Category Archives: migration

by Joel | 25 April 2023 · 5:42 am

French Yield to Mohawks, 1622

From Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America, by Pekka Hämäläinen (Liveright, 2022), Kindle pp. 92-94:

In 1622, desperate to put an end to the violence that disrupted the fur trade, the raison d’être of New France, Champlain yielded to Mohawk demands. The Dutch came to their own conclusions about Mohawk power around the same time, retreating from closer interactions; and Champlain, spotting an opening, extended a peace proposal to the Indian nation. The Mohawks accepted a treaty, which freed them to focus on their Native rivals. They attacked Montagnais towns in the Saint Lawrence Valley, securing the northern and western flanks of Iroquoia, the Iroquois homeland. In the south and east, Mohawks, the “Keepers of the Eastern Door,” moved to discipline the Dutch, who, placing profits before politics, had opened Fort Orange to Mahicans. By 1628, the Mahicans and the Dutch had seen enough. The Mahicans agreed to pay the Mohawks an annual tribute in wampum, and the Dutch resigned to placate the Iroquois League with goods. Mohawk sachems now controlled who was allowed to trade at the fort—whose guns, lead, and powder could make and unmake Indigenous regimes in the Northeast.

France’s support for its Native allies was not altruism; it was secured by a generous trade in beaver pelts and through the social alchemy of sharing. “The Beaver does everything perfectly well,” a Montagnais hunter declared, “making sport” of French traders. “It makes kettles, hatchets, swords, knives, bread; and, in short, it makes everything.” It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the beaver also made New France itself. In 1627 the colony was home to mere eighty-five people, yet its charter granted it all of North America, from Florida to the Arctic Circle. To prop up the colony, Cardinal Richelieu, the chief minister of King Louis XIII, established the Company of One Hundred Associates to facilitate immigration. Expectations were still modest. The company had to bring in fifteen hundred French “of both sexes” during the first ten years, or face heavy sanctions. It was clear that collaboration with the Indians through the beaver pelt trade would remain New France’s lifeline.

However, New France was also a religious and moral project that mobilized French officials, missionaries, and soldiers to make a concerted effort to enforce acceptable behavior. Marriage customs, especially polygyny, became a source of contention between Jesuits and Indians. For Native men, having multiple wives was essential as a mark of status, as well as insurance that they would produce more children who would contribute to the household’s prosperity and reputation. When French missionaries challenged Indigenous marriage arrangements, both Native women and men fought back fiercely. But large numbers of women—especially captured secondary wives—also sought relief from the grueling labor and lack of autonomy under authoritative and abusive husbands. For them and others, missionaries and Christianity could be useful: they could offer a different life.

In the early 1630s, New France, already inseparable from its network of Indian allies, encompassed an expanding domain around the Saint Lawrence Valley. French traders were reaching out to the Indians for their furs, and Jesuit friars were reaching out for their souls, entrenching the French in North America. In 1631, Champlain wrote a booklet on French and English colonization in the New World, stating that the English “do not deny us all New France and cannot question what the whole world has admitted.”

…

By the mid-seventeenth century, the colonies in Maine that had been founded by European powers were confined to the Atlantic coast below the Penobscot River, and most of those colonies were small and vulnerable. European maps were remarkably accurate when depicting coasts and rivers, but the rest of the continent remained terra incognita. The English, French, and Dutch colonies had not become launchpads for territorial expansion, and only the French had a plan for colonization—a plan that emphasized coexistence. All colonial powers simply struggled to survive. Rather than looking to the west for conquests, they looked to the east, toward their mother countries, for goods, weapons, and soldiers to keep them safe. The settlements were more footholds than full-fledged colonies. It is telling that the out-of-the-way Great Fishery was still the most lucrative of the European schemes, and it was a business venture, not a colony.

The Spanish Empire had instigated an early European surge consisting largely of ruthless pillaging, which was lucrative but not sustainable. It had not led to permanent possessions in North America. By 1600, the Spanish were seriously questioning their methods. More than a century of colonialism had merely scratched the surface of the Indigenous continent.

