Aboriginal Resistance

"I was over on North Keppel some five years ago, and the blacks showed me a line of bones over a hundred yards long, and told me they belonged to a tribe of blacks who were shot by a boarding party of whites many years before … an old black named ‘Jamie’ told me all about the brutality of the shooting. He mentioned about an old gin who was trying to escape carrying a cripple on her back, and how both were mercilessly shot down."
(Rockhampton Bulletin, 27 January 1903)

Time Line of Aboriginal Armed Struggle

The reality of armed struggle against the European colonisers has only relatively recently been accepted as being part of Australia's history. For many years it was taught that the indigenous peoples of Australia where not capable of organising an armed struggle against the colonisers. In the last decade or two there has been a large amount of research and public discussion around the resistance to colonisation and the violence that often accompanied it.

The Stolen Generation

The Stolen Generation (or Stolen Generations) is a term used to describe the Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, usually of mixed descent who were removed from their families by Australian government agencies and church missions, under various state acts of parliament, denying the rights of parents and making all Aboriginal children wards of the state, between approximately 1869 and (officially) 1969. The policy typically involved the removal of children into internment camps, orphanages and other institutions. The Stolen Generation has received significant public attention in Australia following the publication in 1997 of Bringing Them Home - Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families. Questions regarding whether the Stolen Generation actually occurred or to what scale it occurred, remain controversial topics within Australian political discourse.


The federal government of Australia, led by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, made a formal apology to the Stolen Generations on February 13, 2008.

Dark Science

In 1910 a team of young Swedish scientists sailed to the far north of Australia in search of the missing link between Man and Ape. They did not find it and, in their search, they lost themselves. The expedition returned to Sweden with illegally smuggled indigenous human remains and artefacts accompanying the flora and fauna they collected. Dark Science tells the story of an expedition gone badly awry, of a megalomaniacal leader and of the men who found paradise but failed to recognise it. The remains that he took from the Kimberleys were returned to Australia in 2003 by the Swedish Government , the first repatriation of human remains by a major European Museum.
Contemporary Australian Reaction to Eric Mjöberg

Blackbirding

Blackbirding refers to the recruitment of people through trickery and kidnappings to work on plantations, particularly the sugar cane plantations of Queensland (Australia) and Fiji.[2] The practice occurred primarily between the 1860s and 1901. Those 'blackbirded' were recruited from the indigenous populations of nearby Pacific islands or northern Queensland. In the early days of the pearling industry in Broome, local Aboriginal people were blackbirded from the surrounding areas, including aboriginal people from desert areas.

The Convicts

The convct system was brutal and severe. When the last shipment of convicts disembarked in Western Australia in 1868, the total number of transported convicts to the Australian mainland stood at around 162,000 men and women. They were transported on 806 ships. The colony of Van Diemen's Land was established in its own right in 1825 and officially became known as Tasmania in 1856. In the 50 years from 1803-1853 around 75,000 convicts were transported to Tasmania. By 1835 there were over 800 convicts working in chain-gangs at the infamous Port Arthur penal station, which operated between 1830 and 1877. Transportation to the colony of New South Wales was officially abolished on 1 October 1850, and in 1853 the order to abolish transportation to Van Diemen's Land was formally announced.




The Female Factory was the destination of all convict women transported to the colony who had not been assigned as servants. Within a decade there was considerable pressure on the authorities to deal with increasing numbers of female convicts who could not be adequately accommodated at the Factory but it was not until the arrival of Governor Lachlan Macquarie that a solution was found.

Macquarie selected a four acre site on the opposite bank of the Parramatta River from the Governor's Domain to build a new Factory and issued instructions to convict architect Francis Greenway to design a building that would accommodate 300 women.

The Factory was built using convict labour from locally quarried sandstone and was completed in 1821 at the cost of 4778 pounds. The walls of the main building ranged from 2 feet 6 inches at the foundation to 20 inches at the apex of its three storeys. It had an oak shingled roof, floors of 6 inches paving or stringbark with barred leadlight windows in the basement and lead glazed windows on the upper floors.

The first floor was used for meals with the top two floors for sleeping. The porter, deputy superintendent, superintendent and matron were provided separate accommodation on the site.

The Factory was often referred to as the Nunnery and served as a refuge, a gaol, an asylum, a home for the infirm, a labour exchange, a marriage bureau, a hospital and a manufactory.

Originally intended as a place of refuge for the women and children of the NSW colony, within a decade it became more like a conventional prison, like that of Pentonville in the UK.

The Factory was the site of Australia's first industrial action in 1827 when women rioted for better food and conditions. It was also the site of the colony's first manufactured export producing 60,000 yards of woven cloth in 1822.


By 1842 the Factory accommodated 1,203 women in the most deplorable conditions, riots occurred frequently and reforms were called for which resulted in the cessation of solitary confinement and alterations to the main building.

" Hunger is our sauce; we grind in a hand mill, we bake
in the ashes, and live in miserable huts,which admit both
wind and rain.

A sheet of bark and a bundle of straw is our bed,and a
blanket our covering: but fatigue is ours, and we sleep
as if on beds of down.

The slightest offence provokes flogging; insolence is
the grand bugbear in this colony. A man calls himself a
settler, first imposes upon his slaves,goads them on to
speak and then drags them before a magistrate to be lashed
and tortured for insolence.It is useless to murmer, for
complaint is crime in this dreadful country.

A Master,up the country, is a petty King, and the spirit
with which he exercises his power is truly diabolical.If
his slave speaks, the wretch's stomach is tormented. We
all feel a twofold degradation here; we feel that we are
slaves to paltry tyrants, who seem as if they where born
to add to the stings and tortures of a wretched criminal." Female Convict (1838)


Exploration

The exploration of Australia by Europeans went on into the 20th century. The explorers of Australia are household names even today and are taught to every school child. Here are some of the most famous:

Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth

From the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788, settlement had been confined to the coastal strip around Sydney, because no way could be found across the Blue Mountains to the west. In 1813, following several attempts by others, Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth found a passage to the western plains by following the top of a ridge. It was a difficult journey, often through thick scrub and steep country, and sometimes it was difficult to find grass for the horses to eat.

Blaxland described the start of the journey:

"On Tuesday, May 11, 1813, Mr. Gregory Blaxland, Mr. William Went worth, and Lieutenant Lawson, attended by four servants, with five dogs, and four horses laden with provisions, ammunition, and other necessaries, left Mr. Blaxland's farm at the South Creek near the present town of St Marys, for the purpose of endeavouring to effect a passage over the Blue Mountains, between the Western River, and the River Grose. They crossed the Nepean, or Hawkesbury River, at the ford, on to Emu Island this sand island disappeared some time later, at four o'clock p.m., and having proceeded, according to their calculation, two miles in a south-west direction, through forest land and good pasture, encamped at five o'clock at the foot of the first ridge. The distance travelled on this and on the subsequent days was computed by time, the rate being estimated at about two miles per hour."

