“I walked back through the streets of this jungle city where detectives and gangsters hunted all men and women who entertained any thoughts other than the official ones. Within half an hour the girl [an activist] would have moved her dwelling and be warning all her friends”.¹

The problem of “messy urbanism” is not one restricted to modern-day theory. Of course, more recently, this concept has been formalised in an edited volume by Manish Chalana and Jeffrey Hou: Messy Urbanism: Understanding the ‘Other’ Cities of Asia.² Here, the contributors aim to look beyond the spatial and imagined construction of East Asian cities and award agency to the informal practices of urban life, which are given meaning as processes which both subvert and interact with formal hierarchies of city planning and organisation. “Messy” urban practices, such as the autonomy of slum dwellers on the periphery of a city, are renewed as a dynamic expression of the inhabitants of the city which constitute its real meaning.³ The authors suggest that the layers of actors and actions revealed by the concept of ‘messy urbanism’ allow us to view urban life from a diverse, rather than hierarchical perspective. However, the search to understand “conditions and processes which do not follow institutionalised or culturally prescribed notions of order” has long been a task of historians, anthropologists, theorists, and travellers alike.⁴

The lament of the “jungle city” above belongs to Agnes Smedley, an American triple agent who worked for the Soviets, Chinese Communists, and the Indian Nationalists. She has been described as a “fellow traveller”- a term coined by Trotsky to describe someone who had Communist sympathies, without actually belonging to the party or nation in question.⁵ The line comes from her monograph Battle Hymn of China, which describes China in the midst of the Sino-Japanese War which she witnessed alongside Chinese soldiers and Japanese prisoners of war (POWs).⁶ Her dedication at the start is “to the soldiers of China: poor, glorious pioneers in the world struggle against Fascism” and is representative of her desire to uncover the lived experiences of the population at the birth of Communism.⁷ For Smedley, the war created the cultural conditions for the articulation of the lives of the Chinese population, which arguably, she saw as the messy “urban fabric” that lay beneath China’s imperialist history.⁸

Smedley’s description of underground activists in Shanghai is largely valuable for an accurate representation of “messy urbanism”. The war-trodden city is described as a “jungle”, which suggests that the concrete fabric of the city had dissolved in favour of a natural loss of order. Here, Smedley adopts an almost nostalgic tone, as she illuminates the hidden structures of the city which worked toward the Communist resistance. The proletariat is inherently connected with the “messiness” of the city to emphasise their origins of poverty and disconnect from the old hierarchical and imperialist vision of Shanghai. Smedley describes this through a contrast between the “detectives and gangsters” of the government and “men and women” who can be seen as a personification of the spatial and visual order of the city. The “detectives and gangsters” enforce order against the messier undercurrents of “men and women” of resistance, who inhabit the street corners and slums which Smedley describes first-hand. Her account demonstrates how the Communist resistance formed part of the everyday “forms of planning and engagement” with the city, by using street corners to advertise Communist literature and slums to house temporary Communist ‘libraries’.⁹ This spatial usurpation was exacerbated by the fact that the perpetrators in the case were not only women, but “girls”. This heightened the objective sense of urban messiness by removing the female from her traditional role within the house and placing her in a visible position of defiance on the street corner, which she had claimed as her explicitly Communist “dwelling”. These dwellings were significant as an undefined and restricted feature of the city because when their activism was threatened, the girl and her friends simply moved their dwellings and “warn[ed]” fellow activists through their network of communications which subverted the government’s attempts at restraint. This demonstrates the fluid reality of Shanghai’s urban structures, which did not conform to planning or zoning, but instead provided a flexible foundation for the inhabitants of the city, who defined and utilised the streets according to profession, ideology, and present-time experience or emotion. The changes in the energy, success, and motivation of Communist activists during this period was reflected in the changing makeup of the different districts of the city, as dwellings emerged, moved, or were destroyed. Consequently, Smedley’s account illuminates the “broader patterns of informalized urban orders” through her description of wartime resistance, which can be characterised as the “messy” urban fabric of Shanghai in the 1930s.¹⁰ Likewise, Smedley’s own text can be seen as an effective form of engagement with this “messiness”, in which she gives meaning to urban messiness as an immersed witness of emerging Chinese Communism.

Frequently identified as a “fellow traveller”, Agnes Smedley’s grappling between the role of external witness and immersed reporter is representative of the struggle that the ‘Messy Urbanism’ authors elucidate between the removed ideology of the city and the lived experiences of its inhabitants.¹¹ Smedley’s unique role places her between in a gulf between the two, and her text is a continual struggle to represent the “messy” urban conditions of the rise of Chinese Communism without the impression of an urban, foreign, gaze of misunderstanding- a “paradoxical quest for attachment outside the nation”.¹² Overall, the text is largely valuable for an understanding of the informal structures and practices of the city, which, as historians, allow us to avoid “historicising the city instead of doing history inside the city”.¹³ 