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by Joel | 24 April 2023 · 10:08 pm

Early Palauan Enka Composer

Here’s another excerpt from Jim Geselbracht’s Palauan music blog, about one of the early Palauan enka: Wakai Inochi (young life) by Tekereng Sylvester.

Today’s song — Wakai Inochi [young life] — is another song of heartbreak, with words mostly in Japanese. The song was composed by Tekereng according to Diane’s lyric collection [1]. This is possibly Tekereng Sylvester, who was born in 1920 in Yap, moved to Palau at age 5, then Indonesia at age 14 to further his education. He then went to Japan in 1942 and worked as a translator for Japanese and Indonesian soldiers during World War II. He returned to Palau in 1953 to work as a telephone operator and then moved again to Saipan in 1966, where he spent the rest of his life [2], passing at the age of 95 in October, 2015 [3]. I don’t know the year that this song was composed, but with his life’s story, it would make sense that he was the Tekereng who composed this song.

The earliest recording of this song I have is from the Ngerel Belau [Voice of Palau] Radio Tapes, recorded in the 1960s, sung by Kui-Roy Arurang and backed up by the Friday Night Club. The recording is good and Kui-Roy’s voice is very strong. The tape box was labeled with the title “Ng Kol Mo Oingerang,” a line which comes from the last verse of the song. Diane’s lyric collection [1] listed the title as “Wakai Inochi”, as did Gailliard Kladikm’s tape. And since there is another, different, song with the title “Ng Kol Mo Oingerang,”, we’ll use “Wakai Inochi” for this one.

The rough transcriptions of the Japanese amid the Palauan lyrics (which I’ve italicized) give a feel for the heavier mix of Japanese lyrics in the 1930s and 1940s. Below I’ve added best-guess glosses in square brackets to the beginning and end of the lyrics (and attempted light corrections to the Japanese transcriptions). My glosses of the Palauan are also rough.

Wakai inochi [t]o mangokoro wa [若い命と真心は]
Ng diak kubes era [it not I-forget ART] kimi no omokange yo [君の面影よ] …

A young life and a true heart
I can’t forget you in my memory …

Natsukasii omoide, kazukazu to [懐かしい思い出数々と]
Kanasii kago no tori no you ni [悲しい籠の鳥のように]
Tsubasa orarete [翼折られて], ng ko el mo oingerang [it will be when?]
A cheldedechad [ART story-our(INCL)]

Dear memories, they are many
Like a sad bird trapped in its cage
With a broken wing. When will it be,
our story?

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Filed under Japan, language, Micronesia, migration, music

by Joel | 23 April 2023 · 3:49 am

The Fox of the Mohegans

From Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America, by Pekka Hämäläinen (Liveright, 2022), Kindle pp. 86-87:

THE MOHEGAN SACHEM UNCAS SEEMED TO BE everywhere, shaping every major development in the borderlands between the colonists and the Indians. In 1626, at the age of thirty-six, he had forged a Mohegan–Pequot alliance by marrying the daughter of Tatobem, the great sachem of the Pequots. Uncas accepted a subordinate role under the senior sachem, only to immediately challenge Pequot authority when Tatobem died in 1633. Uncas persuaded the Narragansetts to join him but struggled to challenge the supremacy of the Pequots, who had drawn the Dutch into their orbit. The Pequots banished Uncas to live among the Narragansetts. Stripped of followers, Uncas seemed to have exhausted his options. The Mohegan territory was shrinking rapidly, and he had but a handful of followers.

But then Uncas spotted an opening in the form of the new English colony of Connecticut. He approached the newcomers and established ties with the leading Puritans. He warned the colonists of an imminent Mohegan attack and earned their trust. When the English moved against the Pequots, Uncas supported the colonists, having become alienated from the haughty Pequots. When the Pequots were crushed, he adopted several survivors as newly born Mohegans. He was one of the crucial signers of the 1638 Treaty of Hartford, which dispossessed all the Indians who were not party to it. He promised to live in peace with the English; in return, the remaining Pequots would be divided between the Mohegans and the Narragansetts. It was at once revenge and an attempt at ethnic erasure. The treaty’s clause that the Pequots “shall no more be called Pequots but Narragansetts and Mohegans” was as much Uncas’s doing as it was that of the colonists. Acutely aware of their weakness in the midst of powerful Indigenous confederacies, the English expected the Mohegans and Narragansetts to punish the Pequots and “as soon as they can either bring the Chief Sachem of our late Enemies the Pequots that had the chief hand in killing the English to the said English or take off their heads.” When peace came, the English held more than three hundred Pequots captives. They carried many of them to the colony of Providence Island, near the Spanish-controlled Mosquito Island, trading them for African slaves. New Englanders did not want Pequots nearby.