Towards the end of their journey, Blaxland had this to say:
"The party encamped by the side of a fine stream of water, at a short distance from a high hill, in the shape of a sugar-loaf. In the afternoon they ascended its summit, from whence they descried all around, forest or grass land, sufficient in extent in their opinion, to support the stock of the colony for the next thirty years. This was the extreme point of their journey. The distance they had travelled they computed at about fifty-eight miles nearly north-west; that is, fifty miles through the mountain, (the greater part of which they had walked over three times,) and eight miles through the forest land beyond it, reckoning the descent of the mountain to be half-a mile to the foot."

The Burke and Wills Expedition

When John McDouall Stuart and Charles Todd arrived separately in Adelaide in 1839 and 1855 respectively, the British Empire was at its zenith, and young men were flocking to the colonies in search of adventure, fame and fortune. The mother country was six months by sea, and Australia it seemed was six months behind in news and fashion, scientific breakthroughs and new technologies.
Todd, a mathematical talent, took up the position of Government Astronomer. But his fascination for the telegraph soon led him to link a wire from Adelaide to Port Adelaide, cutting information travel time from one day to one minute.
Stuart was an adventurer. At first he worked for wealthy pastoralists, exploring the outback looking for gold, copper, and grasslands. But as he perfected the art of travelling light with few men or provisions, his usefulness took on a more important dimension. He became known as the man who would go where other surveyors could not.
Todd came to see that Stuart was the man who could make the hazardous journey to Australia’s northern most shore, and map the route of a telegraph line that would transform the whole country. It was paramount to Todd and his supporters that Adelaide should be the first Australian city to connect to London.
At the time, most people imagined a vast inland sea separated Australia’s east and west coastlines. There was enormous public and media speculation about whether the Victorian backed Burke and Wills or South Australia’s Stuart expedition would be the first to cross the continent’s interior.
Burke and Wills perished, but Stuart survived, partly because he adapted himself to the arid Australian landscape and was able to read signs of water. He realised that he could follow the techniques used by Aboriginal people who had survived in this harsh land for many thousands of years. Inevitably there was conflict as he crossed (unannounced) tribal lands. In describing one battle he wrote in his journal of the warriors he fought; “They are the finest natives I have yet seen. Tall, powerful and muscular men. Bold, daring and courageous. Not at all afraid of either us or our horses.”

The image of the explorers and the ways they describe the country and its inhabitants should always be considered in the contexts from which they come.

[]

The Proposition

The Proposition is a movie directed by John Hillcoat and written by Nick Cave. It stars Guy Pearce, Ray Winstone, Emily Watson, John Hurt and Danny Huston. The film's production completed in 2004, and was followed by a wide 2005 release in Australia and a 2006 theatrical run in the U.S. through First Look Pictures. The movie was Rated R by the MPAA for strong grisly violence and for language.

Set in the Australian Outback in the 1880s, the movie follows the series of events following the horrific rape and murder of the Hopkins family, allegedly committed by the infamous Burns brothers gang. The film opens with a violent gunfight between the police and Charlie Burns's (Guy Pearce) gang, which ends with the deaths of all of the gang except for Charlie and his younger, mentally slow brother, Mikey (Richard Wilson), who is wounded. Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone) offers Charlie a proposition whereby he and Mikey can go free of the crimes they have committed if Charlie kills his older brother, Arthur (Danny Huston). Arthur is a mercurial psychopath who has become something of a legend and is so vicious that the aboriginal tribes refer to him as "The Dog Man" and both the police and the aboriginals refuse to go near his camp. Captain Stanley muses that, perhaps, the bounty hunters will kill him in time and then states his intention to civilize the harsh wilderness he has been forced to live in by bringing Arthur to justice and uses Mikey as leverage. Charlie has nine days to find and kill Arthur, or else Mikey will be hanged from the gallows on Christmas Day.

Southern Africa

''The Scramble for Africa''

It is important to remember that the countries of India, South Africa and Australia did not exist prior to colonisation. Each was created as a nation through the colonisation process. South Africa was part of the Southern African possessions of Britain which included what is now Zimbabwe, Botswana and Uganda.

When war broke out in Europe in 1803, Napoleon tried to stop British trade with Europe. Britain had lost its American colonies with their valuable trading opportunities and was forced to look elsewhere to find new markets for trade. The logical choice was the East. This meant trading by sea and the Cape was the ideal place for ships to obtain fresh water and produce. This prompted the second occupation of the Cape of Good Hope by Britain, in January 1806.

In 1875 the two most important European holdings in Africa were French-controlled Algeria and the United Kingdom's Cape Colony. By 1914 only Ethiopia and the republic of Liberia remained outside formal European control. The transition from an "informal empire" of control through economic dominance to direct control took the form of a "scramble" for territory by the nations of Europe. The United Kingdom tried not to play a part in this early scramble, being more of a trading empire rather than a colonial empire; however, it soon became clear it had to gain its own African empire to maintain the balance of power.

As French, Belgian and Portuguese activity in the lower Congo River region threatened to undermine orderly penetration of tropical Africa, the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 sought to regulate the competition between the powers by defining "effective occupation" as the criterion for international recognition of territorial claims, a formulation which necessitated routine recourse to armed force against indigenous states and peoples.




European claims in Africa, 1914

The Congress of Berlin

The Berlin Conference (German: Kongokonferenz or "Congo Conference") of 1884–85 regulated European colonization and trade in Africa during the New Imperialism period, and coincided with Germany's sudden emergence as an imperial power. Called for by Portugal and organized by Otto von Bismarck, the first Chancellor of Germany, its outcome, the General Act of the Berlin Conference, is often seen as the formalization of the Scramble for Africa.

The Cape Colony

The Cape Colony, part of modern South Africa, was established by the Dutch East India Company in 1652, with the founding of Cape Town. It was subsequently occupied in 1795, and finally taken in 1806, by the British - the period immediately before and during the Napoleonic Wars. It was coextensive with the later Cape Province, stretching from the Atlantic coast inland and eastward along the southern coast, constituting about half of modern South Africa: the final eastern boundary, after several wars against the Xhosa, stood at the Fish River. In the north, the Orange River, also known as the Gariep River, served for a long time as the boundary, although some land between the river and the southern boundary of Botswana was later added to it.

In 1902 the United Kingdom completed its military occupation of the Transvaal and Free State by concluding a treaty with the two Boer Republics following the Second Boer War 1899-1902. The four colonies of Natal, Transvaal, Free State and Cape Province later merged in 1910 to form the Union of South Africa.

British gains in southern and East Africa prompted Cecil Rhodes, pioneer of British expansion from South Africa northward, to urge a "Cape-to-Cairo" British controlled empire linking by rail the strategically important Suez Canal to the mineral-rich South. In 1888 Rhodes with his privately owned British South Africa Company occupied and annexed territories which were called after him: Rhodesia between 1896 and 1980, when it became independent under the name Zimbabwe. Together with British High Commissioner in South Africa between 1897-1905, Alfred Milner, Rhodes pressured the British government for further expansion into Africa. German occupied territories in East Africa would hamper Rhodes’ Cape-to-Cairo-ambition until the end of World War I. In 1903, the All Red Line telegraph system communicated with the major parts of the Empire.