1. Agnes Smedley, Battle Hymn of China, (London, 1944), <https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.207541/page/n5/mode/2up> [accessed: 11 February 2022], p.56. [↩]
2. Manish Chalana, Jeffrey Hou, Messy Urbanism: Understanding the ‘Other’ Cities of Asia, (Hong Kong, 2016). [↩]
3. Chalana, Hou, Messy Urbanism, p.9. [↩]
4. Chalana, Hou, Messy Urbanism, p.1. [↩]
5. DWF Kerr, ‘Agnes Smedley: The Fellow Traveller’s Tales’ in DWF Kerr and J Kuehn (eds), A Century of Travels in China: Critical Essays on Travel Writing from the 1840s to the 1940s, (Hong Kong, 2007), p.1. [↩]
6. Agnes Smedley, Battle Hymn of China, (London, 1944), <https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.207541/page/n5/mode/2up> [accessed: 11 February 2022]. [↩]
7. Agnes Smedley, Battle Hymn, Title Page. [↩]
8. Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, (California, 2011), p.47. [↩]
9. Chalana, Hou, Messy Urbanism, p.17. [↩]
10. Chalana, Hou, Messy Urbanism, p.5. [↩]
11. Kerr, ‘Agnes Smedley’, p.1.  [↩]
12. Maureen Moynagh, Political Tourism and its Texts, (Toronto, 2008), p.112. [↩]
13. Sheetal Chhabria, Making the Modern Slum: The Power of Capital in Colonial Bombay, (2019), p.9 [↩]

James Ranald Martin opens his 1837 ‘Notes on the Medical Topography of Calcutta’, with a quote from Hippocrates on the title-page:

 

‘It is necessary for a Physician, when entering a city of which he knows nothing, to examine its exposure, the predominant winds, the seasons, the nature and elevation of the soil, the quantity of the waters of which the inhabitants make use, and the kind of life they follow’.¹

 

However, rather than examining the habits and lifestyle of the inhabitants, Martin was one of many European travelers to “the Tropics” to look upon their lives with utter disdain. ‘The Foundation of an English School of Medicine’, he writes, ‘…must prove one of the most direct and impressive mores of demonstrating to the natives the superiority of European knowledge in general’ (italics in original).² There is little of the Hippocratic call to examine and learn about the life or habits of the local population in Martin’s remarks. Instead, they reveal a sense of superiority, and a belief in the righteousness of European colonialism. Shang-Jen Li argues that as the 19^th c. progressed, British medical practitioners were less and less inclined to learn from native customs or from indigenous medicine- it was now seen as a ‘loss of the white self’, as a sign of contagion.³  Tropicality, with its pseudo-scientific observations, creates the perfect environment for the cultivation of scientific racism. Unlike Orientalism, which is rooted in an interest in history, languages and cultures of South Asia, Tropicality takes its inspiration from science, nature and observation. Despite its seeming dedication to empirical evidence and interest in the environment, writings about the tropics frequently omit mention of the local population or local practices, and instead focus on discussing the discrepancies between the imagined tropics and the actual environment travelers encountered.

For instance, in Joseph Hooker’s 1855 Himalayan Journals he does little to hide his disappointment at the disparity between the tropics he had imagined in his mind, and the “tropics” he encountered. Of the Sunderbunds he writes “these exhibit no tropical luxuriance, and are, in this respect, exceedingly disappointing”.⁴ As David Arnold argues, despite their “scientific” backing, the Tropics were frequently romanticised. Romanticism in tropicality played the role of glorifying nature, selling travelers the idea of a wild landscape which was rarely found by the traveler upon their visitation.⁵ As we can see from Hooker’s memoirs, , “the tropics” for him are more a playground for the medic, the naturalist, the botanist, the geologist, rather than a place on equal grounds with Europe. The tropics in these writings exist for European observation, cultivation and improvement. Even Hooker’s desire to see true “tropical” and “wild” nature appears false. When visiting the botanic garden during his travels, he writes that instead of a beautiful tropical garden he finds ‘an unsightly wilderness, without shade (the first requirement of every tropical garden) or other beauties’.⁶ Clearly, the reality he was in did not match the very specific European conception of a wild, yet cultivated tropics.

Beyond his disappointment with the nature, Hooker’s account of his early travelling experience seems devoid of people. He dedicates paragraphs to describing plants he sees, or buildings he stays in, but there appears to be no mention of the native population. Therein lies the contradiction of the tropics: they must maintain wilderness, but also careful cultivation. They must be a place of novelty for the European, but the medicine, the food, and the buildings must be European in style. Most revealingly, however, travelers’ disdain for the experiences, voices, and habits of the indigenous populations of the places the visited show that tropicality was and continues to be an imagined place.

 

Bibliography: 

Arnold, David. 2005. The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape and Science 1800-1856. Ranikhet: Permanent Black.

Hooker, Joseph Dalton. 1954. Himalayan Journals: Notes of a Naturalist. London: J. Murray.

Martin, Sir James Ranland. 1837. Notes on the Medical Topography of Calcutta. Calcutta: G.H Huttmann.

Shang-Jen, Li. 2013. “Eating Well in China: Diet and Hygiene in Nineteenth-Century Treaty Ports.” In Health and Hygiene in Chinese East Asia: Policies and Publics in the Long Twentieth Century, edited by Qizi Liang, Che Leung, Angela Ki, and Charlotte Furth. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

1. Sir James Ranland Martin, Notes on the Medical Topography of Calcutta (Calcutta: G.H Huttmann, 1837), front cover. [↩]
2. Martin, Notes on the Medical Topography of Calcutta, p60. [↩]
3. Li Shang-Jen, “Eating Well in China: Diet and Hygiene in Nineteenth-Century Treaty Ports,” in Health and Hygiene in Chinese East Asia: Policies and Publics in the Long Twentieth Century, ed. Qizi Liang et al. (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013). p124 [↩]
4. Joseph Dalton Hooker, Himalayan Journals: Notes of a Naturalist (London: J. Murray, 1954), p1. [↩]
5. David Arnold, The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape and Science 1800-1856 (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2005), pp104-5. [↩]
6. Hooker, Himalayan Journals: Notes of a Naturalist, p2. [↩]