With the Pequots utterly defeated, the Mohegans emerged as a major regional power. While maneuvering to marginalize the leading Narragansett sachem, Miantonomi, Uncas directed the English—apparently through misinformation—to move against the Narragansetts. In the mid-1640s, the English began to encroach on Narragansett lands. Uncas captured Miantonomi and turned him over to the English. The colonists sentenced the sachem to death and asked Uncas to execute the order. With a Puritan delegation witnessing, Uncas’s brother Wawequa sank a tomahawk in the sachem’s skull. The Narragansetts soon signed a peace treaty with the Connecticut Colony.

Uncas’s opportunistic diplomatic maneuvering and his ability to create and break alliances placed the colonists at a significant disadvantage in the contest for position and power. Uncas and his Mohegans endured endless colonial challenges, large and small—not just surviving as a people but controlling the world around them. Huddling in their small colonial enclaves, the English and Dutch were insular and powerless in comparison, managing little more than glimpses of the Indigenous politics that determined events and outcomes. The English thought they could regulate matters of war and peace in the New World, but more often than not, Indians steered them into fighting and financing Indian wars and facilitating truces and treaties with goods and gifts when the fighting stopped. The colonists—whether Spanish, French, English, or Dutch—could be arrogant and brutal, but the Indians had learned how to exploit them for their own purposes. Properly managed and manipulated, they could be useful.

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by Joel | 22 April 2023 · 9:16 am

Heydey of Dutch Wampum Trade

From Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America, by Pekka Hämäläinen (Liveright, 2022), Kindle pp. 74-76:

IMPERIAL RIVALRIES among the European powers exacerbated the tense situation in New England. More quietly than the Spanish, French, and English, the Dutch had entered the contest for North America in 1609, when Henry Hudson, having failed to find a sea route to China through North America, came to a river that still bears his name. When Dutch merchants arrived in the Hudson Valley in the 1610s, they realized it was a place of vast advantages. The Hudson was navigable for 160 miles into the interior, allowing access to bustling Native markets along the Saint Lawrence Valley and in the Great Lakes. Uninterested in converting and “civilizing” the Indians, the business-minded Dutch treated Indians as customers and trading partners.

The Dutch Indian policy was persistently practical. Dutch merchants quickly determined where the power lay and acted accordingly, forging close ties with the Mahican Nation, which dominated the interior trade. The Dutch built Fort Nassau in 1614 on the Hudson and, through the Mahicans, sold guns, powder, and iron tools across an enormous hinterland. In return, Fort Nassau was flooded with beaver pelts, North America’s most coveted commodity, making a fortune for the Dutch. The fort had only about four dozen employees, half of them traders and the other half soldiers. This kind of light colonialism was not exactly by design—Dutch imperial ambitions in Asia drew most of the available resources—but the relative modesty of their operations in North America would serve the Dutch well.

Dutch commercial prowess alarmed the English, triggering an unexpected imperial contest centered on processed clamshells. Clamshells were the raw material for wampum beads, which were sacred to many eastern Indians. They painted them with various colors and strung them into belts that were used in religious ceremonies, to proclaim social status, to stabilize border relations, and as mnemonic devices in relating traditional stories. Wampum also served as currency, and there the entrepreneurial Dutch merchants spotted an opportunity. They began to supply the coastal Indians with metal lathes that enabled them to manufacture wampum on an industrial scale. Native women could produce five to ten feet of wampum belt a day, and soon some three million monetized wampum beads were circulating in the Northeast, fueling an expanding exchange economy. Europeans had accepted a currency that a moment earlier meant next to nothing to them.