Paradoxically, the United Kingdom, the staunch advocate of free trade, emerged in 1914 with not only the largest overseas empire thanks to its long-standing presence in India, but also the greatest gains in the "scramble for Africa", reflecting its advantageous position at its inception. Between 1885 and 1914 the United Kingdom took nearly 30% of Africa's population under its control, compared to 15% for France, 9% for Germany, 7% for Belgium and 1% for Italy: Nigeria alone contributed fifteen million subjects, more than in the whole of French West Africa or the entire German colonial empire




Cecil Rhodes of the British South Africa Company


The British South Africa Company (BSAC)

The British South Africa Company was established by Cecil Rhodes through the amalgamation of the Central Search Association and the Exploring Company Ltd., receiving a royal charter in 1889. Modelling the BSAC on the British East India Company, Rhodes hoped it would enable colonisation and economic exploitation across much of south-central Africa, as part of the "Scramble for Africa". The company's directors included the Duke of Abercorn, Rhodes himself and the financier Alfred Beit.

British Colonialism in Southern Africa

The British attempted to alleviate the land problems of Boers in the eastern Cape by sending imperial armies against the Xhosa of the Zuurveld (literally, "sour grassland," the southernmost area of Bantu-speaking settlement, located between the Sundays River and the Great Fish River). They attacked the Xhosa from 1799 to 1803, from 1811 to 1812, and again from 1818 to 1819, when at last, through ruthless warfare, they succeeded in expelling the Africans into the area north of the Great Fish River. Thereafter, the British sought to create a fixed frontier by settling 5,000 British-assisted immigrants on smallholder farms created out of land seized from the Xhosa south of the Great Fish River and by clearing all lands between the Great Fish River and the Keiskama River of all forms of African settlement.

"Open Letter to Blackpool."

As mentioned at the opening of this lecture, it should be remembered that not all Europeans supported colonisation and many were strongly aginst the subjecgation of colonised populations. An example of this comes from anArticle by Clements Kadalie, in The New Leader, September 30,1927:

"Most Europeans have some knowledge of the opening up of the "Dark Continent" by the white races, from the commencement of the Slave Trade and the invasion of the Continent by missionaries and white settlers, through the successive stages of colonisation and industrialisation, until 1909, when the separate Colonies of South Africa were grouped into a self-governing unit. After 1909, most British people, except those directly connected with any of the vast profit-making mining or industrial concerns of the country, have ceased to be particularly interested in events in South Africa. The whole fate of the country, and of her millions of people of subject races, has been left to a small minority of white men, whose immediate interests have been diametrically opposed to the welfare of the vast mass of the population." Clements Kadalie, 1927.


Colonial Subjects as Objects




Saartjie "Sarah" Baartman (1789 – December 29, 1815) was the most famous of at least two Khoikhoi women who were exhibited as sideshow attractions in 19th century Europe under the name Hottentot Venus—"Hottentot" as the then-current name for the Khoi people (this is now considered an offensive term), and "Venus" in reference to the many works of art depicting the female form.

Her exhibition in London, scant years after the passing of the Slave Trade Act 1807, created a scandal, and an abolitionist benevolent society (equivalent to a charity or pressure group) called the African Association petitioned for her release. Baartman was questioned before a court in Dutch, in which she was fluent, and stated that she was not under restraint and understood perfectly that she was guaranteed half of the profits. The conditions under which she made these statements are suspect, because it directly contradicts accounts of her exhibits made by Zachary Macaulay of the African Institution and other eyewitnesses.

She died December 29, 1815 of an inflammatory ailment, possibly smallpox, while other sources suggest she contracted pneumonia. An autopsy was conducted and the findings published by French anatomist Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville in 1816 and by Cuvier in the Memoires du Museum d'Histoire Naturelle in 1817. Cuvier notes in his monograph that Baartman was an intelligent woman who had an excellent memory and spoke Dutch fluently. Her skeleton, preserved genitals and brain were placed on display in Paris's Musée de l'Homme until 1974, when they were removed from public view and stored out of sight.

There were sporadic calls for the return of her remains beginning in the 1940s but the case became prominent only after U.S. biologist Stephen Jay Gould published an account, The Hottentot Venus, in the 1980s. When Nelson Mandela became president of South Africa in 1994, he formally requested that France return the remains. After much legal wrangling and debates in the French National Assembly, France acceded to the request on 6 March 2002.

Mara Verna's interactive audio and video piece including a bibliography on Saartjie "Sarah" Baartman.

South Africa government site about Saartjie, including Diana Ferrus's pivotal poem

The display of colonial subjects, Africans, Australian Aboriginals, Indian tribal peoples was fairly common. Often it was their bodily remains; skin, hair, bones, teeth, genitals, and even preserved corpses that where put on display around European cities. Other examples include the last of the Australian tribal Tasmanians Truganini, whose life reads like a tragic study in human suffering. Truganini's hair, skin, skeleton and jewelry were kept in museums and her skeleton was displayed until 1976. Bennelong, the Australian Aboriginal man mentioned above was also 'shown' in London for a time, as a curiosity for the royal court and high society.

Resistance in Southern Africa

An interesting factor to the resitance to colonisation in Southern Africa was that it did not just come from the indigenous African peoples (the example I give here is from the Zulus but there were others) but there was also resistance to British colonisation from the Boer descendants of Dutch settlers to the Cape from a previous wave of colonisation which the British displaced.

Zulu War



When I was at High School in Australia in the 1980s the last day of school before the summer holidays (in November) was an 'out of uniform' day where we could come to school in our own clothes. We spent the day playing sport in the morning and then in the afternoon we were shown a film in the assembly hall of the school. The film that was shown was usually a morally upright one with earnest men struggling against some force that was often greater than them, but which they always overcame (often Japanese, German or African). A favorite was the war film and one that was shown more than one summer was Zulu (1964). Now that I think back to it, we were quite the little sons of empire there in the swealtering heat of early summer watching the fatal attack on Rorkes Drift (the site of a Swedish run Christian mission station) and its defence led by Micheal Caine.

"On the January 22nd 1879 the British Army suffered one of its worst defeats when Zulu forces massacred 1,500 of its troops at Isandlhwana. A short time after the main battle a Zulu force numbering in excess of 4000 warriors advanced on a British hospital and supply dump guarded by 139 Welsh infantrymen. The film concentrates on this bloody 12 hour battle during which the British force, under their commander from the Royal Engineers who happened to be in the area building a bridge and happened to be senior to the infantry officer, won 11 Victoria Crosses. While taking some liberties with history the film follows reality fairly closely, including matching exactly the identities of the VC winners."



"Defense of Rorke's Drift" by Alphonse de Neuville. Painted in 1880, commissioned by the Fine Art Society and now located at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney Australia.

