On Pre-colonial Indigenous (Sound) Technologies

Insights from paleomicrobiology into the indigenous peoples of pre-colonial America - A Review

This review investigates ancient infectious diseases in the Americas dated to the pre-colonial period and considers what these findings can tell us about the history of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. It gives an overview, but focuses on four microbial pathogens from this period: Helicobacter pylori, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, Trypanosoma cruzi and Coccidioides immitis, which cause sto...

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

Pre-colonial mining in southern Africa

Mining, as defined by Stocks and Down is the ‘removal of minerals from their natural geological environment and their transport to the point of processing or use1’. As so defined mining has, in one form or another, been providing essential raw materials for tens of thousands of years. Although metal ores were first mined in southern Africa (south of 15°S) approximately 2 000 years ago, minerals...

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...