Struggling to enter into the lucrative wampum trade and to pay their European debts—building colonies was extremely expensive—the still fragile Puritan colonies approached the Wabanakis, who were expert mariners and trappers equally capable of producing great quantities of prime beaver pelts, swordfish, cod, or right whales. Living far to the north of the main clamshell-farming area, Wabanakis were eager for access to wampum; the Puritans began to demand it from their Native neighbors to buy Wabanaki furs. Their methods were harsh, ranging from naked extortion to thinly disguised tribute payments. New Englanders and the Dutch began using wampum belts as currency in their internal trade. In 1637, the Massachusetts General Court declared wampum legal tender, exchangeable for shillings and pennies. Weetamoo, a saunkskwa—female sachem—of the Pocasset people of the Wampanoag Confederacy, relied almost exclusively on wampum in her expansive diplomacy with colonists. It was a precarious dynamic, and the Wabanakis began to carefully consider the extent to which they should engage with the Indians in the interior. For them the interior was a terrifying place where the contest over territory unbalanced the world. The amphibious Mi’kmaqs, not the English, were their most dangerous neighbors. Mi’kmaqs traded with Europeans, accumulating guns and powder and projecting their power deep into the interior and far out into the sea, securing a near monopoly on fisheries and other maritime resources around the Saint Lawrence Bay. They became the foremost maritime power along the Northeast Coast. In their slipstream, the Wabanakis extended their operations in the Saint Lawrence Valley and New France, unnerving New England traders and officials.

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by Joel | 21 April 2023 · 6:34 pm

Reviving Palauan Musical Traditions

At points during its period of Japanese rule (roughly 1915-1945), Palau had more Japanese colonists than native Palauans, who incorporated many Japanese words, names, and songs into their local traditions. Even after the war, Palau continued to be a repository of old-style Japanese enka musicians, who retained many Japanese evocative phrases in their Palauan renditions. Lots of Palauans also mastered the mandolin as well as the guitar.

From Ouchacha: Musings on Palauan cha-cha and other musical forms:

In March of 2018, my friend Tony Phillips and I went to Palau to perform some of the old songs in the 1960s String Band style as “Ngirchoureng“, meet and play with some of the musicians and composers, and talk to folks about how much we love this music. After returning to California, we spent some time recording the Palauan songs that we had worked up for our trip. Just like our performances at the Night Market and Museum back in March, but this time, you can adjust the volume to your liking. Hopefully I fixed the pronunciation problems that you all so kindly overlooked. We’ve produced a CD of 20 songs, and we’re pretty happy with the way it turned out. Thanks again for the wonderful hospitality of our friends in Palau, old and new.

I selected the title “Mengemedaol er a Irechar” because I like the sense that the word “mengemedaol” can mean either “to welcome” or “to celebrate.” The way I think of this word, is through its relation to the word “klechedaol,” the activity where one village invites another to come and spend some time together, dancing, singing and just renewing their friendship. Mengemedaol is like the welcome that one family makes to another, as they come together to share some joy. And it is also the prelude — the first step — to a celebration of shared experiences. And I think that is what we should do with respect to the past: welcome it into our lives and celebrate the beauty that was brought to us by our elders and ancestors. I don’t know about you, but I think it is pretty cool that in 2018 I am singing a song — Tobiera — that two remechas named Dilmers and Degaragas sang in 1936 and was composed by some unidentified person in 1931, 87 years ago. How different their lives were to ours today, but we can cross the bridge to the past (adidil er a irechar) and join them for a song.

If you click on the link you can listen online to all the songs on the CD.

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Filed under Japan, language, Micronesia, migration, music, U.S.

by Joel | 20 April 2023 · 9:51 am

Little Ice Age Effects in North America

From Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America, by Pekka Hämäläinen (Liveright, 2022), Kindle pp. 21-23:

IF THE LITTLE ICE AGE posed daunting challenges to North America’s agricultural societies, it was a boon for the continent’s hunters. The cool and wet conditions favored buffalo and grama grasses, the bison’s preferred forage, and the springs were wet, supporting crucial early growth of grass after the winter’s deprivations. Now the sole surviving species of megafauna, the supremely adaptable and prolific bison faced no serious competitors, and the herds expanded their range all the way from the Rocky Mountain foothills to hundreds of miles east of the Mississippi River, and from the subarctic to the Gulf of Mexico. And where bison herds thinned out, thriving deer herds took over, their domain covering much of the eastern half of the continent.

