A Trial Separation

Decolonization; Politics and government; Papua new guine

A Trial Separation

Decolonization; Politics and government; Papua new guine

Peasant settlers and the ‘civilizing mission’ in Russian Turkestan, 1865-1917

This article provides an introduction to one of the lesser-known examples of European settler colonialism, the settlement of European (mainly Russian and Ukrainian) peasants in Southern Central Asia (Turkestan) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It establishes the legal background and demographic impact of peasant settlement, and the role played by the state in organising and encouraging it. It explores official attitudes towards the settlers (which were often very negative), and their relations with the local Kazakh and Kyrgyz population. The article adopts a comparative framework, looking at Turkestan alongside Algeria and Southern Africa, and seeking to establish whether paradigms developed in the study of other settler societies (such as the ‘poor white’) are of any relevance in understanding Slavic peasant settlement in Turkestan. It concludes that there are many close parallels with European settlement in other regions with large indigenous populations, but that racial ideology played a much less important role in the Russian case compared to religious divisions and fears of cultural backsliding. This did not prevent relations between settlers and the ‘native’ population deteriorating markedly in the years before the First World War, resulting in large-scale rebellion in 1916

Re-Membering Australasia: A Repressed Memory

Throughout the nineteenth century, the term Australasia embraced all the British dependencies in the South Pacific. Federation brought six of these dependencies together, but disrupted the wider Australasia by excluding New Zealand, British New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Fiji. The consequent national histories and historiographies sought to ignore or deny the regional context; but economic, political and cultural links persisted and evolved. This regional nexus has no name (Australasia having been debased), but it is very real for most of its member states and societies. Now Australians are reluctant to acknowledge the only regional club which accepts us as members; but chronic crises in many parts of the region demand our reconsideration