The professionalisation and academisation of advocacy for slum communities has furthered a construction of an abstract conceptualisation of the “slum” where the agency of the slum-dweller is dependent upon the nature of their representation by academics and professionals, making the navigation between these representations in an attempt to write a history more difficult. This begins by how academia tends to rationalise phenomena in order to fit it within a structuralist system of understanding the world, as it is through this system of comprehension that allows the academy to connect disassociated events together and justify the construction of such ideas by feeding them into wider metanarratives. A lot of the inspiration behind this method of knowledge construction comes from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in which Hegel described the origin of knowledge as coming from the distance between an object’s essence, its being in-itself, and the acknowledgement of that object by an agent’s consciousness, this acknowledgement creating a second object, that of the being-for-consciousness.[1] Therefore, since knowledge is created by individual consciousnesses, Hegel argued that the movement from knowledge to truth comes in the mediation between an individual’s original notion regarding an object and another individual’s antithetical notion, with the eventual coalescing around a common universal notion that overcomes both notions’ limitations.[2] It is during this explanation of how knowledge is created that Hegel likens the process to a social struggle, inspiring the understanding of the actions of social agents during historical events as being the result of those individuals self-perceiving their existence as a part of a dialectical struggle.[3]

 

However, this understanding of historical forces can lead to the disassociation of the historical individual from being an agent during historical events, instead relying on wider metanarratives as drivers of history. This can lead to the oversimplification of the motives of agents, as Marc Askew argues exists in the historiography surrounding slums which represents slum-dwellers as participating in wider struggles against the state and capital for the historians’ normative advocacy purposes.[4] The issue that arises from this is that the increasing abstraction of the historical agent as participating within wider struggles makes the historian’s representation of the original object, the potential primary sources offered by that agent, an obfuscation of differing narratives of the objects. For instance, in Shu Mei Huang and Hyun Kyung Lee’s representation of the eviction of residents from Huaguang, the authors argue that recording the heritages of this community can help create wider geographies of responsibility which would reconceptualise the usage of state power.[5] The authors achieve this argument in a number of ways, including by connecting the symbols of national identity displayed by residents to the histories of their ancestors, by recording the viewpoints of those gathered at a student protest against the state’s seemingly arbitrary measures to achieve eviction, and the likening of the plight of the residents of Huaguang to those of residents in other slums which have experienced eviction.[6] However, these generalisations of this community’s history fail to take into account the viewpoint of the individual, instead grouping the heritages represented in the book as part of a wider discourse of the push-and-pull between collective remembering and state power, which may explain why the authors fail to explain the community’s failure to effectively organise against the eviction of individuals.[7]

While this can be seen as an example of one of Askew’s points, that normative academic work on slums tend to highlight notions of communitarianism over the reality of individual responsibility, a more pressing question as to how this community’s heritage can actually function as a platform from which academia can create a geography of responsibility is raised when reading how other sources have represented the individual agents within this community.[8] For instance, how Cheng Wei-hui, one of the community’s leaders, has been represented in the Taipei Times offers an alternative view of the residents as failing to view the actions of the state as constituting part of a wider governmentality of arbitrariness. In one article, she is said to have complained that the government destroyed several dormitory units without warning because ‘it was rude that the work took place without prior warning,’[9] the emphasis being on the failure to communicate the impending action to the residents rather than on the actual policy of destruction itself. In another article, Cheng Wei-hui is quoted as saying ‘I was taught to love my country, but I didn’t know the country I loved was like this,’ adding that ‘it gives money to big corporations and condemns us people to death,’[10] which implies that the issue is not the state’s power in enacting eviction but with the misplacement of government policies on the side of capital, again failing to criticise that the state has this ability to employ its legal and security apparatuses to enforce eviction. While these two articles do link Cheng Wei-hui’s quotations to wider critiques of the government’s policies, none of these critiques are explicitly attributed to Cheng Wei-hui, which would suggest that she does not personally frame herself as existing in a dialectical contest against the punitive state. Instead, these perspectives are implied to be the views of the author, which again feeds into Askew’s perspective on the generalisation of slum politics as robbing the individuals living within them of their agency in describing social phenomena from their own perspectives.

 

What both the Taipei Times’ articles and Huang and Lee’s narrative on Huaguang offer are normative positions regarding state power, but both of them fail to explicitly highlight a moment in which the individuals involved in these events perceived themselves as participating in a slum-communitarianism/state-authority dialectical struggle. It is the abstraction of these events as existing within such a paradigm that turns the agent of the slum-dweller into an object to be represented, and if academia is to serve as a normative force to direct future social development through the representation of knowledge, it would be better to accurately record the histories of the individuals in these communities from their perspectives, perspectives which these two sources currently obfuscate through their framing of them within a wider abstract metanarrative. Askew argued for the deconstruction of how these communities are represented, and so maybe it would serve best to abandon the dialectical construction of these people through the creation of a common “heritage”, and instead ask who the slum-dweller is as an exception to these generalisations, how do they live, and how do they identify themselves and the world around them. This would serve to produce articles which could be considered to better represent the historical nature of the primary sources which they use.

[1] G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Germany, 1807; 1977), 55.

[2] Ibid., 80-86.

[3] Ibid., 111-119.

[4] Marc Askew, “Genealogy of the Slum”, Bangkok: Place, Practice & Representation (Abingdon, 2002), 139-169.

[5] Shu-Mei Huang & Hyun Kyung Lee, “Disarticulation and Eradication of Dissonant Place in Replicating Roppongi Hills in Taipei”, Heritage, Memory, and Punishment: Remembering Colonial Prisons in East Asia (Abingdon, 2020), 132-146.

[6] Ibid., 135-138.