The majority of North American Indians became generalists who farmed, hunted, and gathered to sustain themselves. Instead of striving to maximize agricultural output—an aspiration that had animated Ancestral Puebloans, Cahokians, and other early farming societies—they sought stability, security, and solidarity. Instead of priestly rulers, they preferred leaders whose principal obligation was to maintain consensus and support participatory political systems. Power flowed through the leaders, not from them. Most North Americans lived in villages rather than cities. Ancestral Pawnees, Arikaras, Mandans, and Hidatsas were typical. They settled along the upper Missouri Valley, where capillary action drew groundwater to the surface. They lived in dome-shaped earth-lodge villages that housed hundreds rather than thousands. They were horticulturists and built fortifications only rarely. This sweeping retreat from hierarchies, elite dominance, and large-scale urbanization may have turned North America—along with Australia—into the world’s most egalitarian continent at the time.

The collective mindset that prevailed, reflecting broad-based and carefully balanced economies, also distinguished North America’s Indigenous peoples. The continental grasslands—the Great Plains—were teeming with tens of millions of buffalo. Huge herds blackened the flat plains to the horizon, pulling humans in. The Shoshones moved east from the Great Basin, the Blackfoot came from the northeast, and the Crows, Omahas, Poncas, and Kansas abandoned their villages and fields along the Missouri Valley. The Kiowas migrated south from the upper Yellowstone Valley and forged an alliance with the resident Apaches. Former farmers did not give up tilling, but all of them now hunted bison, surrounding them in large communal hunts and felling them with spears and arrows, chasing them into concealed corrals in riverbeds, or driving them over cliffs to their deaths. In the Black Hills, hunters stampeded bison herds, driving the panicked animals into a corridor marked by stones that channeled the beasts toward a buffalo jump, a steep sinkhole where the high fall did the killing.

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Filed under Australia, democracy, economics, labor, Latin America, migration, North America, religion

by Joel | 16 April 2023 · 12:43 pm

J. Chamberlain on Annexing Colonies

From Britain at War with the Asante Nation, 1823–1900: “The White Man’s Grave” by Stephen Manning (Pen & Sword Books, 2021), Kindle pp. 201-202:

A change of government saw the appointment of Joseph Chamberlain as the new Colonial Secretary. Chamberlain was arguably the most expansionist secretary the Colonial Office had ever seen, and he was a devotee of all the political intrigue that surrounded the Scramble for Africa. He saw events in Asante as being part of the process by which Britain would extend its influence and empire. Chamberlain had anticipated a French challenge into Asante and this he was not going to permit. Thus, he latched onto [Gold Coast Governor] Maxwell’s proposal and replied by cable in September 1895 that [Asante King] Prempeh must be told that the government now expected the 1874 treaty to be met and honoured in full. In addition, he informed Maxwell that Prempeh must also be told that Asante must refrain from attacking neighbouring tribes and that he had to accept a British resident at Kumasi. Crucially, Chamberlain was prepared to back his words with military intervention.

This tougher stance was fully supported by the British Chamber of Commerce as well as many of the British newspapers. For example, The Times of 21 January 1896 claimed that Asante had long formed a block of savagery between the British coast and the interior. This had prevented trade and that the French were taking advantage of the situation by opening their own markets, which may now be lost to Britain.

On receiving Chamberlain’s instructions, the governor despatched Vroom to Kumasi with an ultimatum for Prempeh which required of him either a written reply or a personal interview with the governor before the end of October. Although treated with courtesy, Vroom received no direct answer from Prempeh, and he returned to the coast. It seems Prempeh was putting all his hope in his deputation that had been sent to London and he sent a sword bearer and court crier to the coast to inform the British that he was awaiting a response from his messengers to Queen Victoria. As no written response was received to the ultimatum it was taken by Maxwell, Scott and Chamberlain as a rejection. Maxwell had already informed Scott that he would be in command of the proposed military expedition and preparations were well under way.

