In a blog post published a few months ago, Matt Houlbrook, the historian of twentieth-century Britain, wrote about the difficulties he had deciding what name to call the man that he has been studying for over a decade. This ‘trickster prince’ went by many aliases during his life. Matt (if I may?) also discussed the…
Category: Ramblings
Condiments of Colonialism
A few days ago I read a blog post on Le Minh Khai’s great Southeast Asian history blog on Worcestershire Sauce adverts in 1930s Siam, and the Don Draper-esq mental acrobatics involved in selling this quintessentially English condiment to Thais by telling them that Americans liked it. Then today, thanks to Thant Myint-U’s facebook page,…
No, You’re Peripheral!
The Wa people of the borderlands of Northeast Burma and Southwest China have a foundational myth that claims that all of humanity emerged from a hole in the ground in Wa country. In this story, all human history is a tale of migration from the Wa lands, the centre of world. As with other stories…
Anti-Islamic Abuse in Burma and Britain, the Colonial Past and Present
Last week it was the anniversary of the anti-Indian riots that broke out in colonial Rangoon in 1930. They were ignited when striking Indian dock workers came into conflict with the Burmese labourers recruited to replace them. This clash then spilled over into a broader wave of anti-Indian violence, leaving over one hundred Indians dead….
Archives, Material Histories and Anxieties
At a recent conference on histories of material life in South Asia that I attended there were two excellent papers that touched on the physical creation of archives. The keynote lecture on pre-colonial records in Maharashta, delivered by Rosalind O’Hanlon, described the use of inscribed rocks and copper plates to document and preserve the rites held…
Remembering Empire in Bristol and Brussels
I was recently part of a small delegation of historians from the University of Bristol involved in a trip to the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Brussels. The purpose of the visit was to consider the ways that imperialism and its legacies have been approached in the museum, and the difficulties of publicly engaging…
Aung San Suu Kyi’s Desert Island Discs Decoded
Listening to Aung San Suu Kyi on Desert Island Discs was, for me at least, a surreal experience. It wasn’t the song choices that produced this sense surreality, although I had been expecting more post-punk metallic hardcore and at least one Dr Dre track. Rather it was how Daw Suu Kyi presented herself. The show…
Is Burma ‘Going South’?
I recently read Jean and John Comaroff’s article ‘Theory from the South: Or, how Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa’ in Anthropological Forum (for those of you who either don’t have access to the journal, or would just rather listen instead of read, you can watch a video of John Comaroff delivering a lecture on the…
Colonizing Animals 