Chronicles the life of King Leopold II of Belgium and discusses how he plundered the Congo, how his people tried to overthrow him, and other related topics.

For over five hundred years the Russians wondered what kind of people their Arctic and sub-Arctic subjects were. "They have mouths between their shoulders and eyes in their chests," reported a fifteenth-century tale. "They rove around, live of their own free will, and beat the Russian people," complained a seventeenth-century Cossack. "Their actions are exceedingly rude. They do not take off their hats and do not bow to each other," huffed an eighteenth-century scholar. They are "children of nature" and "guardians of ecological balance," rhapsodized early nineteenth-century and late twentieth-century romantics. Even the Bolsheviks, who categorized the circumpolar foragers as "authentic proletarians," were repeatedly puzzled by the "peoples from the late Neolithic period who, by virtue of their extreme backwardness, cannot keep up either economically or culturally with the furious speed of the emerging socialist society."Whether described as brutes, aliens, or endangered indigenous populations, the so-called small peoples of the north have consistently remained a point of contrast for speculations on Russian identity and a convenient testing ground for policies and images that grew out of these speculations. InArctic Mirrors, a vividly rendered history of circumpolar peoples in the Russian empire and the Russian mind, Yuri Slezkine offers the first in-depth interpretation of this relationship. No other book in any language links the history of a colonized non-Russian people to the full sweep of Russian intellectual and cultural history. Enhancing his account with vintage prints and photographs, Slezkine reenacts the procession of Russian fur traders, missionaries, tsarist bureaucrats, radical intellectuals, professional ethnographers, and commissars who struggled to reform and conceptualize this most "alien" of their subject populations.Slezkine reconstructs from a vast range of sources the successive official policies and prevailing attitudes toward the northern peoples, interweaving the resonant narratives of Russian and indigenous contemporaries with the extravagant images of popular Russian fiction. As he examines the many ironies and ambivalences involved in successive Russian attempts to overcome northern-and hence their own-otherness, Slezkine explores the wider issues of ethnic identity, cultural change, nationalist rhetoric, and not-so European colonialism. --

"The two major schools of thought in Indigenous-Settler relations on the ground, in the courts, in public policy, and in research are resurgence and reconciliation. Resurgence refers to practices of Indigenous self-determination and cultural renewal whereas reconciliation refers to practices of reconciliation between Indigenous and Settler nations, such as nation-with-nation treaty negotiations. Reconciliation also refers to the sustainable reconciliation of both Indigenous and Settler peoples with the living earth as the grounds for both resurgence and Indigenous-Settler reconciliation. Critically and constructively analyzing these two schools from a wide variety of perspectives and lived experiences, this volume connects both discourses to the ecosystem dynamics that animate the living earth. Resurgence and Reconciliation is multi-disciplinary, blending law, political science, political economy, women's studies, ecology, history, anthropology, sustainability, and climate change. Its dialogic approach strives to put these fields in conversation and draw out the connections and tensions between them. By using "earth-teachings" to inform social practices, the editors and contributors offer a rich, innovative, and holistic way forward in response to the world's most profound natural and social challenges. This timely volume shows how the complexities and interconnections of resurgence and reconciliation and the living earth are often overlooked in contemporary discourse and debate."--

"Traces of History presents a new approach to race and to comparative colonial studies. Bringing a historical perspective to bear on the regimes of race that colonizers have sought to impose on Aboriginal people in Australia, on Blacks and Native Americans in the United States, on Ashkenazi Jews in Western Europe, on Arab Jews in Israel/Palestine, and on people of African descent in Brazil, this book shows how race marks and reproduces the different relationships of inequality into which Europeans have coopted subaltern populations: territorial dispossession, enslavement, confinement, assimilation, and removal. Charting the different modes of domination that engender specific regimes of race and the strategies of anti-colonial resistance they entail, the book powerfully argues for cross-racial solidarities that respect these historical differences"--

In 1931, Simone Weil read an article by Louis Roubaud in the Petit Parisien that exposed the Yen Bay massacre in Indochina. That article opened Weil's eyes, and from then until her death in exile in 1943, she cared most deeply about the French colonial situation. Weil refused to accept the contradiction between the image of France as champion of the rights of man and the reality of France's exploitation and oppression of the peoples in its territories. Weil wrote thirteen articles or letters about the situation, writings originally published in French journals or in French collections of her work. J. P. Little's fluid and clear translations finally introduce to English-speaking scholars and students this important element of Weil's political consciousness.

The first landings in the Atlantic World generated striking and terrifying impressions of unknown peoples who were entirely foreign to anything in European explorers experience. From the first recorded encounters with the native inhabitants of the Canary Islands in 1341 to Columbus's explorations in 1492 and Cabral's discovery of Brazil in 1500, western Europeans struggled to make sense of the existence of the peoples they met. Were they Adam's children, of a common lineage with the peoples of the Old World, or were they a separate creation, the monstrous races of medieval legend? Should they govern themselves? Did they have the right to be free? Did they know God? Could they know God? Emphasizing contact between peoples rather than the discovery of lands, and using archaeological findings as well as eyewitness accounts, David Abulafia explores the social lives of the New World inhabitants, the motivations and tensions of the first transactions with Europeans, and the swift transmutation of wonder to vicious exploitation. Lucid, readable, and scrupulously researched, this is a work of humane engagement with a period in which a tragically violent standard was set for European conquest across the world.

This book explores a range of societies in and around the Pacific and southern Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that encountered religions introduced from elsewhere, or fashioned their own responses to already established religious traditions. These changes observed through the responses of the receiving societies indicate that religious change is a creative dynamic, rather than a passive acceptance of new ideas, beliefs and practices. While change is often triggered by the introduction of new understandings, it can only become entrenched within a community when it takes on meaning for individuals, and becomes embedded within the social and cultural life of the community.