Counter Networks of Empires: Reading unexpected people in unexpected places

• Published in: Journal of colonialism & colonial history Vol. 19; no. 2
• Main Authors: Mar, Tracey Banivanua, Rhook, Nadia
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 01.07.2018
• Subjects: 19th century; Abolition of slavery; Black Power movement; Cohesion; Colonialism; Decolonization; Historical text analysis; Ideology; Native peoples; Politics; Printed materials; Religion; Sovereignty; Textiles; New Zealand; Indian Ocean; Australia; Canberra Australian Capital Territory Australia; Antipodes; India
• ISSN: 1532-5768; 1532-5768
• DOI: 10.1353/cch.2018.0009

[...]too, in the streets of the Pacific's colonial cities—Port Vila, Port Moresby and Suva—in the villages and plantations of New Britain, Fiji and the Solomons, existing church networks and new political ones were being utilized and formed around new and localised notions of independence, sovereignty and decolonization.1 Although the activist groups were numerically small, the turbulence caused by the surge of Indigenous and decolonising activity in the Antipodes was often literally spectacular, as in the case of the 1974 land rights march, or hikoi, in New Zealand, or the 1972 occupation of Canberra parklands by the Aboriginal tent embassy in Australia.2 Such public activities attracted unprecedented press and international coverage, but also built on subterranean sources of strength and inspiration that were seen to pose a significant security threat to imperial and settler administrations. [...]many scholars "seem to have arrived at the notion of empire as an inevitably multi-layered, porous and fractured space," observe Nandini Chatterjee and Lakshmi Subramanian, "a notion that does not discard the fact of colonial violence and the ideological aggression of imperialists" but "builds upon them to displace a view of empires as territorially and ideologically stable and bounded units entailing predictable, if oppressive control of colonized populations by colonizers. With various degrees of autonomy, Indigenous and subaltern people pulled settlers into their orbits, routes and projects—even to work on their ideas of sovereignty. Since counter networks of empire have been ongoing processes, involving shifting constellations of places and actors, we cannot assume either their racial composition, nor their outcomes. [...]see Om Prakash, "Europeans, India and the Indian Ocean in the Early Modern Period," South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 19/1 (1996): 15; Eivind Heldaas Seland, "Networks and Social Cohesion in Ancient Indian Ocean Trade: Geography, ethnicity, religion," Journal of Global History 8/3 (2013): 373–90; Pedro Machado, "Cloths of a New Fashion: Networks of exchange, African consumerism and cloth zones of contact in India and the Indian Ocean in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries," in How India Clothed the World: The world of South Asian textiles, 1500–1850, edited by G. Riello and T. Roy (Brill, Leiden, 2008), 53–84.