ZULUS AT WAR-1879 AD After diamonds were discovered at Kimberley and gold in the Transvaal, British colonization stepped up. Charged with stopping Zulu attacks, 5000 British soldiers invaded Zululand, setting camp at Isandalwana, where more than 1300 British soldiers died.

[]


The Second Boer War

Commonly referred to as The Boer War and also known as the South African War (outside of South Africa), the Anglo-Boer War (among most South Africans) and in Afrikaans as the Anglo-Boereoorlog or Tweede Vryheidsoorlog ("Second War of Independence"), was fought from 11 October 1899 until 31 May 1902, between the British Empire and the two independent Boer republics of the Orange Free State and the South African Republic (Transvaal Republic). After a protracted, hard-fought war, the two independent republics were absorbed into the British Empire. The Boer War can be described as the first modern war, featuring guerilla tactics and what are today recognised as war crimes; ethnic cleansing, concentration camps, killing of civilians and mobile artillery.

The campaign had been expected by the British government to be over within months, and the protracted war became increasingly unpopular especially after revelations about the conditions in the concentration camps (where thousands died of disease and malnutrition). The demand for peace led to a settlement of hostilities, and in 1902, the Treaty of Vereeniging was signed. The two republics were absorbed into the British Empire, although the British were forced to make a number of concessions and reparations to the Boers. The granting of limited autonomy for the area ultimately lead to the establishment of the Union of South Africa. The war had a lasting effect on the region and on British domestic politics. The war, known as the last British imperial war, was the longest (almost three years), the most expensive (over £200 million), and the most disastrous of all wars for Britain between 1815 and 1914. Over 30 000 soldiers from the British colonies, including Australia and India fought for the British in the Boer War.

Social Media, Copyright and Creativity

When we speak about copyright, we are so often in some way answering the system of laws that regulate intellectual property according to the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works. Sweden signed the Berne Convention on the 1st August 1904. The United States signed the convention on 1st March 1989.

The Berne Convention requires its signatories to recognize the copyright of works of authors from other signatory countries (known as members of the Berne Union) in the same way it recognizes the copyright of its own nationals. For example, French copyright law applies to anything published or performed in France, regardless of where it was originally created.

In addition to establishing a system of equal treatment that internationalized copyright amongst signatories, the agreement also required member states to provide strong minimum standards for copyright law.

Copyright under the Berne Convention must be automatic; it is prohibited to require formal registration (note however that when the United States joined the Convention in 1988, they continued to make statutory damages and attorney's fees only available for registered works).

The Berne Convention states that all works except photographic and cinematographic shall be copyrighted for at least 50 years after the author's death, but parties are free to provide longer terms, as the European Union did with the 1993 Directive on harmonizing the term of copyright protection. For photography, the Berne Convention sets a minimum term of 25 years from the year the photograph was created, and for cinematography the minimum is 50 years after first showing, or 50 years after creation if it hasn't been shown within 50 years after the creation. Countries under the older revisions of the treaty may choose to provide their own protection terms, and certain types of works (such as phonorecords and motion pictures) may be provided shorter terms.

In the European Union according to 1993 Directive on harmonizing the term of copyright protection,

the the rights of authors are protected within their lifetime and for seventy years after their death (Art. 1, D. 93/98/EEC): this includes the resale rights of artists (Art. 8, D. 2001/84/EC). For films and other audiovisual works, the seventy year period applies from the last death among the following people, whether or not they are considered to be authors of the work by the national law of the Member State: the principal director (who is always considered to be an author of the audiovisual work), the author of the screenplay, the author of the dialogue and the composer of music specifically created for use in the cinematographic or audiovisual work (Art. 2, D. 93/98/EEC).

The rights of performers last for fifty years from the distribution or communication of the performance, or for fifty years from the performance itself if it had never been communicated to the public during this period (Art. 3(1), D. 93/98/EEC). The rights of phonogram producers last for fifty years after publication of the phonogram, or for fifty years after its communication to the public if it had never been published during that period, or for fifty years after its creation if it had never been communicated to the public (Art. 3(2), D. 93/98/EEC, as modified by Art. 11(2), D. 2001/29/EC). The rights of film producers last for fifty years after the communication of the film to the public, or for fifty years after its creation if it had never been communicated to the public during that period (Art. 3(3), D. 93/98/EEC). The rights of broadcasting organizations last for fifty years after the first transmission of a broadcast (Art. 3(4), D. 93/98/EEC). The European Commission proposed this be extended to 95 years and following this suggestion the European Parliament passed legislation to increase the term to 70 years.

Where a work enjoyed a longer period of protection under national law on 1 July 1995, its period of protection is not shortened. Otherwise, these terms of protection apply to all works which were protected in a Member State of the European Economic Area on 1 July 1995 (Art. 10, D. 93/98/EEC). This provision had the effect of restoring the copyrights in certain works which had entered the public domain in countries which shorter copyright terms.[5] The EU Copyright Directive [2001/29/EC, Art. 11(2)] modified the term of protection of phonograms, calculating from the date of publication instead of from an earlier date of communication to the public, but did not restore the protection of phonograms which had entered the public domain under the former rules (Art. 3(2), D. 93/98/EEC, as modified). All periods of protection run until 31 December of the year in which they expire.

It is against this backdrop that all cultural production occurs. There is no guarantee of fair use in the European copyright system of laws. Instead there are a series of permitted limitations, which are:

* paper reproductions by photocopying or similar methods, except of sheet music, if there is compensation for rightsholders;
* reproductions made for private and non-commercial use if there is compensation for rightholders;
* reproductions by public libraries, educational institutions or archives for non-commercial use;
* preservation of recordings of broadcasts in official archives;
* reproductions of broadcasts by social, non-commercial institutions such as hospitals and prisons, if there is compensation to rightholders;
* use for illustration for teaching or scientific research, to the extent justified by the non-commercial purpose;
* uses directly related to a disability, to the extent justified by the disability;
* press reviews and news reporting;
* quotations for the purposes of criticism or review;
* uses for the purposes of public security or in administrative, parliamentary or judicial proceedings;
* uses of political speeches and extracts of public lectures, to the extent justified by public information;
* uses during religious or official celebrations;
* uses of works, such as architecture or sculpture, which are located permanently in public places;
* incidental inclusion in another work;
* use for the advertisement of the public exhibition or sale of art;
* caricature, parody or pastiche;
* use in connection with the demonstration or repair of equipment;
* use of a protected work (eg, plans) for the reconstruction of a building;
* communication of works to the public within the premises of public libraries, educational institutions, museums or archives.

Outside these points the reproduction and distribution of copyrighted material (and it is automatic, everything that is published is copyrighted according to the Berne Convention). As I show in an example below, even the use of copyrighted materials for educational purposes is very restricted.

