Indigenous Customs and Colonial Law

Domain Specific WordNet on Customs Law

The NLP research group at the University of Szeged took part in the development of the Hungarian WordNet between 2005 and 2007. In 2008, they developed a smaller, domain specific WordNet on customs law. This knowledge base contains about 650 concepts cautiously selected by legal experts from the relevant Hungarian statutory legal texts, above all, from two acts and from other laws and decrees. ...

Indigenous and Colonial Origins of Comparative Economic Development: The Case of Colonial India and Africa

Colonial Knowledge and Indigenous Power in the Dutch East Indies

In this passage from Pramoedya Ananta Toer's Child of All Nations, Minke, a budding Indonesian nationalist, is reprimanded by a Dutch journalist for his lack of understanding of his own people, the Javanese. Minke, from an elite aristocratic family, is one of the first Javanese to complete a Dutch high-school education and is enamored with everything European. The accusation of not knowing his ...

Indigenous politics, public health and the Cambodian colonial state

This article examines controversies surrounding the implementation of the first colonial indigenous health service, the Assistance Médicale, in Cambodia. It characterizes individual and group behaviours in the immediate social conditions of colonial Cambodian society, as well as some of the paradoxes of the modernization narrative ascribed to the colonial science of this period. This discussion...

Law and Economic Development: The Cautionary Tale of Colonial Burma

Burmese colonial history suggests that a legal system cannot operate independently from the felt needs of the people who are supposed to obey the law. Despite a monopoly of force for many decades, the British failed to create a sustainable legal system in Burma. Colonial status shifted Burma’s economic role from subsistence agriculture to the generation of large-scale exports. By undermining th...