[7] Ibid., 138.

[8] Askew, Bangkok, 144-145; Ibid., 141.

[9] Rich Chang, “Demolition Work at Taipei’s Huaguang Community Begins”, Taipei Times (24/02/2013), 3, <http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2013/02/24/2003555616> [accessed: 13/02/22].

[10] Ho Yi, “Refugees ‘Squatting’ on a Gold Mine”, Taipei Times (03/07/2013), 12, <http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/archives/2013/07/03/2003566212> [accessed: 13/02/22].

Within colonial-era travel writing and orientalist discourse, ‘despotism’ is a common term used to describe Asia. Montesquieu applies the term ‘despot’ as a reflection of a civilisation’s ‘enslaved’ status.¹ However, writers that utilise this term through orientalist language fail to expand on their application of despotism. Its definition, application and usage are vague and contradictory. Thus, I argue that in most historical discourse, engaging with the notion of despotism utilises it as a literary device as a form of othering, constructing barriers between a civilisational ‘us’ and a despotic ‘other’. Unsurprising that orientalist discourse is utilised to construct boundaries of ‘civilised’ and ‘uncivilised’, my argument highlights the importance of distinguishing between rhetoric and concept within historical writings. Despotism and enslavement are not used as conceptual terms to describe a governmental system or nation state, rather, they are used as rhetoric tools to establish boundaries of civilisation.

‘Despotism’, within Montesquieu’s texts, is used to construct an idea of a ‘despotic Asia’, in contrast to the free and liberated Europe.² Asia exists in a state of enslavement, either enslaved by other Asian empires or enslaved by their own people.³ Despite the existence of vast empires similar to those in Europe, those empires differ in that they are not truly free. Montesquieu provides the example of the ‘Tartars’ as ‘Asia’s natural conquerors’, describing how despite their military prowess in expanding their empires, the ‘Tartar’ people will eventually become enslaved.⁴ This characteristic is attributed to their eventual demise into ‘despotism’ as a desire to emulate the original conquerors of their newly acquired land.⁴ Thus, the ‘Tartar’ colonies become enslaved from arbitrary powers imposed on the colonised subjects. The example provided here describes despotism not as an intricate governmental system but rather as a rhetorical tool to invoke an idea of Asia and Asians as disenchanted, enslaved people. Despotism constructs Asia into both a geographic and ideational space in the minds of European readers.

This ideational spatiality is also applied in travel literature as travellers were important in constructing ‘Asia’ into the minds of their readers. The language of despotism is also applied within the writings of Howard Malcolm, an American missionary who wrote accounts of his travels to British India, Burma, Siam and Malaya during the mid 19th century. Notable mentions of despotism come in his description of Siam, where he constructs a dystopian image of Siam as opposed to Burma as a ‘civilised’ society.⁵ His descriptions of the Bangkok population fall upon orientalist discourse’s rhetoric as he views them as ‘crafty, mean, ignorant, conceited, slothful, servile, rapacious, and cruel.⁶ This assessment of Siamese character reflects on their ‘civilisational value’ as Malcolm attributes these characteristics to Siam’s ‘despotic’ state. Slavery is emphasised to support Malcolm’s despotic reflection of Siam as he argues that ‘men may sell their wives, parents and children, at pleasure; and often sell themselves’.⁷ By highlighting the arbitrary nature of the Siamese slave trade and how people ‘sell themselves’, Malcolm emphasises Siam’s despotic nature through its ‘enslaved’ population. Much like Montesquieu, Malcolm constructs an idea of Asia and the ‘Asian’ as a disenchanted and enslaved individual. This is not to challenge Malcolm’s observations of slavery, rather, I provide this example since Malcolm uses slavery to support notions of ‘despotism’ while also utilising slavery as a means of highlighting Burma’s civilisational prowess. As mentioned previously, despotism is ill-defined and vague, used in contradictory manners. While constructing a disenchanted image of Siam through its extensive slave trade, Malcolm argues how Burma’s well-structured regulations regarding slave maintenance and usage show Bruma’s civilisational prowess in relation to its neighbours.⁸ Additionally, Malcolm’s contradictory discourse on slavery disregards his national context as an American whose country still practised slavery during the time of his travels and publications.

Although it is unsurprising that colonial discourse is contradictory, it is important to unravel those contradictions to highlight the writer’s underlying messages and intended image. It becomes clear that Malcolm utilises dystopian rhetoric to construct an idea of a ‘civilised’ and ‘uncivilised’ Asia in the reader’s mind. Siam, through the rhetoric of enslavement, is othered as ‘uncivilised’, while Burma, through the same rhetoric of enslavement, is accepted as ‘civilised’. The contradictory application of despotism and enslavement highlight the weaknesses in his argument but also uncover the role of these terms as rhetoric tools rather than conceptual terminology. As a result, the imposition of an idea of Asia becomes the primary effect of Malcolm’s text as Asia becomes more than a geographic space, but it is an ideational space within the mind of the reader.

1. Anne M. Cohler, Basia C. Miller and Harold S. Stone (eds.), Montesquieu: The Spirit of the Laws (Cambridge, 1989), p. 282. [↩]
2. Ibid. [↩]
3. Ibid., pp. 282-283. [↩]
4. Ibid [↩] [↩]
5. Howard Malcolm, Travels in South-Eastern Asia: Embracing Hindustan, Malaya, Siam and China; with Notices of Burmese Missionary Stations and full account of the Burman Empire (Philadelphia, 1850), p. 161; pp. 320-322. [↩]
6. Ibid., pp. 320. [↩]
7. Ibid., pp. 321-322. [↩]
8. Ibid., p. 169. [↩]

“that treacherous perfidious race of Beings, whose natural piratical dispositions might, by the small size of our vessel, [provoke] them to some act of violence”.