Where there is contention in regards to copyright law is the difficulties of reconciling the laws, as they have been gradually established since the Statute of Anne, generally recognized as the first mordern form of copyright law which was made law in the (brand new) United Kingdom in 1709:

The Statute replaced the monopoly enjoyed by the Stationer's Company granted in 1557 during the reign of Mary I which, after several renewals, expired in 1695. Under this regime, company members would buy manuscripts from authors but once purchased, would have a perpetual monopoly on the printing of the work. Authors themselves were excluded from membership in the company and could not therefore legally self-publish, nor were they given royalties for books that sold well.

The statute of 1709 vested authors rather than printers with the monopoly on the reproduction of their works. It created a 21 year term for all works already in print at the time of its enactment and a fourteen year term for all works published subsequently. It also required that printers provide nine copies to the Stationer's Company for distribution to the Royal Library, the libraries of Oxford, Cambridge, St Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Edinburgh, Sion College and the Faculty of Advocates library in Edinburgh.

Copyright has since it's earliest days function to regulate and organize the business associated with media. Today digital media is providing those that work with copyright law with plenty to think about.


Lip Dub - Flagpole Sitta by Harvey Danger

Digital Millennium Copyright Act
One example of how nations and legislators have responded to the challenges of digital media in terms of copyright is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 from the United States of America:

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a United States copyright law that implements two 1996 treaties of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). It criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services intended to circumvent measures (commonly known as digital rights management or DRM) that control access to copyrighted works. It also criminalizes the act of circumventing an access control, whether or not there is actual infringement of copyright itself. In addition, the DMCA heightens the penalties for copyright infringement on the Internet. Passed on October 12, 1998 by a unanimous vote in the United States Senate and signed into law by President Bill Clinton on October 28, 1998, the DMCA amended Title 17 of the United States Code to extend the reach of copyright, while limiting the liability of the providers of on-line services for copyright infringement by their users.

On May 22, 2001, the European Union passed the Copyright Directive or EUCD, which addresses some of the same issues as the DMCA. But the DMCA's principal innovation in the field of copyright, the exemption from direct and indirect liability of internet service providers and other intermediaries (Title II of the DMCA), was separately addressed, and largely followed, in Europe by means of the separate Electronic Commerce Directive. (Unlike U.S. federal laws and regulations, the execution of European Union directives usually requires separate legislation by or within each of the Union's member states.)

IPRED
In Sweden the Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED) laws were introduced in 2009:

Section 2 of the Directive deals with the evidence. Article 6 gives the power to the interested party to apply for evidence regarding an infringement that lies in the hands of the other party to be presented. The only requirement is for that party to present “reasonably available evidence sufficient to support its claim” to courts. In case of an infringement on a commercial scale, Member States must also take steps to ensure that “banking, financial or commercial documents” of the opposing party are presented. In both cases confidential information shall be protected.

Measures for preserving evidence are available even before the proceedings commence. Article 7 provides that such measures may be granted under the same conditions as under Article 6 and include provisional measures such as physical seizure not only of the infringing goods (such as hard drives) but also materials used in the production and distribution.

Article 6 provides that such measures may be taken without the other party having been heard, in particular where any delay is likely to cause irreparable harm to the rightholder or where there is a demonstrable risk of evidence being destroyed. These are interlocutory, ex parte and in personam orders known in the English and Irish jurisdictions as Anton Piller orders. They are not used outside the UK and Ireland.

The Nature of Digital Online Media



The nature of digital media is decentralized network orientated with unlimited copying potentials from read-write technology. Every example of a digital media work in its coded form resembles every other copy of the same work. The many-to-many structure of digital networks makes sharing of the copies of digital works very very easy.



When the then Swedish based Pirate Bay Torrent Tracker was taken offline briefly in 2006 there was a noticed decline in Internet traffic. Imagine if all torrent networks were closed down and information generally went through the main channels at the center of the network. The congestion would be severe, as a 2007 study pointed out:

Three distinct regions are apparent: an inner core of highly connected nodes, an outer periphery of isolated networks, and a mantle-like mass of peer-connected nodes. The bigger the node, the more connections it has. Those nodes that are closest to the center are connected to more well-connected nodes than are those on the periphery. (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

Interesting. A review of the study in The Technology Review summarized the findings as; "Routing traffic through peer-to-peer networks could stave off Internet congestion, according to a new study."

Finally I would like to share with you an example of the legal problems that are being created by digital media. In the Museum Studies course last year, which we teaching using the 3D virtual world of Second Life, a number of questions arose concerning the use of cultural materials for the purposes of education, by students. I wrote to one of the university lawyers with questions about what was permitted in regards to streaming in virtual worlds according to the Swedish copyright law.

Dear Jim

I’m sorry for taking some time to answer, it’s been a busy few weeks…

Your Second Life project seems interesting, and I’m sure it raises a few questions that the current legal structure in the higher education area is not equipped to deal with. However I will do my best to answer the questions you raise in your e-mail.

Firstly the university should not, and may not, encourage the students to use copyrighted material in violation of intellectual property laws. As I understand your e-mail the use of the particular materials has been primarily an initiative by the students? I do believe the university still has a responsibility to educate the students on the lawful use of such material and to – within reasonable limits – ensure that our students does comply with IP-laws when fulfilling their assignments. There is a certain room in the swedish intellectual property laws (Upphovsrättslagen) to use materials for scientific and artistic critique. This right does not however include the right to use movie-works such as the documentary from SVT. The Harry Potter photos could, depending on the context of their use be argued to fit within the artistic/scientific critique allowed by the law, but I’m afraid the law was not written with virtual museums in mind, and I think the outcome of a case trying that particular legal question would be hard to predict but likely not to include the right to use them in a virtual museum. My recommendation is therefore to ask the students to remove both the SVT documentary and the Harry Potter images.

The students could also contact SVT and ask for permission to use the movie, as well as the studio owning the Potter photos. As for the policy you requested, the university jurists has written a letter to Utbildningsdepartementet calling for a renegotiation of the copy-agreement which regulate our right to use copyrighted material in the educational context, to allow for a broader use of such material in the growing digital educational arena. As of today there has been no response, but with a little luck there will be a better agreement available in the future. In the meantime, if there are any specific questions that arise, don’t hesitate to contact us with questions.

Best regards

Markus Naarttijärvi
Bitr. Universitetsjurist
Umeå universitet

As far as I know we are still waiting for a response from the "utbildningsdepartementet calling for a renegotiation of the copy-agreement which regulate our right to use copyrighted material in the educational context".

According to swedish law; "Var och en får citera ur offentliggjorda verk i överensstämmelse med god sed och i den omfattning som motiveras av ändamålet." - Any person may quote from published works in accordance with fair practice and to the extent necessary for the purpose. Here is seems the onus is on what is reasonable. Citation is one thing, mass copying and distribution another and remix or mashup yet more.