Chamberlain had already warned the Cabinet in November 1895 that private enterprise was now inadequate for opening Britain’s vast ‘underdeveloped estates’, and that the government must lead the way with money and troops. Without consulting the prime minister, he announced a punitive expedition to Asante.

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by Joel | 15 April 2023 · 6:03 am

Who Led the Scramble for Africa?

From Britain at War with the Asante Nation, 1823–1900: “The White Man’s Grave” by Stephen Manning (Pen & Sword Books, 2021), Kindle pp. 193-195:

When examining the British government’s actions before 1895, it seems evident that ministers felt no urgent requirement to expand British influence in West Africa. They were not interested in using imperial power and capital to work in West Africa for the purpose of investing in new markets and resources. It is often thought that the empire existed to create more business for Britain, yet, according to Robinson and Gallagher in the seminal work Africa and the Victorians, in the Gold Coast, before 1895, it would be truer to say that the merchants were expected to create empire and that the British government expected them to do so without imperial rule, to make do with the limited protection and to pioneer their own way inland.

The ‘Scramble for Africa’ was to change that thinking. This term refers to a period in the late 1880s and 1890s during which many European powers, including Britain, France, Belgium and Germany, sought to expand their own empires or spheres of influence across the African continent. The motives behind such actions were often economic enhancement or dominance, but the nations were equally driven by the desire for their European rivals to be excluded from a region. Although this was true across Africa, West Africa was to be dominated by a strong rivalry between the British and the French.

At the height of the Scramble it was common that local officials were several steps ahead or even led opinion as to what action should be taken. Often the Colonial Office in London was slow in offering definitive guidance and policy could be made by the officials in situ. This was certainly true of the Gold Coast. The Governor Brandford Griffith had already alerted London that French colonial ambitions were being extended by exploration westwards into the hinterland of the Gold Coast, from their colony of the Ivory Coast. In 1886 a French officer, Captain Louis-Gustave Binger, had been tasked by the French government to lead a reconnaissance mission along the Niger River. To avoid arousing British suspicions he started from the interior and by 1889 he had covered a huge area between Bamako, Kong and Wagadugu and he encroached on British influence in Salaga and Kintampo. In 1888, Binger even managed to secure a treaty of protection with the Bontuku under the noses of a British mission. Brandford Griffith feared that the French might even penetrate into northern Asante and so in 1886 he informed the Colonial Office that Asante territory should be quickly brought under British jurisdiction.

The following year the governor gave a further warning to London of German encroachment into Asante from Togo in the east. These warnings were not, initially, taken very seriously and the secretary of state, Henry Holland, 1st Baron of Knutsford, even wrote, ‘If Ashanti is to be annexed to any European power let it be by the Germans.’ However, over the next few years such complacency disappeared from the Colonial Office in light of further European penetration of the interior of West Africa and diplomatic disagreements in Europe. It was felt that some action, at least to the north of Asante, would have to be considered. Here diplomacy within Europe secured two important agreements. The Anglo-French Agreement of 1889 defined the western boundary of the Gold Coast according to treaties made with the local chiefs. Similarly, the Anglo-German Treaty of 1890 established a neutral zone to the north east of Asante in which European nations bound themselves not to acquire protectorates. The treaty also defined the southern Gold Coast–Togoland boundary in general terms, but detailed interpretation on the ground aroused local resentment and the king of Krepi was outraged that the new boundary split his lands. Furthermore, the creation of the neutral zone merely heightened colonial rivalries in the adjacent territories. When the king of Attabubu approached the British seeking protection from German encroachment, the governor was delighted to recommend that a treaty of friendship and protection should be drawn up and this was executed in 1890, much to the annoyance of the Germans.