John Septimus Roe was a British explorer, navigator, and surveyor who is most renowned for charting the Western coast of Australia in the 18^th century. He recorded his expeditions both in the ship logbook, letters, and navigational and coastal sketches. These sources are largely valuable for their contrasting depictions of his journey through Southeast Asia to get to Australia. Within them, we are confronted with both scientific visual representation and a haze of tropical madness- the phenomenon of ‘tropicality’, whereby imperial preconceptions of the tropical climate and its inhabitants seeped into their lived experience of these ‘other’ countries. As historians our task is to navigate the fog and determine the value of these sources beyond their accusations, preconceptions, and racism. Felix Driver’s work on the ‘Views and Visions’ of the tropics is significant for beginning this task.

Driver presents the idea of the “view” and the “vision” as a means for distinction between ‘tropicality’ and the tropical. He defines the view as a process where “landscapes are depicted at a distance, their surface features translated into a recognisable visual code”.[1] In this way, landscape sketches became a means of scientific representation through their “topographic aesthetic”.[2] Meanwhile, Driver argues, the “vision” was a dangerously “transformative” concept.[3] It included the spectator as an active participant in the scene, creating an image of the whole which was influenced by the preconceptions, motivations, ‘haze’ which imbued the explorer. Both concepts are useful for determining the influence of ‘tropicality’ on 18^th century visions of Asia and Southeast Asia.

The full entry from Roe’s logbook on the Tamar, which set sail in 1824, reads as follows:

“Traces of Malays, who come here to fish for Trepang (a kind of blubbery soft fish, which sells well to the Chinese) were everywhere seen, and put us on our guard against that treacherous perfidious race of Beings, whose natural piratical dispositions might, by the small size of our vessel, [provoke] them to some act of violence”.[4]

Here, Roe ‘others’ the Malaysian population, by implying that their geographical position on an island influences their psychological nature. He suggests that because of their coexistence with the sea as a life source, they have “natural piratical dispositions”, as if the wild coastline infiltrates their character. They are violent, unpredictable, and domineering- all according to the small “traces” of their existence which Roe has actually witnessed. The notion of the tropical landscape becoming synonymous with the characteristics of a population also adds to the thrill of Roe’s adventure. He adopts a self-congratulatory tone when he later marks himself immune from the influence of the climate, which “saps” the strength of his colleagues- “I feel great pleasure in being able to say that [my constitution] is exempt from that particularity”.[5] Whilst the analytical interlude in the first entry related to the Trepang fish gives us a small insight into the transnational relationships across Asia and broader economic features of the Malaysian population, the extract is dominated by Roe’s preconceived “vision” of the tropics. His writing attempts to reconcile the haze of ‘tropicality’, which sees Asia as both thrilling and degenerative, with the empirical evidence of his expedition. In doing so, the haze becomes stronger, as his preconceptions of ‘tropicality’ are projected onto the natural landscape.

By contrast, Roe’s accompanying drawings are a valuable insight into his journey and serve as both an empirical and historical source which provide a “view” of the tropics uninhibited by his own gaze.[6] In his coastal sketches, the mountains form part of a panoramic view which suggest that we too, are a witness to this unfamiliar landscape. The observational detail of these sketches continues to the edge of the page, situating the viewer at the edge of the boat from which the sketch was made. Drops of plantain juice on the parchment itself immerse the viewer in Roe’s view, providing tangible evidence of the tropics, not as a singular specimen, but as a vibrant and interactive whole. Consequently, they are valuable for their scientific accuracy and spatial placement- we are aware of the presence of the explorer, without their unwanted encroachment on the real view. Rather than being immersed in a tropical haze, we are immersed in the explorer’s empirical and representational gaze, which sought to create an accurate and uninhibited portrayal of their travels. Driver states that the drawings are evidence of “more personal aspirations” too, a testament to the explorer and his craft. As such, they are evidence of a very real passion, rather than a passionate haze of imperialist intention.

“If we look more closely at the archive of tropical travel…it is clear that [the travels] raised as many questions as they answered. How was the experience of travelling itself to be put into words and images?”[7]

As Driver notes, the view of the tropics is hard to decipher from amongst the multi-layered visions of ‘tropicality’ which infiltrated the explorer’s mind. The questions which it raised for the explorer however, are of equal importance to the historian when studying travel accounts of Asia and Southeast Asia- what were the processes, both empirical and psychological, which were behind the words and images?

[1] Felix Driver, ‘Imagining the Tropics: Views and Visions of the Tropical World’, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, vol.25, no. 1 (2004), p.4.

[2] Ibid, p.4.

[3] Ibid, p.5.

[4] John Septimus Roe, The Mermaid and Bath Letters, (1817-1823), <https://www.matthewfishburn.com/writing/2021/2/15/letters-of-john-septimus-roe> [accessed: 04 February 2022], p.124.

[5] Ibid, p.106.

[6] Felix Driver, ‘Imagining the Tropics’, p.10.