Social Media as Text

In Close Reading New Media, Jan van Looy and Jan Baetens write

The decentered nature of electronic text empowers and invites the reader to take part in the literary process. Poststructuralist theorists predicted a total liberation of textual restrictions imposed by the medium of print. However, while these are culturally significant claims, little attention has been paid to their realization

In the seven years since these words were published little has changed in regards to claims made in regards to "a total liberation of textual restrictions imposed by the medium of print". The so-called social media which is filling the lives of so many people today is based upon an often unstated premise that 'You' are the media. That the limitations of what can be created and published are based on the limits of the imagination and ingenuity of those who sign up for Blogger, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Myspace and so on. But if we pause time and stop to consider the mechanics, what could be termed the archiTEXTure, of social media platforms, what do they reveal when they are exposed to close readings as texts?

A close reading is a product of a particular approach to literature that has developed during the past two hundred years, although it has its origins in the humanism on the Renaissance.

"In literary criticism, close reading describes the careful, sustained interpretation of a brief passage of text. Such a reading places great emphasis on the particular over the general, paying close attention to individual words, syntax, and the order in which sentences and ideas unfold as they are read" Wikipedia

Close reading of digital media pays attention to the components of the text and how they relate to each other. It analyzes and attempts to explain how possible meanings are built up according to the choices available in the digital text and what the texts present for reading. When you perform a close reading of a digital text look at the relationships that are present in the text, what values and hierarchies are represented, and the possible choices the texts makes available in responding to it.

The Text
I would like to begin by clarifying what is a text. Looy and Baetens return to the great poststucturalist theorists for gaining perspective of what is a text in the context of the digital,

"The passive reader becomes an active participant choosing his own path and assembling not just his own interpretation of the text (level of the signified), but also his own text (level of the signifier). Texts no longer have a beginning or an ending being a web of interlinked nodes or rhizome (Deleuze & Guattari through Landow 1997: 38)."

Going further along this road, "A text is a coherent set of symbols that transmits some kind of informative message" (Wikipedia).

Things to Read For
1.Authorship
Included in the concept of the digital text as social media is an enormous range of variables. They can be grounded in the fact that there is no single author in social media. Even a blog is a product of collaboration, from the design (consider if one downloads a template) to the comments section on each post. Some best blogs on the web are group projects, such as the HUMlab Blog, WFMU Beware of the Blog, and Grand Text Auto. The principle of many-to-many in social media has great implications for authorship. How textual components are transmitted and presented is in terms of "such modes as appropriation, synthesis, recombination, mutation and generation, postmodern poetics expresses a commitment to the dialogical, social world"(Joseph M. Conte, Unending Design: the Form of Postmodern Poetry).Similarly, in the Web-based communications, everyone is a potential author, contributor, and message creator . The concept of a traditional author (or a message creator) is deconstructed and replaced by a collective authorship. The individual as well as an organization cedes control over the communicative process. Attention should be paid to the material configuration of the media, as it is where form is adhered to. In his book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Lawrence Lessig argues that code displaces the balance in copyright law and doctrines such as fair use (135). If it becomes possible to license every aspect of use (by means of trusted systems created by code), then no aspect of use would have the protection of fair use (136). The importance of this side of the story is generally underestimated and, as the examples will show, very often, code is even (only) considered as an extra tool to fight against "unlimited copying".


2.Space
Digital texts are generally spatial. By this I mean they use the elements of space that are part of the media to transmit informative messages. Let take a look at Grand Text Auto



In considering space one should look for contrasts, colors, space between features, the size and possible areas of dominance, how the eye is drawn across the screen, how links are arranged, how time is represented in the page, and functional aspects such as ease of differentiation between permanent and temporal features.

Prezi is a good example of how time is presented in space:



How Prezi forces us to subscribe to its depiction of time is a result of the rules of its code. A hierarchy is created by the two dimensional arrangements of elements in Prezi presentations.

3.Repetition
The repetition of elements in a digital text which suggests responses that can be made to it. Janet H Murray writes it is devices for patterning language into units that make it easier for bards to memorize and recall" that "we in a literate era devalue as repetition, redundancy and cliché," but that make it possible for each performance to be improvised on the spot, so that they are essentially multiform, with "no single canonical version." Repetition of words, images, audio assists in guiding reading of digital texts.

A Reading of Facebook
Facebook is a horizontally arranged network based on association rather than interest (unlike Myspace). One builds connections with others in the viral sense; email is used to bring contacts into the system. By allowing Facebook access to email account (Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo and AOL) mass mail-outs can be one way of building up you friends list and of course bringing contributing to the Facebook database. The other way of finding contacts is through work, school and college. I myself went to a tiny high school in a small town in rural Australia (Oakey State High…go the Bears!) so it is not on the list of schools (you can only choose, not type in). But the town I went to university in is well represented. Interestingly the private schools (as in non-government) seem to be much more represented in the lists of high schools. In Brisbane, the capital of my home state there are 13 High schools listed and only 3 of them are government schools that did not charge fees. I wonder if this reflects the overall demographic of Facebook or the use of digital social software in Queensland, Australia. There is also college and company searches but when you type in the title Facebook will not prompt the line for you as there are no prior entries in the database of the term.

Setting up a profile on Facebook is not too different from other social platforms. There is lots of plug-ins that can be loaded into a page; video, books I’ve read, photos, movies and the list is growing daily. There are issues of readability relevant in regards to a Facebook site. I myself believe minimalism works on the web, this is a design question but I try to keep my site fairly sharp and to the point. I decline lots of offers from friends for zombie clubs, vampire attacks and poking or biting my colleagues. I have decided it is an identity thing I have going on Facebook and not a game. I am also fully aware of what I disclose on Facebook as it is a public space, even if it does have something of a gated community feel to it. I don’t think the gated (restricted access, password protected etc.) is that substantial.

Once you have a profile on Facebook then you can join interest groups. These can be from the sublime to the ridiculous: “I bet I can find 1,000,000 people who dislike George Bush!” was a group I just noticed. I have just applied to be friends with digital researcher Anna Valdes (I have met her, I wonder if she remembers me?) in order to join her group Gender and Computer Games. The gender group is made up of serious academic researchers, game developers and players in Sweden. A worthwhile project I believe. The groups are what led me into the close reader of Facebook, as we need to create a group for our honored guests visiting Umeå for the annual awards ceremony. There are actually 3 stages we have to get through to create a group:

1. Joining Facebook
2. Becoming a friend with one central person who is organizing the group if it is not open.
3. Joining the group
Each of these stages has to be fulfilled if one is to be a member of the group. If it is a closed group only the administrator of the group can invite another;

You can join any open group on your networks. Also, you can join any “global” group that is open. These groups can be found using the Search page. Just type in a keyword for the group you want to find and specify that you are looking for “Groups.” Alternatively, you can browse by category from the Groups page. When you find the group you are looking for, click on the “join group” link on the right side of the screen. Some groups require administrative approval for you to join. If you try to join these groups, you will have to wait for an admin to let you in. Finally, there are some groups on Facebook that are invitation only. You cannot request to join these. Only an invitation from a group admin will give you access

So sometimes you have to make each member a friend before you can invite them to the group (tedious). If you send an invite to become a friend to someone who is not a member of Facebook they are asked in the same mail to join Facebook and become members of the group once they accept the invitation that appears in the Facebook Inbox.

