Unruly agents: Police reform, bureaucratization, and policemen's agency in interwar Togo

This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.In the last few years, our understanding of police forces in Africa has increased significantly. Whilst in previous literature the police tended to be presented as a mere instrument in the hands of state elites, recent studies have shown the ability of policemen to defend their group interests. This article analyses a pivotal moment in the history of French West Africa, namely the creation of theService de Sûretéin the early 1930s. Drawing on archival evidence from Togo, it takes a close look at the shift from military to urban policing, arguing that the bureaucratization of security modified the agency of African policemen. Whereas previously their forms of protest were very much connected with the specific setting of military camps (indiscipline, desertion, rebellion), these now increasingly included written protests within the administration.Peer Reviewe

BDEEP vB6: The West Indies

The British Documents on the End of Empire Project (BDEEP) is an initiative of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. Established in 1987 under the auspices of the British Academy, the Project has since published 18 volumes containing an annotated selection of official documents from the UK National Archives, charting British withdrawal from its colonial territories. Electronic versions of these volumes have been made available with the support of The Stationary Office under an Open Government Licence. Series B Volume 6 on 'The West Indies' was published in 1999 and edited by SR Ashton and David Killingray

Tensions of colonial punishment: perspectives on recent developments in the study of coercive networks in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean

The study of penal practices in colonised parts of Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean has recently witnessed a significant shift. The first generation of research into the coercive measures of colonial states tended to focus rather narrowly on imprisonment. The second generation, which has emerged only in the last five years, has significantly widened their field of vision to incorporate much more than the prison. The most recent literature considers capital and corporal punishment, as well as the larger functioning of police and courts. It also explores in more depth the ways in which indigenous peoples experienced and interpreted their punishments. Finally, this new research is sensitive to the paradoxes and tensions of colonial punishment, which often frustrated its purposes. This article reflects upon these historiographical shifts, and argues that, in light of these developments, a new framework for the study of colonial punishment is now called for. It suggests that an approach which views colonial coercive techniques as part of imperial ‘coercive networks’ encapsulates this new thinking

Deaths from Bacterial Pneumonia during 1918–19 Influenza Pandemic

A sequential-infection hypothesis is consistent with characteristics of this pandemic

Pandemic Influenza Planning in Nursing Homes: Are We Prepared?

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/66316/1/j.1532-5415.2007.01299.x.pd

British Torture in the 'War on Terror'

Despite longstanding allegations of UK involvement in prisoner abuse during counterterrorism operations as part of the US-led ‘war on terror’, a consistent narrative emanating from British government officials is that Britain neither uses, condones nor facilitates torture or other cruel, inhuman, degrading treatment and punishment. We argue that such denials are untenable. We have established beyond reasonable doubt that Britain has been deeply involved in post-9/11 prisoner abuse, and we can now provide the most detailed account to date of the depth of this involvement. We argue that it is possible to identify a peculiarly British approach to torture in the ‘war on terror’, which is particularly well-suited to sustaining a narrative of denial. To explain the nature of UK involvement, we argue that it can be best understood within the context of how law and sovereign power have come to operate during the ‘war on terror’. We turn here to the work of Judith Butler, and explore the role of Britain as a ‘petty sovereign’, operating under the state of exception established by the US Executive. UK authorities have not themselves suspended the rule of law so overtly, and indeed have repeatedly insisted on their commitment to it. They have nevertheless been able to construct a rhetorical, legal and policy ‘scaffold’ that has enabled them to demonstrate at least procedural adherence to human rights norms, while at the same time allowing UK officials to acquiesce in the arbitrary exercise of sovereignty over individuals who are denied any access to appropriate representation or redress in compliance with the rule of law

‘Savage times come again’ : Morel, Wells, and the African Soldier, c.1885-1920

The African soldier trained in western combat was a figure of fear and revulsion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My article examines representations of African soldiers in nonfictional writings by E.D. Morel about the Congo Free State (1885-1908), the same author’s reportage on African troops in post-First World War Germany, and H.G. Wells’s speculative fiction When the Sleeper Wakes (1899, 1910). In each text racist and anti-colonialist discourses converge in representing the African soldier as the henchman of corrupt imperialism. His alleged propensity for taboo crimes of cannibalism and rape are conceived as threats to white safety and indeed supremacy. By tracing Wells’s connections to the Congo reform campaign and situating his novel between two phases of Morel’s writing career, I interpret When the Sleeper Wakes as neither simply a reflection of past events in Africa or as a prediction of future ones in Europe. It is rather a transcultural text which reveals the impact of European culture upon the ‘Congo atrocities’, and the inscription of this controversy upon European popular cultural forms and social debates

A transient presence: black visitors and sojourners in Imperial Germany, 1884-1914

The onset of German colonial rule in Africa brought increasing numbers of Black men and women to Germany. Pre-1914 the vast majority of these Africans can best be described as visitors or sojourners and the Black population as a whole was a transient one. This makes recovering their presence in the archival record exceptionally difficult and it is not surprising that the existing historiography almost exclusively focuses on individual biographies of well documented lives. Through utilising a number of newly digitised archival materials, particularly the Hamburg Passenger Lists, this article draws upon a database with information on 1092 individuals from sub-Saharan Africa who spent time in Germany over the period 1884-1914 in order to add considerable bread and depth to our understanding of the Black presence as a whole. It provides increasing empirical detail about the make-up and character of this fluid population - where visitors came from, why they came to Germany, their age on arrival - as well as more accurate detail on the temporal and, to a lesser extent, spatial distribution of visitors