[7] Ibid, p.14

Mary Sutphen argued in 1997 in favour of David Arnold’s position that germ theory did not affect the primacy of environmental determinism in the European doctor’s view of aetiology.[1] However, Sutphen’s article underplays the impact which bacteriologists’ linkage between plague and rats had upon municipal public health policy considerations. Sutphen is right to place colonial responses to bacteriology within the context of tropicality, but just because this new form of empiricism contributed to this hegemonic discourse rather than undermined it is not an indicator that such developments failed to make an historical impact. Indeed, there is a whole wealth of literature that highlights the role which the plague outbreaks of the 1890s and onwards had on the decisions that municipal authorities took in the name of public health, whether they be in road construction or the architecture of houses.[2]

 

In the case of Rangoon, Sutphen’s argument that, rather than diminishing the emphasis of environmental determinism, new biomedical knowledge had shifted its focus from natural miasmas to the insanitary conditions of cities’ slums is evidenced in the town’s Municipal Committee reports. It is no surprise that the committee’s first reported encounter with the plague in 1899 was accompanied in the same year’s report with a lengthy request for funds to perform land reclamation of the town’s suburb with the highest mortality rates, Lanmadaw, as it was only through improvement of the land that they believed disease rates could be reduced.[3] Not a single mention of rats appears in this report. However, when the plague finally did strike Rangoon in 1905, the destruction of rats was noted as one of the immediate measures to combat the epidemic, with requests for funds in order to change the sewer systems and to demolish the insanitary abodes of the town.[4] This same report does also bring up the need to reclaim the land of Lanmadaw, but this time the language had changed, without a reference to how the swampy soil contributed to the spread of disease as they had done in 1899, instead the necessity for reclaiming this land was entirely for the purpose of constructing new properties to offset the town’s rising house prices.[5] This shift in emphasis between the two reports would suggest that, as Sutphen argued, colonial authorities accepted the scientific link between rats and plague that bacteriology had made possible as the natural environment of these communities were no longer considered the main factor in disease spread, but rather the nature in which people lived. As the committee’s health officer reported:

‘the epidemic seems never to have been more severe in the… undrained and badly conserved quarters of Lanmadaw… than in the “Pucca Area,” which is better provided with… surface drains… but where the houses are often… four storeys in height, the lighting and ventilation very imperfect, and where over-crowding upon area attains its maximum… The only conditions common to all the infected dwellings were their general dirtiness and the absence of adequate light and ventilation, and the prevalence of rats in the vicinity.’[6]

However, Sutphen’s assertion that this ‘did not require colonial officials to change any of the routines they had used to control disease in the past’[7] was absolutely not the case in Rangoon, and the effects of this discursive shift bore itself out in drastically new approaches to municipal policy. For instance, in 1899 the committee sought to improve the drainage and infrastructure of the less urbanised sections of Rangoon, with the first response for prevention being the quarantining of ships from infected ports under the Venice Convention; there was little intention of changing how people living in these areas conducted themselves or organised their households.[8] Whereas, in the years following the 1905 report, with the blame for the plague’s spread being placed upon those dirty households attracting rats which the health officer had described, the committee started requesting designers to present examples of new ‘model houses for the poorer classes.’[9] With this, the rate of forced evictions increased as an amendment to the Burma Municipal Act of 1898 allowed for greater numbers of lower ranking officials’ signatures to count as providing sufficient authorisation for the demolition of buildings, a reflection of the increasing workload the rate of these demolitions were creating for the higher authorities in the effort to construct more free-standing masonry structures.[10] Finally, it is with the efforts to totally redesign the barracks provided by private businesses for their hired coolies that showed the extremity with which the plague had affected municipal policy, the 1910 report reading:

‘the want of power to control the laying out of private estates is a serious danger to the proper development of the town. The Committee is not eager to apply for these powers, but unless they are obtained and exercised or unless private owners exercise more liberality and foresight in the laying out of their estates… the health of the inhabitants of East Rangoon and other improved quarters will be imperilled by the existence of undrained, illventilated and grossly over crowded buslees which would put the slums of Liverpool to the blush.’[11]

A sentiment which was reflected across South Asia, with Robert Home directly linking the plague outbreaks to the development of new town planning techniques by taking a broader view of the discourses of colonial policy, a view which takes the impact of such developments into greater account than Sutphen’s focus on the immediate medical responses to such events.[12]

 

Therefore, it is clear that the link between rats and incidences of plague that bacteriology made possible greatly impacted the nature of municipal policy. The shift from theories that natural miasmas caused plague to plague being the result of human insanitary practices meant that local governments sought to exercise a new governmentality of biopower that increased controls over how indigenous people occupied domestic spaces. While it is important to note, to Sutphen’s credit, that the goals of colonialism existed similarly either side of the change from humanity needing to conquer nature to survive, to humanity needing to conquer humans to survive as both discourses sought to exploit foreign resources, the significance of this change lies in how the latter allowed the state to justify intensifying the regimentation of people’s lives. It is this change in policy that is absent in Sutphen’s article.

[1] Mary P. Sutphen, “Not What, but Where: Bubonic Plague and the Reception of Germ Theories in Hong Kong and Calcutta, 1894-1897”, Journal of the History of Medicine, Vol. 52 (1997), 81-113.

[2] Robert Home, Of Planting and Planning: The Making of British Colonial Cities (Abingdon, 1997; 2013), 149-199; Michel Sugarman, “Reclaiming Rangoon: (Post-)Imperial Urbanism and Poverty, 1920-1962”, Modern Asian Studies, 52: 6 (2018), 1856-1887.

[3] Report on the Working of the Rangoon Municipality, for the Year 1898-99 (Rangoon, 1899), 18-19.

[4] Report on the Working of the Rangoon Municipality for the Year 1905-06 (Rangoon, 1906), 11-12.

[5] Ibid., 10.

[6] Ibid., 12.

[7] Sutphen, “Not What, but Where”, 112.

[8] Report on the Working of the Rangoon Municipality, for the Year 1898-99, 29.

[9] Report on the Working of the Rangoon Municipality for the Year 1907-08 (Rangoon, 1908), 21.