All these considerations add up to becoming the texture of Facebook. The texture is the layers of text that have to be negotiated to engage with the site. Texture combines the collaborative aspects of Facebook (millions of authors creating content) with the structures and laws that come from those that created the Facebook platform. In essence with the efforts to create the annual awards group, I have been navigating the texture of Facebook in something akin to what Jerome McGann described in Radiant Textuality: Literature After the World Wide Web (2001) as a ‘Deformance’, the moving from non-normative readings of Facebook (I have no idea what I am doing and I make ‘mistakes’) to normative readings, where the texture becomes familiar and I create the group site that is suitable for the annual awards ceremony.

Excercises

I would like you to perform a close reading of a social media text. What you are actually paying attention to in critiquing the possible meanings of these texts is interaction design.

"Interaction design (IxD) is the study of devices with which a user can interact, in particular computer users. The practice typically centers around "embedding information technology into the ambient social complexities of the physical world."[1] It can also apply to other types of non-electronic products and services, and even organizations. Interaction design defines the behavior (the "interaction") of an artifact or system in response to its users. Malcolm McCullough has written, "As a consequence of pervasive computing, interaction design is poised to become one of the main liberal arts of the twenty-first century" Wikipedia

You can find some subject texts here:

Blogs
Wiki
Networks

As well as the usual social media sites you have been working with (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, MySpace etc.)

Journalism, Media and the Future

"Public goods are notoriously under-produced in the marketplace, and news is a public good--and yet, since the mid-nineteenth century, newspapers have produced news in abundance at a cheap price to readers and without need of direct subsidy. More than any other medium, newspapers have been our eyes on the state, our check on private abuses, our civic alarm systems. It is true that they have often failed to perform those functions as well as they should have done. But whether they can continue to perform them at all is now in doubt".Goodbye to the Age of Newspapers (Hello to a New Era of Corruption)

Welcome to the future of journalism in the post-industrial world. When I studied journalism in the late 1980s it was a different world. We used typewriters!! I cut and pasted up stories on large 45 degree tables with paper, scalpel and glue. We sold papers on campus as it was a primary source of news and the only avenue for publication for us would-be hacks. Later, after graduation I made fanzines with my friends in Sydney, Australia with the early 90s being a hot bed for creativity in the zine community. Desktop publishing had made it easy to produce copy and two-tone printing was cheap. We hand colored the zine we produced ourselves. It was a work of art.

Then in 1995 the internet arrived. It was a quiet explosion that was followed by a digital media revolution. It is still going on today. Today many newspaper are struggling and citizen journalism is becoming a part of daily life. How does journalism as a profession fit into this new and exciting landscape? That is what the initiative Framtidsredaktionen comes in. The ambition is to provide a network centered on Umeå University Campus for news and media production, distribution and consumption, by students and for students. A community that will allow students to produce the best they can, gain experience, get noticed and inform each other. This is the future of journalism.

The concept of Framtidsredaktionen draws upon a number of precedents, including such news sites as:

Oh My News

Democracy Now

Second Opinion

Läsernas Fria

and such online communities as Warren Ellis are also worth acknowledging in what is possible.

This is an exciting opportunity for us here in Umeå to build a digital journalism network that has the potential to be world-class. Working with HUMlab you will be using cutting edge technology and have access to leaders in the field. We welcome you.

More Links on Journalism and the Future

An Introduction to Digital Literature

What is Digital Literature?

The term refers to works with important literary aspects that take advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer. Within the broad category of digital literature are several forms and threads of practice, some of which are:

• Hypertext fiction and poetry, on and off the Web
• Kinetic poetry presented in Flash and using other platforms
• Computer art installations which ask viewers to read them or otherwise have literary aspects
• Conversational characters, also known as chatterbots
• Interactive fiction
• Novels that take the form of emails, SMS messages, or blogs
• Poems and stories that are generated by computers, either interactively or based on parameters given at the beginning
• Collaborative writing projects that allow readers to contribute to the text of a work
• Literary performances online that develop new ways of writing

The ELO showcase, to which new works are continually added, provides a few outstanding examples of what they term electronic literature. I believe the proximity of the digital in electronic literature warrants the use of both terms. According to the Wikipedia electronic literature is a literary genre consisting of works of literature that originate within digital environments.

To begin with, it is necessary to define what we mean by ‘digital literature’. We can distinguish at least three quite different meanings for this expression:
1. Digital Publishing. This perspective focuses on the production and marketing of literature and books, with the aid of digital technology. It includes such phenomena as eBooks, Print On Demand, AudioBooks as MP3 files etc. Content-wise it is a question of literature in a traditional sense.
2. Scholarly literary hypertext editions for educational and research purposes. This category includes hypertextually annotated literary works, as well as multimedia implementations of classics. Mainly, because of rights issues, these are older works, free of royalties.
3. Writing for Digital Media. Digital texts are always programmed text, on one level they are computer code. This opens up a limitless field of literary play and experimentation, as texts can be programmed to behave in a more or less dynamic way. We call this perspective cybertextuality and the works cybertexts, following Espen Aarseth (1997). Cybertextuality is an umbrella term for different types of digital texts, such as hypertexts, kinetic texts, generated texts, texts employing agent technologies etc.
All three categories are important for literary studies, and they also bear implications for literary pedagogy.
Raine Koskimaa, Teaching Digital Literature: Code and Culture

Medieval Help Desk
The Scriptorium was in turmoil. Brother Paul, the precentor in charge, had detected a murmur from the back row and, furious that the rule of silence was being compromised, strode down the aisle just in time to see Brother Jacob tuck something under his robe. When he demanded to see it, Brother Jacob shamefacedly produced a codex, but not one that the antiquarii of this monastery had copied — or of any monastery, for this Psalter was printed. Shocked as much by the sight of the mechanical type as Brother Jacob's transgression, Brother Paul so far forgot himself that he too broke the silence, thundering that if books could be produced by fast, cheap and mechanical means, their value as precious artifacts would be compromised. Moreover, if any Thomas, Richard or Harold could find his way into print, would not writing itself be compromised and become commonplace scribbling? And how would the spread of cheap printed materials affect the culture of the Word, bringing scribbling into every hut and hovel whose occupants had hitherto relied on priests to interpret writing for them? The questions hung in the air; none dared imagine what answers the passing of time would bring.

Electronic literature, generally considered to exclude print literature that has been digitized, is by contrast "digital born," a first-generation digital object created on a computer and (usually) meant to be read on a computer. The Electronic Literature Organization, whose mission is to "promote the writing, publishing, and reading of literature in electronic media," convened a committee headed by Noah Wardrip-Fruin, himself a creator and critic of electronic literature, to come up with a definition appropriate to this new field. The committee's choice was framed to include both work performed in digital media and work created on a computer but published in print (as, for example, was Brian Kim Stefans's computer-generated poem "Stops and Rebels"). The committee's formulation: "work with an important literary aspect that takes advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer."
Hayles, N. Katherine, ”Electronic Literature: What is it?”

