Depoliticisation and the Politics of Imperialism

Approaches to depoliticisation have tended to focus on its use as a domestic strategy. The purpose of depoliticisation, whether discourse-, rule-, or institution-based, is to distance or limit the political character of a particular issue or policy. Where the literature on depoliticisation tends to be lacking is in its international role. This paper seeks to explore how imperialist policies, that is policies intended to dominate one state by another, have been depoliticized by being channeled through technically- managed or apparently economic institutions. The paper situates an account of depoliticisation in terms of the nature of global capitalist society, and seeks to explore how imperial strategy was depoliticized through the Sterling Area. The paper looks at an episode in British-Malayan relations in which the apolitical character of the Sterling Area is brought into question. The purpose of this strategy of depoliticisation, as with its domestic instances, is to remove accountability from state managers, provide them with greater governing autonomy and to limit social instability, while at the same time trying to remove barriers for capital accumulation on a global scale

Towards a History of Mass Violence in the Etat Indépendant du Congo, 1885-1908

The present article provides an up-to-date scholarly introduction to mass violence in the Etat Indépendant du Congo (Congo Free State, EIC). Its aims are twofold: to offer a point of access to the extensive literature and historical debates on the subject, and to make the case for exchanging the currently prevalent top-down narrative, with its excessive focus on King Leopold's character and motives, for one which considers the EIC's culture of violence as a multicausal, broadly based and deeply engrained social phenomenon. The argument is divided into five sections. Following a general outline of the EIC's violent system of administration, I discuss its social and demographic impact (and the controversy which surrounds it) to bring out the need for more regionally focused and context sensitive studies. The dispute surrounding demographics demonstrates that what is fundamentally at stake is the place the EIC's extreme violence should occupy in the history of European ‘modernity’. Since approaches which hinge on Leopoldian exceptionalism are particularly unhelpful in clarifying this issue, I pause to reflect on how such approaches came to dominate the distinct historiographical traditions which emerged in Belgium and abroad before moving on to a more detailed exploration of a selection of causes underlying the EIC's violent nature. While state actors remain in the limelight, I shift the focus from the state as a singular, normative agent, towards the existence of an extremely violent society in which various individuals and social groups within and outside of the state apparatus committed violent acts for multiple reasons. As this argument is pitched at a high level of abstraction, I conclude with a discussion of available source material with which it can be further refined and updated

The Sterling Area 1945-1972

The Sterling Area was an international monetary system that operated for almost thirty years after the end of the Second World War. Born from wartime exchange controls, it was initially a short term response to global imbalances in the wake of the war, and the failure of the new Bretton Woods institutions to support multilateral trade and payments. From 1945 to 1972 members of the Sterling Area agreed to maintain fixed exchange rates with sterling, to hold the bulk of their foreign exchange reserves in sterling and to impose exchange control in common with Britain to protect against possible flight from sterling to other currencies. In return, members enjoyed freer trade with Britain and freer access to British capital than other countries. In the early years, it was defined by Britain’s war debts, but through the 1950s these were retired and replaced by fresh accumulations of sterling by other members. But by the 1960s, a weaker pound and waning enthusiasm for monetary cooperation among its members undermined the system and it became part of the crumbling of the wider Bretton Woods system. A concerted multilateral effort supported the gradual retreat from sterling until it was finally abandoned without fanfare in 1972