Many scholars have argued that British colonial rule promoted post-independence democracy, but there has been considerable debate over the robustness of this result and its causes. We show that this relationship follows a strong temporal pattern. Although former British colonies were considerably more democratic than other countries immediately following independence, subsequent convergence in ...

Approaching from a perspective that takes discourse as a tool of power in arranging and shaping the ‘social body,’ the article shows the importance of looking at gender when addressing the issues of coloniality and the colonial difference in general and when addressing the issue of the Spanish Protectorate of Morocco in particular. This reflection and analysis concentrates on the relevance of g...

Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of double-voicedness and James Scott’s theory of public and hidden transcripts, this essay investigates the colonial context of Romans 13:1–7 with particular attention to the Roman imperial cult. It is my contention that Paul attempts to persuade the audience to resist the imperial cult, whilst negotiating colonial power and authority. It is assumed that colo...

This article traces and analyses efforts by practitioners of traditional medicine to obtain official recognition of their sector in post<olonial Zimbabwe. Beginning with a brief historical background of the role of traditional medicine in the colonial period, during which traditional medical practice was marginalised and denigrated, while efforts were made to promote western medicine by the col...

In this paper I examine the case of the highly controversial Jabiluka uranium mine which was recently given the green signal by the John Howard government. The mine, to be constructed in the heart of the Kakadu National Park (home to the Mirrar people and a World Heritage site) has been the topic of public debate and controversy involving Aboriginal communities, political parties, the mining in...

Palaeontological data of extinct groups often sheds light on the evolutionary sequences leading to extant groups, but has failed to resolve the basal metazoan phylogeny including the origin of the Cnidaria. Here we report the occurrence of a stem-group cnidarian, Cambroctoconus orientalis gen. et sp. nov., from the mid-Cambrian of China, which is a colonial organism with calcareous octagonal co...

In this paper we look at the impact of elite class and Japanese colonization on modernizing Korea. Our case study focuses on the historical Korean kingdom known as Joseon, the first monarchial state to be colonized by Japan in 1910. In particular we investigate how pre-existing scholarly traditions and colonial public school provision influenced the overall literacy level in Korea. We introduce...

This essay demonstrates how key concepts from ecology can be applied within historical analyses in order to gain insights regarding contemporary environmental change. We employ a coupled human and natural systems conceptual framework in a nascent historical analysis of rapid societal and environmental change in colonial New England, where European colonization led to stark and rapid transformat...

Although a large literature argues that European settlement outside of Europe during colonization had an enduring effect on economic development, researchers have been unable to assess these predictions directly because of an absence of data on colonial European settlement. We construct a new database on the European share of the population during colonization and examine its association with e...

This article reports primary archival data on the colonial penal history of British India and its reconfiguration into the postcolonial Indian state. It introduces criminologists to frameworks through which postcolonial scholars have sought to make sense of the continuities and discontinuities of rule across the colonial/postcolonial divide. The article examines the postcolonial life of one exa...