QSpace Collection: http://hdl.handle.net/1974/800 2014-04-19T10:31:46Z 2014-04-19T10:31:46Z 'Undesirable Practices': Women, Children, and the Politics of Development in Northern Ghana, 1930-1972 Cammaert, JESSICA http://hdl.handle.net/1974/8685 2014-04-05T05:14:22Z 2014-04-04T04:00:00Z Title: 'Undesirable Practices': Women, Children, and the Politics of Development in Northern Ghana, 1930-1972 Authors: Cammaert, JESSICA Abstract: Following the First World War, colonial policy in West Africa underwent a transition as British administrators began to adopt indirect rule reforms to help usher in peasant-driven agricultural development in Northern Ghana. This thesis addresses the impact of these important policy changes on women and children through a study of local colonial and indigenous responses to four bodily practices: female circumcision, human trafficking (female pawning and illicit adoption), nudity and prostitution. Although much has been written about colonial and post-independence legislation of the female body, especially the female circumcision controversy in Kenya and prostitution in the mines and cities of east and southern Africa, few historical studies have fully considered the role of West African development doctrine, or the importance of ‘tradition’ and ‘community’, in colonial policies affecting women and children in Northern Ghana. Through a Parliamentary inquiry in 1930, West African departments came to reluctantly engage with questions of women and children’s status. Collectively, they decided that a gradualist path which sought to preserve community or ‘tribal’ cohesion was preferable to legislation promoting individual rights and civil society. This thesis situates this reluctance to introduce potentially destabilizing legislation in the context of development doctrine in northern Ghana. This thesis focusses on the north-eastern borderland corridor of northern Ghana where in the 1930s anthropologists and district officials investigated questions of female circumcision and as a solution to Parliamentary inquiry, sought to encourage a milder form practiced in infancy, rather than adolescence. The refusal to legislate reflected West African officials’ privileging of ‘community’ over the ‘individual’ and was repeated in their responses to ‘undesirable practices’, including nudity, pawning, and in post-independence times, illicit adoption and prostitution. In exploring state officials’ handling of these practices in a gradualist manner, this thesis illuminates the connections between development doctrine and the role of the male colonial gaze in managing undesirable practices in north-eastern Ghana, West Africa. Description: Thesis (Ph.D, History) -- Queen's University, 2014-04-03 14:33:00.037 2014-04-04T04:00:00Z Population Control and Small Wars Roy, Richard http://hdl.handle.net/1974/8490 2013-12-03T06:08:58Z 2013-11-29T05:00:00Z Title: Population Control and Small Wars Authors: Roy, Richard Abstract: This thesis argues that while there are various contending notions of how a government can improve its chances of success in a small war, few strategies will be effective without the application of a comprehensive program of population control measures. For this study, small wars are conflicts in which a government uses limited means to secure national objectives against an adversary who uses primarily the tactics of guerrilla warfare. Population control measures are defined as those restrictions imposed on movement, on choice of residence, and on the availability of food that protect the population from the insurgents while simultaneously denying the insurgents access to critical resources. This work examines the vital importance of population control measures in overcoming guerrilla forces lacking external sponsors in small wars during the period 1870 to 1960. Five examples are used to determine their importance: the treatment of prairie Amerindians in the Canadian West (1870 – 1890); the guerrilla phase of the Philippine-American War (1898 – 1902); the guerrilla phase of the South African War (1899 – 1902); the Malayan Emergency (1948 – 1960); and the Kenyan Emergency (1952 – 1960). Within the broad strategies used to prosecute these campaigns, population control measures were a consistent feature and were instrumental in contributing to the termination of the conflicts. Despite their importance, these measures are typically overlooked or only treated superficially when discussed by historians. Therefore, to understand more fully the outcome of small wars, greater attention needs to be applied to the study of these measures. In small wars the primary contest between the belligerents is for control of the people. For the government, the strategic value of population control measures is in how they separate the population from the guerrillas. This denies a wide range of critical resources to the guerrillas and additionally allows the government to both prosecute its campaign more effectively and protect the population better. Population control measures need to be a key component of a government’s strategy in a small war as their proper application may be the tipping-point between success and failure. Description: Thesis (Ph.D, History) -- Queen's University, 2013-11-29 16:13:52.31 2013-11-29T05:00:00Z PLACING THE KHASI JAINTIAH HILLS: SOVEREIGNTY, CUSTOM AND NARRATIVES OF CONTINUITY Ray, REEJU http://hdl.handle.net/1974/8401 2013-10-03T21:11:28Z 2013-10-03T04:00:00Z Title: PLACING THE KHASI JAINTIAH HILLS: SOVEREIGNTY, CUSTOM AND NARRATIVES OF CONTINUITY Authors: Ray, REEJU Abstract: The north eastern region in India represents a legacy of uneven imperial state formation inherited by the Indian nation state. My doctoral dissertation examines British imperialism in the nineteenth century, as it operated in “non-British” spaces of the north east frontier of colonial India. I focus on the historical production and cooption of the Khasi and Jaintiah hills, into a frontier space of the British Empire. I analyse the interconnections between physical transformations, colonial structures of law, and colonial knowledge that produced inhabitants of the autonomous polities, north east of Bengal into “hill tribals”. Law provided a foundational framework through which colonial commercial and military advancement into non-British territories such as the Khasi hills was achieved. The most profound implication of colonial processes was on ruler-subject relations, which accompanied the reconstitution of space and inhabitants’ conceptions of self. The dissertation traces both spatial and imaginative transformations that stripped the groups occupying the Khasi and Jaintiah hills of a political identity. The Khasi tribal subject’s relationship to the governing structures was navigated, and negotiated using a reconstituted notion of custom. This project is more than a history of tribal minorities in India. It addresses the crisis of colonial sovereignty in colonial frontiers, and the nature of imperialism in non-British territories. The dissertation also addresses how the hills and its peoples have long resisted incorporation and integration into totalizing histories of colonial modernity, capitalism and nationalism. Social identities of the diverse communities in the north east of India are articulated through, what I have called narratives of continuity that are both constitutive of and framed against colonial knowledge systems. Critical of the “naturalisation of the association between history and western modernity” and the consequent binaries of past and present, this dissertation analyses indigenous narratives, and the articulation of distinct pasts often inhered in the present. Description: Thesis (Ph.D, History) -- Queen's University, 2013-10-02 21:24:20.595 2013-10-03T04:00:00Z South Asians as Medical Scapegoats in British Columbia and the Pacific Coast States, 1900-1924 Wallace, SARAH ISABEL http://hdl.handle.net/1974/8318 2013-09-29T05:09:17Z 2013-09-26T04:00:00Z Title: South Asians as Medical Scapegoats in British Columbia and the Pacific Coast States, 1900-1924 Authors: Wallace, SARAH ISABEL Abstract: This transnational study of the first-wave South Asian immigrant experience in British Columbia and the Pacific coast states shows how elected officials at all levels of government, bureaucrats, union leaders, physicians, members of the press, and the general public utilized purported public health concerns to justify South Asian exclusion and disenfranchisement. While all Asian groups living along the Pacific coast faced opposition to their immigration and settlement, India’s subordinate status within the British Empire, and a sustained western association of South Asians with disease, uniquely positioned North American discourse on South Asians at the intersection of colonial theory, Orientalism, and medicalized nativism in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Description: Thesis (Ph.D, History) -- Queen's University, 2013-09-25 20:19:03.29 2013-09-26T04:00:00Z