[10] Report on the Working of the Rangoon Municipality for the Year 1909-10 (Rangoon, 1910), 14.

[11] Ibid., 16.

[12] Home, Of Planting and Planning, 149-199.

The study of labour as an integral element of empire is frequently underrepresented in academic literature. Labour is an integral element in fueling colonial capitalist enterprise and oftentimes enlightens the reader on the fabrics of how an imperial power was supported. The third chapter of Shu-Mei Huang and Hyun Kyung Lee’s work, Heritage, Memory and Punishment: Remembering Colonial Prisons in East Asia, engages with the experiences of Korean, Chinese and Taiwanese penal labourers under Japanese colonial rule between 1895 and 1945.¹ It highlights the gruelling experiences of Korean and Taiwanese penal labourers, the conditions they endured, the work they were forced to conduct and the Japanese structures and rhetoric that supported the system. An enlightening aspect of Lee and Huang’s chapter is their argument regarding Japan’s desire to demonstrate its modernity to western powers by mimicking western practices of punishment. The intense study of western penal systems led Japanese penal institutions to emulate those practices in their penal settlements to expand their imperial holdings and demonstrate their modernity.² I argue that efforts to mimic the west are most visible when comparing the rhetoric and conditions of penal labour usage of Korean penal labourers in Japanese colonies and South Asian penal labourers in British Southeast Asian colonies. Both structures, which were prevalent less than a century apart, hold distinct similarities that demonstrate the origins behind Japanese structures of correction.

Lee and Huang highlight how justifications for the use of Korean penal labour was to reform the prisoner through labour. The Japanese were endeavouring on a moral mission to change the attitudes of the prisoner and convert them to become ‘dutiful subjects of the Japanese emperor’.³ The rhetoric demonstrates how Japanese officials self-identified as their subjects’ moral educators and reformers. These justifications are quite similar to Indian experiences in Penang, Malacca and Singapore as John McNair, a former superintendent of convicts highlights how the use of convict labourers was so they ‘become useful members of society, and free themselves from the disabilities under which they labour’.⁴ From McNair’s account, he viewed himself as integral to the moralising mission of ‘reforming’ the convicts he supervised and making them into ‘useful members of society.⁵ Written in 1899, McNair’s accounts were logged not long after the colonisation of Taiwan and Korea. Although not displayed directly, the two accounts display the transnationality of penal ideology as both states utilised paternalistic rhetoric to uplift their own international image.

In addition to the justifications, the practices of penal labour usage beyond the rhetoric also falls upon similar lines. Structures under both imperial regimes expanded, assimilated, and maintained empires in their colonised territories. Both examples demonstrate the mobile nature of penal life as labourers were juggled between the military, engineering department, private enterprise and their labour was not restricted to any particular prison or space.⁶ However, one of the unique links I believe both examples hold is their use of their prisoners as skilled labourers. Lee and Huang highlight the profitability of Taipei prison by utilising convicts as skilled labourers that would construct furniture, consumer and military goods for department stores, railway hotels, railway museums, the military and even the royal family.⁷ This correlates strongly to accounts of South Asian convicts being used as skilled labourers for government and private usage. McNair accounts for convicts in Singapore being particularly skilled in brickmaking whose production capacity and quality surpassed any private business and heavily supported the construction of infrastructure for the engineering department.⁸ Statistical accounts of the Strait Settlements detail the revenue generated by ‘selling’ penal labourers to private institutions and other government departments, highlighting the commercialised nature of penal labour usage.⁹ South Asian penal labourers were primarily viewed in the context of their profitability, and as the account details, the eventual abandonment of the practice came primarily from their lack of profitability that provided no incentive to employ them.¹⁰ From these examples, the South Asian and Korean examples show strong similarities as both structures were enforced due to the highly commercialised nature of skilled labour supported by the rhetoric of reform.

Insights into the rhetoric and practices of penal labour usage across both empires speak to the profit-making nature of penal institutions that exist even to this day. As mentioned by Dr Huang in her discussion with the MO4971 class, the privatisation of the US penal system in the use of prisoners as a cheap skilled labour force holds legacies from previous systems of imprisonment, which guise their practices under the rhetoric of reform.

In addition to the above connection, the comparative analysis speaks to the transnational nature of penal history. Although spatial in nature, penal institutions are not isolated to a single compound or building. Rather, the institutions also uphold an ideological foundation that can be inspired, affected and influenced by foreign penal practices and institutions. Penal history also connects to the wider historical narratives of modernity and empire. As reflected in the Japanese example, the operation of Japanese penal institutions resonated with imperial desires to appear modern in the face of western powers, both by upholding a reformist image while sustaining an ever-growing empire. The examples above spoke to the contradictory nature of penal institutions, necessary as a signal of reform and necessary to expand private and imperial interests.