Navigation is not just how readers move through electronic literature but how they read digital works. When and how the reader inputs a command, whether it is a mouse-click or a typewritten word, this action affects the work’s performance and the reader’s engagement with it. In other words, navigation enables the digital work’s performance and its signification. To understand how navigation is signification in electronic literature, let’s examine a few modes of navigating electronic literature and the their distinct effects on the reading practices and signification processes they produce.
Pressman, Jessica. ”Navigating Electronic Literature."

Konkret poesi
At the intersection between games, puzzles, poetry and prose is concrete poetry:
Concrete poetry, pattern poetry or shape poetry is poetry in which the typographical arrangement of words is as important in conveying the intended effect as the conventional elements of the poem, such as meaning of words, rhythm, rhyme and so on. It is sometimes referred to as visual poetry; a term that has evolved to have distinct meaning of its own, because the words themselves form a picture. This can be called imagery because you use your senses to figure out what the words mean. Concrete poetry has a long history. Poems that Go is an online periodical that publishes kinetic digital concrete poetry.


Worth Considering in the Reading of Digital Literature
Space
A defining characteristic of digital literary works is how space is utilized within them to aid in the conveyance of meaning. I believe space is the raw material of design and within its frame it is the grounding of the places that feature in the work. Space is used in a number of ways in works of digital literature;
* As a means to convey rhythm and a sense of timing,
* To regulate and direct the choices that can be made in navigating to the work,
* To create pauses and gaps in the work for reader reflection
* To arrange the features of the work in the sense of design, including the creation or representation of place,

Reading Paths
The reading paths of a digital literary work can take various forms, the tree and the labyrinth are the most common.

Layers
The ways the sections or segments of a digital literary work combine can be thought of in terms of layering in order to understand how they function within the structures of narrative media. Layering is present in the combinations of audio, image and text when moving through a three dimensional space that tells a story.


Dreamaphage by Jason Nelson (2004) shows how layering in a work of digital literature is used to organize the reading experience. Order is established in space by the layering of the components.

Speed
The feedback system of a digital literary work is important for how the story can be realized. How information is entered into the digital work of literature and what results it returns drives much of the narrative structure of the work. Katherine Hayles has written:

"Complex feedback loops connect humans and machines, old technologies and new, language and code, analog processes and digital fragmentations. Although these feedback lops evolve over time and thus have a historical trajectory that arcs from one point to another, it is important not to make the mistake of privileging any one point as the primary locus of attention, which can easily result in flattening complex interactions back into linear casual chains." My Mother Was a Computer

When we read digital literature it is not only words we read. The images, spaces, sounds and representations of media (radio, film, newspapers, TV, architectures) in a digital work are interepreted and responded to by us. How fast each of these systems returns a result to us establishes much of how the digital work is read. The speed of the publishing system, the resolution of images, the size of audio files in a work provide a unifying thread in the work that does not privilege one site in the system. Rather how the speed of the work directs reading ties the diverse media forms together.

Sources for Digital Literature
Jim's Archive
A growing collection of online works

Facade
An "interactive one-act drama" that is installed on each of the computers in HUMlab. Please experiment with it.

Alleph
A complex work that involves seven visual spaces with three links in each. Telling a story of migration and self identity.

Dreamaphage
A dystopian narrative about a plague and those who are infected and those who are left behind.

Last Meal Requested
An artistic recounting of the cruelty of people and the struggles of minorities and the disempowered. By Japanese/Swedish artist Sachiko Hayashi

Fast City
A multimedia representation of Singapore in poetic form. By Don Bosco. You need to download and install it.

Research, HUMlab and the Community of Scholars

HUMlab in Second Life

I began working in HUMlab, a digital humanities lab and studio at Umeå University, in the Spring of 2003 as a third term English Literature student. I immediately knew it was different. What struck me about 'the lab'included:

* Learning across the spectrum
Digital tools provide entry points to a variety of learning situations. My first project in HUMlab was the Virtual Weddings Project. Since then I have been involved in projects with other virtual worlds (Adobe Atmosphere, Second Life), mobile blogging (working with informatics scholars), digital literature research work (my thesis area in Language Studies), seminar and workshop presentations (art and technology, programming, narrative studies), teaching at undergrad course level (museum studies, culture studies), course planning (Media and Culture), web design and authoring (I am blogging on several sites), design and conference planning.

* Media as Frame
Digital media can be used to frame research across subjects. In my own area two examples are The William Blake Archive and The Virtual Macbeth project. The Blake Archive is an example of what could be termed tool-based humanities computing. Virtual Macbeth is an example of more process and critically-based digital literary studies. Each exhibits potentials to increase the dimensions of scholarship in English Literature, without discarding that which has been achieved in the past centuries. Other examples of digital media setting new frames in research, but from the activities in HUMlab, includes:

- The Creative
The creative energy in HUMlab is apparent. I have been involved in art, music, performance, and poetry since working in the lab. More 'pure research' use of creative digital applications include in Mapping and Visualization and Archeology with the Environmental Archeology Laboratory (use of GIS technology has broad implications and applications). Many examples can be called upon from what has been achieved in HUMlab over the past decade. Visualization ranges from 2 and 3 dimensional media applications as well as text, graphic, and dynamic animations.

- The social:
As an approach to research the social is present in HUMlab from retro computer game to online communities. Domestic violence to the use of YouTube in youth cultures. Language studies are of course present in social media. A recently defended thesis that was based in HUMlab, Making Sense Digitally: Conversational Coherence in Online and Mixed-Mode Contexts, can be included. As well as the social in the research, one is rarely along in working in HUMlab. There is a constant focus on networks and team work in the lab. Projects are launched in fika chats, through coincidental meetings and from seminar encounters.

- The Relevant
Working in HUMlab has for me brought a stong degree of cutting edge relevance to my work. I am trained in generic skills that can be used across academic callings. I have learned programming, composition, planning, and much more. A particular interest of mine is copyright and Intellectual Property (IP), which has never been a hotter topic than it is now. While we have had not had a single large project on copyright and IP in HUMlab, it is a constant element in the working of the lab. One example of this is a blog post by American scholar and HUMlab friend Bryan Alexander.

- Collaboration
Access to international researchers, artists and figures in the field is a central element in HUMLab. Visits and often extended stays in the lab have included such figures as Howard Rheingold, Katherine Hayles, Henry Jenkins, Charles Ess, Bruce Damer, Ana Váldes, Tallan Memmott, Ian Bogost and many more. Over one hundred seminars from guests teachers, researchers and artists are available online on the HUMlab wesbite as streamed video. As a doctoral student I have worked in teams that included techniicans and other researchers, artists and undergrad students.

A Slightly out'of-date presentation of the history and ideas behind the name HUMlab

Presentation of HUMlab to Science and Technology Studies Conference

View more presentations from Jim Barrett.