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Filed under Belgium, Britain, economics, France, Germany, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Mali, migration, military, nationalism, Niger, Nigeria

by Joel | 10 April 2023 · 6:16 am

British Military Expansion, 1800s

From Britain at War with the Asante Nation, 1823–1900: “The White Man’s Grave” by Stephen Manning (Pen & Sword Books, 2021), Kindle pp. 16-18:

The truly massive expansion in the British Empire throughout Victoria’s long reign (1837–1901) saw British troops (‘The Soldiers of the Queen’) and naval personnel deployed across the world in such diverse countries as Russia, New Zealand, India, Canada, Egypt and South Africa, to name just a few. Such deployments were made to right a perceived wrong, to defeat a European foe, to stop a competing country securing spoils or simply to expand British prestige and power. On many such occasions British troops were placed in direct conflict with indigenous ethnic tribes or nations and the resulting military actions have become an important part of British colonial history, which some view with immense pride and others with shame or even disgust. Whatever personal views are held there is no doubting the immense bravery and fortitude of the British troops and equally these terms can be applied to their foes.

In most of the colonial wars of the Victorian age the British had a significant technology advantage in terms of weaponry over their enemies and this allowed them to achieve some crushing victories such as at the battles of Magdala (9 April 1868) and Omdurman (2 September 1898). Yet, there were occasions when despite this advantage the British were defeated, most famously at the Battle of Isandlwana (22 January 1879). When the British met defeat at the hands of an indigenous enemy such foes became respected and even achieved mythical status. This is certainly true of the British relationship with the Zulu nation, but it also applies to the Maoris of New Zealand, the Dervishes of Sudan and the Sikhs of Northern India. Less well known are the numerous conflicts that the British fought against the Asante nation in what is now modern-day Ghana in West Africa.

Whilst the Zulus did indeed inflict a crushing defeat upon the British at Isandlwana, a minor one at Intombi Drift (12 March 1879) and a more serious reversal as at the Battle of Hlobane (28 March 1879), the Asante nation was a thorn in the side of both British politicians and the military throughout the nineteenth century. Indeed, the casualties endured by the British in the various campaigns against the Asantes were comparable to those suffered during conflicts with the Zulus and the Dervishes. The Anglo-Zulu War lasted a mere seven months, although the unsatisfactory political settlement that was imposed by the British resulted in lesser conflicts which extended into the beginning of the twentieth century. By contrast, the Asante nation and the British were in both political and military conflict for over seventy years during the nineteenth century and three major wars resulted in which there were significant military reversals for the British. This volume is split into three separate parts to reflect and illustrate these wars, each of which possessed fascinating moments and challenges which are captured in this work. Whether this is the death of the British Governor, Sir Charles McCarthy, at the Battle of Nsamankow (22 January 1824), Sir Garnet Wolseley’s brilliant planned and orchestrated expedition of 1873–4, or the siege of the British fort at Kumasi in 1900, all offer a rich and engrossing history. Indeed, the 1900 siege tells a tale of bravery, fortitude and ineptitude that can stand alongside other more famous sieges of Victoria’s reign, such as Ladysmith and Peking. One particularly fascinating aspect of these three major wars is how the unsatisfactory settlements reached at the conclusion of each were the lifeblood for further conflicts.

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Filed under Africa, Britain, China, economics, migration, military, nationalism, New Zealand, South Asia, war

by Joel | 7 April 2023 · 5:51 am

Soviet Campaign for Latin Scripts

From Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern, by Jing Tsu (Riverhead Books, 2022), Kindle pp. 188-192:

In 1921, twenty-two-year-old Qu Qiubai was dispatched by a Chinese news syndicate from Beijing to the Soviet Union with a mission to report on the post-Bolshevik regime. The journey would become a personal quest as well as a political pilgrimage for this rookie journalist with delicate features and a touch of melancholy. Qu unexpectedly met many compatriots on his way to Moscow, among them Chinese laborers and shopkeepers ensconced in the Far East cities of Irkutsk and Chita.

…

Qu was sent back to Russia in 1928 with many of his fellow Chinese Marxists to regroup under the tutelage of their Bolshevik brothers. By this time, the language question occupied the forefront of the Soviet Union’s policy toward its own national minorities. The newly unified Soviet Union included swaths of Central Asia that did not speak or read Russian. Among the groups in these regions that already had a written tradition, Arabic had been in use for almost a thousand years. Some of the national minorities in Turkic Central Asia had no script at all. Pacifying and assimilating these groups would require careful strategy from the Soviets. Reducing illiteracy with Latinized scripts became a key part of a general campaign to educate and control the population.