1. Shu-Mei Huang and Hyun Kyung Lee, Heritage, Memory and Punishment: Remembering Colonial Prisons in East Asia (New York, 2020), pp. 31-52. [↩]
2. Ibid., pp. 35-37. [↩]
3. Ibid., p. 49. [↩]
4. John McNair, Prisoners their own Warders (London, 1899), p. 5. [↩]
5. Ibid., p. 159. [↩]
6. Lee and Huang, Heritage, p. 44-45; McNair, Prisoners, p. 66. [↩]
7. Lee and Huang, Heritage, p. 44. [↩]
8. McNair, Prisoners, p. 29; Ibid., p. 58. [↩]
9. Department of Statistics, Government of the Straits Settlements, Straits Settlements Blue Book for the Year 1873, 1874, pp. 38-46. [↩]
10. Ibid., pp. 60-76. [↩]

The kisaeng, with her outstretched hand, welcomed the visitors to Kyŏngbok Palace Colonial Industry Exhibition with the promise of entertainment, her vibrant dress and painted face the hallmark of an “ancient Korea”.[1] This “ancient past” formed a mirage in front of the visitors’ eyes, only to be interrupted by the dominant Japanese-built structures of the Machine Building and Special Forestry Building which offered up facts, statistics, and mechanical solutions to Korea’s progression into modernity. This was Michel De Certeau’s “concept city” in miniaturised form- the Japanese Government-General’s imaginative vision of Korea rendered into consumable and attractive exhibits whose attached discourse dismissed history in favour of the future.[2]

The 1915 Colonial Industry Exhibition was created with the purpose of spreading the ideology of progress and modernity on behalf of the Japanese Government-General. It included Korean and Japanese exhibitions ranging from sumo wrestling to agricultural and factory technologies. The intentions of the Exhibition were later summarised in the illustrated government publication Chōsen of Today, (1930).[3] The brochure aimed to highlight the agricultural, industrial, and cultural achievements of the colonial government. As De Certeau would suggest, it formed part of the imagined “spatial story” of Korean modernity in which technological progression was asserted through a linguistic narrative that dictated the public’s reaction to the exhibition.[4] The publication states that the Keijo Museum “preserved many treasures”.[5] This language suggests that the Korean displays belonged to a distinct historical past. In the exhibition, shamanic rituals and non-mechanical agricultural technologies were deliberately exoticized to create a sense of displacement because of their physical location next to statistical posters and mechanised technologies such as the rice-polisher.[6] This suggests that the Korean exhibits, or “treasures”, were valued for their juxtaposition with colonial exhibits and contributed to the artificial construction of Korean space and time. By suggesting that Korean culture belonged to an ancient and intangible past, the exhibition involved the temporal-spatial reconstruction of Korea’s historical timeline in order to bring the ‘new era’ of Japanese coloniality to the forefront. In doing so, the very space of the exhibition became an immersive lesson in the Government-General’s ability to immediately propel colonial Korea into modernity.

The concept of space-time reconstruction which pervades the Chōsen Today publication, as well as the exhibition itself, is evidential of the government’s anxiety toward the ideological cooperation of their Korean subjects. Fifteen years on from the exhibition, the brochure situates the Colonial Industry Exhibition in a similar juxtaposition between ‘modern’ and ‘ancient’. The description of the 1915 “treasures of ancient art” is paired with that of the “recent establishment” of the government library.[7] The library possesses an “efficient male staff” and “ancient and foreign” collection. The contrast in language concentrates the historical timeline, forcing the reader to jump abruptly from the static relics of the museum to the humanised and spacious library. This suggests that the ideology of progress in the Colonial Industry Exhibition had to be reinforced in multiple different forms. By consolidating the aims of the exhibition in written form it implies that Korea’s modernisation needed to be immortalised in text to reinforce the lived experiences of the population. This implies an artificial application of ideology to space, in contrast to De Certeau’s abstract acting out of the city.[8] It suggests that the government struggled to fully impart the messages of the exhibition, which is reinforced by reports of confusion and misunderstanding.[9] The attempt to transform the notion of ‘progress’ from a timely process into an immediate lived state connects with Michel de Certeau’s suggestion that it is discourse which makes space habitable.[10] In the report of Chōsen of Today, language of juxtaposition seeks to transform the empty and artificially constructed modernity of the Colonial Industry Exhibition into a lived experience, long after the event.

Consequently, the anxieties of the brochure reveal the failures of the 1915 exhibition. The preface states that change should be “manifest to even the most casual observer” and that “the aim of this brochure is to give readers at a glance some real idea of the progress…”.[11] The gulf between the “casual observer” and the “reader” is apparent on reflection. The “observer” would be far from the audience of a government-issued brochure, as the necessity of technological progress was largely aimed at small-town agricultural farmers and industrial labourers who would be unable to access such materials. In the same way, the ideological messages of the exhibition remained obscure to the observer. Patrol officers and cooperative community guides were placed to either physically steer the visitors through the new modernity exhibited in the Kyŏngbok Palace or narrate the transformation between the two distinct eras.[12] Despite this, the visitors were the people who occupied the missing space in between the ancient and the modern. Consequently, they usurped the narrative of the Government-General, simply through their personal interpretations of the exhibits and the way they both physically and psychologically navigated the space. As De Certeau would suggest, this spatial practice resulted in the creation of “singularities”- individual visions which disrupted the government’s singular, concentrated timeline of Korea’s progression with multiple space-time divisions formed from the moment of their individual exhibition experience.[13]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[1] Government General of Chosen, Chosen of Today, (Korea, 1930), p.17.

[2] Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall, (California, 1988), p.96.

[3] Government General of Chosen, Chosen of Today, (Korea, 1930), <https://archive.org/details/chosen-of-to-day-illustrated-october-1930/mode/2up?q=exhibition> [accessed: 21 January 2022].

[4] De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p.117.

[5] Government General of Chosen, Chosen of Today, p.17.

[6] Todd Henry, Assimilating Seoul: Japanese Rule and the Politics of Public Space in Colonial Korea 1910-1945, (California, 2014), p.107.

[7] Government General of Chosen, Chosen of Today, p.17

[8] De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p.98.

[9] Henry, Assimilating Seoul, p.108.

[10] De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p.106.

[11] Government General of Chosen, Chosen of Today, p.1.

[12] Henry, Assimilating Seoul, p.105.

[13] De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p.100.