Comparative Studies in Overseas History – serie

The exclusion of the discrimination of women from the concept of racism should not be thought as entailing that racist and sexist ideas do not have much in common, since both derive from essentially biological determinism, and indeed 2 racist societies have historically almost invariably been strongly sexist.

TELKAMP I In a sense, cities were superfluous to the purposes of colonists. From the point of view of the colonists, the cities were therefore in some respects necessary evils, as they were parasites on the rural producers, competing with the colonists in the process of surplus extraction.

by C. A. Bayly and D. H. A. Kolff The papers published in this volume were originally presented at two meetings of the Cambridg~-Leiden group for the comparative study of colonial India and Indonesia he1d in June 1979 and September 1982. These meetings were jointly sponsored by the Centre for the History of European Expansion at Leiden and the Centre for South Asian Studies at Cambridge. The Cambridge Centre had been restricted to the study of India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Burma and Nepal but had recently incorporated Southeast Asia into its area of interest; the Leiden Centre, which had encouraged comparative study from the beginning, necessarily found itself concentrating attention on Indonesias as the most important region of the former Dutch colonial empire. The meetings were intended to be exploratory, as much to alert the participants to work being done in the respective countries and to their different types of academic discourse as to compare 'India' and 'Indonesia'. Nor were the meetings intended to be exclusive. Scholars from several British and Netherlands Universities were involved from the beginning. More recently a wider series of conferences has been inaugurated. This brings scholars in India and Indonesia into a project wich seeks to develop the comparisons between the * two colonial societies on a more systematic basis.

by ROBERT ROSS and GERARD J. TELKAMP I In a sense, cities were superfluous to the purposes of colonists. The Europeans who founded empires outside their own continent were primarily concerned with extracting those products which they could not acquire within Europe. These goods were largely agricultural, and grown most often in a climate not found within Europe. Even when, as in India before 1800, the major exports were manufactures, in general they were still made in the countryside rather than in the great cities. It was only on rare occasion when great mineral wealth was discovered that giant metropolises grew up around the site of extraction. Since their location was deter­ mined by geology, not economics, they might be in the most inaccessible and in­ convenient areas, but they too would draw labour off from the agricultural pursuits of the colony as a whole. From the point of view of the colonists, the cities were therefore in some respects necessary evils, as they were parasites on the rural producers, competing with the colonists in the process of surplus extraction. Nevertheless, the colonists could not do without cities. The requirements of colonisation demanded many unequivocally urban functions. Pre-eminent among these was of course the need for a port, to allow the export of colonial wares and the import of goods from Europe, or from other parts of the non-European world, in the country-trade as it was known around India.

1. REFLECTIONS ON A THEME by ROBERT ROSS This book, the fourth in the series Comparative Studies in Overseas History, and, like its predecessors, the product of a symposium held by the Leiden Centre for the History of European Expansion, is organised around a single theme, the relationship between the ideological structures of domination and oppression that have come to be called racism and the political and economic ones which grew out of Europe's conquering and ruling much of the rest of the world. By racism, we mean those systems of thought in which group characteristics of human beings, of a non-somatic nature, are considered to be fixed by principles of descent and in which, in general, physical attributes (other than those of sex) are the main sign by which characteristics are attributed. In addition, almost by definition, the systems of thought entailed in this require that there is a hierarchy of the various races, and that those people in the lower ranks of that hierarchy are seriously disadvantaged, at least if the proponents of racist thought are able to impose their will on the society in which they live. ! The exclusion of the discrimination of women from the concept of racism should not be thought as entailing that racist and sexist ideas do not have much in common, since both derive from essentially biological determinism, and indeed 2 racist societies have historically almost invariably been strongly sexist.