Colonialism

Revisiting South Africa through Gale Primary Sources

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│ By Tom English, Strategic Initiatives Manager – EMEA │

Was South Africa the first African state to gain independence from colonising powers or the last? This question is posed by Frank Welsh’s telling of the country’s colonial history in his book, A History of South Africa, and it speaks to the rich and complex nature of the country known as the rainbow nation.

If we want to make sense of, and make new discoveries about, a country as complex and dynamic as South Africa, we need to look at it from a range of perspectives. What are the different narratives of its inception? Who are its constituents? How do they see themselves in relation to their country? How did South Africa come to be as it is today? And what journey has the country been on in its long walk to freedom and beyond?

Gale Primary Sources collections give us the perspectives and insights that can help us to make sense of these questions and find some answers.

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From Chains to Change: The Differences Between African Slavery and the Trans-Atlantic Trade

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│By Rawan Mohamed, Gale Ambassador at the University of Leeds│

Slavery has been a pervasive institution throughout human history that has manifested into multiple forms across different societies. In Africa, indigenous systems of slavery pre-date the trans-Atlantic slave trade. However, the arrival of European powers and the subsequent demand for labour within the Americas transformed existing practices into a dehumanising enterprise. Delving into Gale’s Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive enables us to uncover the distinct differences between indigenous African slavery and the trans-Atlantic slave trade and shed light on their enduring impacts upon entire societies.

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A Window Into Decolonization: Perspectives From Formerly Colonised and Commonwealth Regions

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│By Aiman Urooj, Gale Ambassador at the University of Delhi│

For scholars deeply studying decolonisation, access to primary sources and uncovering the voices that influenced anti-colonial movements is indispensable.

Archival collections consisting of historical documents like political pamphlets, newsletters, and institutional press releases provide unique insight into the socio-political and intellectual struggles of the independence movement. In that line, Gale Primary Sources’ Decolonization: Politics and Independence in Former Colonial and Commonwealth Territories digital archive proves to be an essential asset for researchers intending to understand the real dynamics of the revolutionary period.

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The History of West Malaysia and Singapore as Refracted Through British Colonial Office Files

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|By Liping Yang, Senior Manager, Academic Publishing, and Emma Harris, Associate Editor, Gale Primary Sources|

Please be aware that this blog posts includes primary sources which describe extensive violence and oppression; the decision to read the post is at your own discretion.

Gale Primary Sources’ State Papers Online Colonial: Asia digital archive welcomed its third instalment in September 2024 – State Papers Online Colonial: Asia, Part III: Malay States, Malaya, and Straits Settlements – providing a continuation of and perfect complement to Part II through a thematic collection on the history of West Malaysia and the earlier history of Singapore.

Made up of mostly original correspondence, as well as two series of maps and plans, and a series of historical photographs, Part III contains over 625,000 newly scanned pages from twelve Colonial Office series sourced from The National Archives, UK.

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Lost (and Found) in Translation: Language in Archives of Latin American and Caribbean History

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│By Leila Marhamati, Associate Editor, Gale Primary Sources│

Post-colonialist thinker Frantz Fanon declared the importance of language in a world globalised through empire and colonisation: “To speak… means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization”. It is ironic to cite this quotation in translation from the original French, as Fanon’s point is that the language we speak is both a product of and perpetuates the culture we live in. As an English speaker, what do I know about his thinking? His worldview?

For societies and nations founded through colonialism, language is crucial. The language of the coloniser is often forced upon the colonised. Holding onto a language despite imperialist pressures then becomes a form of resistance and a declaration of selfhood. All of these implications of language can be explored in Gale Primary Sources’ Archives of Latin American and Caribbean History, Sixteenth to Twentieth Centuries.

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Kowloon Walled City: An Accident of Hong Kong History

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│By Masaki Morisawa, Senior Product Manager│

In the February 1991 issue of the National Geographic there is an aerial photo of a strange architectural structure in Hong Kong. What at first glance seems like a giant post-apocalyptic fortress, on closer examination reveals itself to be a jumble of many small buildings crammed so close together that they seem to form a single mass.

This was Kowloon Walled City, an infamous slum district within colonial Hong Kong for nearly a century until it was torn down 30 years ago in 1994. Its haunting visual appearance, and the extreme density and anarchy of life within its compound continues to capture many people’s imagination today, as evidenced most recently in the huge success of an action movie set in the now legendary location.

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Studying Colonialism in Complementary Archives: Nineteenth Century Collections Online and Decolonization

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│By Louis Venter, Gale Ambassador at the University of the Free State│

If you ask any seasoned historian what makes historical research unique, they will emphasise the crucial role of primary sources, which define and distinguish history from other forms of academic writing. In an ever-digitising world, historians can now access digital scans of genuine archival material from anywhere, eliminating the need to travel to distant archives, and making research more efficient.

Bringing together primary sources from multiple archives can enhance one’s research, and Gale Primary Sources offers two key complementary digital archives that can be used in tandem to study colonialism – Nineteenth Century Collections Online: Europe and Africa, Colonialism and Culture and Decolonization: Politics and Independence in Former Colonial and Commonwealth Territories.

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Celebrating South Africa’s Independence “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika”

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│By Carolyn Beckford, Gale Product Trainer│

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a prominent South African anti-apartheid activist and Nobel laureate, coined the phrase “Rainbow Nation” to describe his country.  South Africa is home to a wide range of ethnic, cultural, and linguistic groups, including indigenous African tribes, Afrikaans and English-speaking communities, and people of Indian and Asian descent. This post will explore the country’s complicated history and its journey to independence.

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New Environmental History Archive: Colonial Policy and Global Development, 1896-1993

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│By Clem Delany, Acquisitions Editor, Gale Primary Sources│

On sitting down to write a brief explanation of what environmental history is, I have spent the last twenty minutes staring into space thinking about Pando. Pando is, as I’m sure the sophisticated and well-travelled audience of this blog will know, the largest and heaviest living organism on earth. Pando covers 100 acres and is around 10,000 years old. That means that when Pando first began its long, slow life, there were woolly mammoth and sabre-toothed cats still living, although increasingly finding their parties a little light on company.

Pando is a tree. It is a quaking aspen in Utah; in appearance it is over 45,000 individual quaking aspens, but below ground it has a single root system. Each ‘tree’ is a clone of its neighbours, a stem of one single organism. And it is on my mind because I am trying to think of a pithy way to describe environmental history, an area of study where many different disciplines and topics meet, connected at their roots as different expressions of one phenomenon: human interaction with the natural world.

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The Warrior Queen: Lakshmibai, the Rani of Jhansi

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│By Carolyn Beckford, Gale Product Trainer│

For Women’s History Month, I wanted to highlight a woman that many of us have probably not heard of before. Sure, we know about Cleopatra, the Dahomey Warriors, Boudica, Nana Yaa Asantewaa, Joan of Arc, and maybe even Njinga, but have you ever heard of Rani Lakshmibai?

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