After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the Central Asia Turkic republics began testing the Latin alphabet as a medium for their spoken languages. Many Turkic groups saw Arabic script as increasingly insufficient to meet the practical demands of modern life, much in the same way that Chinese reformers had viewed character writing as a disadvantage in the technological age. As a Soviet Tajik poet explained, the Latin alphabet flew at the speed of an airplane, while the Arabic script limped along like a weak donkey in pain. Others saw the conversion to Latin script as a matter of sharing in humanity’s survival, because written records provide continuity from the past into the present.

The Soviet Central Committee supported the Latinization of the Arabic script in pursuit of a multinational language policy. The idea was to give each group its own right to linguistic self-determination within the newly unified Soviet state. Fifty-two languages were targeted for conversion to Roman script and about seventy were eventually Latinized, spanning an area that stretched between Norway and Korea.

In truth, Latinization was also a way to divide and conquer. From the Russians’ perspective, Central Asia was about as savage and backward as a place could be—and they found its inhabitants difficult to tell apart. The Azerbaijanis were often referred to as the Tatars, Uzbeks as the Sarts, and Tajiks as the Uzbeks. If the Soviet East were to be brought to heel, the Russians thought, it would have to be purged of its Islamic influence. It was convenient to seize on the Arabic script as an object of backwardness in need of reform. And as long as the Turkic republics had their own separate writing systems—in Latin script, not the Turko-Persian Arabic that a few groups were already accustomed to—it would be harder for them to form a pan-Islamic alliance that could challenge Soviet rule. Only later, in the late 1930s, would language policy shift from Latinization to Cyrillization. Once these groups were sufficiently distant from their mother tongues, Russian control and influence could strengthen.

The Soviets were eager to include the Chinese laborers of the Amur region as a test group in their anti-illiteracy Latinization campaigns, hoping to extend their influence even further into Asia. These were the Chinese laborers whom Qu had met during his first trip to the Soviet Union. Their illiteracy rate was almost 100 percent.

The Soviet campaigns were instructive for the Chinese Communists, at the time young political upstarts. During his time in China serving the CCP, Qu had been immersed in Chinese language debates and consequently had a more informed perspective on language reforms when he returned to the Soviet Union. Yet Qu was not a trained linguist. He solicited the help of the Russian linguists Vsevolod S. Kolokolov and Aleksandr A. Dragunov. He drafted a proposal for the Latin New Script in February 1929 and distributed two hundred copies among Chinese workers. A revised version, with further input from Kolokolov, was published that October and reprinted again the year after with three thousand additional copies in distribution.

The Chinese laborers cheered the effort. Night schools opened to teach them how to recognize simple phrases like “boiled water” or “I sell dumplings,” as well as ideological questions like “To what class do poor people belong?” More than five thousand factory workers and peasants were able to read and write letters to their families by the time they graduated, thanks to the comrades who volunteered their time as instructors and administrators. Between 1931 and 1936, scores of Latin New Script textbooks and several literary works were circulated and taught. The demand was overwhelming. The language reformers could not train teachers or print textbooks fast enough. A weekly newspaper wholly printed in Latin New Script, Yngxu Sin Wenz (Support the New Alphabet), was published in Khabarovsk, with its forty-third issue appearing in late 1934.

Instruction in Latin New Script was touted as a hallmark event in an era of socialist brotherhood and mutual aid. The Soviets saw it as an opportunity to finally address the problem of illiteracy among the community of one hundred thousand Chinese laborers within their territory. As for the Chinese Marxists, they now had a linguistic instrument with which to reach their revolutionary goals: If the Chinese could read easily, they could be radicalized and converted to communism with the new script. For Qu, it was inevitable, even imperative, that Latinization would replace written characters. Unlike National Romanization, which was designed by a small coterie of academically minded intellectuals and based on fancy linguistic theories, he remarked, Latin New Script was a practical phonetic script that served every dialect and every class.