Race and Color in Colonial Society: Biographical Sketches by a Eurasian Woman concerning Pre-World War II Indonesia

This article links the terms of trade, money supply, labor market, and money and credit markets to explore a puzzle in Malayan economic history: why, despite rapid growth and high per capita income, did pre–World War II Malaya industrialize so little? A range of data is drawn together to show how for Malayan manufacturers economic boom was accompanied by precipitate deterioration in the real exchange rate, while in a slump credit contracted sharply and with it the size of the Malayan market for manufactures. Analysis of Malayan experience may be relevant for understanding slight industrialization elsewhere in Southeast Asia.

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Assimilation of Ethnic-Religious Minorities in the Netherlands: A Historical-Sociological Analysis of Pre–World War II Jews and Contemporary Muslims

Social Science History ◽

10.1017/ssh.2017.12 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 41 (3) ◽

pp. 477-504

Author(s):

Peter Tammes ◽

Peter Scholten

Keyword(s):

World War Ii ◽

The Netherlands ◽

Minority Groups ◽

Religious Affiliation ◽

Religious Practices ◽

Boundary Crossing ◽

Dutch Society ◽

World War ◽

And Behavior ◽

Pre World War Ii

This article examines what assimilation trajectories were manifest among present-day Mediterranean Muslims and pre–World War II Jews in Dutch society. Alba and Nee conceptualized assimilation in terms of processes of spanning and altering group boundaries, distinguishing between boundary crossing, blurring, and shifting. This study carves out to what extent assimilation processes like boundary crossing, shifting, and blurring had taken place for those two non-Christian minority groups in Dutch society. This research is based on findings of recent (quantitative) empirical research into the assimilation of pre–World War II Jews in the Netherlands and on the collection of comparable research and data for the assimilation of contemporary Mediterranean Muslims. Our study suggests that processes of boundary crossing, such as observance of religious practices and consumption of religious food, and blurring, such as intermarriage, residential segregation, and religious affiliation, are much less advanced for Mediterranean Muslims in the present time. Though several factors might account for differences in boundary-altering processes between pre–World War II Jews and contemporary Mediterranean Muslims such as differences in length of stay in the Netherlands, the secularization process, and globalization, Jewish assimilation might provide us some reflections on assimilation of Mediterranean Muslims. The continuous arrival of Muslim newcomers might affect attitudes and behavior of settled Mediterranean Muslims, while policy to restrict family migration might be insufficient to stimulate Muslims to integrate in Dutch society given the quite negative mutual perceptions, the slow process of residential spreading, the continuation of observance of religious practices, and the low intermarriage rate.

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The Nation as Family

The Oxford Handbook of Politics and Performance ◽

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190863456.013.47 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 622-636

Author(s):

Nobuko Anan

Keyword(s):

World War Ii ◽

Normal Family ◽

Reproductive Function ◽

Postwar Period ◽

Japanese Empire ◽

World War ◽

Critical Relation ◽

Pre World War Ii

This chapter examines mother-child love linked to love for the nation within two Japanese plays. In Rio Kishida’s Thread Hell (1984), a pre–World War II silk factory represents the Japanese Empire, where a mother and her daughter are manipulated by the nation. However, they eventually challenge this symbolic realm that forces women to sustain the national lineage through their reproductive function. In Hideki Noda’s MIWA (2015), a homosexual transvestite’s relationship with his mother in the postwar period is depicted. As resistance to heteronormative ideas about family, and the nation as its extension, he commits matricide, but this leads to his melancholia as he cannot fully give up his desire to belong to a “normal” family and nation. These plays explore the ways individuals develop a critical relation to the nation by reconfiguring their love for their mother.

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The Mother Who Birthed the Florida Park Service

How the New Deal Built Florida Tourism ◽

10.5744/florida/9780813056319.003.0005 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 54-68

Author(s):

David J. Nelson

Keyword(s):

World War Ii ◽

The State ◽

World War ◽

Park Service ◽

Pre World War Ii

As the most powerful woman in pre–World War II Florida, May Mann Jennings was instrumental in the development of the Florida Park Service and its predecessor, Florida Forestry Service, as well as bringing the Civilian Conservation Service into the state for park work.

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Turning Tropical

Rubber and the Making of Vietnam ◽

10.5149/northcarolina/9781469637150.003.0005 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 130-166

Author(s):

Michitake Aso

Keyword(s):

World War Ii ◽

Human Disease ◽

Human Biology ◽

Industrial Agriculture ◽

Pasteur Institute ◽

World War ◽

Racial Categories ◽

Rubber Plantations ◽

Colonial Society ◽

Ecological View

Rubber plantations necessitated extensive medical studies of human biology and diseases. Researchers at the Pasteur Institute carried out numerous studies of mosquitoes and plasmodia, and to a lesser extent other pathogens, among plantation workers. Race served as an important analytic category for these researchers even as anthropologists were beginning to question the coherence of racial categories. Chapter 4 investigates the racialized society that the architects of industrial agriculture imagined they were creating. It also discusses the interactions in Indochina between the burgeoning tropical sciences and government and transnational capital, focusing on human disease environments to examine how “rubber science” was applied to the surrounding countryside. If plantations were microcosms of the global colonial society, they were also laboratories where solutions to colonial problems were worked out. Tropical agronomy, geography, and medicine, linked by an ecological view of climates and soils, helped naturalize racial distinctions for the colonizers. Yet the colonial subjects who were the targets of these projects did not act in ways that race makers expected. While these subjects could not control the discourse of race, they could appropriate it for their own ends, and they attempted to do so before the outbreak of World War II.

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